Mick Hartley

Hadley Freeman in today's Sunday Times – Academics obsess over bigotry. So why is there no outcry over the Leeds chaplain? 

Here’s a story of our times: ten days ago Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch, a Yorkshire university chaplain, went into hiding after receiving hundreds of death threats. Now, Jews tend not to be believed when they talk about threats against their lives, which is why Israel had to compile footage from Hamas’s own GoPros of its attacks on October 7, and show it around the world, to prove the terrorism happened. But even that wasn’t enough for some, and at one screening a man in the audience found the images of dead women’s bloodied torsos insufficiently convincing and shouted, “Show the rapes!”

So in case anyone out there heard about Rabbi Deutsch and shouted, “Show the death threats!”, here you go: “We’re coming to his house, we’re going to kill him and you as well you f***ing racist bitch”; “Us Muslims are coming for you, you dirty Zionist motherf***er.” Those are just two of the messages he and his wife received. Threatening enough for you? They were for the police, who told Rabbi Deutsch, his wife and their two young children to get to a safe place.

Last week’s report from the Community Security Trust (CST) showing that antisemitic attacks in the UK had skyrocketed since October 7 by almost 600 per cent compared with the same period last year was widely reported. And yet the story of Rabbi Deutsch hasn’t been. Which seems odd, given that he serves as chaplain to the universities of Leeds, York, Hull, Huddersfield, Bradford, Sheffield and Leeds Beckett. Maybe it got lost in the deluge of British antisemitism.

Or maybe some people feel a little squeamish about this story because the rabbi and his family are Israeli and the protests against him began in November, when Rabbi Deutsch returned to Leeds University’s campus after doing his service in the Israel Defence Forces. While he was away, he sent his students private video messages, defending Israel’s response to October 7. One of these videos was leaked and posted on what the Jewish Chronicle describes as “an anti-Israel social media account with over one million followers”, and several British Muslim groups promptly demanded that the rabbi not be allowed back on campus. A network for Muslim female academics accused him of posting “propaganda about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”. Last week the Muslim Association of Britain posted a statement on social media directed at Leeds University asking: “How can your students feel safe with a war criminal complicit in genocide roaming your campus?” Shortly after that, the Deutsch family went into hiding.

Maybe that complicates this story for some. It shouldn’t, but I bet it does.

You can criticise Israel’s actions against Hamas. But to terrorise a rabbi for briefly serving in the IDF in the immediate aftermath of October 7 shows that, for some people, there is no act of anti-Jewish terrorism so bad that Jews are allowed to fight back….

By now, antisemitism on US and UK campuses has become so familiar that no one seems to notice how strange that is. Antisemitic incidents on UK campuses have tripled since October 7, according to the CST, while in the US things are so bad that three university presidents were summoned for a much-watched congressional hearing in December, where they refused to say calls for Jewish genocide violated their university policies. “Oh, young people are just very pro-Palestine,” people blithely say, which is all well and good. But “pro-Palestine” does not mean chanting “Death to Zionists”, as happened on Birmingham University’s campus earlier this month, or chanting, “Gas the Jews,” and, “Hitler was right”, as students and faculty allegedly did at a protest at New York University. A professor at Columbia University described the Hamas attacks as “awesome”. One at Soas in London said they were “amazing”, and evoked the “boldness of the Biblical David against the giant Goliath”.

When well-meaning folk ponder how to combat the rise in bigotry, they always suggest the same solution: “More education.” But university campuses show the lie of that. There is a long history of highly educated people spouting the worst kind of antisemitism, from Martin Luther in the 15th century, whose writings inspired the Nazis, to what we are seeing now. In British universities, there is a toxic mix of anti-Israel Muslim activist groups and liberal proponents of identity politics, who argue that Jews are white and therefore can’t be oppressed.

This country used to boast the best universities in the world. Now it produces students who threaten to rape a rabbi’s wife and are told by their friends and tutors that they’re on the right side of history for doing so. What’s happening in Gaza is a tragedy. What’s happening on British campuses is shameful.