For two years, Natalie Pitimson has schlepped around London carrying a library bag emblazoned with just one word, a Yiddish word: “Schlep.”
“[It] perfectly describes my regular hour-long trek through central London,” Pitimson, a senior sociology lecturer at the University of Brighton, wrote on her blog.
Up until last week, she had encountered no unpleasant incidents. But on June 28, the bag seemed to invite a verbal attack from a fellow passenger on the London underground. According to Pitimson, the man told her to “f— off back to Israel with the other yids.”
The incident left Pitimson “shaking and very upset,” she wrote. “I thought about nothing else for the rest of the day. I have never been targeted in this way before.”
Pitimson traced the incident to a noticeable uptick in expressions of xenophobia following the June 23 referendum in the United Kingdom, in which 52 percent of voters supported a British exit from the European Union.
Brexit opponents cite such incidents as proof that the vote has unleashed a wave of racism. According to the National Police Chiefs Council, 331 alleged hate crime incidents were reported to police in the week after the vote, compared with a weekly average of only 63 before the vote (the statement did not specify the previous time period).
The Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, expressed its concern, along with other British Jewish groups, over this rise in incidents, which included hate graffiti against Polish immigrants and verbal abuse of other immigrants on the street.
But neither CST nor the volunteer-led Campaign Against Antisemitism can point to any directly related rise in anti-Semitic incidents following the Brexit vote.
In the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Golders Green, some locals said they feel no less safe after the vote than they did before. “I don’t see it, not more than usual,” said Mike Cohen, an observant Jew who lives in Golders Green. “Not on the street, not on television, not anywhere.”
Nevertheless, reports of hate crimes and verbal attacks prompted front-page headlines and passionate op-eds in Britain’s liberal media. Minister David Cameron, who worked to prevent a Brexit vote and resigned over his efforts’ failure, condemned the spate of attacks.
“In the past few days we have seen despicable graffiti daubed on a Polish community center, we’ve seen verbal abuse hurled against individuals because they are members of ethnic minorities,” Cameron said in Parliament. “Let’s remember these people have come here and made a wonderful contribution to our country. We will not stand for hate crime or these kinds of attacks.”
But some Brexit supporters suggested Cameron and other Brexit opponents were exaggerating the severity of the situation to undermine the Brexit results.
Will Franken, a conservative London comedian and blogger, wrote that the media and watchdog groups reporting a rise in hate crimes were “scaremongering” to discredit those who voted to leave the EU.
CST’s director of communications, Mark Gardner, said that new complaints of racist rhetoric are cause for concern.
“The racism that came out in Brexit’s wake is based on the principle of ‘taking the country back,’ and when that is the mode of thinking, it is very easy for Jews to also be labeled as aliens, as inauthentic to Britain,” he said.
He added that “Brexit has been seized upon by far-right anti-Semites in social media circles, where some celebrated the vote as a defeat to Zionist bankers.”
Pitimson has no doubt that her subway ordeal was Brexit-related.
“I’ve just been verbally abused – tell me again how racism played no part in Brexit,” she titled her blog entry on the experience.
Though her interlocutor said nothing of the vote specifically, Pitimson feels his actions were an expression of nationalist sentiment against anyone perceived to be foreign.
Immigration was a major theme for those who voted to leave the EU, with many citing concerns over the stream of 1.8 million Muslims who entered Europe this year from the Middle East. Migrant workers from Eastern Europe were also a major gripe.
In another London Underground incident, filmmaker Haim Bresheeth said that on June 24 an “obvious Brexiter” confronted him because Bresheeth spoke in Hebrew on his phone. “In this country we speak English! Can’t you speak English, sir?” the man told Bresheeth, but made no reference to the vote, according to Bresheeth’s account of the incident on Facebook.