Jews face real racism, but campaigners are blind to it

I spent part of last week at a conference organised by The Equiano Project, named after the 18th-century freed slave Olaudah Equiano. The conference was about the state of racism and anti-racism in Britain and the US. The speakers, mostly African American, British Caribbean and African British, were excellent – and the debate was illuminating.

Conspicuously absent from the conference’s themes and panels were Jews. In a sense, a conference about race, and what next for what has become a counterproductive and often actively harmful “anti-racist” movement, did not need to be about Jews. Given that there is limited elite interest in ending anti-Semitism, it is perhaps not surprising that Jews did not fit within the conference’s core purview.

In fact, what is clear is that anti-Semitism enjoys amazingly weak opposition in the places most intent on rooting out racism: universities. A landmark inquiry into anti-Semitism in the National Union of Students (NUS) released last week – the eighth since 2005 –found that the NUS is a downright “hostile environment” for Jews.

Rebecca Tuck KC offered numerous accounts from Jewish students who said they were “treated as a pariah at NUS events… answerable for Israel, responsible to call out any anti-Semitism, seen to represent every single Jew in the student population, and stripped of any other characteristics”.

Anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian bias in the NUS means that while extreme Right-wing anti-Semitism garners attention, there is a wilful refusal to engage with the tsunami of anti-Jewish language coming from the Left – which is the predominant form now on campuses.

This latest report was announced last year following the anti-Semitic posts of former NUS president Shaima Dallali and the helpful suggestion by the then-NUS president that if they didn’t like it, Jewish students could “remove themselves” from a performance by the rapper Lowkey, who defines Zionism as “ethnic cleansing” and “colonialism”.

Anti-black racism rightly gets a lot of attention. But perhaps it’s time to figure out where Jews fit into the picture because, as the Tuck report makes clear, our struggles are just as real as those facing other minorities.