A letter to my British and Jewish children

Every Sunday evening, between the ages of about eight and fifteen, I went to a Jewish youth group in west London. We played football badly, ate crisps enthusiastically, and once in a while the leaders would inflict upon us something called a “programme.” A discussion topic, usually printed on a sheet of A4 in that slightly wonky way things were before laser printers. It was meant to make us think.

The one I keep coming back to - because it came back, in various forms, at least once a year - asked what seemed like a simple question: “Are you British or Jewish?”

Sometimes they dressed it up. Sometimes it was a spectrum exercise where you had to stand at different ends of the room. Sometimes a debate. The question was always the same, though. And I always had the same reaction.

I thought it was stupid.

I couldn’t understand why the two things were supposed to be in tension. I was British. I was Jewish. Much the same way I was right-handed and liked cricket. These facts coexisted without the slightest friction, and the idea that they shouldn’t struck me as faintly absurd.

Why wouldn’t they coexist? I was a fourth-generation immigrant. Our family had been in Britain long enough that the immigration wasn’t a memory but a piece of genealogy, the kind of thing you’d dig up on a television programme, not something anyone actually remembered. My grandparents’ generation served in the armed forces. My grandmother’s brother never came home - killed serving his country in the Second World War. Not Israel. Britain. Our family had been at a British university for three generations. I went to a very British school, the sort of school that regards itself, with some justification, as one of the institutions that actually defines what Britishness is. And every Saturday morning in synagogue I said the prayer for the Royal Family - knew it by heart then, know it by heart now - because praying for the sovereign wasn’t a contradiction of being Jewish. It was an expression of it.

So when someone asked me to choose between British and Jewish, I felt rather as if I were being asked to choose between Tuesday and the colour blue. The categories simply did not compete.

I wasn’t wrong, exactly. But I was naive. I’d had the great good fortune to grow up during what I now recognise was an extraordinarily unusual period in British history - roughly thirty years, from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, in which it was genuinely, practically, livably true that you could be entirely British and entirely Jewish and nobody of any consequence would ask you to explain the contradiction. Because nobody of any consequence thought there was one.

That period is over. I know it not from a single event but from a pattern, and the pattern is so clear that denying it takes a conscious act of self-deception. I’ve never been much good at those.

I need to explain what I mean, because it matters. It matters especially to you, my children, who’ll have to navigate what comes next. And I need to be precise about something: what I’m about to say is not about the British people. It’s about the British state, and the class of people who run it.

The Britain I grew up in had a culture, and it expected you to join it. Nobody said this unkindly or even particularly openly. It was just understood. And it was, when you think about it, the most generous possible basis for inclusion. The deal was straightforward, had the clarity of a well-drafted contract: come here, learn the language, send your children to school, obey the law, adopt the customs, and you’re in. You’re one of us. Doesn’t matter where your grandfather came from. Doesn’t even matter if you’re not Church of England.

Our family took that deal and ran with it. They didn’t just become British - they became fiercely British. Joined things. Volunteered. Sat on committees. Observed the two-minute silence with a sincerity that would make a Guards officer weep. They understood, instinctively, that they’d been offered membership of something worth belonging to, and they intended to be the best members the club had ever had.

This wasn’t unusual. It was what immigrants to Britain did. The Huguenots did it. The Jews did it. The Ugandan Asians did it, with perhaps the most spectacular success of any immigrant community in modern British history. And it worked. If you want to be grand about it, it was one of the quiet triumphs of British civilisation: the ability to absorb difference by offering a clear, compelling identity to absorb into.

But something changed. Gradually, then suddenly, in the way Hemingway wrote about going bankrupt - which is also the way countries tend to lose things.

The British state lost its confidence. And then it lost its nerve. I haven’t lost mine. I’m as confident as my grandmother ever was that this country and its culture are worth believing in. But the state around me has stopped believing it, and that changes everything.

