Like many diaspora Jews, I have an exit strategy. When Dame Margaret Hodge recalled in an interview last year her father’s advice to “keep a packed suitcase at the door in case you ever have to leave in a hurry,” there was shock and even incredulity that a British Jew might ever need to heed such counsel.
To me, it was prosaic. One of my earliest memories is getting the same talk from my father, whose parents escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania by dropping everything and heading east. My maternal grandparents, who didn’t, were less fortunate.
For Jews, whose habitual persecution is etched into our collective consciousness, if not our skin, intuiting which way the wind is blowing is as much part of our cultural identity as apples and honey.
Today, those with their fingers in the air will tell you that Europe, with its government-sanctioned Holocaust distortion in Poland, repeated homicidal attacks on Jews in France and the pandemic of leftist antisemitism in the UK, has once again begun to feel like an increasingly uncomfortable place to be a Jew.
America, by contrast, has generally been billed as an ersatz Promised Land, warmly embracing each fresh batch of Jewish refugees who wash up on its shores in every century, from the pogroms of the 1800s to the mass exodus of Persian Jews in the late 70s and 80s. (Although those with longer memories will rightly point to the SS St Louis, the cruise liner full of Holocaust refugees turned away in 1939 as evidence that even America isn’t always a sure thing).
But today, in Los Angeles, where my husband and I have spent a lot of time for work, Jewish life is ample and unabashed.
In December we delighted in the numerous public Channukah celebrations throughout the city, the giant inflatable dreidels propped up in many front yards and the menorahs flickering brightly next to Christmas trees in the doctor’s office.
In February, ‘Happy Passover’ cards popped up in supermarkets, nestled between Easter and Valentine’s Day displays. On one trip we briefly enrolled our toddler in one of the abundant Jewish daycares, where he danced to Israeli songs and, on Tu Bishvat, lined up to hug a teacher dressed as a tree.
In America, we could wear our Judaism on our sleeves. America, we thought, was a viable exit strategy.
Until two weeks ago, that is, when in the same weekend a furor erupted over the New York Times’ publication of a deeply antisemitic cartoon (featuring Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog leading a blind Donald Trump with a kippah on his head) and a white nationalist entered a San Diego synagogue during the last hours of Passover, shooting dead one person and injuring three more, including the rabbi.
The shooting came exactly six months after another gunman, on the opposite coast of America, walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh where he killed eleven people while shouting antisemitic slurs.
These were not isolated attacks, nor can they all be attributed to white nationalism.
During our most recent trip to LA I noticed an increase in the number of incidents reported on a local Jewish Facebook group, from antisemitic graffiti daubed on one synagogue to a man spotted brandishing a knife outside another.
Meanwhile, it was reported last week that over 50% of hate crimes in New York targeted Jews. Just over half of the perpetrators arrested were white.
The eruption of such violent antisemitism in the US, where Jews have long contributed to the tapestry of American culture, is deeply disturbing.
Conspicuously, it has coincided with a newfound Democratic obsession with Israel, similar to that which has poisoned Labour in the UK.
While those on the left bleat ad infinitum that anti-Zionism is not antisemitism, they are often indistinguishable, whether in British Labour activist Kayla Bibby’s praise of an antisemitic image published by a far right website or Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s recurrent sly comments accusing Jews of dual loyalty, “hypnotic” power and a preoccupation with money.
This single-minded demonisation of Israel (seemingly at the expense of all other global conflicts and occasionally even pressing domestic political issues) does little to fracture support for the only Jewish country in the world. Quite the opposite.
Because for those of us who still keep a packed suitcase by the door — mentally, if not literally — it merely serves as another reminder that there’s only one exit strategy Jews can ever truly count on.
