‘Ifsomeone OPINION hates Jews, ELEANOR MARGOLIS chances are they hate gays.’

AS A GAY, agnostic, Jewish woman, I enjoy thinking of myself as ISIS’s worst nightmare. OK, second to worst nightmare, maybe. That lingering belief that there may be a God, I suspect, deprives me of public enemy number one status. Perhaps I’m a neo-Nazi’s worst nightmare. They tend not to be particularly God-fearing, right?

As far as I can remember, the first time I experienced antisemitism was at primary school. In assembly, the headteacher was telling the New Testament story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. There was something about the way she said Paul (then Saul) was “a Jew”. It was crawling with conspiracy. Sitting cross-legged on the hard floor of the school hall, I could tell something wasn’t right.

Why was she telling us about this Bad Man, Saul the Jew, who converted to Christianity, becoming a Good Man? After the assembly, I and the two other Jews in my class agreed that we felt weird and picked-on.

The first time I experienced direct homophobia (not the more subtle kind, implied by the general lack of acknowledgment that people can be anything other than straight) I was 18 and kissing a girl at a bus stop. “Lesbians,” said a passing idiot. He was, at least, correct.

The recent Orlando attack left 49 LGBT people — a high proportion of whom were Latin American — dead. It was both racist and homophobic. For the most part, my gayness and Jewishness are invisible. That isn’t to say that now — with antisemitism on the rise across Europe and the biggest mass shooting in recent US history targeting LGBT people — it doesn’t feel like a challenging, and even slightly scary time to be both gay and Jewish. I’ve always considered these two parts of my identity completely separate. But antisemitism and homophobia so often go handin-hand. If someone hates Jews, the chances are they’re not all that keen on gays either. Maybe that’s just the ironically non-discriminatory nature of being a bigot.

At the same time, I have the privilege of being part of not one, but two love-filled, vibrant and

I’m part of two love communities

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