The stabbing of two men in a Jewish neighborhood in London appears to be the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks in the United Kingdom since the beginning of the American-Israeli war against Iran, in late February. The attacks, which also include the torching of ambulances belonging to a Jewish aid group, have caused alarm among many British Jews, and have led the British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, to call antisemitism in the U.K. a “crisis.” And it’s not just this year—an estimate puts the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.K. in 2025 above any other year in recent decades, except for 2023, when they spiked after the October 7th attacks and the start of the Israeli bombings of Gaza. Police are investigating whether an extremist group, the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right, which has claimed responsibility for several of the attacks, is formally linked to the Iranian government. The issue of antisemitism is also roiling the Green Party, which has passed Labour in the polls, but is now facing numerous scandals involving its candidates posting antisemitic content. Several of the candidates have been arrested for the posts. (The government has additionally banned the group Palestine Action, which supports attacks on the U.K. arms industry, under a terrorism statute, and arrested people for protesting in support of the group.)

I recently spoke by phone with David Feldman, the co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a professor of the history of antisemitism at the University of Melbourne. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the different types of antisemitism in the United Kingdom, how left-wing organizations need to police antisemitism in their own ranks, and why the government’s response is unlikely to solve the problem.

How would you characterize what we are seeing in the U.K. right now in terms of antisemitic incidents? And does it feel different from past times, such as right after October 7th, when there was an uptick in antisemitism?

I think that what is clearly new about now is this series of horrific incidents in the last couple of months, which have involved attacks on Jewish people, on synagogues, on Jewish buildings, and on Jewish property. This collection of events in a short period of time is not something that I recall before in the U.K. And that’s in a context in which there have been other terrible events internationally, not least, most obviously, most prominently, and most terribly, the massacre at Bondi Beach. These events reverberate around the world, especially among Jews who see themselves as being part of a transnational community.

The other thing to take into account is the continuing high level of recorded antisemitic incidents of a lesser intensity than the violent ones we have seen recently, and those also engender fear and anxiety among many Jewish people. And then there are also the continuing demonstrations against Israel’s destruction of Gaza, and against the ongoing attacks on and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank, demonstrations and protests which have a significant Jewish involvement, but which some Jews and, in particular, the leaders of Jewish legacy organizations find objectionable.

Are you trying to say there is a connection or there is not a connection between these protests and what we are seeing now?

There are those three elements that I went through, and they are often given the same label of antisemitic, and that suggests a close organic connection between them. There are these violent attacks on Jewish people, buildings, and property. And then, No. 2, there’s the level of antisemitism within British society as a whole, of which antisemitic recorded incidents are often taken to be a key indicator. And then there are the demonstrations. And while it is the case that there are some objectionable antisemitic slogans in pro-Palestine marches, over all, I would say that we are dealing with three distinct phenomena, which need, from a policy point of view and from a practical point of view, to be dealt with separately. But we also need to reckon with the fact that, in the eyes of many Jewish people, they are seen as being a part of a single phenomenon.

O.K., but aside from the demonstrations, you are trying to draw somewhat of a distinction between these recent incidents and more common antisemitism?

Yes, a distinction between what is often everyday antisemitism and the recent spate of violent attacks. Most of the incidents that are recorded are incidents of abusive behavior. There are assaults recorded in the figures for antisemitic incidents, so it would be a mistake not to acknowledge that, but they’re a tiny minority of the over-all number of incidents. So I was trying to draw a distinction between the recent attacks and the general run of antisemitic incidents, which are recorded by a Jewish charity called the Community Security Trust.

What is the importance of drawing this distinction, though? Obviously, violent attacks are worse than insulting someone, but why are you sure they are different phenomena in terms of what causes them?

Well, we don’t really know for sure what is behind the recent attacks on synagogues and the arson attack on the Jewish ambulances, but there are signs that these are not expressions of what we could call organic antisemitism in Britain, but rather that these were attacks bought by proxies acting for foreign states. And these are not only attacks in the U.K. but also in the Netherlands and in Belgium, and the Islamic Movement of the Companions of the Right has at least claimed responsibility for them. And it’s these attacks which have played an important role, a significant role, in bringing fears and anxiety to their current pitch. So it’s for that reason that I would, for the moment, until we know more, separate them from the more general and broader question of the state of antisemitism in Britain today.

