It’s like the “special relationship” counts for nothing. With respect to the discourse on the Jewish left that arose with Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular victory in the New York mayoralty race, some commentators have made comparisons between the US and the UK – usually painting the latter as inferior, and the British Jewish community as being fearful in the face of rampant antisemitism. This is a particular bugbear of mine. Over the years, I have read countless articles by American Jewish journalists who have relocated to the UK and recount how distressing their experience was of moving between the two countries. They depict their life in the US as full of positive, public expressions of Jewishness, while Jews over here are portrayed as being frightened, closed-off and part of a community in terminal decline.

The paradigmatic case is where the American hails from New York – hardly representative of a typical American city in terms of its Jewishness – and inevitably finds the UK tragically wanting. We British Jews appear to them as “trembling Israelites”, terrified to be Jewish in public. Were they to compare the UK to some small town in a US rural state the difference would be far less stark. An oft-quoted reference is the scene from Philip Roth’s 1986 novel The Counterlife, where protagonist Nathan Zuckerman experiences antisemitism in an upmarket restaurant in the West End of London. I can’t speak of the realities of antisemitism in London in 1986, since I was five at the time. There were some significant moments of difficulty for British Jews 1980s: the Spare Rib affair, the cancellation of Perdition at the Royal Court, the Guinness trial. But I can say that I don’t remember antisemitism being mentioned at all in my childhood. If it was, then it was purely as a satirical punchline: “no parking spaces at Brent Cross? Antisemites.”

The most recent contribution to this discourse has come from Peter Beinart, a writer with whom I agree on much. Writing about Mamdani’s recent speech on his Muslim identity, Beinart said:

I remember the two years that I spent in England. I didn’t experience antisemitism in England particularly, but what I did notice again and again and again is the way in which British Jews left their Jewishness in the private space. They left it at home. Didn’t mean they didn’t care immensely about being Jewish, but there was a kind of understanding that it was inappropriate to bring that into your workplace life, into your public life; that in the public, on the street, you were a deracinated British person. It was at home that you were a Jew. And I remember thinking, how grateful I was that that was not the bargain in the America that I grew up in, that I felt that I could bring my identity as a Jew into all aspects of my life. I could speak about it. I could ask for days off for Jewish holidays. I could use terminology and languages and words and ideas that came from Jewish tradition. All of these things were part of why I felt proud to be an American, and why I felt fully at home in America, in a way that I didn’t when I was in the UK. I thought, you know what, in this place, I have to kind of amputate a part of myself when I leave the shadows, when I go out into the public space.

The conclusion of his discussion was that only in the US, and perhaps only in New York, could Zohran Mamdani become mayor while being so proudly and openly Muslim – just as Beinart himself could only be so proudly and openly Jewish there and not here. 

This is an odd position to take given that, since 2016, London has had a proudly Muslim mayor in the figure of Sadiq Khan. The uniqueness argument doesn’t stack up. 

It appears that Beinart’s UK experience was in Oxford, studying for an MPhil on a Rhodes Scholarship from 1993 to 1995. As one who attended Cambridge just a few years later, I would say that there is something distinct and peculiar about Oxbridge; Christianity looms large in university life in ways that it simply doesn’t in other parts of the UK. Almost every college has a dean and chapel, which provides an important venue for civic and religious ceremonies. I didn’t experience any antisemitism at Cambridge; I experienced an awful lot of Christian normativity, and I imagine that’s what Beinart perceived. But for me at least, Jewish student life was vibrant, and I felt extremely confident identifying as Jewish in public as well as in private spaces.

There is surely a degree of American exceptionalism in this genre of analysis. That America is uniquely bountiful and free, and Europe is irredeemably backward and feudal. It is as if antisemitism is somehow bound to the soul of the continent, rather than being a political phenomenon that can occur anywhere. 

This view always used to colour my interactions with American Jews; they would ask about antisemitism and the position of Jews in Britain (or Europe, as if the continent was all one and the same); with the implication that speaking from the privileged position of the New World allowed them to be condescending towards the Old. 

That changed sharply in around 2017, with the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, and the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. Belatedly it became clear that violent antisemitism could occur in the US too. Since then, especially over the past two years, we have seen a wave of state politicisation of antisemitism in the US, using it to control universities and increase carceral and violent policing.

You might think that this new understanding would lead American Jews to a re-evaluation of the relationship with Jews in Europe – that our experiences of both antisemitism and its politicisation might be able to offer some lessons? That the fact that everything the Trump administration has done on antisemitism was previewed by Conservative governments in Britain since 2010 might warrant some mutual sharing of experiences? That the UK’s antisemitism moral panic of 2018-2019 might be instructive when considering the New York anti-Mamdani panic of 2025? It seems not. In a recent letter to Vashti, Ben Spatz quoted the academic Benjamin Balthasar (with whom I also agree on a great deal, I’m really not trying to stoke broyges) to argue that:

one reason why the right, including rightwing Jews, has not (so far) been able to harm Zohran Mamdani with the accusation of antisemitism – as they did to Jeremy Corbyn – is the greater visibility of exactly those anti-Zionist Jewish left voices in the US compared to the UK. This is something I have felt deeply over the past twelve years as an immigrant from New York to England.