It happened, I think, from a place of genuine decency. The governing class - the people who set the tone in Whitehall, in broadcasting, in the universities - looked at the world after Empire, after Iraq, after the slow moral reckoning that every post-colonial power eventually has to go through, and arrived at a conclusion that felt, at the time, like wisdom. We needed to understand the other better, they decided. We should not judge. The cultural inheritance of a Yorkshire Methodist and the cultural inheritance of someone arriving from Helmand or Sylhet were, at the deepest level, morally equivalent. To suggest otherwise - to suggest that one set of values might be, on the whole, preferable to another - wasn’t just impolite. It was wicked.

And look, this came from something real. The best part of the British character, even. The part that queues patiently, that’s embarrassed by boasting, that instinctively sides with the underdog. The impulse was generous. Genuinely generous. The error was catastrophic.

Because once you’ve decided all cultures are morally equivalent, you can’t ask anyone to integrate into yours. You’d have to assert that British culture exists, that it has value, that some practices are compatible with it and some aren’t. And this was felt to be - the word they used was exclusionary. So instead of expecting newcomers to adapt, as your great-great-grandparents had done with such willingness and such success, the state accepted - by a process of insecurity dressed up as sophistication - that it had no right to ask.

And so behaviours and cultural standards that would’ve been considered wholly unacceptable a generation earlier - attitudes towards women, towards homosexuality, towards free expression, towards the separation of religious and civic authority - were now not merely tolerated but respected. Actively accommodated. Given institutional support.

I want to stop here and say something important. I don’t believe most British people agreed with this. I think the vast majority of people in this country - the people who run the local cricket club and volunteer at the food bank and hold the door open for strangers and say sorry when someone else treads on their foot - still believe, quietly and firmly, in the culture I’m describing. They believe in fair play and free speech and the rule of law. They believe Britain stands for something, and they know what it is, even if they’d be embarrassed to put it into words. Being embarrassed to put things into words is itself one of the things Britain stands for.

But these people have been told - by their government, their broadcasters, their universities, every institution that sets the terms of what can be said in public - that expressing this belief is unsophisticated at best, bigoted at worst. The gap between what the British people actually think and what the British state is prepared to say on their behalf has become a chasm. And into that chasm, a great deal has fallen.

When your great-great-grandparents arrived, they outdid each other to become British. They’d no more have demanded that Britain rearrange itself around their preferences than they’d have turned up to the Cenotaph in fancy dress. But the new settlement - if you can call it that - told newcomers something quite different. You don’t need to become British, because there is no British to become. There’s only a geographical space where diverse communities happen to coexist, and the state’s job is to manage that coexistence without favouring any particular tradition.

This sounds enlightened. It is, in fact, a catastrophe. Moral equivalence is only virtuous when there is, in fact, moral equivalence. When you grant it where none exists - when you decide that a culture in which calling publicly for the murder of your neighbours counts as protest is morally the same as one in which it’s a crime - you haven’t risen above judgement. You’ve abdicated it. You haven’t become more tolerant. You’ve become less serious. You have, in the most genteel and well-mannered way imaginable, abandoned the very people your tolerance was supposed to protect.

The British genius was always for a kind of pragmatic decency. The sort of thing Orwell noticed in the England of warm beer and old maids cycling to Communion. Never utopian. Never claimed perfection. But it knew what it stood for, and was prepared to say so. What’s replaced it, at the level of the state if not the street, is something that can’t bring itself to stand for anything at all. Just in case someone, somewhere, might feel excluded by the suggestion that some things are simply better than others.

The path our family took - integration, joining in, earning belonging by adopting a shared identity - is no longer really on offer. Not because anyone’s closed it explicitly, but because the destination’s been abolished. You can’t integrate into nothing.

And here’s where it becomes specifically, painfully, relevant to Jews.

Jews were, in a sense, the proof that the old model worked. Four generations in and indistinguishable from the surrounding culture in every respect bar what they did on a Friday night and where they went in September. Intermarriage rates climbing. Accents indistinguishable. Cultural references shared. Jews were British. Not as a concession, not as a performance, but as a fact.

And yet.

