What's driving an increase in antisemitism in the United Kingdom?
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2026
⏱️ 9 minutes
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Summary
The United Kingdom faces an antisemitism emergency.
That’s according to the government there.
This week, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said there is a plan to fight it.
Brendan McGeever co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism in London breaks down what's happening.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's consider this, where every day we go deep on one big news story. |
| 0:06.2 | Today, anti-Semitic attacks are on the rise in the United Kingdom, so much so that last week the government there raised the national terrorism threat level from substantial to severe. |
| 0:18.7 | The move followed a stabbing attack on two Jewish men in Golders Green, |
| 0:23.0 | a part of London with a large Jewish community. |
| 0:25.6 | Well, I felt sick about it because I thought to myself as a country, I'd hope we put anti-Semitism behind us. |
| 0:33.2 | And, you know, there was quite a bit of a round in the 1930s, even in countries not occupied by the Nazis at the time. |
| 0:39.4 | And I thought to myself, we can't have this again. |
| 0:41.7 | 93-year-old Alfred Dubs is a Labour Party member of the House of Lords. |
| 0:46.7 | This is not his first experience with anti-Semitism. |
| 0:50.3 | Dub's father was Jewish, and the family lived in Prague in the 1930s during the rise of Nazism. |
| 0:56.5 | When the Nazis said they were going to occupy Prague, my father said to his cousins, |
| 1:01.7 | if they come, he's getting out. |
| 1:03.8 | And the cousins tragically said, they'll take their chance. |
| 1:07.6 | And in 1942, they were taken to Auschwitz. |
| 1:10.1 | His father fled to England first. Dubs followed |
| 1:13.1 | when he was six years old. So she put me on a kind of transport. His mother wasn't allowed to leave. |
| 1:18.2 | Fortunately for her, when they refused her permission and threw her down the stairs at some |
| 1:23.6 | Gestapo place, they threw her passport after her, and with that, she had a further |
| 1:29.4 | chance of escape. So I was on the Kind of Transport, and my mother managed to get to London on |
| 1:36.3 | the last train before the war. The Golders Green attack is one of many over the last several |
| 1:41.7 | months that has targeted the UK's Jewish citizens. There was an |
| 1:45.5 | arson attempt in London last month, an attack on the Jewish ambulance service, an attempted |
... |
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