Dov Forman@DovForman
Being a Jewish student in Britain today means living a kind of double life.
I go to lectures. I take exams. I navigate seminar rooms and library queues like any other student. But unlike most of my peers, I do all of this while calculating: am I in danger because my Star of David or Kippah is visible? Will speaking up in this discussion make me a target? Is today a day there'll be a demonstration outside?
Going to university is supposed to be a student’s main job. Right now, for many British Jewish students, it feels like a side gig - squeezed in around the exhausting, full-time business of simply being Jewish on campus.
My great-grandmother was Lily Ebert. She arrived at Auschwitz at just 20 years old. In a single day, her mother, her younger sister, her youngest brother, and over 100 members of her extended family were murdered - gassed and cremated, their ashes scattered with no grave, no place to mourn. That was July 1944.
She survived. She came to Britain to rebuild her life, and she did more than survive; she thrived. She built a large and loving family: ten grandchildren, 38 great-grandchildren and even a great-great-grandchild in her final year. She believed Britain would be a safe haven. A place where her family could live openly, proudly, as Jews. A country that had learned the lessons of history.
For decades, she travelled across the UK speaking in schools, and in her later years she used social media to warn young people that the Holocaust did not begin with violence. It began with words. With small actions. With a shifting atmosphere.
In her final months before she passed away in October 2024, my great-grandmother was horrified. Horrified to see the country she had trusted - after the greatest crime in history beginning to fail its most basic duty.
She was right to be horrified. And this week, her warnings feel more urgent than ever.
British counter terror police are today investigating a wave of arson attacks on Jewish sites across London - four in as many days - probing whether Iranian proxies are responsible. Two synagogues and a Jewish charity torched. And an Iran-linked group threatening to fly drones carrying hazardous substances at the Israeli embassy. This all coming only a few weeks after Jewish ambulances were set alight in Golders Green – one of the most Jewish areas in the UK. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis has warned that "a sustained campaign of violence and intimidation against the Jewish community of the UK is gathering momentum."
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has expressed surprise and called the attacks "abhorrent." But how can he possibly claim surprise? If you tolerate chants of "Globalise the Intifada," don't be surprised when the Intifada is globalised.
And throwing money at the problem simply is not a solution. You cannot pay your way out of an Intifada. And we cannot continue to besiege ourselves with security – living behind ever thicker doors and higher fences with barbed wire.
This violence doesn't begin with arson. It begins with ideology - and until Britain starts tackling the ideology, no amount of policing or security will stop the flames.
That means banning the IRGC, who may well be behind this very campaign of attacks. And it means confronting the Muslim Brotherhood, who are radicalising young people across this country - on campuses, in mosques, in community centres - and may well be recruiting the people lighting these fires.
And it starts closer to home too, on campuses like mine, where week after week, masked demonstrators flood university spaces, chanting slogans that go far beyond political protest into something far darker. Jewish students are singled out in lectures, booed, shouted down, accused of being "baby killers" simply for being Jewish. Many now tuck away their Star of David necklaces and think twice before speaking up in seminars. A Jewish professor had his lecture stormed by masked protesters who screamed abuse, branded him a "war criminal," and - according to witnesses - threatened to behead him. His only crime was being Jewish and refusing to be intimidated.
And it is not just coming from the students. Too often, academics themselves are part of the problem. On my own campus, the medieval blood libel - the conspiracy that Jews use non-Jewish blood in their rituals - was repeated to students as fact, at one of supposedly the best universities in the UK.
Beyond campus: an NHS doctor posts "gas the Jews" online and faces no meaningful consequence. Jewish artists are quietly dropped from programmes. Jewish events are cancelled without explanation. Protests where chants cross into open hatred are allowed to continue unchecked by police.
Individually, each moment can be explained away. Together, they reveal a slow and steady normalisation of dangerous jew-hatred.
In the past year alone, the UK recorded the highest number of violent antisemitic assaults per capita anywhere in the diaspora - roughly one for every 2,500 Jews. Jewish schools have warned students not to wear visible symbols on their commute. Jewish teenagers have been assaulted on public transport. Every Jewish institution now sits behind security barriers, guards, and locked doors. We are a community under siege.
My great-grandmother spent her life warning that these things begin not with violence, but with silence. With the small capitulations. With institutions that hedge, qualify, and reach for the language of "context" and "balance" - as if balance is possible when a minority is being targeted.
Britain has a choice. It can honour the lessons it claims to have learned. Or it can allow that silence to continue - and discover, too late, where silence leads.
My great-grandmother, Lily Ebert, survived Auschwitz. It is shameful that she lived to see Britain begin to echo the very hatred she had survived - and thought she had left behind in Eastern Europe.
