Secondary school pupils across the UK should be taught not just about the Holocaust but also about Jew-hatred in modern times says a ground-breaking report by the government’s “antisemitism Tsar” Lord Mann published today.
All schools must have policies to recognise and combat antisemitism when it does occur, the report says, and this should also form part of basic teacher training. If followed through, Lord Mann told the JC, this would make Britain the first country in the world to make this kind of education mandatory.
As a Labour MP, Lord Mann commissioned reports on behalf of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism in 2006 and 2015. He said while the situation had improved since those reports, there was still a long way to go, as the earlier documents did not give much attention to analysing the impact of Jew-hate online - an increasingly severe problem.
Lord Mann also stressed that the recommendations in the report would require only a small investment.
He said: “Obviously this is not the time to be making demands with big resource implications, but what I’m setting out will not need much extra money at all. Building a basic course on how to deal with antisemitism into teacher training doesn’t need much extra money – we’re talking about a little bit more here and there that can be found from existing budgets.”
Entitled Anti-Jewish Hatred: Tackling Antisemitism in the UK 2023 – Renewing the Commitment, Lord Mann said his report is a “work plan” for the next two years. The document also calls for a debate on whether the term “antisemitism” should be replaced generally by “anti-Jewish hatred” – a move, he said, that would be supported by many Jewish community leaders he had consulted.
“I’m in favour of this myself,” he said, “because I think it goes further and deeper and has an extra bit of impact.”
Lord Mann’s recommendations for schools cite the investigation published in July by the Henry Jackson Society think tank, first reported by the JC, that revealed that recorded antisemitic incidents in schools in England have almost trebled over the past five years. But according to the think tank, just 47 schools have any kind of formal, written policy that “might make staff more aware of the vicious forms of antisemitic bullying” – such as making a hissing sound when Jewish pupils enter a classroom in a reference to the Nazi gas chambers.
“The feedback I get from teachers tells me they don’t know how to handle this,” Lord Mann told the JC. “If the basics aren’t taught in their training, it’s not surprising things do go wrong.”
His report adds: “If this scale of incidence among young people is not tackled, then we are storing up potentially serious problems for the future as well as for the present…. we must avoid young people going into higher education or working life without an understanding of anti-Jewish hatred.”
Lord Mann’s report also calls for new research to investigate the link between antisemitic incidents in the UK and events in the Middle East, for the government to work with online platforms to hold them accountable for antisemitic content; for Jewish university students to feel safe from hatred on campus; and for an official review to determine why police and prosecution authorities appear to deal with antisemitism less effectively than other forms of racial hatred – which, the report says, has led to such crimes being under-reported.
Lord Mann told the JC that his contacts with senior Government and Opposition figures led him to believe his recommendations would command widespread support – not just in England but across the UK’s nations: “We need UK-wide solutions, and this report is also addressed to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh and Northern Ireland assemblies.”
