To ask you to help with a cover story for my Jewish child

If there is a whisper of evidence of teachers facilitating or accommodating anti
semitism this should be reported immediately to the local authority and to the
department for education. This cannot be allowed to take hold in any school in any part of this country. Please shine the light of disinfectant on this and hold teachers and schools to account.

Especially not in London!
I get (and regret) that they don't want to admit to being Jewish because young people do tend to be blindly pro-Palestine - but in most school classes in London, white British kids are in a small minority; almost everyone is something else, or often a complicated mixture of different backgrounds. I am just not sure it's a topic of conversation. They're "from London"; that's the end of it!

This is a bit naive.

It sounds that a group of different ethnicities met at one school.
There is a bigger group from an antisemitic culture/families who spotted the potentially jewish child at the school.
Telling them "not your business" won't remove the target from the child's back, denying it is a kind of confirmation.

Agreed 👍

@Aislyn - Cant think of any advice but I’m so sorry that it’s come to this OP. It’s a weird world right now .

And any teacher who tolerates let alone promotes anti Semitism should be out of the profession.

I can't see how you can conflate Nazi Germany with some suspiciously well informed teenagers.

The reason people knew who might be a Jew in 1930s Germany was because they were constantly told with stereotypical images. And their neighbours would have known who were practising before the Nazis came to power.

I simply don't buy that British teenagers are that racist, or that a school culture is racist. There is definitely something else going on here. For example that the school is protecting other ethnicities.

I’m so sorry you are going through this .
Do you think it’s a good idea to hide their descent? Are you scared for their safety ?

Yes but that involves joining the dots.
Maybe I'm just thick.

Nazis were German who ran concentration camps.
Auzhwich was a concentration camp
They took people on trains to Auzwich.

They kind of brushed over where the Jews came from.
I thought until someone pointed out the dots earlier, that the Jews they killed came from Germany. The penny never dropped that transporting people to kill them was pointless.

But for a long time I thought Auchwich was in Germany. Although I've never studied WW2.

Going through school in the 80s it wasn't really mentioned. I think it might still have been too soon, painful for teachers. Only 40-50 years. There may well have been teachers who'd lost parents or possibly even faught in it.

PP is probably confused, as I am, because you said before you knew how these total strangers felt about being British which is all a lot to cover and have happen regularly in conversation with strangers.

Thank you for clarifying that, I hadn't properly understood what you meant in your previous post and I apologise. I don't use social media (MN is the closest I get!) so I don't see the proliferation of antisemitic posts you're referring to, but sadly I can well imagine. It must be horrifying and I would never want to be part of any gaslighting about the scale of such awful disinformation, misinformation and downright prejudice, bigotry and hate crime.

Anyway, for what it's worth, MN have let your post stand and that's absolutely fine with me. I guess I'm fortunate that, to the best of my knowledge, neither my family members, friends or colleagues are antisemitic, and I would be disgusted to discover they were. But perhaps it colours my appreciation of how widespread antisemitism is in the UK.

I didn't notice any typos in your post, by the way! ☺️

I'm sure most young people have learned about the Holocaust? And where it mainly took place?

Persistently asking someone where they are from, rather than accepting the first answer, can happen in a casual conversation with a stranger 🙄

Is this what we have become as a nation? OP I’m so sorry for you and your children 🩷

You shouldn’t have to live like this because of feral people.

You said they were persistent, now you said it was just casual conversation.

The latter makes more sense. Strangers are really not that invested in which culture you identify with.

And? I don't ask them for their motives for asking me questions (once again, "interrogate is your word, not mine). I'm not interested in prolonging a conversation about something I'm not interested in in the first place. Don't people have casual conversations with you in your day to day - even at work? Waiting for your kids outside a club? Volunteering? In a taxi?

Nail on head. It is ofc factual that Ashkhenazi Jews descend from ancient Hebrew populations. There seems to be a lot of denial of that among some anti Semitic quarters.
Imo the skin colour thing is misleading and reflects US racial ideas of people having to be dark-skinned to be oppressed. It also ofc overlooks that a lot of Palestinians have fairer skin and sometimes more European-typical hair and eye colours due to European mixing, which would by their logic mean they're not Middle Eastern either.

Firstly, I am so sorry that your child has experienced such awful racism at school, and from teachers too!! I see you have made complaint, I would urge you to continue reporting every instance of racism and discrimination, and escalate through the process as needed every time.

Regarding "London" not being an acceptable answer to peers, I would recommend empowering your DC to feel confident that they are under no obligation to answer any such questions at all! Just because someone asks, doesn't mean they have a right to the answer!

As others have suggested if peers ask where they are from, they could say "i live in X, and I was born in Y" IF they WANT to share that information. If pushed for "where are you REALLY from" they can reiterate that and they could also say "My parents heritage is none of your business" or "i dont know the details of my parents heritage" or just simply "that information is private and none of your concern". Whatever they feel most confident in saying. They shouldn't have to do any of this at all but I understand they want to feel safe and they have a right to nkt be bullied or harassed!

I absolutely HATE that the country is in such an awful state we are making an suggestions as to how your child can hide their true selves, rather than being proud (or even ambivalent!) of who they are, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, sexuality etc. Its absolutely awful and makes me so sad and angry x

Because not everyone makes a good teacher
Not every child will respond to a parent as a teacher.
And not every family can afford to effectively have a SAH non earning Parent

The bullying needs stopping not the child removed from professional teachers.

As above. People with racist views have a range of other views.

Being anti-Farage and being antisemitic are not mutually exclusive positions. Quite the opposite I’d say.

Jeremy Corbyn managed the two together quite well. His anti-Semitism has left its mark. Pity he wasn’t so effective in his anti-Farage-ism.

In Poland, Jewish surnames were sometimes a bit more Germanic-sounding. For instance, the Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz. Or the heroic children's doctor Janusz Korczak -his birth name was Goldszmit.

Moreover, I imagine the type of bullies OP is dealing with might be alert to stereotypical Jewish surnames like Rosen, Levy, etc. There are surnames that have traditionally been more common among Jewish people.

https://jewishcurrents.org/the-origins-and-meanings-of-ashkenazic-last-names

Please don't forget some people ask out of curiosity. Nothing nasty, nothing more serious than 'thats a name ive never heard before, where is it from?'

Why can’t you? I’d homeschool rather than have my child exposed to daily bullying.

Sorry- I’m not blaming you, obviously. Go to the governors- contact your MP- you can’t leave your child in that situation without it causing damage. Again- not blaming you; the bullies are the ones to blame.

Oh, absolutely. Racist twats are racist twats and manage to have a range of other world views without seeming to see the hypocrisy.