Thread by @NudderingNudnik

@DamCou Damian - I love you dearly for the mensch you are, but you’re wrong.
I’m going to rustle up some food to feed my perpetually hungry teenager and then when that is done I’ll try and explain why.
Stay tuned.

@DamCou Ok, sorry for the delay in responding properly. I had a rare “teenager wants to hang out and talk music & even let the old guy into the studio” moment so had to embrace it. Precious moments.

The problem is not whether or not the racists are the majority. It’s more subtle.

@DamCou It’s a rich, toxic brew that I have started referring to as a political & cultural pogrom.
Jews are finding that the spaces in which we can exist as the people we really are, are contracting at an alarming rate.

And we find that those who were -on paper- our allies are not.

@DamCou For every rancid racist Corbynista there are perhaps 1000 bystanders.
Some of those bystanders simply can’t parse the antisemitism, partly because the racists have blown such a dense fog of denial around it. And largely because Jews have pretty much existed under the radar.

@DamCou It’s our default approach and has generally served us pretty well but it does mean that our concerns, our identities and our history are not well understood by the wider population.
All people think of is the Holocaust. And Shylock.
So that chunk of bystanders is blind.

@DamCou The larger group of bystanders have just categorized us as P17 - a priority below the NHS, social care, free broadband etc.
They might at some level recognize a problem but it simply doesn’t have any bite in the “what’s in it for me” stakes.

And the final group of bystanders:

@DamCou They’re not active Corbynista racists, but they’ve heard for decades all about how bad Israel is. They don’t really care about it or know anything about it but it chimes at a deep level with the culturally embedded forms of antisemitism that have existed in Britain for centuries

@DamCou So they do the “no smoke without fire” thinking that populist politics relies upon.

And these groups of bystanders make up at least 30-40% of the electorate, and in reality probably much much more than that.

Back to the pogrom. As Jews we now have to change how we relate...

@DamCou ..to the world around us.
We remove ourselves from scenarios on a regular basis. We distance ourselves from those who we thought had our backs and shared common values. This means we lose relationships with friends and family members.
The famous author, the musician, the actor..

@DamCou ..the cultural figures who we once perhaps enjoyed or even admired we now know are our tormentors.
So we remove ourselves but by bit from those cultural and political spheres.
Of course, we don’t really remove ourselves - no, we are removed by others
To our new Pale of Settlement

@DamCou And as we are headed into our cultural and political shtetl - which does of course offer us relief, solidarity and common understanding - we are then derided and abused for being insular and tribal. The old ones are the best, after all.
Our lives as Jews are contracting.

@DamCou And when we talk about leaving it’s not because we’re scared in some physical sense of the Corbynistas in that video.
Though of course their rhetoric has physical consequences. I remind you of the day this year when @MrsNuddering and I arrived at our synagogue to be greeted by..

@DamCou @MrsNuddering ...4 heavily attired police after a “credible” threat was made to set fire to both our synagogue and us “in the name of the Palestinian people”.

So yes, the physical threat is there - it always has been as @CST_UK can attest - but I personally don’t talk about leaving....

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK ...because I’m scared of the Corbynistas. I know these people. I know what they are and they don’t scare me.
No, when I talk about leaving it is simply because I deserve better than this. I and my dear wife and beloved son deserve a life that isn’t contracting.

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK We deserve expansive lives. And not only that, we know we can have those lives. But probably not here, not right now.

As you will know Damian, the immigrant life story is a long and hard one.But it is meaningful and dignified because it promises redemption. It promises expansion

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK It brings the promise that the lives of our children, grandchildren etc will be better than the lives of those of our family who arrived as poor, illiterate peasants fleeing the pogroms.
And that’s how it has broadly worked out for around 120 years in the case of my family.

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK None of that 120 years was without moments of contraction - there are specific dates I could point to. But the curve, the direction of travel was positive. And so we stayed.
But now - I’m not so sure anymore. I’m not utterly convinced either way tbh, but that’s an extraordinary..

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK ...position to find myself in.
The legend that is @DavidHirsh sums up a lot of this much more coherently and succinctly in his concept of the “community of the good”.
Jews are now on the outside of that virtuous circle here.
But other circles exist.
We have choices.
Hard ones...

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK @DavidHirsh ...for sure. But knowing that others have had no choices and have simply been victims of history, I will not bleat about the choice being hard. Instead, I will embrace the challenge of the choice in honor of those who couldn’t

Sorry, that was a long -if only partial- explanation

@DamCou @MrsNuddering @CST_UK @DavidHirsh I hope it helps a bit.
But whatever else, I and many others will always remember those like you Damian who stand tall. You are the real community of the good and we love you dearly for it.
Right, enough from me.
xx