Why have many of the UK’s largest Jewish institutions been so reticent to condemn Nigel Farage in the wake of revelations about his schoolboy antisemitism? That’s a question the Guardian’s Jonathan Freedland has posed in a damning article for the Jewish News.
A drip-drip of allegations about the Reform leader in recent weeks has seen him accused of sidling up to classmates and saying “Hitler was right”, singing “gas them all, gas them all” to the tune of George Formby’s Bless ‘Em All and making a hissing sound to simulate the sound of deadly Zyklon B being released into the gas chambers during his time at Dulwich College.
And yet, as Freedland writes in his article, UK Judaism’s most august bodies – specifically naming the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and Holocaust Educational Trust – have said “not a word”.
Freedland – who last year quit the Jewish Chronicle over allegations that it published inaccurate stories about the conflict in Gaza – writes in its underfunded competitor in what marks a real coup for the title: “A more truthful explanation for the Jewish organisations’ silence comes in private conversations.
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“In those, communal figures will admit that they believe the accusations against Farage are true, but that they have made a pragmatic calculation. ‘He’s the coming man and right now he’s not hostile to us,’ was how one senior official put it to me. They don’t want to make an enemy of a politician who, polls suggest, is heading to Downing Street.”
He goes on: “That is an Anglo-Jewish strategy with a long and unhappy history. Our communal elders tried it back in the 1930s, when Oswald Mosley was on the march.
“Of course, the situations are different: Mosley was overtly hostile to Jews, while Farage seems, for now, to have other minorities in his sights. But it amounts to backing away from the crocodile, hoping he’ll eat you last.”
It’s powerful stuff, particularly from a voice as influential and respected as Freedland. But will the Board of Deputies, Jewish Leadership Council and Holocaust Educational Trust have anything to say in response?
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