Articles

The Difficult Truth about Antisemitism in the UK, by Brendan McGeever, Ben Gidley, David Feldman – 21 October 2025

From The Prospect

Why don’t we acknowledge that there are different ways of measuring the prevalence of anti-Jewish prejudice?

The murderous attack this month on worshippers at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, has left many Jews in Britain with a sense of foreboding. Given the timing of the attack—on the eve of a fragile ceasefire in Gaza—many MPs and Jewish leaders understood the shocking scene at Heaton Park as a coda to the two-year period since Hamas’s 7th October massacre in southern Israel.

Throughout this time, prominent figures have decried protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza and its population as hives of antisemitism. In their responses to the atrocity in Manchester, senior politicians and communal leaders in the UK, from the prime minister to the chief rabbi, have presented a now familiar story of British Jews in peril. In this telling, the attack is the latest expression of a rampant and unrelenting wave of antisemitism. Is this a true reflection of Britain today? If not, what are the implications for politics and policy? 

Public discussions too often fail to acknowledge that there are different ways of measuring antisemitism. No measure is perfect, but taken together they build a picture that is strikingly different from the conventional wisdom expressed in response to the murders at Heaton Park. 

Of all the available data, reports of recorded antisemitic incidents seem to indicate that antisemitism in the UK is rising dramatically. The Jewish charity the Community Security Trust (CST), recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents across the UK in the first half of 2025, the second-highest total ever reported in the first six months of any year. Reported incidents since October 2023 have been consistently high, usually well over 200 a month—far more than in preceding years.  

The data on reported incidents is echoed in Jewish perceptions of antisemitism. A recent report by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) shows that 47 per cent of British Jews now see antisemitism as a “very big” problem, up from just 11 per cent in 2012. Perhaps fuelled by encounters on social media, this reflects a widely held view among British Jews that an attack like the one in Manchester was waiting to happen. And these figures also indicate that an antisemitic incident is more than a single data point. Each experience reverberates among Jewish people as the hurt and harm is shared. 

Yet the significance of such statistics is not clear cut. While hopefully we can all agree that what happened in Manchester was unambiguously antisemitic, definitions of what is and what is not antisemitic more generally are fiercely contested. In compiling its reported incidents data, the CST inevitably makes a series of judgement calls, and in doing so seeks guidance from the controversial IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of antisemitism. In its list of examples of antisemitism, that definition includes “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis”. Many experts question the idea that these cross the threshold of antisemitism.

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David Feldman is Director of BISA at Birkbeck, University of London and a Professor of History. He has advised the UN, the OSCE, Human Rights Watch, the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Antisemitism and the Labour Party on policy issues connected with antisemitism. His most recent book is Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Politics of Definition (2023, ed. with Marc Volovici).

Ben Gidley is a Reader in Sociology and Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of BISA. His research has focused on diaspora and diversity in urban Europe, and on antisemitism in relation to other forms of racism. His books include: Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today (2010, with Keith Kahn-Harris); Antisemitism and Islamophobia: A Shared Story? (2017, ed. with James Renton); and Jews and Muslims in Europe: Between Discourse and Experience (2022, ed. with Sami Everett).

Brendan McGeever is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birkbeck, University of London and a member of BISA. His core areas of specialism include the study of racism, antisemitism and anti-racism. He is the author of Antisemitism and the Russian Revolution (2019) and Britain in Fragments: Why Things Are Falling Apart (2023, co-written with Satnam Virdee).

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