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‘I can’t discuss Israel with my anti-Zionist kids – it’s pointless.’
Meet the Jewish parents whose families have split since October 7
April 9, 2025 16:08
Meet the Jewish parents whose families have split since October 7
April 9, 2025 16:08Two months after October 7, Sarah’s* eleven-year-old daughter Talia* quietly deposited the Star of David she had been given as a baby on her mother’s dressing room table. It was not a casual gesture. The previous week, she had told her mother that she was resigning as a Jew.
Neither was it the child’s first pronouncement against being Jewish in the wake of the deadliest attack on Jews in a single day since the Shoah.
“After the big march against antisemitism in London in November 2023, I kept a big Israeli flag in our kitchen but it would regularly disappear” says Sarah “When I asked Talia if it was anything to do with her, she confessed and said she didn’t want her best friend, a non-Jewish girl and frequent visitor to our home to see it.”
Sarah and her daughter are emblematic of a growing intergenerational phenomenon: Zionist parents whose children are scared of being associated with Israel; youngsters who have internalised antisemitism, in particular its political iteration, anti-Zionism. Their parents say these young people openly loathe the Jews’ nation state. And anecdotal evidence suggests that the problem has grown exponentially since the October pogroms.
“The lack of intellectual rigour is what disappoints me as much as anything else,” says Alison*, whose sons are aged 24 and 22. “They are very bright boys who have fallen hook, line and sinker for a crude pro-Palestinian narrative that has brainwashed their generation. They simply don’t question any of it. I know this might sound patronising but it feels like groupthink.
“My husband and I are left-wing Jews who are more than willing to consider a range of views on the Middle East but we feel our kids are stuck in an intellectual position that beggars belief. The kindest thing I can say is they are incredibly naïve. They are even taken in by the disgraced academic David Miller.”
Like the other parents I spoke to, Alison and her husband gave their sons what can be described as a conventional Jewish upbringing.
“They both went to a Jewish primary school, we used to holiday regularly in Israel, where my husband has extensive family, and we sent them on Noam summer camps,” says Alison. “We never lectured them about Israel, it was just the backdrop to our family life. Now they wander around in Palestinian insignia, go on anti-Israel marches and tell me they were brainwashed in childhood.”
The shift in her sons’ attitudes began she says at the Russell Group universities they both attended. “That’s where they first encountered and swallowed Corbynist claptrap and where I feel they were desperate to identify with their peers, to fit in. Their position on Israel now feels immutable and the arguments along the way have been so horrible, that I don’t bring the subject up any more. It’s too painful. And it also feel pointless – we all end up shouting at each other.”
Dalia*, an Israeli and Israel activist in London, knows all about the yelling that often accompanies in this inter-generational rift.
“My daughter has screamed that I am a Nazi and I have called her a kapo which I regret but I am horrified by the anti-Israel sentiments that come out of her mouth.”
Her 22-year-old daughter works in the arts and Dalia thinks this is part of the problem. “Being anti-Israel is an article of faith in her professional circles and if you are dare to stand up for Israel, you are bullied.”
On top of this, she thinks her daughter genuinely believes the lies that are spread about the Jewish state. “When she says Israeli snipers deliberately target Palestinian children, my hair stands on end. I tell her she is talking about our family, about my brothers and her uncles, and ask if she could possibly imagine them doing such a thing. She never replies.”
Alison says she wishes her parents, who were Holocaust survivors, were still alive today. “I think then my children would have a better understanding of antisemitism.”
All names have been changed.