When Jews start packing suitcases, everyone should be concerned.

History is unambiguous: When Jews no longer feel safe, the society around them is already in serious trouble.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

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.

---

There is a statistic so chilling, so historically resonant, that it should dominate every front page, every political speech, every national conversation in Britain. Instead, it appeared quietly in The Telegraph on Sunday and then slipped, with barely a ripple, into the bloodstream of a country that has learned to shrug at Jewish fear.

According to new polling by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, 61 per cent of British Jews have considered leaving the UK. Last year it was 50 per cent. This year, 51 per cent say they no longer believe they have a long-term future in this country, and an overwhelming 96 per cent feel less safe than before October 2023.

Read that again.

A minority community, deeply woven into the fabric of this country for centuries, now asking itself, seriously, openly, fearfully, whether Britain is still home.

History teaches us one clear truth: When Jews begin eyeing their suitcases, the whole of society is already in deep trouble. Because whatever corrodes the safety of Jews corrodes the nation that houses them.

And yet here we are.

This is the country my mother’s family ran to in 1935 when escaping Nazi Germany. Most of the family stayed behind and most of them died in the camps. Those brave or lucky enough to seek an early escape route found refuge in Britain and for nearly a century we have called this place home.

On the other side of my family, it was the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the late 19th century that drove them here. Two branches of one Jewish story, one fleeing Cossacks, the other fleeing Nazis, converging in a nation that offered shelter, identity, and possibility.

Like so many Jewish families, across both sides we have contributed greatly to the society that took us in. We have played our part, proudly, in building the Britain we believed in. We have fought for this country, helped rebuild this country, contributed financially, civically and emotionally.

And yet here we are, 100 years on, having the same conversation our ancestors prayed their children and grandchildren would never need to have again. Where do we go next? How quickly the world turns, in the blink of an eye, a handful of generations, and yet another refuge becomes infected by the world’s oldest hate.

The generation of Holocaust survivors often spoke of a truth they hoped their children and grandchildren would never need to confront. It was a warning whispered across kitchen tables and handed down like an heirloom: Be aware, be alert. The same hatred that brought us here could one day rise again and, if it does, you must be ready to leave. With this in mind, many kept suitcases packed under their beds from the moment they arrived in Britain until the day they died.

We told them it was irrational, a trauma response, a relic of another era. We told them that here, in the UK, they were safe. We insisted that we were safe. Safe because we were integrated, because Britain was civilised, because its institutions would surely guard against the forces that once hunted us.

How desperately naïve we were.

Since October 7, 2023, I thank God every day that my grandmother is no longer here to see what this country has become: the marches, the excuses, the indifference, the cowardice. She survived history’s darkest chapter only to build a life in a place she believed would never betray her.

And now, it is not their suitcases that lie waiting beneath the bed; it is ours. They may not be packed, not yet, but for the first time in generations, we know exactly where they are, and how quickly we could reach them if the moment ever came.

It is not complicated. I have no problem with people questioning Israel’s actions (as long as they hold all countries to those same standards, not just the Jewish state). I have no problem debating Israel’s policies and strategies. That is the nature of democratic life. But what we have seen since October 7th is neither “questioning” nor “debate.” It is a transmutation, anger at Israel alchemised into open hatred of Israelis and Jews.

I have said it again and again: Words have impact and actions have consequences.

And the consequences have been lived in Manchester, where Jews were murdered on the doorstep of a synagogue on the holiest day of the year. They have been lived at Bondi Beach, where Jews were hunted down at a Chanukah lighting. They have been lived in Washington, D.C., at universities across the West, in Amsterdam, in Birmingham, in Zurich, in Berlin, in Paris, in Los Angeles, in the United Arab Emirates, and on and on it goes.

They have been lived every weekend on the streets of London and across the Western world, where marching for “Palestinian freedom” somehow never requires condemning Palestinian terrorism, fascism, corruption, antisemitism, and failed leadership spanning decades.

This rising tide is not accidental; it is the direct result of leaders, institutions, and gatekeepers refusing to do the most basic thing, to draw a clear line between political criticism of Israel and racial hatred of Jews. When they blurred that line, others gleefully took the opportunity to erase it entirely.

And at the heart of this new hatred lies the greatest lie of all: the lie of genocide. The lie that the Jewish People, survivors of the genocidal project that defined the 20th century, have become the perpetrators of the very crime committed against them. It is a lie that, once unleashed, was carried across the world by a perfect storm of forces: social media rage-merchants, mainstream media outlets chasing clicks, complicit celebrities and influencers, useful idiots, antisemites not in intention but in outcome, and explicit antisemites who no longer bother to hide.

It is a lie so potent that it has created an atmosphere in which Jews can once again be dehumanised — not as vermin this time, but as exterminators. Once a people is cast in that role, anything done to them becomes permissible. Even noble, even necessary. This is the psychological architecture behind every attack, every threat, every chant.

And while Jews quietly plan escape routes, our communal leaders take selfies with the very institutions that failed us. If more than half of British Jews no longer see a future here, if six in 10 are actively considering their options elsewhere, then at what point do our communal leaders stop managing decline and start preparing for reality? Where is the framework for an honest conversation about our future? Where is the courage to speak to the numbers as they are, not as we wish them to be?

Because many of us are tired of watching leadership cosy up to institutions that have failed us time and again. We are tired of the photo ops, the polite statements, the desperate desire to be liked by people who have made it abundantly clear that Jewish wellbeing is negotiable.

If British Jews ever have to pull the emergency slide, who has prepared the community for that reality? It won’t be the ones performing reassurance into microphones. And no, this is not a call to jump; it is simply the recognition that it’s far better to possess a plan you never use than to find yourself needing one that no one bothered to write.

A country in which half of its Jews no longer see a future is not a healthy country. A country in which 96 per cent feel less safe than two years ago, less safe than the day on which more Jews were murdered than on any other since the Holocaust, is not a stable country. A country in which the accusation of Jewish genocide can be shouted from national monuments without consequence is not a morally serious country. A country in which Jewish parents debate whether to keep their children’s identity visible is not a confident country.

This is the Britain we are living in right now.

There are roughly 300,000 Jews in the UK. We are a community smaller than the population of a medium-sized town. We are a stitching thread in the national tapestry: thin, but bright. If half of that community were to leave, if 150,000 Jews quietly packed their bags and slipped away, Britain’s GDP would not collapse, and its infrastructure would not buckle. Its cities would not fall silent. On paper, in the cold arithmetic of census tables, the impact would be negligible.

But nations are not kept alive by arithmetic. A Britain that loses half its Jews is not a Britain that “stays the same.” It is a Britain that has failed, morally, spiritually, historically. Because when a people who have contributed so disproportionately to science, culture, medicine, law, philanthropy, business, public service, literature and national life look at the country they helped build and conclude we are no longer safe here, that is not an indictment of us; it is an indictment of the UK, and perhaps the wider Western world.

A society that watches its Jews shrink, not through assimilation but through fear, is a society that has forfeited its claim to being tolerant, open, or civilised. A country that drives out its Jews does not become less Jewish; it becomes less British and less Western. A society that forces its Jews to consider the door is a society already halfway through it, and it might well be a society for which the door cannot now be shut.

Numbers show what is happening, but only courage decides what happens next. Because the packed suitcases under the bed aren’t a metaphor anymore; they’re a warning.

---