What It Was Like Growing Up Jewish in Britain. And Why 2026 Feels So Disturbingly Familiar

Britain likes to tell itself a flattering story.

A tolerant country. A decent country. A country of fairness, inclusion and polite little slogans about respect pinned to classroom walls.

And yet, if you grew up Jewish here, especially in 1970s and 1980s North West London, you learned very early that there was the story Britain told itself — and then there was the story Jews were actually living.

I went to a Jewish secondary school in North London. I wasn’t particularly religious. My parents chose it because it was supposed to offer a strong education. And maybe it did. But it also gave me another kind of education entirely: an education in what it meant to be visibly Jewish in Britain.

Every day after school, we ran the gauntlet.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

Other school kids would single us out for a good kicking simply because we were Jewish. That was it. No argument. No provocation. No history. We had never bothered them, attacked them or even spoken to many of them. But our uniform marked us out. Wearing a kippah was mandatory. We were identifiable. We stood out. Not because we “looked Jewish” — whatever that ridiculous phrase is supposed to mean — but because we were unmistakably Jewish kids and therefore, to some people, fair game.

That was normal.

Mad, yes. But normal.

Even the buses were part of the theatre of contempt. Drivers would slow down at our stop, gesture obscenely, or stop altogether and simply refuse to open the doors, leaving Jewish school kids stranded outside after a long day, waiting for the next bus and hoping that one might actually let us on.

Just think about that.

Children. In school uniform. Refused transport because they were visibly Jewish.

And somehow, even then, it never seemed to count as a national scandal.

The school itself looked less like a school and more like a fortified compound. High reinforced fences. Razor wire. Crash barriers. Security guards behind security huts. Not because we were dangerous. Because we were in danger.

That too became normal.

Which other group of children in Britain is expected to attend school behind bank-vault security and treat it as ordinary life?

Which other minority is expected to grow up with that level of threat built into the architecture of childhood?

Then there were the Thursday nights.

Back then, many of us would meet up in Edgware or Golders Green and head over to Hampstead. It was just what kids did. No fights. No drugs. No drinking. No drama. Just a bunch of teenagers hanging out with friends and having a laugh. And still, with grim regularity, someone would drive past and hurl some antisemitic filth out of the window for no reason other than the fact that we were Jews standing together in public.

Even getting home by bus had its own survival code.

Don’t sit at the back.

Don’t sit upstairs.

Don’t make yourself vulnerable.

Because if you did, you risked being beaten up, abused, robbed, or having your bag snatched and thrown out of the window for entertainment.

Again: normal.

At least, normal for us.

And now it’s 2026

And this is the part that chills me.

Because for a while, many of us believed that although antisemitism had never disappeared, Britain had at least moved on from the ugliest forms of public hostility. We assumed that what our grandparents warned us about belonged to history books, documentaries, fading memory.

We were wrong.

Ever since October 2023, and especially now in 2026, we have been witnessing something that feels horrifyingly familiar.

Not identical in every detail, of course. History never photocopies itself perfectly. But the rhetoric, the frequency, the breadth, the justification, the social acceptance, the whataboutery, the ambivalence, the way hatred gets normalised and explained away — all of it carries an echo that should make every decent person in this country deeply uncomfortable.

It resembles the sort of social descent Jews have seen before.

The sort of descent our grandparents warned us about.

The kind that doesn’t begin with camps.

It begins with contempt.

With mockery.

With excuses.

With selective outrage.

With people deciding that hatred of Jews is understandable, contextual, even somehow morally sophisticated.

And then suddenly you look up and realise that four firebombings of synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses in a single week barely seem to stop the national conversation. Four Hatzalah ambulances are set alight and the story flickers briefly before vanishing. There is an alleged drone incident at the Israeli Embassy in London, with claims involving radioactive or biological materials, and even when the threat turns out to be unfounded, the sheer fact of such an allegation should be front-page, wall-to-wall, national headline news.

Because surely the attempted targeting of an embassy with that kind of threat — anywhere, by anyone — should shake a country.

Surely that should stop the presses.

Surely that should not be followed by, “and now for the weather.”

And yet somehow, when Jews or Jewish institutions are the target, the national response so often feels like a shrug.

That is what being Jewish in the UK feels like today.

The old story in modern clothes

The saddest part?

Most of my non-Jewish friends are bored of hearing about it.

Not cruel, necessarily. Just weary. Detached. Slightly irritated. As though Jewish fear is a tiresome hobby. As though talking about antisemitism is somehow more offensive than antisemitism itself.

We get told we’re overreacting.

We get gaslit.

We get told we’re always complaining.

That we’re seeing bogeymen everywhere.

We’re not.

The signs are there in neon red paint.

The warnings are real.

The threats are real.

The hatred is real.

And the reason Jews notice it early is not because we are paranoid. It is because we have lived this before. Our families have lived this before. Our people know what it looks like when society starts making space for anti-Jewish hostility and then dressing it up as politics, activism, nuance or righteous anger.

We know the pattern.

That is not hysteria.

That is memory.

And I never, ever thought I would see this in my lifetime.

I never thought I would be writing, almost daily, about the kinds of things my grandparents warned us about.

I never thought I would be watching Britain flirt so casually with the same social poison, while so many people either cheer it on, excuse it, or tell us to stop making such a fuss.

This is what it means to be Jewish in Britain

It means growing up with fences, security guards and escape routes.

It means learning early that your visibility can make you a target.

It means understanding that Jews are often the only minority expected to explain, contextualise and absorb hatred directed at them.

It means seeing open hostility rebranded as “concern”.

It means watching antisemitism get endlessly rationalised in ways that would be unthinkable if aimed at almost any other community.

It means being told to endure what nobody would dare ask others to endure quietly.

And it means living with the sickening knowledge that by the time wider society finally admits the danger is real, Jews will once again be told the warning signs were obvious all along.

Yes.

We know.

We were the ones seeing them first.

We were the ones living behind the fences.