Here’s a Jewish joke for you. When I had kids a decade ago, I decided not to raise them where I grew up, in the U.S., for the supremely neurotic but not entirely crazy reason that I didn’t want to worry every day about them being killed by a school shooter. No, I decided, better to raise them in London, with its reassuring aversion to guns and generally calmer news cycle.
Well, as the Yiddish proverb goes, “Man plans, God laughs.” Because while it’s true that I don’t have to worry about my children being shot at school, I do have to worry about them being attacked by terrorists every time we go to synagogue, or when I drop them off at Hebrew school. Which, okay, is not Annie Hall levels of funny. But you have to admit, that’s a heck of a Jewish joke.
Calm and reassuring are not words any Jew would use to describe life in Britain today. In the past two weeks, two synagogues near me in northwest London have been firebombed. On Monday, the Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, just 10 minutes up the road, suffered a suspected arson attack. On Wednesday, two Jews were stabbed on Golders Green’s main high street, near the much beloved Kosher Kingdom supermarket that every Jew in London knows.
