Recent polling by the Union of Jewish Students found that one in five students would be unwilling to share housing with a Jewish student. The same survey found that 49% had seen Hamas or Hezbollah glorified on campus, and 47% had seen the October 7 attacks justified. Those are not isolated uglies at the edge of campus life. They are signs of something more settled, more habitual, and far more corrosive.
That matters because antisemitism on campus has not appeared all at once. It has hardened over time. A 2024 report by the Intra-Communal Professorial Group described a significant rise in antisemitism across UK academia after October 7, including harassment, intimidation, threats, and students feeling less protected as Jews. A separate 2025 analysis said antisemitic abuse in universities had risen by up to 34 percentage points since October 7. The pattern is clear enough. The collapse was not sudden. It was prepared.
For years, the campus world has drifted into a strange moral confusion. Hatred arrives wrapped in the language of activism. Intimidation is recast as solidarity. Jews are told their fear is political theatre, their complaint overblown, their safety negotiable. And when institutions lose the courage to name a thing plainly, they give it room to grow.
That is where the political culture matters. Some of this is the work of radical ideologues who have learned to dress up extremism in the costume of justice. They know exactly how to use the language of rights, liberation, and anti-racism while smuggling in something much older and uglier. They do not announce themselves as antisemitic. They rarely have to. They rely on the tenderness, vanity, and cowardice of institutions that prefer a vague statement to a hard line.
And yes, British politics has its part to play. Too many party figures have been slow to recognise how ideological entryism works. It comes disguised as concern, as justice, as the correct language of the moment. It infiltrates student politics, activist networks, and campus institutions. Then, before anyone with authority has quite woken up, the terms of debate have shifted and Jewish students are the ones paying the price.
Universities should be among the easiest places in Britain in which to protect Jewish life. They are public institutions built around free inquiry, argument, and the pursuit of truth. If they cannot set a line against the glorification of terror, the harassment of Jewish students, and the casual normalisation of antisemitic sentiment, then they have forgotten their own purpose.
This is where clarity is needed. Not a committee. Not another statement. Not another round of institutional soul-searching followed by silence. Universities need enforceable rules, swift consequences, and leaders willing to say that Jewish students do not have to earn the right to feel safe on campus.