Being a Cambridge Jew Since 7 October

This piece is a reflection on mine and my friends’ experiences as Cambridge Jews, from 7 October onwards. It is not intended as a comment on the ongoing war.

A few days ago, I saw that someone at my college had reposted a series on their story about the treatment of Gazans who had been detained in Israel in the aftermath of the massacre of more than 1,200 Israelis on 7 October. The treatment of the Gazans described by the posts was awful. What made me respond, however, was one particular slide. It was a screenshot of a tweet containing a picture of a Gazan’s ankle with a number tag. The text on the tweet described the picture and informed me that “this should look all too familiar”.

Of course, this referred to the numbers tattooed on Jewish people at concentration camps during the Holocaust. And, of course, it is no coincidence that the reference was made in the context of allegations against Jewish Israelis. When they reposted this on their story, it felt like the post was telling me that it should look all too familiar to me because my family members, they dared to remind me, were killed during the Holocaust.

I responded, without mentioning my family history, telling them that the comparison to the Holocaust was both “unnecessary and unjustified”. I couldn’t believe how much of an understatement I had typed. It was hardly the point I was trying to make. Unjustified is the tip of the iceberg.Their response was: “Okay. I’ve taken the post down”.

I read this in two ways. “Okay. It was antisemitic”. In which case, an admission of racism is made without apology. The second way was even worse. “Okay. Whatever you say to end this discussion.” I wondered how they could deny that their post was antisemitic when a Jewish person has just spelled it out for them. Have we not all accepted that the victims of prejudice are those best placed to define and identify where that prejudice rears its head? Or is that not something that applies to Jews?

After 7 October, very few people checked up on us to see if our family in Israel was safe. It was worsened by stories posted from 8 October “contextualising” or minimising the atrocities – murder, rape, torture of civilians.1 On the 9th, the death toll from the massacre had become clearer. Images of burnt bodies in kibbutzim and accounts of slaughter from the Nova music festival were emerging. I replied to a story of a Fanon passage about resistance from victims of colonialism. I suggested that there is no need to contextualise rape or the abduction of children. The person said they did not know that the atrocities had been committed, despite their being plastered across mainstream news. They then drunkenly told me at Lola’s they didn’t mean to offend me.

More recently, I saw something that had been reposted on someone’s story that had a caption about “assertions that have also been discredited” from 7 October including “claims of r*pe”. I wanted to reply with graphic videos taken by Hamas terrorists themselves or of survivor testimonies. But I was too hurt by the mistrust of Jews and the need to put such trauma on display as “evidence”. In what other context is a socially conscious university student emboldened to publicly deny rape testimony?

When I think about replying to these stories, sometimes I wonder whether I am merely inserting myself into a situation that’s not about me. Am I dramatising my response: getting wound up in my comfortable Cambridge room, when thousands of people are dying? I minimise my anger, I make apologies, and I qualify my criticism.

It is in these moments that I realise how bad the situation is. I have fallen prey to the gaslighting of non-Jews denying the legitimacy of my response to antisemitism. If that is what the relentless dismissal of Jewish pain does to me, then how must it affect the way that non-Jewish people perceive us? It does this to me, a proud Jew. Me, acutely aware of my heritage. Me, who talks and thinks about antisemitism constantly. Me, who walked down my street in North West London and was berated as a “f**king Jew” just a few months ago.

“I could not count how many times I’ve heard – or said – something like the phrase “nobody cares about us” in Jewish circles in the past few weeks.”

Such experiences of antisemitism are just as present in my family history. On my Dad’s side there was expulsion from early-modern Spain; on my Mum’s a lucky story of escape from pogrom-ridden Eastern Europe before the spread of concentration camps. Had they not emigrated, it would have been more than my great-great-grandparents and the extended family who were killed during the Holocaust. I would probably not be here. Today in Cambridge my friend tells me that, at a Gaza Teach-In they attended a few weeks ago, one of the speakers told a packed lecture hall that commemorating the Holocaust is very difficult nowadays without being complicit in Israeli genocide.

There has not been a day since 7 October when I have not seen an antisemitic Instagram story. My Jewish friends tell me about how they have open conversations about Israel and antisemitism with friends, only to see antisemitic content on their stories the next day. It becomes scarier when I see an unending series of antisemitic attacks across the world. A Tunisian synagogue burned; an Armenian synagogue burned; a mob looking for Jews in an airport in Russia; a Jewish woman stabbed in her flat in Paris and a swastika graffitied on her home. Only my Jewish friends seem to be outraged, or even aware.

I could not count how many times I’ve heard – or said – something like the phrase “nobody cares about us” in Jewish circles in the past few weeks. Some of my Jewish friends have decided that spending time with non-Jewish people who are apathetic to antisemitism is too taxing. They feel isolated, unseen, and unsafe. Some of my Jewish friends make a different choice. They mute Instagram stories, turn a blind eye to antisemitism, just to make seeing the perpetrators at lectures more tolerable.

But it is not always confined to social media. It cannot always be easily ignored. One of my friends approached her friend, the Vice President of their JCR, about concerns over a post from the College’s Feminist Society. Someone suggested they run the posts through the Jewish Society in the future. The JCR Vice President replied that they shouldn’t because that would be like running them through the oppressor.

These are a small sample of the interactions we have had since 7 October. I’m sure I’m not alone in my excitement for the holiday, so I can be around people who are not apathetic - or accessories  - to my isolation as a Jew.