You are listening to a program from BBC Radio 4.

Rabbi Lord Sachs, good morning.

Good morning.

I've been doing thought for the day for 30 years,

but I never thought that in 2018,

I'd still have to speak about anti-Semitism.

I was part of that generation born after the Holocaust

who believed the nations of the world when they said never again.

But this week there was an unprecedented debate about anti-Semitism in Parliament.

Several MPs spoke emotionally about the abuse they'd received because they were Jews, or more scarily, because they'd fought

anti-Semitism. According to the Community Security Trust, anti-Semitic incidents in Britain

have risen to their highest level since record-keeping began in 1984, at an average of four a day.

This is not the Britain I know and love. In Paris a month ago, just before

Passover, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor was murdered because she was a Jew. And this was just the

most harrowing. In a whole series of such attacks in Europe in recent years, there is today almost no European country where Jews feel safe,

and this within living memory of the Holocaust in which one and a half million children were murdered,

simply because their grandparents were Jews.

It's happened because of the rise of political extremism on the right and left,

and because of populist politics that plays on people's fears, seeking scapegoats to blame for

social ills. For a thousand years, Jews have been targeted as scapegoats because they were a

minority and because they were different.

But difference is what makes us human.

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