Golders Green is where the original Jews of London’s East End discovered the suburb. Half nice, kosher bakeries, kids flooding the hilly roads on scooters, space to park the family property. The British Dream.
It is now in a constant state of emergency. All the arms of the state that are supposed to wrap around the citizens are doubled up here – in Shomrim’s volunteer officers with their hi-vis jackets and quasi-police badges, Hatzola’s local volunteer ambulances – four of which were burnt down by arsonists a month ago – and the security services provided by the charity Community Security Trust.
I was shown inside the entrance of a popular local Jewish primary school, with its complex system of codes and gates, CCTV and four guards on duty. Children screamed and laughed, tearing up the playground, not far from a guard post manned by a man in all black, barrel-armed and shaved eyebrows, who was watching.
Synagogues, too, are locked and guarded, with private security vehicles parked outside heavy black railings. Until ten years ago, there were no guards. Parent volunteers took it in turns to keep an eye on the school gates, I’m told, and there was just an ordinary fence around the Golders Green shul like any parish church. But times have changed. A plainclothes man in the corner with a remote control and a baseball cap on his back watched me as I walked down the street leaving the school.
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This suburban stronghold – home to Britain’s largest Jewish population – has been breached again. A man tore through its streets in the bright sun of a Wednesday afternoon and stabbed two Jewish men. He tried to stab the Shomrim policemen and guards who were the first on the scene. “He has a knife in his hand and he’s waving it; he was saying things, but I couldn’t hear what,” said a Shomrim volunteer who came face to face with the suspect. The Met has declared the attack a terrorist incident.
When I arrived at the scene of one of the stabbings, in the walled-off section of the high street lined with shops with cozy names like Kosher Kingdom and Good for You and Posh Wash, there was a crowd. Boys in their school uniforms and kippahs ran down a staircase in the walkway along the flats above the shops to see the scene. Chief Rabbi Efraim Mirvis was surrounded by cameras. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch arrived and did a sort of ceremonial walk back and forth through the crime scene surrounded by Shomrim guards.
The atmosphere was almost that of an audience waiting for the main act, but more angry than waiting. Keir Starmer has said he will leave as soon as possible. Met Commissioner Mark Rowley criticized – “resignation!” – after giving his statement. He blamed hostile states, foreign organizations, the far left and the far right and warned: “Legitimate debate on international affairs must never be allowed to legitimize anti-Semitism or violence… when that line is blurred, attacks become more likely.”
Sarah Sackman, the Labor MP and justice minister, was met with cheers of “shame on you” from some as she told the gathered residents that “an attack on Britain’s Jews is an attack on Britain itself” and that the Prime Minister would hold a Cobra meeting. “Look, I’m done with hard stuff,” she told me afterward. “I think that in these moments you have to face the music and give important and principled messages, but also a unifying and constructive policy”. She said she had also received messages of “excellent solidarity” from the Jewish community and beyond.
After the attack, she was “directly in a room” with the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, and told her “what I thought the community needed in terms of policing, in terms of security from the head of government”. Is the government providing enough of that security? “(Mahmood) gets it, the Prime Minister gets it, the government gets it,” she said. “The anger and frustration is understandable, but I think most community leaders understand that the government and the police have the support of the community.”
Reflecting on the “intensification” of physical threats and an “atmosphere and environment in which hatred can fester,” Sackman cited Iran-linked groups paying youths “small amounts of money to go and cause trouble and panic in the Jewish community,” as well as anti-Semitism that “has its roots in domestic Islamists, as well as right-wing and far-left extremism.”
“Something has changed,” said Ari, 27, who has lived in the area all his life, looking out at the empty road surrounded by police tape. “This was a quiet neighborhood, I never heard of any terrorist attacks or murders when I was growing up here as a kid. Sadiq Khan says this is the safest city in the world. Well, where is the safety for us?”
Time and time again, residents told me they felt more afraid to be visibly Jewish in London than at any time in their lives. They talked about the Golders Green attacks, the Manchester synagogue murders last October, the attempted bottle bombing of nearby synagogues in recent weeks. And, in every conversation, even about the pro-Palestinian protests – they are often described to me as “hate marches”.
“When you hear someone calling for the ‘globalization of the Intifada,’ it’s literally stabbing people in the street,” said Rabbi Sam Fromson of Golders Green Synagogue, a tall man with a thick beard, sky-blue embroidered kippah and blazer buttoned tightly over his suit. “You hit my synagogue, it’s globalizing the Intifada. You stab people in the streets of London, it’s globalizing the Intifada. It’s not just a slogan.”
