My son attends a Jewish day school where there’s a permanent security presence, and often a heavy police presence over the past two years too. Every morning, when I drop him off, I experience what it means to raise a Jewish child in Britain in 2025. Police outside school is so normal now that he has never asked me why they are there.
The Community Security Trust, or CST, is the charity that protects British Jews from antisemitism and terrorism. It trains volunteers to guard synagogues, schools and community centers, and administers the government grant to help guard Jewish buildings. I have been one of their volunteers. I have worn the stab vest. I have stood at the gates of synagogues. The threat has been very real for decades.
For British Jews, including me, a murderous attack on a synagogue like the one that unfolded in northwest England on Thursday was always something we’d expected — a question of when rather than if. Our fear was born from experience, history and security assessments. For two years, the temperature has been heating up. The almost weekly protests, the chants, the placards, the online abuse. Most Jews share the feeling that something terrible is happening in British society — that a threshold has been crossed.
The danger was never hypothetical. We knew it was inevitable. It might have been in Manchester this time, but it could have been anywhere. But this attack isn’t just a Jewish problem. It is a challenge to Britain as a whole. For two years, and across two different governments, a culture has been allowed to develop in which deeply irresponsible speech, sometimes lawful and sometimes not, has filled our streets week after week. We have been told that free speech, even if it makes minorities feel uncomfortable, is the price we pay for living in a free society.
I used to believe that. I used to think that free speech was such a bedrock principle that my unease as a Jew walking through a hostile crowd was a small sacrifice in the bigger scheme of things. But I no longer think that; my thinking has changed.
The near-weekly pro-Palestinian protests have had a cumulative effect. They’ve normalized intimidation. They’ve created an atmosphere where citizens, whether Jewish or not, don’t feel safe in their own cities and neighborhoods. They’ve blurred the line between protest and communal harassment.