VOICE OF THE JN: Joan’s right, this country is not a chuppah for refugees
Holocaust survivor Joan Salter took the home secretary to task for all of us... but our history of taking refugees is still rose-tinted.
It speaks volumes that a Jewish Holocaust survivor was the one to challenge anti-immigrant Home Secretary Suella Braverman on her use of words like “invasion” on Friday. It speaks further volumes that, by Tuesday morning, it had been viewed more than five million times.
Joan Salter, who was awarded an MBE for her work on Holocaust education, told Braverman that using words like “invasion” and “swarm” reminded her of the kind of language used by pre-war Nazis to demonise Jews. She then asked the pertinent question: why does she feel the need to use words like that in the first place?
Braverman, who is firmly to the right of the Conservative Party, refused to retract or apologise, but had she answered truthfully, she’d have told Salter that she was playing to her base. Alas, in this case, it means playing to people’s base instincts.
For all Sir Nicholas Winton’s efforts, the UK allowed very few Jews to flee Hitler.
Xenophobia, racism, insularity, and protectionism are the playthings of populists, who conjure a fear of ‘the other’ – of being overrun by hordes of out-for-themselves foreigners. As Jews, we know this well. Brexit, if anything, was about borders.
This reminds us that – while Salter was right – the UK has hardly been an international chuppah, open on all sides like the biblical tent of Abraham and Sarah, signifying that everyone is welcome and will be treated hospitably.
For all Sir Nicholas Winton’s efforts, the UK allowed very few Jews to flee Hitler. Around 70,000 were admitted by the outbreak of war in 1939, but British Jewish associations had half a million more case files of those who were not. The US was no better: from 1933-1941, only 150,000 German Jews were allowed in.
Yes, Braverman’s comments are disappointing, but they are also unsurprising and unfortunately nothing new. They are just palpably stark when uttered in the company of a Holocaust survivor.
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