Never forget this

Few of us will not be pleased to see the back of 2019. For almost the entire year, the community lived under the cloud of Jeremy Corbyn. The election result led to relief, but it would be misguided to believe that the problems unleashed by Mr Corbyn and his allies have now vanished. The Labour leader may be departing but the membership is not. Antisemitism is now a part of the Labour Party and has, as a result, been given a new lease of life more widely. As a new year approaches, it is right to hope for a more positive and less stressful twelve months to come — not least because we, and the country, deserve it! It is also right to hope that a new Labour leader will genuinely tackle the issue. And it is right to hope — indeed, to expect — that our community can, for the first time since 2015, move our focus away from Jew hate. Because it has been tiring and diverting to spend so much time and energy tackling antisemitism.

But it is also right to remember that, once uncorked, the genie of antisemitism does not return to the bottle. None of us should imagine that the Corbynites’ election defeat means the defeat of antisemitism. We must, however, find a way to move on — to look to the many wonderful things about being a British Jew. That means not just those within our community — such as Limmud, which is taking place as you read this and is our greatest export to the rest of the diaspora — but also a fact that always needs to be stressed but which has sometimes been lost in the past four years. There has never been a safer or more secure place to be Jewish than in Britain, today. For all our worries, we live in a country with successive governments committed to our protection, and with voters who have no truck with Jew hate. We must not forget that.