Celebrity involvement in politics is a wretched thing. It should be consigned to dust, especially post-Jimmy Savile – who spent many holidays at Cheq… - Tanya Gold

I now know my generation of Jews is the luckiest in modern history. I never saw antisemitism in my youth. I know that others did. OK, a boy at my school shouted, "Jew" at me once, but I knew it was lust. Likewise, a boy at my college – a devout Christian – also shouted "Jew" at me once, but I think his DNA test would come up 25 per cent Ashkenazi Jewish at least, and we both knew it.

I read social media all week, and it is a maelstrom. One man says he laughed on a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Another says the Final Solution wasn't final enough. Yet another says the world is run "mostly" for the benefit of Jews. I'm called a genocidaire, immune to non-Jewish suffering. I present my credentials – a Liberal Zionist, in favour of two states – which are dismissed, since, to some, all Zionists exist in a state of pre-murder. The most sympathetic people are religious Christians, which initially confuses me: I am contrite, and grateful to them. I am not grateful for "allies" who use Jews to pursue their vendetta against Muslims – and if you mention European anti-Semitism, they insult you and withdraw, for you have disappointed them.

Then Jackie Walker of Momentum said, "Anti-Semitism is no more special than any other form of racism." There was an ovation. I think it was the line they had been waiting for.
What did I hear in that small sentence? Perhaps I am oversensitive. My mother is a historian of the Holocaust. She has traveled around Europe since the Eighties, teaching people how to teach the Holocaust in the countries where it took place. I can tell you, without recourse to any reference book, that there isn't a favorable mention of Jews in European literature until Gotthold Lessing's The Jews, in 1749. I can tell you that when Edward I expelled the Jews from En­gland in 1290, a ship captain, having taken their money for passage, dumped some on a sandbank, and left them to die. I did not hear a passing remark. I heard a deep rebuke from Walker that spoke of general, and eternal, Jewish immorality: that Jewish concern for Jewish safety and for the memory of Jewish dead is something tainted.