Anti Semitism in the UK

[Oakmaiden]

This is in the news a lot at the moment.

I have never, to my knowledge, heard anyone make anti-Semitic remarks. Anti Islam, yes. Anti "them Polish people coming over here and taking our very badly paid jobs", yes. Anti Semitic, no. Am I just very lucky/ sheltered?

But what does integrating with the local population mean.

We were told for years, how happy immigrants were to come here, how they admired the british way of life blah blah blah. How grateful they are.

A Jewish lady was interviewed on Radio 4, they have to have guards at the get of his son's jewish school, dinner times conversations are about who is moving to Israel next.

Hmmm, so my DCs will never mix with hers, mine are at a non-religious school, and I will never sit at her dinner table as I am not Jewish.

Then Muslims, all this talk of multi culturalism for the last 30 years, Huh, not only do they not admire my way of life, they hate it, they also hate me for not praying to their god. They are here to make money to improve their DCs opportunities because their countries are too corrupt.

It's sad that Jews are leaving but, I don't know, if they'd blended into the existing pop they wouldn't be targeted. They choose to keep their separateness, for me it really won't affect me if they stay or go.

Muslims, AAAAaah, they have been allowed to move here in their thousands and thousands, arranged marriages ensure a regular input of uneducated non-English speaking newcomers, so they will never need or want to integrate. Sadly, they won't go as they have nowhere to go to.

Hmmm, so my DCs will never mix with hers, mine are at a non-religious school, and I will never sit at her dinner table as I am not Jewish.

Why wouldn't you sit at her dinner table? I have eaten a LOT of meals at Jewish dinner tables. the difficulty is in reciprocating if they keep kosher, but it can be done if you're determined enough: I had an orthodox Jewish friend to stay for almost a week once and he didn't starve.

True perhaps if I lived in a jewish area then I would eat with them, but that's partly the prob, they live in jewish areas, hence don't mingle, or, I could be wrong there and there are hardly any of them and therefore they are scattered wide and I never meet them.

Have only known one jew ever and he knows my DH through an unusual shared hobby. He lives near Manchester.

It's sad that Jews are leaving but, I don't know, if they'd blended into the existing pop they wouldn't be targeted. They choose to keep their separateness, for me it really won't affect me if they stay or go.

So antisemitism is my own fault for being 'too Jewish' or Jewish in the'wrong way'. My own fault for wanting to keep my religious and cultural identity.

Thank you very much.

Moniker there are 'areas' for many groups of people - New Malden in Surrey for example has a huge number of Koreans - I only realised this when driving through it my son commented on how many signs there were written in Korean script. When he cooks his annual Bibimbap feast, we now head to New Malden to get the ingredients as there are so many shops serving that community. If they were more scattered, there wouldn't be the shops, so they wouldnt be able to buy kimchi easily - the same for Jews who want to buy kosher food, surely. But it's about more than that - we naturally congregate with people who are like us.

And why does not being antisemitic have to be linked to whether or not you integrate with Jews or not? I don't mix with any Sikhs, but I manage to not be prejudiced against them. There are less than 300,000 of us in the entire UK, so I am afraid it's going to be a tall order for us to integrate sufficiently for the rest of you to get to know us. Even if we were willing to forgo living in communities of other Jews which enables us to have the sense of community and facilitates the infrastructure that we need.

It's sad that Jews are leaving but, I don't know, if they'd blended into the existing pop they wouldn't be targeted. They choose to keep their separateness, for me it really won't affect me if they stay or go.

Blimey Moniker, I don't know where to start with that. Its like hearing something from the 1970's. If you live in a city, your son will be mixing with people who are Jewish or partly Jewish. Many/Most(?) Jews are entirely blended into the existing population. I assume you've heard of say, Alan Sugar, Nigella Lawson, Sir Robert Winton, Ed Milliband - they don't exactly 'keep their separateness', do they?

Muslims, AAAAaah, they have been allowed to move here in their thousands and thousands, arranged marriages ensure a regular input of uneducated non-English speaking newcomers, so they will never need or want to integrate. Sadly, they won't go as they have nowhere to go to.

Are you a UKIP fan by any chance? If I were a Muslim, I would organise a mass 'pull a sickie' day just so people like you could see how things like the Nhs would absolutely crumble without Muslim immigrants. Uneducated? Many of our doctors, scientists and lawyers are Muslim. Why should they go?

Eyes. Opened.

I'm not Jewish. I live near a synagogue but I'm clearly blinkered. I smile and wave at the people who park in my street on Saturday and then "walk" to synagogue. We've developed a neighbourly casual "how are you" type relationship.

I've worked in a local Jewish state school as an external provider. Atmospherically, it was more on a par with working in any number of local private schools... The longer school days, the security etc. Just so happened that the behaviour of the pupils in that particular school was atrocious but you get that in hundreds of schools.

The staff of that school were intolerant of me. Nothing said, just brash, dismissive. I disliked conversing with them because I experienced a lot of rudeness and "looks". My Jewish colleague didn't experience or see any of it. Perhaps I made a bad impression each time I visited.