So then let’s just talk about the antisemitic incidents that you mentioned before and that you say are part and parcel of British society. They go up and down; they went up in 2025; they went up in 2023. I read the report that you mentioned by the Community Security Trust. Some of the standards struck me as things I would not define as antisemitic if I were coming up with the definition, but obviously a lot of them were quite clearly antisemitic, and obviously they’re concerning. What do you make of this report, and the seeming uptick in incidents in 2025?

First of all, I think that the incident figures need to be understood alongside other indicators, so we can build up a holistic picture. The incident figures on their own only tell a part of the story. Above all, we need to consider what we know from surveys about antisemitic attitudes in the United Kingdom. And there, we do not see evidence to suggest that the situation is getting worse, or that British society is turning antisemitic. Most surveys present that something like five or six per cent of people in Britain are thoroughgoing antisemites. Five or six per cent of the adult population is still a pretty big number. It’s something like three million people. So it’s not to be dismissed, but it also seems to be a fairly stable figure. In fact, there are some indicators that suggest that attitudes toward Jews are improving. A survey by YouGov in 2015 found that twenty-five per cent of those surveyed thought that Jews chased money more than other people, and then, in 2025, that had fallen to around fifteen per cent. So what these surveys suggest is that while its declining, there’s a much larger portion of the population that are not hard-core antisemites, but would assent to one or two antisemitic stereotypes like “Jews chase money more than other people.”

So these trends paint a less alarming picture than we get from looking at antisemitic incidents. And the incident figures themselves need to be treated cautiously, because we know that people are more likely to report incidents at times when antisemitism seems politically salient, for example. And there’s also the question of what counts as an antisemitic incident, and the Community Security Trust employs the I.H.R.A. working definition of antisemitism to help it make its judgments.

And we know that that definition is contentious. There are controversial elements where it can be interpreted, and is often interpreted, as saying that if you label Israel as a racist state, then you are guilty of antisemitism. The other issue is that people who specifically focus on the question of Israel’s behavior are vulnerable to being accused of having a double standard for violence in Israel and violence in other countries, which again, according to the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism, can be antisemitic. Most fundamentally, the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism is part of a marked tendency since the beginning of the twenty-first century to shift the understanding of antisemitism from attacks on the rights of Jewish people to attacks on the Jewish state.

So, for example, we know that the C.S.T. report regards putting up anti-Israel posters in an area with a large Jewish population as antisemitic or is likely to be regarded as antisemitic. And it’s not clear to me that that is antisemitic.

What do you think about conflating pro-Palestine activism with the rise of antisemitic incidents?

Well, there’s nothing inherently antisemitic about protesting against Israel’s destruction of Gaza. There’s nothing inherently antisemitic about protesting over the dispossession of Palestinians, and the attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank by settlers, which appear to be sanctioned by the Israeli government. So the marches themselves are not antisemitic, although pro-Israel or Zionist Jews may find them objectionable. It is the case that there are regrettably antisemitic expressions on and around these marches and that anti-Israel expressions sometimes regrettably take antisemitic form.

O.K., but the question that I have is whether you think that the broader pro-Palestine movement in the U.K. has, internally, done an appropriate job of weeding out antisemitism in its ranks? The Green Party has now gotten into trouble because a bunch of their candidates have posted antisemitic things online. I’ve looked at this stuff. Some of it is maybe borderline, but a lot of it is quite bad—

I couldn’t agree with you more, Isaac. And the left needs to police itself better than it has been doing. I think it’s as simple as that. I don’t have the granular information to answer your question about how successful the Palestine-solidarity campaign has been at this. What one can say is that, over a period of time, there has been this strain, an antisemitic strain within the Palestine-solidarity movement. And as you rightly say, it has become a presence in the Green Party through the online activity of what seems to be a handful of Green candidates.

Right, the reason I ask is that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all these Green Party candidates have these posts. Something is going on in 2026 where a left-wing party that finds political support, in part, by expressing opposition to what Israel is doing, and the complicity of Western countries in what Israel is doing, is also going to attract people who are posting this kind of stuff. I think it would be very surprising if the Green Party had a bunch of people who were posting racist things or anti-Muslim things or other hateful things. So this does not seem like a coincidence, and that’s why I asked about the movement.

