A group of non-Jewish students at a British university posted on social media recently that they had a room going spare. One rule, they wrote. No Zios in the flat.
They used a term with roots in white supremacist rhetoric. They used it like a rule about dishes or noise after midnight. The Union of Jewish Students included it in a report published March 16 alongside graffiti at Essex Student Union reading “F*** Jews,” a leaflet at the University of Bristol featuring a Star of David intertwined with a swastika, and a whiteboard at City St George’s in London showing an Orthodox Jew with the caption: “This room was promised to him 3,000 years ago.”
The same report documents two Jewish students in Leeds being chased home last October by a man who crossed the road to follow them. He reached into his waistband and produced what the students believed was a blade. They ran.
That happened. On a British street, in October 2025. And the word the UJS report reaches for, looking at the full landscape of what has happened on British campuses over two and a half years, is not alarming. Not extreme. Normalised.
The report, Time for Change, polled 1,000 students across 170 British universities. One in five said they would be reluctant to share housing with a Jewish student, or would never do so. Among Muslim students that figure rises to 37.5%. Nearly half had heard chants glorifying Hamas, Hezbollah or other proscribed terror groups on campus. Almost half had witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks. One in ten students said they did not think Holocaust denial was antisemitic. 65% reported their learning disrupted by protests. 40% had changed their route through campus to avoid them.
Louis Danker, the UJS president, described what the report found in one word: normalised.
Normalised is the word you reach for when hatred has stopped being an event and become a condition. When it no longer requires a trigger or a crowd or a banner. When it sits quietly in a flat listing like a reasonable preference. When a man reaches for a blade on a Tuesday evening and the system’s response is a working group.
They Didn’t Invent This. They Were Taught It.
There is a useful way of understanding what has happened. Jews were once hated for their religion. Then, after the Enlightenment, it became difficult to hate people for their religion, so they were hated for their race. Then, after the 20th century, it became unacceptable to hate people for their race, so they were hated for their state. In each era, the vocabulary changes. The hatred does not.
The vocabulary of 2026 is geopolitical. It comes dressed in the language of human rights, anti-colonialism, and resistance. It has learned that if you find the right framing you can express the oldest hatred in the world and be applauded for your moral courage. The student who posts “no Zios in the flat” is not acting as an ideologue. He is a person who has absorbed, through years of accumulated media framing, lecture hall atmosphere, and campus culture, the lesson that Jews are a category of person about whom it is acceptable to have strong feelings. That their presence is, in certain contexts, a provocation.
He was taught that. Normalisation does not emerge on its own.
It is reinforced every time Jewish suffering is contextualised before it is condemned. Every time a complaint is filed and found complex. Every time a student at a protest in Bristol turns to a Jewish student on the second anniversary of October 7 and says, out loud, that antisemitism no longer needs disguising. Every time a student magazine at Glasgow University responds to the massacre of Jews at Bondi Beach in December 2025 by publishing the line: “A dead fascist is still a fascist.”
That was a student publication. At a British university. About Jewish massacre victims. In 2025.
When 47% of students in the UJS poll say they have witnessed justification of the October 7 attacks on campus, and 16% believe glorifying those attacks should be protected as free speech, they are not making a legal argument. They are expressing a moral position about whose suffering counts. That position was formed somewhere. The question is where.
A Particular Kind of Cowardice.
Not open hostility. The refusal to confront it.
Luciana Berger knows this particular cowardice well. She writes the foreword to the UJS report from personal experience: spat at during an NUS national conference, antisemitic incidents ignored, attacks on UJS stalls, bystanders in positions of responsibility turning the other way. She resigned from the NUS national executive over it. That was more than 20 years ago. The same patterns, she writes, are being repeated on campuses today.
She has children now. They are six and eight years old. She wonders what British campus life will look like for them when they reach university age.
The universities have had two and a half years.
In that time, Jewish students have filed complaints and been told the matter is under review. They have reported incidents and found the process itself an additional ordeal. They have attended classes in buildings where the walls carry slogans calling for their state’s destruction, walked past encampments where Jewish students reported feeling excluded, sat in seminars where their identity was treated as a political position requiring justification. 40% changed their route across campus to avoid a protest. 26% watched friendships with Jewish students become more distanced. At Russell Group universities that figure rises to 36%.
The universities issued statements. They convened working groups. They adopted definitions. Baroness Deech put it plainly on LBC this week. “We’ve got the greatest universities in the world,” she said. “And look what they have sunk to.”
The sinking did not happen in a term or a year. It happened one unaddressed complaint at a time, one unanswered letter, one chant not challenged, one flat listing left up, one blade in a waistband that led nowhere. Normalisation is the accumulation of small decisions by institutions that found the path of least resistance ran through Jewish students rather than through the people making their lives impossible.
Baroness Berger was 20 years too early for anyone in authority to do anything. Her children are growing up now. The question is whether they will be 20 years too late.
He Didn’t Change His Route.
There is another story worth telling alongside the UJS report.
Shabbos Kestenbaum opened his Harvard WhatsApp group on the night of October 7 expecting grief. He found students celebrating. He planted 1,200 flags the next day. They were torn down within 24 hours. He wrote to his university’s antisemitism task force 40 times. He never received a reply. His own community told him he was too loud. He was a Democrat who had never voted Republican. He spoke at the Republican National Convention because he had run out of institutions on his own side willing to say the word without a clause attached.
He did not change his route. He named it, pursued it, and held the line until the institution broke. Harvard now formally partners with an Israeli university. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is in its policies. He was 25 years old.
A Sense of Memory.
Douglas Murray, who has spent more time than most thinking about what Jewish survival actually requires, once recalled a private conversation with Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He asked Sacks what it meant to be a Jew. Sacks quoted Isaiah Berlin: to be a Jew is to have a sense of history. Then Sacks tilted his head. “I think Isaiah was almost right,” he said. “To be a Jew is to have a sense of memory.”
Memory is not a burden. It is the reason the Jewish people are still here. They know that this moment, as bleak as the UJS report makes it appear, is not the first time a generation has decided that Jewish presence was an inconvenience to be managed. They know how many societies have tried to push them out, and how each of those moments ended. They know what became of every empire that made the removal of Jews its policy.
The student who posted “no Zios in the flat” is not running the Roman Empire. He is a person with a room going spare and a vocabulary he absorbed without examining it. The answer to him is not primarily a new complaints procedure, though that matters. It is Jewish students who refuse the premise that their presence is the problem. Who speak the Hebrew. Who wear the necklace. Who plant the flags. Who write the 40 letters. Who do not change the route.
“This is your country,” Murray has said to British Jews who think they should keep their heads down. “And it has been through centuries.”
It still is. The flat listing will not change that. Neither will the chants, the encampments, the graffiti, or the whiteboard. The Jewish people have outlasted every version of this, and contributed, in the process, more to the world that tried to exclude them than the world will ever fully acknowledge.
A sense of memory knows this. It has always known it.
Stand in it.
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