When I arrive at the Islington branch of Gail’s, I spot Ben M Freeman (he’s very insistent on the M) immediately. He’s the only person in the bijou bakery wearing a kippah and a Magen David pendant. A big, gold Magen David pendant.
“I started wearing them a couple of years ago,” he says. “Historically, the non-Jewish world marked us as Jews to shame us. But I’m very proud of being Jewish, and a kippah and Star of David are my way of showing it, of moving through the world as a visible Jew.
“And this Magen David,” he adds, “is a replica of the Star of David that’s on the cover of my first book — it was a present to myself to mark its publication.”
Entitled Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, that first book was a call to Jews to celebrate themselves and change perceptions of what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century. It was published in February 2021 and this week, not quite two years later, saw the publication of what he describes as its second instalment: Reclaiming our Story: The Pursuit of Jewish Pride.
“There’s a brief chapter about internalised antisemitism in my first book that everyone kept talking about at my speaking engagements and on social media. My new book explores the phenomenon at length,” he explains. “People wanted to know more about the impact Jew-hate has on Jews.”
Unlikely as it sounds from the author of a manifesto on Jewish pride, he writes about the subject from personal experience. Freeman is gay and his first boyfriend had a problem with Jews: “He demonised Israel obsessively.”
So obsessively, he told Freeman, they could never marry because he couldn’t countenance any connection to Israel, even if it was simply through Freeman and his family.
“How could I, of all people, have been in a relationship with a Jew-hater? The answer is that back then I was suffering from internalised anti-Jewishness,” he says.
“My ex didn’t succeed in destroying my relationship with Israel, but to be accepted in that relationship, my first same-sex relationship, I had to diminish my Jewishness. And because I was so desperate to heal the trauma I had experienced of being a young gay teen in a homophobic world, that is what I did. I put up with Jew-hate.”
The main argument of his new polemic is that many Jews feel the same: Jewish self-hatred is a long-standing Jewish phenomenon. It can be relatively mild and use the language of qualification: “I’m Jewish, but…”
Or it can be extreme and manifest itself in the complete rejection of Zionism, in Jews, he writes “who have discarded their inherent connection to our indigenous homeland, Israel… who have accepted, and internalised, non-Jewish negative perceptions of the world’s only Jewish state”.
In doing so, they are trying to be “good Jews”, but the very expression is a misnomer, he argues, as is its flipside “bad Jews”.
They are “categories created by the non-Jewish world’s ideas of Jewish identity. The truth is we are, there are, just Jews.”
If you are a Jew whose Jewishness causes you discomfort on some level — someone who whispers the word Israel in public, who would never sport a big, gold Magen David in the Corbyn neighbourhood that is Islington, who would not, perhaps, read this newspaper outside the home — Freeman has sympathy for you.
“Internalised hate isn’t the fault of the individual who feels it. It is the fault of the wider world that has persecuted, shamed, and traumatised you,” he says.
Moreover, many minority communities suffer from the problem.
In the foreword to his book, he discusses how black Americans have long analysed their complex relationship with anti-black racism and how it manifests itself in feelings of low self-worth and not believing in others who look like them. And before he came out at the age of 19, Freeman himself suffered from extreme internalised homophobia.
“I self-harmed, investigated conversion therapy and attempted to take my own life, several times.”
It wasn’t until he reached his early 20s that he realised he was being punished by society for something he had not done: that it was the world that was guilty, not him.
In his new book, he asks Jews to come to the same realisation: to accept it is impossible that of all the world’s marginalised groups, they alone have not absorbed other people’s negative views of them.
“I say to Jews, with love, why do you think you’re so special? The black community suffers from internalised hatred, the gay community suffers from internalised hatred, but not the Jews? Don’t be ridiculous.”
The book is also a plea for us to catch up with those two communities. “Gay pride is a thing, Black pride is a thing. We Jews are generations behind them.”
The first half of Freeman’s book is a rigorous analysis of the historical reasons for Jewish self-hatred. In the second half, we hear from people who have found Jewish pride, who realised they were suffering from internalised antisemitism, but who came out the other side.
All the stories are very affecting, but Lyvia Tzamali’s journey to self-acceptance stands out. She had a nose job, went to church and became a Corbynite before she realised during the Israel-Hamas war of May 2021 that the pent-up hatred being unleashed on Jews on the streets of Europe and America, in schools and on social media was the same persecution and humiliation that has followed Jews since the dawn of civilisation.
Before he wrote his books, Glasgow-born Freeman already had experience educating Jews about the consequences of antisemitism. He was the only “out Jew” on his course at Glasgow University — “it’s where I learned to defend Israel and the Jewish people” — and after his politics degree he worked for the UJIA in his home town for several years.
This was followed by a brief interlude in London, working for the fashion designer Tom Ford. He remains a sharp dresser, who revels in the confusion he creates for others by teaming his kippah with hipster threads, such as the cardigan he wears for this interview.
“Its’s good to break down stereotypes,” he says.” But fashion was never going to be his life’s work and after London, he moved to Hong Kong where he worked in Holocaust education for six years. There he might have stayed had Corbynism not happened and turned him into one of his generation’s leading voices against anti-Jewish racism.
“I was still in Hong Kong when I joined Twitter in 2018 so I could take part in the fight against Corbyn. But I didn’t want to just fight. I wanted to help people understand why Corbynites think the way they do, to explain that their mindset is a product of Soviet antisemitism.”
The books followed because he said he was limited by social media. “I’ve been called an influencer, but what I really am is an educator.
“I like to get to the root of things, to explain phenomena at length. Both books are 80,000 words long.
“I’m not a rabble-rouser, I’m a teacher who tries to educate without judgment. How could I be anything else? Being gay was such a source of shame to me, it almost cost me my life.”
It’s a key difference he says between him and Glasgow’s other big-name antisemitism warrior, “best bud” Eve Barlow, with whom he grew up. “Academic teachers and journalists both do vital work in fighting Jew-hate, but it’s different work.”
Indeed, difference is something this gay Jewish author, who now lives in Islington, champions.
“Imagine if that table behind us” he says, pointing to the baked goods counter at Gail’s, “groaned not only with the smoked salmon bagels we see, but with Jewish foods like chopped liver and chicken soup and hummus and shaksuka.
"You and I go up to the table and we choose different things. You like hummus, but I don’t. I go for the chopped liver, and you plump for the chopped egg. It doesn’t matter what we choose, the only important thing is that we get up and go to the table.
“My mum goes to shul every week, but I don’t because God isn’t really part of my Jewish identity. But I wear a kippah and I have started keeping kosher.
"Maybe you don’t do any of those things, but you visit Israel regularly. The only thing that matters is that we do Jewish things. We are each of us a thread in the tapestry of Jewish civilisation and the future of our people depends on us.”
Reclaiming Our Story is published by No Pasaran Media.
