This week, the epicenter of Jewish hate in the world is, once again, the United Kingdom.
On Wednesday, in my home city of London, two men were injured in a knife attack in broad daylight. The video footage is jarring; the fact that it happened at all is much less surprising. It’s the latest attack on British Jews among dozens of others in the past few weeks alone.
Growing up in Britain in the early 2000s, we never thought of our country as a place where this type of violence could happen. When incidents would happen on the continent, we would offer our pity to Europe, all the while thinking of our home as somewhere safer, more accepting—more similar to America than Europe.
But the events of the past few years have shattered that illusion. These are, of course, not novel observations. I’ve made them before, including in these pages. But the incidents have not slowed down—indeed, they’ve only grown worse. As one British rabbi, who was touring Auschwitz with a school group when he found out the news from London, put it yesterday: “There are Jewish communities that have been decimated and don’t exist anymore, and one day, in 80 years’ time, am I or my children going to take our grandchildren down the streets of Golders Green, Hendon, Edgware, Stamford Hill, any Jewish community in the UK, and they’re going to say, ‘Look at that marking on the wall. There was once a Jew here.’ ”
While the Jewish community’s heartbreak is profound, the reaction from those in British society at large has remained the same: total apathy. This indifference feels like it is becoming one of the defining features of life for Jews in the UK in 2026.