Ouch. It’s our fault, we British anti-Zionist Jews. If only we were as well-organised as our US cousins. For starters, this is a little unfair to us. We did have some voices: Jews for Justice for Palestinians was founded in 2002, Jewish Voice for Labour in 2017, Na’amod in 2018, Jewdas (with which I may or may not have had something to do) was founded in 2005 – Corbyn famously attended its seder in 2018. There was also Jewish Solidarity Action, which campaigned in the 2019 election under the name Jews Against Boris. While we definitely could have done more and done better, it’s a bit unfair to write us off.

I also think this analysis is politically flawed. In my view, Mamdani has dealt with accusations of antisemitism better than Corbyn for three main reasons: 1) He is an exceptionally able candidate; a brilliant communicator, much more so than Corbyn who, much as I love him, is usually the worst speaker on any lineup; 2) Mamdani inherited a comprehensive political philosophy, including a universal rejection of ethnonationalism, from his father Mahmoud Mamdani, espoused most clearly in his 2020 book Neither Settler Nor Native. During a televised Democratic party primary debate, in response to questions over whether he believed in a “Jewish state of Israel”, the then candidate responded: “I believe every state should be a state of equal rights” – shifting the point of contention to force his opponents to admit they don’t support such equality – a tactic all leftists should borrow; 3) Mamdani’s campaign occurred during an Israeli genocide, one which has been supported or condoned by all the major anti-antisemitism organisations that campaigned hard against Corbyn. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has inevitably discredited them, and their influence has been diminished.

Overall, it feels like navel-gazing to make this all about the Jews. It wasn’t Jewish opposition that stopped Corbyn becoming prime minister, and it wasn’t Jewish support that brought Mamdani victory in New York. As I have recently written, not everything is about us, and to behave as if it is, causes us to get things seriously and repeatedly wrong.

Of course, every Jewish community has different characteristics, shaped by its specific history. Britain allowed Jews to return and/or practice Judaism openly in the 1650s, and since there was no formal act of readmission, there was no charter of limitations, unlike elsewhere in Europe. As a result, Jews in Britain faced relatively few constraints, though it took a long time to rise through the class system, particularly for poorer Ashkenazi immigrants. 

Where there were restrictions, these were on religious grounds, such as the requirement to take a Christian oath, provisions that were overturned in the 1850s. The predominant experience of British Jews is thus not antisemitism but Christian normativity and hegemony, in a country with a state church that dominates public life.

The privileges enjoyed by American Jews, in contrast, were due to it being a settler colony. If a group was understood as being neither Black nor Indian (indigenous) then they were accepted as part of the white settler class. US Jews have always been able to be confident and public because the United States is a structurally racist and genocidal country, and (most) Jews were understood as being white. This is not a flag-waving exercise; the UK is no less structurally racist and bears responsibility for an astonishing amount of global violence. But there is a difference between being a metropole and a settler colony; and that distinction impacted upon the Jewish communities of both locations. 

American Jews, like the other “white ethnics” (such as Poles, Irish, and Italians) benefitted enormously from the post-war settlement, allowing many to move to the suburbs and join the middle and upper classes. This phenomenon laid the groundwork for the ethnic revival of the 1970s, which is surely what lies behind Beinart’s sense of the US being a place where Jews could be openly and publicly Jewish. That same postwar settlement denied African Americans the possibility of social uplift, and the limited gains of the civil rights era were later fought against through court rulings in the 1980s. The key reason Jews could be public and proud in American life was because they were (mostly) not conceived of as black.

The equivalent move happened later in the UK – it was the 1990s and 2000s that saw British Jews begin to adopt multiculturalism and a more public identity. From 2010 the British state took increasingly philosemitic positions and held up Jews as a model minority whom all others should emulate or else face the consequences. This process happened in tandem with the state surveying and criminalising British Muslims, who were treated en masse as potential extremists and terrorists. In contemporary Britain, Jews can be public, loud and proud because they are not Muslim. And today, British Jews take to the streets with alarming regularity, mostly to advocate for Israel or against antisemitism. The idea that British Jews hide their Jewishness behind closed doors is long out of date, to the extent it was ever true. 

We are not defined by our history. And obviously neither the American nor British Jewish community (nor the French, German, or Canadian ones) are monoliths. There are a range of diverse Jewish international currents that influence one another; we may well have more in common with Jews of a particular type abroad than the rest of the Jewish community in our country. The point is to ease off the patriotic polemics. If we can jettison the idea that some countries are more welcoming than others to Jews as a matter of their DNA, we might be able to learn from each other, and better further our collective liberation everywhere.▼