LONDON — As a “little Jewish boy” growing up in postwar Britain, Simon Schama says he never felt physically unsafe walking the streets wearing a kippa. Nor, he says, were guards routinely posted at the door of the local synagogue.

But, notes the acclaimed historian, that’s not the experience of Jewish children in Britain today. Instead, he says, it is the most difficult time for young Jews to be growing up since the end of World War II.

“It’s really painful that little kids, for example, Hasmonean or Jewish Free School kids, have to hide their uniforms,” Schama tells The Times of Israel. “The sense of a fearful loss not just of self-esteem, but basic civil rights. Nobody goes around tearing hijabs off Muslim women, and I’m very glad they don’t. But this is a dreadful time just [in terms of] feeling you have equal rights to the rest of the multicultural population.”

Parts of central London’s West End, says Schama, have become “no-go” areas, with Jews wearing a kippa or a Star of David facing the risk of “being screamed at.”

Schama’s comments came during a week when Britain’s Jewish community — already experiencing near-record levels of antisemitic incidents — was further shaken by an arson attack on four ambulances belonging to a Jewish-run volunteer organization in the heavily Jewish north London neighborhood of Golders Green.

A renowned art historian, as well as a scholar of British, French, and Jewish history, Schama is clearly put off by an anti-Israel exhibition in Margate, on the south coast of England, that made headlines that same week.

“Disgusting, horrible, mad, kind of bad Julius Streicher cartoons of Jews eating babies,” says Schama. “The really worrying thing is, of course, how these extreme, murderous, grotesque things have become absolutely… part of Generation Z’s repartee.”

All of this is far removed from the world in which Schama grew up.

“My father thought, after the Holocaust, there was nothing to fear in Britain,” he recalls. “Both my parents, and their generation, and indeed mine growing up, thought somehow of British life and Jewish life being a kind of almost perfect cultural fit.”

Despite being a Labour supporter, like many British Jews at the time, Schama’s father “worshiped Churchill both as a Zionist and for the war,” he says. Schama recalls the pride with which his father later told him about the speech by William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, delivered in the House of Lords in March 1943, denouncing Allied procrastination and inaction in the face of the Nazis’ mass slaughter of European Jewry. “We stand at the bar of history, humanity, and God,” the archbishop declared.

My father thought, after the Holocaust, there was nothing to fear in Britain

My father thought, after the Holocaust, there was nothing to fear in Britain

“My father was moved by that,” says Schama. “The sense that the head of the Church of England would be the one person to say, ‘Don’t look away, don’t do nothing,’ struck him as a symptom of the benevolence and the fit between British history and Jewish history.”

Schama, who is currently working on the third volume of his trilogy “The Story of the Jews,” rejects the idea that Jews do not have a long-term future in Britain, as well as comparisons with the 1930s. There is no “horrible, intimidating, crazed popular antisemitism” backed and encouraged by the state, as was the case in Nazi Germany.

And, he says, there continue to be “moments of fantastic hope” for the community. By coincidence, on the day of the Golders Green arson attack, it was announced that King Charles is to become a patron of the Community Security Trust, which monitors antisemitism and protects Jewish synagogues, schools, and other institutions.

“It was an incredible thing that the king accepted the patronage [of the CST]; that’s exactly what was needed,” Schama says.

Schama, who has known the monarch for many years, is full of praise for the king. Charles, he says, is “a very good friend of the Jews. He’s not someone who just finds Jews amusing intellectual entertainment — he actually likes Jews as human beings.”

King Charles, he says, is ‘a very good friend of the Jews. He’s not someone who just finds Jews amusing intellectual entertainment — he actually likes Jews as human beings’

King Charles, he says, is ‘a very good friend of the Jews. He’s not someone who just finds Jews amusing intellectual entertainment — he actually likes Jews as human beings’

Schama seems less impressed by the country’s political leadership, gently mocking oft-repeated pledges to “stand by the Jewish community” in the face of antisemitism. “We stand alongside, maybe 100 yards off,” he quips.

The “rhetorical utterances” delivered by politicians have been “exemplary,” the historian says, but there is often a “failure in the translation from [those] rhetorical pieties to what to do about [antisemitism] in particular circumstances,” especially at a local level. The police, he notes, visited the Margate exhibition but deemed it a criticism of the Israeli state rather than antisemitic.

He is not critical of the “two obviously sweet, nice coppers” who visited the gallery — you would not expect police on the beat to be knowledgeable about the “entire history of Jewish life going back 3,000 years,” he jokes — but is nonetheless frustrated.

In Margate. My cheeks are red. I am shaking. I popped into an exhibition that turned out to be the insane fever dream of an artist called Matthew Collins: ‘Drawings Against Genocide.’ The exhibition is described as ‘drawings… raising consciousness about hell…. Israel is the… pic.twitter.com/CO8Ee8eYLG — Zoe Strimpel (@realzoestrimpel) March 21, 2026

In Margate. My cheeks are red. I am shaking. I popped into an exhibition that turned out to be the insane fever dream of an artist called Matthew Collins: ‘Drawings Against Genocide.’ The exhibition is described as ‘drawings… raising consciousness about hell…. Israel is the… pic.twitter.com/CO8Ee8eYLG

— Zoe Strimpel (@realzoestrimpel) March 21, 2026

“You have to wait until something horrific like Golders Green or Heaton Park [the scene of the Yom Kippur Islamist terror attack in Manchester] happens for the police to say, ‘This is a nightmare and we’re actually doing something about it.’”