I experienced a little intolerance from the (young) children in my class when they asked me my religion but nothing to write home about. More than anything they were shocked and appalled that I couldn't read or speak Hebrew and so I gently said that in my religion, the Torah was still important but luckily for me it had been translated into English and put with some other "books" too. They did ask me why a non Jewish lady was "allowed in" to their school but I said that I'm a teacher and today we're learning xxxxxx

I don't have a real "point" as it were. People are people in my book. I've not seen anti sematism but I'm not looking for it.

Was this in Stamford Hill leddit?

they live in jewish areas so don't mingle - i don't like that vibe they. i have stated in an earlier post that i am jewish and don't mix with jews and only non jews. i knows jews & asians aren't great at mixing, something that saddens me, however alot of jews do........

fwiw as a jew if i were working in a hasidic school/office etc i would be looked at as a stranger. i find some very religious/devout followers of their religion view most outsiders as just that, outsiders, lots of suspicion. so many times, quite recently actually, when i mention early on in meeting someone (to save in embarrassement if quips are made) will tell me how ie once they worked for a nice jewish person (ie in a shop) and sound in their voice surprised that they were nice OR...tell me about some awful jew they met but that (quote) 'i don't mean you, of course'... Whilst i don't much care for it i do understand why different groups tend to keep themselves to themselves as from the view of someone like me who has strayed from the nest, i regularly get vocal crap which is really upsetting where as if you stick to your own cultural group this just doesn't happen although it does make the outside situation worse.

Jews face a dilema though- the religion and the race/ ethnicity are intrinsically linked, unlike with most other religions. Muslims positively love making converts, jews a lot less so partly because you can only be Jewish if your mum/ maternal grandmother etc were. So if a Jewish man marries a non jew, his kids are not Jewish. The choice is kind of stark- marry in or break the chain. It's not PC in today's terms, but that's the way it is. In my grandfather's family all but one sibling married out. Now my elderly great aunt (who fell in love with and married a goy) is i can tell a little sad about the lack of Jewish grandchildren for her long dead mother.
On the other hand I have a Jewish colleague who married out, lives in South London where there are virtually no other jews around I would think, and is still bringing up her 3 children jewish and keeps kosher, she has a very wide circle of friends only a few of whom are Jewish. So you can stay Jewis and integrate in my opinion.
Sorry just reflections really, it doesn't prove anything.

Bear in mind that one of the most integrated Jewish communities in history was Germany in the 1920's. Few were practising, because they thought it marked them out from their neighbours, rate of outmarriage was huge, Jews were proud of being accepted almost everywhere. And that didn't end well.....

Also, you can convert to Judaism (I knew a very devout Jew at uni whose mother was a convert). It just isn't easy, or common, at least not in orthodox circles.

It's sad that Jews are leaving but, I don't know, if they'd blended into the existing pop they wouldn't be targeted.

Holy. F**ck. What a comment.

Let me explain something to you; through the course of your utterly blinkered life you will have met any number of people who were Jewish but you didn't know it because they 'blended in.' Do you think all Jews wear funny hats or wigs? Do you have a fantastically stupid explanation for why those people might be targeted too? Was it the Parisian Jews' fault they were blown to kingdom come because they went to a Kosher supermarket rather than blending into an existing one?

bobthebuddha - I agree entirely - important that this sort of remarks stay on the board to show the sort of attitude we have to deal with....

good point bob. i think alot of people think all jews either wear sheitels (wigs, if female) or are really flashy/loud & rich...sure there are plenty like that BUT there are loads and loads that aren't, the ones that are like that (flashy/loud types) make it fucking hard for the rest of us, we all get tarnished with the same damn brush and have to go through life defending yourself explaining that we aren't all rich..

Really shit to read so many anti semitic comments on MN. We've learned nothing.

I don't think the super-religious ones or the flashy-loud ones make it hard - I think its the racists who make it hard.

I meet people every day who annoy me! I manage not to hate all other people of that race/religion/sex/profession or whatever.

This whole thread is full of examples of anti-semitic comments.

Having grown up in a Jewish community I would say that anti Semitism never went away. But I would also say that anti American, anti Jewish and anti Israel coverage by certain media organisations is incitement to racial hatred. Jeremy Bowen a BBC Middle East reporter was found to have misreported on a Middle East conflict in the recent past. During the last Israeli Palestine conflict the BBC reported that Israeli soldiers were combing the streets looking for Arab children to kill. I asked the BBC for evidence of this. This misreporting impacts on how Jews are treated in the UK.

But the increase in hate crime is not just a problem for Jews it is also a problem for people who do not fit the narrow view of the ideal. Amnesty had to condemn this government for it's treatment of disabled people. Also people on benefits are being attacked www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/212000-people-beaten-up-being-4186370

I was going to say that I believe in assimilation not multiculturalism but then I thought for a moment, how do you assimilate if you don't have a white face. It seems that human nature never learns from history.