One way of approaching this is to go back to our earlier discussion about attitudes. I said that we know that antisemitic attitudes are widely diffused through British society. So antisemitism is a wider phenomenon than the number of thoroughgoing antisemites. And what these diffused attitudes draw on are a set of myths and stereotypes about Jews, which are part of our common cultural inheritance, that Jews have a particular affinity for money and material goods, and that Jews conspire against the common good. And, as I say, this is part of our common inheritance. It doesn’t belong to the left or to the right or to any particular religious group. It’s there to be drawn on. Although, in parentheses, I’ll say that these ideas have only really ever been constitutive of, rather than just present within, far-right racist politics, but they’re there, and they can be drawn on by conservatives, by liberals, and by the left.

And they’re drawn on when they appear to be useful, when they appear to offer an explanation for something that people care about. So you get examples of people on the left in the pro-Palestine movement alleging that there’s a conspiracy of Jewish power across the world. And the other really important element in this is, of course, the connection between Israel and the Jewish people. Israel calls itself a Jewish state. Many Jewish people across the world are Zionists, and so there is a temptation, which needs to be resisted, to hold Jewish people across the world responsible for the misdeeds of Israel.

You said it has only ever been constitutive of right-wing movements?

What I meant was that antisemitism has only ever been a core element of the ideology of racist far-right political movements. But that doesn’t mean it’s not present elsewhere.

Right, we have the example of the government of Iran, too, although it’s not clear how to define them, or Stalin in the later years, and so on.

Yeah. I was really talking about European history. But I take your point about the rest, yes.

How do you think the British government, broadly speaking, has dealt with and is dealing with this rise in antisemitism? Because what it seems like is that it is trying to criminalize expression. Obviously, some of these things, like firebombing a synagogue or stabbing Jewish people, are crimes and should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but there also seems to be a lot of criminalizing expression to a degree that I think, even in Trump’s America, many Americans would find slightly surprising, and which seems unlikely to solve this problem.

The government has thrown a lot of money at bolstering security for the Jewish population. And that seems to me to be an understandable response, both for reasons of policy and reasons of politics. But, more broadly, the government is really focussing its attention on what I’ve described as the problem of antisemites rather than the more diffuse problem of antisemitism. And so they focus on security, but they put far smaller sums of money into what they call their “common ground” program—intended to help build social cohesion at a local level, and much of that is training, over education—which I think is a mistake.

What do you mean by training over education?

Training is something that you give to a household pet rather than to young people in schools and universities. It assumes that you have a behavioral problem that has to be corrected, rather than a process through which you give people information and concepts through which, hopefully, they can make better decisions. In the end, it’s about people making better decisions and teaching people to recognize antisemitic myths and stereotypes and to check themselves and to check others when they see them, and not to fall into those traps and to come up with better and more realistic understandings of why the world operates as it is. And a further problem with the education program that where the government is advancing that in universities, it’s put it into the hands of the Union of Jewish Students, which is a fine and legitimate organization, but it’s also an organization that campaigns for the widespread adoption of the I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism. And it’s a bad position for schools to be in where they’re seen as being part of a partisan movement, because then I think the students may not listen.

But going back to your earlier question about government policy, there are statements from senior politicians in the U.K., like the Prime Minister, saying that it’s his goal to stamp out antisemitism. That doesn’t seem to me to be a realistic goal, and it’s something that again confuses the problem of antisemites with the culturally diffused problem of antisemitism. So I welcome the investment in neighborhood and community groups. I only wish there were more money being devoted to it.

Do you think the ban on the group Palestine Action has had the intended effect?

It has generated large-scale civil disobedience. And, of course, it’s important to just say that Palestine Action was not proscribed because Palestine Action was accused of being antisemitic. Palestine Action was proscribed after some of its members broke into an R.A.F. base and damaged some airplanes. But, clearly, they are a pro-Palestine organization, and proscribing them has generated large-scale civil disobedience by people whose sympathies are with Palestine and who oppose Israel’s destruction of Gaza. I think there is perhaps something wider to be said in connection with this. The government sometimes appears to be more concerned about antisemitism and about what it takes to be the feelings of the Jewish community—I put it in that way because there is no single Jewish view on Israel-Palestine and no single Jewish community anymore—than for the racism endured by other minorities, and that I think that is noticed and commented upon in Britain, and I think, while it brings Jewish people security in the short term, it will produce blowback in the longer term if it continues.

What you’re saying is complicated, because I think that there’s some real truth to it, but you also don’t want it to function as an excuse for people who are going to be antisemitic.

Yes, I hope nothing I said would endorse that. What I was saying was more directed at the government and at directions in which policy ought to go, in which all racism is treated with equal urgency and concern by the government. That doesn’t mean any slack should be given to anti-Jewish racism. ♦