LAST WEEK David Hirsh resigned from the Labour Party. He was, he wrote, fed up with being humiliated by anti-Semitism. "I have fought it for years, in the student movement, in the academic unions and in the Labour Party. I won't subject myself to it any longer." But the 51-year-old sociology lecturer, and author of a book called "Contemporary Left Anti-Semitism", is not only worried by what is happening in the Labour Party: he sees a conspiratorial outlook spreading across the political spectrum. "When people talk about cosmopolitans, citizens of nowhere or the Rothschilds, I kind of think they are talking about me and my kids," he says, "even if we don't own any banks at all." He is not alone. A recent survey by the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights found that three-quarters of British Jews believe anti-Semitism is a problem, up from half in 2012. There has been a rise in the number of recorded anti-Semitic incidents, which range from graffiti to physical violence. The Community Security Trust (CST), a charity, counted 1,652 such incidents in 2018, the highest annual total since it began in 1984. In the past, anti-Semitic incidents have tracked events in the Middle East, with violence against Jews in the West mirroring wars involving Israel. This time that is not the case.
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