This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. It is adapted from a talk I gave last week at Tel Aviv University’s Irwin Cotler Institute. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Barely a week goes by without summations of record or near-record levels of antisemitism — attacks, incidents, rhetoric — in Germany, in Canada, Australia, the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium… the list goes on.

I’m going to focus initially on England, where I grew up before moving to Israel 40 years ago, and where I often visit. It’s the community I know best and where I feel the strongest personal connection. But the picture I’ll draw is emblematic of the reality and the challenges facing many other Diaspora Jewish communities.

I’m going to start with a little bit of family history; if that seems strange when discussing a very current crisis, you’ll understand why quite soon.

My family, on my father’s side, is a largely Orthodox, sometimes rabbinical family. My great-grandfather founded the Borneplatz Synagogue in Frankfurt, and they were that fairly common mix of very Orthodox Jews and very loyal Germans. My grandfather served in the German Army in World War I — indeed, he was nearly killed in World War I — wounded just above the heart. I have at home the Iron Cross he was awarded; quite the medal to look at, given its widespread use by the Nazis in World War II.

It took my grandfather quite a while to internalize that the Nazis were not a passing phase, and that there was no future for Jews in Nazi Germany. He was a lawyer by profession, and it is said that one of his clients, who was Jewish, unjustly jailed, took his own life, and that this was the event that brought home to my grandfather that he had to get his family out.

They fled to England in 1937; my great-grandfather’s synagogue was burned to the ground on Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — the following year.

The Horovitzes settled in northwest London, in a quite heavily Jewish neighborhood called Golders Green, and gradually started their lives all over again.

Every Shabbat when I was a kid, we would walk from our home in nearby Hendon to visit my wonderful grandmother in Golders Green — a peaceful 20-minute walk, through leafy London.

Three months ago, four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service, were destroyed by arsonists outside a synagogue on the main Golders Green Road, a short walk from my now late grandmother’s house. Less than a month later, two Jewish men were stabbed a short distance away, one of them seriously wounded; the suspect, a Muslim man born in Somalia who has been charged with attempted murder, allegedly set out to attack “visibly Jewish” people.

Other synagogues in London have been targeted in recent months. On Yom Kippur last October, a British citizen born in Syria attacked congregants at a synagogue in Manchester, in northwest England, killing one of them. A second congregant was killed, in error, by police, as he and others were blocking the synagogue doors.

There was an undertone of antisemitism in the England in which I grew up. I went to a Jewish high school in Camden Town, a working-class inner-city area, and we’d have occasional fights at the bus stop with the kids from the not-Jewish school down the road, but these were not particularly violent and nobody was ever badly hurt.

The several Jewish cabinet ministers in Margaret Thatcher’s governments didn’t speak too much about their Jewishness; much of the community was wary of drawing too much attention to itself, feeling, perhaps, that they were living in the UK on sufferance. But Thatcher was a philo-semite, and one of her most trusted advisers was the chief rabbi, Immanuel Jakobovitz. None of the governments when I grew up, least of all Thatcher’s — and none since, I’d say — were fanning the flames of antisemitism.

Indeed, Anglo-Jewry became emboldened in the decades after I moved to Israel. The turning point was the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s bid to become prime minister in 2019, when Ephraim Mirvis, the British chief rabbi then and now, did something quite unprecedented. Reluctantly, Mirvis intervened in British politics by penning an op-ed in The Times in which he charged that “anti-Jewish racism — a poison – sanctioned from the very top” – had “taken root” in Corbyn’s Labor Party, and all but explicitly discouraged the British electorate from voting for Corbyn. “I ask every person to vote with their conscience,” wrote Mirvis. “Be in no doubt – the very soul of our nation is at stake.”

Corbyn, an anti-Israel obsessive and, in my view, an antisemite, lost the election by a landslide — in small part, perhaps, because of his antisemitism — and was booted out of Labour by now-outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose wife is Jewish and has family in Israel. Like Labour, the main opposition Conservative party is committed to........

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