A Jewish author is leaving the UK over fears the country is no longer safe for British Jews, as data shows one in three personally experienced an anti-Semitic incident last year.
Ben M. Freeman, author of The Jews: An Indigenous People and the acclaimed Jewish Pride trilogy, told The Independent that he was in the process of applying for Israeli citizenship and plans to move to Israel after spending much of his life in Britain.
He said the difficult decision came after spending months worrying about his safety in London. “Every time I left my house for about a year after October 7, I wondered if I would be attacked or stabbed.”
Mr Freeman said in the wake of the Manchester synagogue attack on 2 October that he believes other people will now “be having more serious conversations” about leaving, too.
“It’s really – especially if you have a family – such a difficult thing to know when and what to do,” he said, alluding to similar considerations faced by Jews who stayed in Germany in the 1930s. “But people are having the conversation. Everyone I know is having a version of the conversation.”
He added that “whether or not they do or don’t actually make the move, Britain needs to get its act together,” accusing “successive governments” of ignoring the causes.
Mr Freeman, who is now based in Scotland, said that activist marches had made him, “as a Jew living in London”, feel “unsafe to move about the capital city in which I lived”.
He said it was a “tragedy” that the pro-Palestinian movement “purports to support them doesn’t”, and pointed to Hamas and Hezbollah iconography at demonstrations.
“I paid council tax. I paid tax to be there. And I couldn’t move around the city because I was nervous,” he said. “Some people may think ‘that isn’t such a big deal’ [but] it is a big deal when you are made to feel discomfort. It makes you want to diminish yourself and make yourself smaller, and I really don’t believe in doing that.”
“I don’t want to hide. I want to be able to wear my symbols of pride proudly.”
Mr Freeman said he “always felt very British”, voted and “took part in my civic duty”. But now he feels he is being “forced out”.
He said a minority of radicals were still “threatening Jewish life” in Britain, and that a friend had been physically attacked a month after the October 7, 2023 attacks while putting up hostage posters in London.
“It’s a stain on the United Kingdom that there are Jews, and it’s not just me, there are many Jews looking at leaving. That should be making people in the UK crazy with grief because what is happening to the country that our citizens want to leave?”
“For whatever reason, our fears are not listened to. We are accused of being hysterical at best, and [at] worst we’re accused of being imperialists and fascists and oppressors and Nazis … and then something like Thursday [2 October] happens.”
“While it’s amazing that in 2024, the government pledged £54 million for Jewish security, I need everyone to take a step back and ask themselves why a population of 300,000 people need security to go to synagogue or to go to school.”
On the decision to move, he said: “I did care [about Britain]. And I still do care … But I’ve had to make this choice because the country doesn’t feel safe anymore. And those in positions of power – they either don’t care or they are ignorant and they do not understand the state of affairs.”
He added: “There is a place that I can go, that, yes, has its own issues and its own danger, but there’s a place I can go where I’ll be the majority and I’ll be in my indigenous land.”
Dr Jonathan Boyd, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), told The Independent that while the Jewish community is “strongly embedded in Britain” and “feels, broadly speaking, that this is its home in most cases”, incidents like the Manchester stabbing could influence a wider trend of British Jews leaving the country.
“It’ll take some time before we really know what the reaction has been. Obviously, at the moment, I think everything’s very raw,” he said.
“I think wherever people were on that question previously, in terms of thinking about ‘Would I want to leave or move to Israel?’, everyone’s moved up a small notch … The question has become slightly more active, I think, for a good proportion of British Jews.”
He observed, from their recent data based on a survey of 4,822 British Jews, that there was not yet any clear movement at scale.
Dr Boyd recognised comparative data from France, which saw a spike in French Jews leaving in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo and Hypercacher kosher supermarket attacks.
“I can only really speculate, but that sort of empirical indicator would suggest that there probably will be a reaction [in Britain].”
Still, he says, “the Jewish community is very resilient here. It’s very strongly embedded in Britain. It’s been here for a long time … In spite of the volatility of the last couple of years, Jews are showing a strong degree of resilience, and that will act, I think, as a counterbalance to the fears and apprehensions.”
Their latest data, based on a survey conducted in June/July 2025, showed that British Jews saw a higher likelihood that they would move to Israel permanently in the next five years.
Dr Boyd added that there had been a sharp rise in British Jews thinking anti-Semitism was a problem.
“It really jumped quite significantly since the October 7 [2023] attacks,” he said. “It’s clear that this is an issue and it’s pretty widespread … A third [32 per cent] of British Jewish adults say at some point in the course of calendar year 2024, they personally experienced an anti-Semitic incident.”
He said that young and Orthodox people were reporting incidents at a rate “higher than average”.
Their data showed trust in institutions was generally low, with only the legal system and parliament scoring above average. Emotional attachment to Israel had risen to 45 per cent from 38 per cent in 2022, though 40 per cent said the war had weakened their attachment and clashed with their Jewish values.
Younger Jews were more likely to be critical of Israel, and criticism of Israel’s conduct in Gaza more widely was growing, the data showed.
