Europe said “Never Again” — but it’s happening again.

This week, on the 87th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the glass is breaking again.

A poster in Aston, Birmingham, England telling Jews and Israelis they are not welcome (photo: Our Fight/Gill Levy)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Leo Pearlman, the co-CEO of Fulwell Entertainment.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

In 1938, on November 9th and 10th, Nazi Germany erupted in violence against its Jewish population. Synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses destroyed, and nearly 100 Jews murdered — while thousands were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

The streets glittered with broken glass from smashed shopfronts, giving rise to the name Kristallnacht, “the Night of Broken Glass.” It marked the end of Jewish life in Germany as it had existed for centuries, and the beginning of what would become the Holocaust.

Eighty-seven years later, the lesson that “Never Again” was meant to teach feels less like history and more like warning.

This week, Aston Villa hosted Maccabi Tel Aviv in the Europa Conference League, a fixture that, in any normal world, should have been a celebration of sport.

But Jewish fans were banned from attending. Not because they posed a threat, but because others had threatened them. For “safety reasons,” British Jews, Zionists, were told to stay away.

And yet, the match still took place under the same sky that lit up with hate. The Islamists marched anyway, not in protest, but in celebration. Across Birmingham, banners and Palestinian flags were paraded through the streets, while protesters chanted “Zionists not welcome” and plastered those very words on shopfronts and lampposts.

Elected officials, members of parliament, and local councillors came out in force, smiling for cameras, declaring victory and boasting that they were “anti-Zionists and we have won.” So let’s be clear: Britain’s second city just hosted a football match where Jews were banned, and the people who made that ban necessary marched to celebrate it. They called it justice. They called it progress. But what it looked like and what it felt like was the echo of a pogrom.

This isn’t Nazi Germany. This is Britain in 2025, a nation that calls exclusion safety, that mistakes hate for principle, and where the broken glass now lies in the shattered trust between neighbours who were meant to share a nation.

In 1938, the destruction was carried out by state-backed militias and civilians. In 2025, it is being carried out by our institutions, our paramilitaries, and our neighbours.

The recently released Prescott Report confirmed what many of us already knew: that the BBC, our most trusted national institution, has harboured and perpetuated systemic antisemitism, gaslighting a minority community for years, while presenting our pain as political controversy. A state broadcaster has done to Jews what its microphones claim to expose in others: Normalise prejudice under the guise of neutrality.

The paramilitary forces of today are the Muslim Brotherhood-backed networks that now dominate British street politics. The Muslim Association of Britain, described by Michael Gove as “the UK affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood — an international and complex network of Islamist organisations,” continues to exert influence through a web of local chapters and activist groups, many operating under the banner of so-called “solidarity” movements.

The Palestine Solidarity Campaign, too, masquerades as a movement for justice but has become a vessel for intimidation, its chants now indistinguishable from those that echoed across Europe in the 1930s.

And the civilians, the weekend marchers waving flags and chanting for the erasure of a Jewish state, are the ones who make it all look normal. They think it’s protest, but it’s participation.

If Kristallnacht was the night Germany stopped pretending it was civilised, then this past week, Aston, Sydney, and Brooklyn are the places the West stopped pretending it has learned.

Because it’s not just one nation’s failure anymore. It’s a collective forgetting. Synagogues burn in Australia; Jewish fans are banned in England; Jewish schools are defaced in New York and everywhere, the chorus is the same: “We condemn antisemitism in all its forms…” — before moving swiftly on.

In Sydney, two synagogues were set ablaze in coordinated arson attacks. Jewish families watched live on social media as their houses of worship went up in flames, the footage shared and cheered by online mobs. The real glass shattered there; the digital glass amplified it, each shard reflecting indifference back at those who watched.

In Brooklyn, swastikas were daubed on a yeshiva, a cemetery, and a Jewish social services organisation, appearing within hours of Zohran Mamdani’s election as New York City’s next mayor. The graffiti read like celebration, as though the victory of a man who opposes the Jewish state were somehow licence to target the Jewish People.

These are not separate events; they are synchronised notes in the same dark symphony. Each one an echo, of broken glass, of burning Torahs, of a lesson still unlearned.

And still, as the flames rise and the glass breaks, our political class finds new ways to excuse the arsonists. When Zohran Mamdani, a man who openly denies Israel’s right to exist, was elected to lead New York City, the city with the largest Jewish population in the world, there were cheers in parts of Britain’s political establishment. Jeremy Corbyn, Zack Polanski, Sadiq Khan, men who claim to fight hate, publicly applauded him. They didn’t even flinch at the symbolism: that the man now presiding over millions of Jews stands against the right of Jews to self-determination.

This isn’t progress; it’s the institutionalisation of hypocrisy. First they celebrate your exclusion, then they normalise your erasure, then they call it justice.

This is how Walter Bingham described it:

“We live in an era equivalent to 1938, where synagogues are burned, and people in the street are attacked … antisemitism, I don’t think, will ever fully disappear, because it’s the panacea for all the ills of the world.”

At 101 years old, Walter Bingham is one of the few remaining witnesses to that night of terror some 87 years ago. He remembers the sound of glass shattering, the smell of burning Torahs, and the look on his neighbours’ faces as the world fell apart. And this week, he said he feels like he’s living through the 1930s again.

The Holocaust didn’t begin with the gas chambers. It began with six years of indoctrination, with laws, lies, and lessons that conditioned a population to hate their neighbours. People saw the march toward antisemitism. They had time to stop it. Most didn’t.

“In those days,” Bingham recalled, “the Jewish mentality was apologetic. Please don’t do anything to me, I won’t do anything to you.”

If ever we needed a lesson from someone who lived it, there it is: Stand up. Speak out. Be proud. And never, ever apologise for calling out the antisemites in our society.

The shattered shopfronts of 1938 have become the shattered sense of belonging in 2025. The broken glass was swept from the streets, but its echo was never silenced. It glitters again now, in the windows of synagogues, in the pixels of our timelines, in the fractures of our shared society.

Our November pogrom doesn’t need torches and uniforms; it hides behind hashtags, headlines, and hesitation. Eighty-seven years on, the glass is both real and digital, and both cut just as deep.

This is not history repeating; it is history continuing and, if Walther Bingham, still standing at 101, can find the strength and courage to warn us, then the least we can do is listen.

Because broken glass still glitters, even in the dark — and we’re done apologising for the shine.

---