‘If you don’t live in a leafy suburb like Richmond,’ said the new president of the Board of Deputies, Jonathan Arkush, last week, ‘you just won’t send your children to the local schools. They are rife with problems – bullying, violence, drug-taking and racism.’
In Mr Arkush’s day job he is a barrister, paid to construct clever arguments. In this statement, hidden within a double negative is a fearful view of the world outside a sealed sphere of privilege. For ‘leafy’ read affluent, for ‘local’ read working class and multi-cultural. Mr Arkush seems to believe that Jewish children can only be safe when removed from the mainstream. He speaks out against racism, but there is a disquieting undercurrent to his words that pulls in the other direction.
I wonder why Richmond escapes his gloomy view of the world. Perhaps he has friends who live there who send their children to local schools. Maybe these children are clearly happy and well-adjusted, neither bullied or bullying and manifestly drug-free. Richmond, he allows is the exception to the rule. A utopia where Jewish children are free to mingle with their non-Jewish peers, unlike the dystopian hell that rules elsewhere.
Well, this month my daughter finished her exams at a sixth-form college in Clapton, an area of London that is most definitely neither leafy nor suburban. Jewish pupils at her college can be counted on the fingers of one hand. More than 80 percent of pupils come from deprived areas, more than half are Black or Asian. Before going to this college she spent five years at our local comprehensive in Crouch End, a school with many children from Turkish Muslim families.
In these seven years, she has not once been bullied, nor suffered from any violence. She has friends from many different backgrounds, black, white and Asian. Her closest friends at college are from Somalian, Kurdish, Pakistani and Romanian families. She has friends who wear the hijab and classmates who are veiled in a full niqab. Being part of such diverse community has been both enriching and enlightening, and profoundly anti-racist.
Only once in seven years has she encountered antisemitism in the classroom, some boys talking about rich Jews controlling the world, during a discussion in an Economics class. She was not afraid to tell them that they were ignorant and bigoted, that they were spreading anti-Semitic lies. The boys did not even try to argue back. That was it, the end of the incident. We were proud of her for dealing with it without fear or trauma.
As the author of books for and about young adults I visit many schools around the country and abroad. I talk to pupils, teachers and librarians. I find that the schools with more affluent pupils are the ones that worry the most about drug-taking. Middle-class children have a lot of pressure put on them to achieve high grades and progress to top universities. Some react by turning to drugs, and they have the spare cash to buy them. It’s not something that we talk about a lot in public in the Jewish community, but it is a problem that many families struggle with behind closed doors.
I would be an utter steaming hypocrite if I argued against Jewish schools. Not only am I very happy to send my son to one, but a few years ago we were in the same position as the unfortunate families so bitterly upset that there is no provision for their children in the Jewish schools. I know the feeling of impotent fury as you wait for a coveted place to come up, and the sadness of trying to explain to your child that the system is unfair and wrong.
However, as I raged and prayed, I did know that the local school was a perfectly reasonable alternative for my precious son – as my equally precious daughter was happy there. He’d been to a Jewish primary school, and was used to a Jewish atmosphere, so the transition might have been more difficult for him. But at least we could assure him that the dark fears articulated by Mr Arkush were unfounded.
All schools need policies to deal with violence, racism, bullying and drugs. These are not problems that can be escaped by paying school fees, or securing a place at a Jewish school. As the recent embarrassment over JFS’s ‘muck-up day’ shows, even the most desirable schools have to contend with the daft behaviour of a few idiots. Teenagers are, by nature, often thoughtless and reckless. That’s why I love writing about them.
Every child is different, and what suits one will not be right for another. No school is perfect, but it is perfectly possible to get a good education and retain a strong Jewish identity surrounded by Christians and Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, atheists and agnostics. Children do not make the distinctions that adults do. My children both started their education in an international school, where they learned that who you are and how you treat other people matters far more than your nationality or religion.
There are many good and sensible reasons to send your child to a Jewish school. Fear is not one of them.
Keren David is the author of six Young Adult novels, including This is Not a Love Story (Atom, £6.99)