When it came down to it - when the state faced a straightforward question about whether the open expression of anti-Jewish hatred on British streets was acceptable - the state made a calculation. Not philosophical this time. Arithmetical. The oldest calculation in European history, as it happens.

It looked at which communities were growing and which weren’t. Looked at where the marginal seats were, who lived in them. And it decided, in that particularly British way - without ever quite saying so, in the manner of a committee that takes no vote but somehow reaches a conclusion - that it would rather have votes than Jews.

Not in those words, obviously. Never in those words. In the words of community cohesion and balanced perspectives and legitimate criticism and disproportionate responses. Wrapped in the language of reason. Delivered in the calm tones of a Radio 4 presenter introducing a segment on whether both sides have a point. But the effect - the actual, observable, lived effect - was that Jews in Britain were told, with increasing clarity: we are with you in words. We’ll condemn antisemitism in parliamentary motions and on social media and in carefully drafted statements released on Holocaust Memorial Day. But in practice? In the choices that actually matter, in the things that are done rather than said? You’re on your own.

And I must say again: this is the state, not the people. My neighbours aren’t the problem. The woman in the village shop isn’t the problem. The vast, decent, quiet majority of this country isn’t the problem. The problem is a governing class that hasn’t got the courage to reflect what its own people believe, because somewhere along the way it convinced itself that those beliefs are something to be ashamed of.

I’m not saying this out of self-pity. Self-pity is unattractive and unhelpful. I’m saying it because you need to understand what I didn’t understand at your age: that the question asked at that youth group wasn’t stupid. It was prophetic. Those leaders weren’t being dramatic. They were drawing on a collective memory that I, in my comfortable, suburban, fourth-generation confidence, had decided was no longer relevant.

They knew, because history had taught them over and over and over, that the relationship between Jews and the countries they live in is never permanent, never unconditional, never to be taken for granted. They knew that thirty good years don’t abolish two thousand bad ones. They knew the question “are you really British?” would one day be answered not by Jews but for them, and the answer might not be the one they wanted.

So here is what I want to say to you, my children, and I want to say it clearly.

You are British. Born here. Speak the language. Know the culture. You understand, without having to think about it, why a cream tea must be consumed in the correct order and why one does not clap between movements. You know the correct response to any crisis is to put the kettle on, and that there’s no problem in life that can’t be made marginally more bearable by a properly made cup of tea. You’re as British as Marmite, as the Shipping Forecast, as a Bank Holiday Monday spent indoors complaining about the weather. As British as anyone who has ever lived.

And I am proud of that. Enormously, stubbornly proud. The Britain that took our family in and made them its own was one of the great achievements of human civilisation. A country that believed in the rule of law, in fair play, in the right of every person to speak freely and worship as they chose. A country that defeated fascism and then, without fuss or fanfare, went and built a National Health Service. A country whose basic instinct, confronted with catastrophe, was to put the kettle on and get on with it. That Britain was worth coming to. Worth joining. Worth defending. Worth being proud of. And it still exists - not in the pronouncements of ministers or the resolutions of councils, but in the character of its people, who remain, despite everything their government has done and failed to do, fundamentally decent.

I still believe in that Britain. I believe in it the way my grandmother believed in it when she opened the door to receive her brother’s uniform with the bullet holes still in it. My confidence in this country hasn’t wavered. It’s the state’s confidence in itself that’s collapsed, and I refuse to accept that collapse as the final word.

But I won’t pretend to you that the country as it’s governed today is the same country our family fell in love with. It isn’t. The state has decided that being British isn’t quite enough. Not through malice, mostly. Through a failure of civilisational confidence so total that it can’t bring itself to defend the very culture that made this place worth coming to. A country that once governed a quarter of the globe has decided it lacks the moral authority to govern its own public squares.

I didn’t choose to become a Jew who is British rather than a British person who is Jewish. That choice was made for me, by a political class that found it easier to accommodate the intolerant than to defend the tolerant, and that made its electoral calculations accordingly.

The youth group leaders were right. I was wrong. It was never a silly question.

It was the only question that mattered.