Hatred that saved british jews

8/29/25

My little quaint English hometown was in the news for all the wrong reasons this week.

Bournemouth, a beautiful town on the UK’s South Coast, where my parents and family still live, was home to a series of horrible antisemitic attacks last Shabbat morning.

When my brother left his house with his young daughters to walk to shul, as he does every week, he was greeted by a large Swastika painted on the wall of his house. That same day, numerous other Swastikas were found graffitied across the city, and a visibly Jewish boy was shot in the head with a BB gun.

While this was a new low for Bournemouth, as far back as I remember, the UK was never a lovely place for Jews.

My childhood memories in Bournemouth are filled with incidents of being shouted and cursed at for being Jewish. And in old British fashion, there was no disguise to the hatred. It was not about Israel. It was “you dirty Jew, Hitler should have killed you” type of stuff.

I remember one week, when I was walking with my father back home from shul, a Jew-hater cursed at us and threw a stone at my head. I recall clutching my father’s hand and running back home in tears, where my mother held a warm cloth to my bruised forehead. I must have been eight years old at the time.

American Jews don’t know what this is like. American Jews can’t comprehend this type of antisemitism. Or at least not until very recently. American Jews have been sheltered. It’s only now just starting to catch up in America. Jew hatred in America is years behind where it is in Europe.

And if I may say something audacious, I’ll say that British Jews are better off because of it.

Because of the unadulterated hatred Jews are faced with in the UK, they never made the mistake of thinking they were accepted into society, and they therefore assimilated to a much lesser degree.

For the most part, in the UK, even if you’re a secular Jew, your social circle will be Jewish, and your children will have a Jewish education. According to recent surveys, over 70% of Jewish children in the UK attend Jewish schools, compared to just 25% in the US.

British Jews understood that not everybody loved them, so they preferred to stick together rather than be let down once it was too late.

But American Jews were spoiled. They were blessed with kind neighbors and welcoming communities. America was a blissful dream. The land of the free where Jews were woven into the tapestry of society. Jew hatred was a thing of the past. It didn’t belong to America.

And for this temporary calm, American Jewry paid a heavy price. The promise of acceptance weakened the commitment and dedication to education, to community, to continuity, and to preserving a strong Jewish identity in our families.

Today, antisemitism is having a reawakening in the United States, shattering the falsity of comfort we hoped the Statue of Liberty promised.

But as American Jews organize to counter this threat, I hope we will all learn from what the British Jews always knew:

Our Jewish identity is inseparable from who we are. We should be proud of it and hold it dear. We should love it with our hearts, teach it to our children, write it on our doorposts, and never let hopes of societal acceptance weaken our commitment.

Antisemitism is having a reawakening.

Our Jewish identity should have one too.

Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz

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Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz is the Founder and Director of Chabad on the Vineyard

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