Antisemitism is back in British academia
British universities collectively appear to be unaware of the definition of insanity: to repeat the same action, and to expect, somehow, a different result.
The ‘action’ is simple: introduce a new set of rather vague, hazy regulations, enforce them to such a minute degree that they might as well not exist at all, wait for a new report to be released detailing administrative failings that permit antisemitism to flourish, and repeat.
The latest report of this sort, released a fortnight ago, describes antisemitism’s growth to become ‘normalised in middle-class Britain.’ What differentiates this report from those that have come and gone already – and those that will inevitably arrive in future – is less about where antisemitism occurs, and more about who participates in it. It is no surprise that the arts sector, the NHS, and universities are most particularly under fire from the report’s co-authors, former defence secretary, Penny Mordaunt, and the government antisemitism advisor, Lord Mann. The surprise, however, is that antisemitism appears to have sprouted among Britain’s most well-educated and well-off citizens.
Such things have been evident in the United States for some time already: Columbia University’s 2024-2025 tuition exceeds $93,000, a small fortune for just a year of study in such an environment that evidently lends itself more to protests and virtue-signalling activism than to any actual learning.
What has taken longer to spread, though, is antisemitism in educational institutions across the pond. The numbers in Britain point to a definite collective increase in antisemitism: according to the Community Service Trust (CST), recorded antisemitic incidents increased by 147% in 2023 following the October 7, 2023, massacre. In 2024, numbers remained the second highest ever recorded, short of those in 2023. CST logged over 200 cases in every month of 2024 except December – apparently, it was too cold for anyone to bother attacking Jews.
Britain’s higher education infrastructure is a distinguishing feature for a country that has an otherwise rather bleak future following the rise of far-right extremism and economic troubles. National mismanagement means that this struggle inevitably extends to universities: British university tuition fees will rise to more than £9,500 from September 2025, as universities seek a cash injection to assist their most immediate economic challenges.
Jews have been, are, and will likely remain, humanity’s scapegoat for any sort of issue for which a solution remains to be found. Oxford and Cambridge have seen students setting up encampments in so-called ‘solidarity’ with the people of Palestine, pressure from students to cut ties with a state they deem ‘apartheid’, and the intimidation of their Jewish classmates. This intimidation is, of course, less about terrorising Jewish students and more about protesting Israel’s ‘genocide’ in Gaza. Few things are more ironic than chanting slogans of ‘human rights’ while harassing Jewish students in a library.
This, however, is not limited to universities: a survey by the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) has discovered that antisemitism is has become rife across British secondary schools and sixth forms, prompting calls for the Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, to meet with the union. A third of respondents to the survey felt unable to report antisemitism to their employers, and of those who did, the majority believed the appropriate course of action was not taken. Shouts of ‘fuck the Jews’ have been heard outside meetings of Jewish students, red paint has been thrown on the exterior walls of Jewish schools and meeting spaces in universities, and swastika graffiti is ever constant.
That this is happening in Britain’s most prestigious universities is a complete failure of leadership and the standard of education Britain claims to uphold. Cambridge and Oxford must be prevented from becoming the next Columbia or Harvard, lest this sort of ‘fashionable antisemitism’ – that is, the tendency of the progressive, anti-Israel left of the West to conflate their disagreements with Israeli policy and their anti-Zionism with personal, direct attacks on Jews – become standard. Such ‘respectable’ anti-Semitism as the form we see repeatedly in academic institutions are no more justified than the sort we have seem in past millennia.
