The Suitcase Under the Stairs

There is a metaphorical suitcase under the stairs of every Jewish home. It is the bag with the theoretical items we would need when, not if, we are forced to leave. For most of the post-World War II period it remained exactly that: theoretical. A lesson. A fable from another time. It is theoretical no longer. Across Britain, Europe and the wider West, Jewish communities are doing something they have not done in living memory. They are having conversations - at dinner tables, in synagogues, in WhatsApp groups - about where to go, when to know and how to be ready. Second passports are being renewed. Foreign schools are being Googled. Exit plans, once the preserve of grandparents who remembered worse times, are becoming ordinary topics among people who have never felt anything but entirely at home. What British Jews are facing is not a Jewish problem. It is a national, civilisational problem, and Jews are simply the part of the population most historically attuned to reading its signs. The metaphorical suitcase has sat, packed or unpacked, in the corner of Jewish consciousness for centuries. Sacerdoti examines how the forces dismantling Jewish life in Britain and pulling the country apart from within are the same forces eating away at the foundations of Western liberal society more broadly.