Seeing antisemitism everywhere? Don’t worry, you’re not crazy

Now there’s the Adidas shoes furore. One can only imagine what was in the minds of the executives who came up with the idea of relaunching shoes from the 1972 Olympics – the one in which 11 Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian terrorist group. A sensitive subject anyway, but to do it with Bella Hadid, a model of Palestinian heritage who has called Israel a “Jewish supremacist state”? And – moreover – to do it when you are Adidas, a company founded by actual Nazis and who just a few years ago only reluctantly dropped Kanye West when he was saying what a great man Hitler was?

Then there is the swastika in the artwork about Gaza at the Royal Academy - which was taken down - and the drawing called “the mass slaughter of women and girls is not how you deradicalize Gaza” which remains up.

“Ooops!” They all say bashfully when Jews from around the world write letters and take to social media to say something is antisemitic. “We didn’t know you’d get upset about that!” The subtext is “Ooooooh you pushy Jews are so thin-skinned.” I don’t want to be a thin-skinned pushy Jew. Stop making me be one.

I know I am not alone in asking myself if the whole world became more antisemitic since October 7 or am I simply seeing things? Let’s call it antisemitism-mania. But I don’t think I am seeing things.

Antisemitism is not only mainstream but it’s now positively fashionable. Its in the water, it’s in the air. It’s in the fact that my schoolfriend’s son couldn’t even pick up his degree without having the entire service ruined by various rants about the “genocide in Palestine” by keffiyeh-wearing students.

It’s there when you want to scream that, yes, people in the UN and Amnesty and Oxfam are out and out antisemites even though they are trusted by most people. It’s in the daily examples of antisemitism I am sent; the school kids goading Jewish children by talking about how great Hitler was, the artists whose shows are closed because they said they were sad about October 7, the TV company which says it can’t do a show about antisemitism because it’s “a sensitive topic at the moment”.

It’s on the television, all over social media, within our politics and our newspapers. It’s in the fact that a memorial to those murdered in the 1972 Olympics being celebrated by Adidas ahead of the Paris Olympics has to be done in a secret place at a secret time because of the risk to attendees.

Each time stuff like this is accepted, the Overton Window moves a little and it becomes clear that antisemitism has been allowed back into our social discourse. Worst of all, it’s often being done by people who claim they are antiracists.

If you, too, are suffering from antisemitism-mania, please know you are not alone. It is not us who have gone mad – it’s the rest of the world who have forgotten what happens when you let antisemitism run rampant.