Shades of the Spanish Inquisition

Schama is scathing in his view of both the far left and extreme right. He denounces the “ideological selection ramp between ‘good Jews’ and ‘bad Jews’” promoted by the progressive Left.

“The obligation is that you undergo a kind of formal denunciation and repudiation of Israel’s right to exist. Then [you’re] welcome to the world of progressivism. This is absolutely appalling,” he says.

The obligation is that you undergo a kind of formal denunciation and repudiation of Israel’s right to exist. Then [you’re] welcome to the world of progressivism

The obligation is that you undergo a kind of formal denunciation and repudiation of Israel’s right to exist. Then [you’re] welcome to the world of progressivism

Schama finds this attitude “deeply reminiscent” of the treatment of Jewish “conversos” during the Spanish Inquisition.

“It wasn’t enough to leave your faith,” he says. “You have to actually show us that you’re prepared to be martyred as a good Christian… to be an inquisitor yourself… [or] that you’re prepared to try and burn the Talmud in public. You have to absolutely undo everything that has made you a Jew.”

Schama believes New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to scrap the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism on his first day in office was “profoundly offensive.”

“He ran a brilliant campaign… but that was an extraordinarily stupid and immoral thing to do,” he says. For Schama, the relationship between Zionism and antisemitism is clear. “Zionism was caused by antisemitism; [it’s] not the cause of antisemitism.”

Schama says he was “horrified” by the reaction to the October 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel, which he has compared to “lifting a floor covering to expose what we’d idly imagined to have long gone, the endlessly festering slough of dehumanization.”

The Hamas-led onslaught saw some 1,200 people in Israel slaughtered and 251 abducted to the Gaza Strip, amid acts of horrific brutality.

A professor of history and art history at Columbia University for nearly two decades, Schama has admitted to being “astonished” by the reaction of fellow academics.

“One of the most upsetting things was the speed with which, as it were, euphemism took over,” he says, citing a public letter signed by colleagues, which said the attacks could be viewed as a “military action” and the “exercise of a right to resist” occupation. “It was shocking and wicked to euphemize this sadistic slaughter,” says Schama.

The letter, he says, reflects the manner in which the claim that Israel is a colonial society has “become an… academic norm.” There is irony in the projection of “colonial guilt” onto Jews. “The real settler-colonials are Australians, Canadians, and Americans. We [Jews] have an actual organic relationship to our formative language, which has never been broken.”

The “settler-colonial thesis” — Schama hesitates to use the word “thesis” for what he regards as historical bunkum — has come at the same time as the “extraordinarily successful… long-term propaganda campaign to make the younger generations feel that Jews weaponize the Holocaust in order to overlook Gaza and the West Bank.” Schama charts this back to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s notorious Holocaust revisionism conference in Tehran 20 years ago.

The truth about the Holocaust is also under assault from what he terms the “particularly dangerous creepiness” of online far-right activists such as Nick Fuentes. This is driven by what he calls “the twitch of the daring… the sort of adrenaline high of what they like to call ‘disruption,’ so the more shocking you can be and the more you can direct it at the pieties surrounding the Shoah, the more fun it gets, and the more clickbait it gets as well.”

In this telling, “the Third Reich is sort of sexy and the Jews, who are controlling everything, are going to go and whine and moan and wheel out Auschwitz yet again,” he says.

Schama is also sharply critical of the former Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, who conducted a softball interview with Fuentes on his podcast last autumn.

Time to ‘reboot our antenna’

By contrast, to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation, the BBC last year screened Schama’s powerful documentary “The Road to Auschwitz.” The historian closes the program with a quote from a speech by Holocaust survivor Marian Turski in 2020, who argues at the gates of the death camp: “Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Evil comes step by step.”

But do we still have the capacity to identify and resist those steps? Yes, believes Schama, but we have to “reboot our antenna.”

“Obviously, it doesn’t make any sense at all to say, ‘It’s the Third Reich all over again,’” he says, suggesting that it is no good to simply look out for “jackboots, Julius Streicher and Heinrich Himmler.” The process of “dehumanization” today comes in different forms, he says, and pointedly notes that it includes “children not being able to wear their Jewish school uniforms.”

Schama admits that writing the third volume of “The Story of the Jews” at such a difficult and unsettling moment can be “very painful” at times, but he is also determined that Jewish history should not be a “complete counsel of despair.”

There will be chapters on Irving Berlin and Tin Pan Alley, and the book begins not with the Zionist Congress, but with the “so-called discovery” of the Ethiopian Jewish community by the “father of the Falashas,” Jacques Faitlovitch, in 1903.

“I don’t want the whole book to be yet another motorway to Auschwitz. Of course, I’m not going to discount that or minimize it or shortchange it in the body of the text,” he says.

But, he adds, “I do want to enrich [the book] with moments of beauty and hope… I suppose [as] a tribute to my parents and that long-lost world of gratitude and happiness, of finding a place where you fitted into the cultural mosaic unproblematically.”

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