We sat in the glow of the stained glass of the synagogue, under the string of Israeli flags left over from last week’s independence day celebrations. For Fromson, anti-Semitism has become “more common” over the past ten years. Online radicalization is part of this, he believes, and also blames “political rhetoric becoming more extreme”.
“I’m not a political commentator, but there was a clear expression of a commitment to change from the Labor Party, post-Corbyn, and I feel very disappointed,” he said. “Anti-Zionism is just a new variation of this ancient hatred. It is the duty of every good and civilized society to call out and stand against it and I don’t hear politicians doing it.”
With two weeks to go until England, Scotland and Wales go to the polls for local elections, Jewish identity is somewhat on the agenda along with potholes and bin collections.
It is the independent candidate, formerly jailed for terrorism, running for a seat in Birmingham, who he said casually New statesman: “This is becoming a Jewish state, not a Muslim state. But why isn’t this being talked about? You know why. Because who controls the media? They do.”
then is the candidate for the reform council who called the Nazis “true visionaries” and another who accused “Jews” of “creating division by forcing other races into our societies.” And Green council candidates who have called the government “over-represented with Zionist Jews”, suggested Israel was responsible for the shooting at Bondi Beach in Australia, characterized the October 7 attacks as “Palestinians inevitably trying to defend themselves” and ran an “Anne Frank” hoax account that posts about killing Zionists.
“Zack Polanski should be ashamed of himself,” Fromson said of the Green Party leader, who is Jewish and said recently THE New statesman that accusations of anti-Semitism against his party do not “pass the smell test”.
“They should be concerned about local services and bins being distributed,” he said. “The fact that it’s even possible for someone to win on a foreign policy issue that has no impact on their domestic electorate… is really undermining the UK’s beautiful democracy.”
Instead, the rabbi is feeling “less connected than ever” to the British Jewish identity he was once so proud of. His WhatsApp groups are full of messages from “super hard-connected Jews”, saying they are increasingly likely to leave Britain for Israel.
I hear this from Ben Haffner, who teaches Talmud to the boys at the Menorah Grammar School and is standing with a few students around the corner from the police cordon. “We’re British, we’ve been British for a long time, but the result of all this will be to pack up for Israel,” he said, as his students nodded around him. One added: “We’ll have to go eventually; this isn’t British anymore.”
A non-practicing Jew who works for a transport company in north-west London, including in Golders Green, told me that most of his work in the past year has been moving Jews from London to Israel – even those who have no family there.
“They would rather be in a war zone. They don’t feel protected by the police and feel that pro-Gaza sentiment takes precedence and that the demonstrations are anti-Jewish marches in disguise in many cases,” he said. He is amazed at the number of moving boxes he sees that are marked “Safe Room”.
“Although I may not agree with everything the Israeli government is doing, I believe in the existence of Israel as a homeland. People will jump at any cause to justify anti-Semitism – it has existed forever.”
More British Jews moved to Israel last year than in any year since the turn of the century. And reports of anti-Semitism have reached record levels.
Concern about Muslim immigration came up in several conversations I had during the day, but mostly amid speculation about the role of Iran (a terrorist group linked to Iran took responsibility for this as has happened for other attacks, although the evidence is not yet clear).
“Islamophobia is an issue, of course, but we have to talk about anti-Semitism as something specific,” the Talmud teacher said. “We are targeted more than any minority.” (Jews are far more likely, per capita, to be victims of religiously motivated hate crime, according to Home Office data published last year).
As the afternoon turned to evening, protests erupted in the streets, with chants of “Keir Starmer, Jew pest”. The vice president of reform, Richard Tice, appeared. Two young men chatting about politicians were cynical, recalling reports of anti-Semitic things Nigel Farage is accused of saying as a schoolboy. “He doesn’t really like Jews, you know, he sounds quite anti-Semitic,” one of the men said as the other nodded. “After the Muslims, we will be next.”
The British Jews of Golders Green – whose grandparents sought refuge in Britain from the Nazis, whose parents sought refuge in suburbs further up the northern line – no longer seem to find refuge in mainstream British political life.
On the Tube to Golders Green after news of the attack broke, I was sitting across from a nervous-looking middle-aged man wearing a black kippah. He was refreshing his phone and reading updates and sighed. Footage of the stabbings flashed across news pages. He didn’t seem scared, or angry. I would like to write that he looked defiant. But he didn’t. He just looked like a man driving home from work. For so many of his neighbors now, the question is where “home” really is.
(Further reading: We are under attack)
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