Gerard Leval
The design of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is intended to be evocative of the tragic history told within its walls. Among the museum’s most prominent physical features are glass bridges that soar over the museum’s main hall and link parts of the museum to other parts of the museum.
James Fried, the museum’s distinguished architect, designed those bridges expressly to echo the wooden bridges that were constructed so that Jews could travel from certain parts of the ghettos to which they were confined to other parts of those ghettos without interacting with non-Jews walking on major thoroughfares bisecting the ghettos.
During World War II, German occupation forces, with the complicity of locals, were intent on ensuring that interactions between Jews and non-Jews would be kept to a minimum — that the presence and sight of Jews would not offend the non-Jewish population. Segregation was the obvious solution. Bridges helped to implement that segregation.
The Holocaust Museum uses its glass bridges to teach a tragic history. But today we are witness to the creation of bridges — in this case, buses, which are mobile bridges — not to teach the lessons of the Holocaust, but to allow the increasingly pervasive antisemitic prejudice that we are witnessing to fester. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, recently authorized the creation of a new bus route intended to create a link between Golders Green and Stamford Hill, two of London’s predominantly Jewish neighborhoods.
While ostensibly the new bus route is intended as a convenience, it is actually being instituted to provide safety for the Jews who live in those neighborhoods. That safety is to be achieved by preventing interaction between Jews and the inhabitants of the area of Finsbury Park, where there has been a flurry of anti-Jewish activity.
The antisemitic harassment suffered by Jews passing through the Finsbury Park transport center as they travel between Golders Green and Stamford Hill has led London’s Jewish community to lobby for some time for this new bus line. Consequently, London’s mayor was able to accurately characterize the creation of the new bus line as a benefit for members of London’s Jewish community. However, characterizing the new route as a benefit is a distortion.
Safety for Jews should not require segregation of Jews from other groups of the population. Just two generations ago, that approach to “safety” for Jews was a prelude to the complete exclusion of Jews from the general population and the ultimate industrialized murder of millions of Jews in Eastern Europe.
There is simply no excuse for the kind of both subtle and overt antisemitism to which observant Jews in London are being subjected and which is requiring special measures for their safety. While members of Finsbury Park’s Muslim community have themselves encountered prejudice and even violence from some Britons, that does not in any manner justify allowing the blatantly antisemitic activity that has emanated from certain quarters in the Finsbury Park area — an antisemitism that has grown significantly since the barbaric Oct. 7 Hamas attack in Israel and Israel’s response to that attack.
Importantly, to the extent that segments of London’s population demonstrate animus toward fellow Londoners, it is up to the municipal and national authorities to protect the objects of that animus. Segregating those who are being subjected to hate, even if this is being done to protect them and even if they are requesting this segregation in order to be shielded from that hate, is simply not acceptable.
No society should tolerate making it necessary for people who are being harassed because of their religion, ethnicity or national origin to have to separate themselves from the general population in order to avoid being subjected to that harassment. And so long as discrimination is unacceptable, then it must be unacceptable for all. No governmental authority should allow itself to be manipulated such that the victims of prejudice are made to endure special treatment in order to allow the perpetrators of that prejudice to continue to purvey their hateful conduct.
For the mayor of London to help construct a mobile bridge in order for his Jewish citizens to avoid being harassed is deeply troubling. Bridges, mobile or stationary, intended to keep Jews away from any part of the public space should be as unacceptable as was the Jim Crow-inspired segregation that was intended to keep Black Americans from fully participating in American life. For Jews, the echoes of the bridges of the Eastern European ghettos make such physical segregation intended to keep them apart from others especially painful.
The mayor of London should find a different means of ensuring the safety and security of London’s Jewish citizens. And, assuredly, the best way to achieve this is simply by fairly enforcing existing laws and prosecuting to the full extent of applicable laws those who fail to adhere to those laws when they seek to harm their fellow citizens by reason of their religious or ethnic affiliation.
Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm.
