Visible, Jewish, and Unwelcome: The Message Glastonbury Now Sends People Like Me

But something shifted. And I’m not going back.

This isn’t about one band, or one tweet, or one awkward moment. It’s about the quiet but growing realisation that for Jews like me — observant, visible, connected to both Jewish identity and British civic life — Glastonbury no longer feels like a safe or welcoming place. And that says something deeply worrying about where British culture is heading.

Glastonbury offers something rare: anonymity. In real life, I wear a kippa, serve as a governor of a Jewish school and as a lay leader in my synagogue. I’ve spent years in Jewish education, but I’ve also spent three days in Ramallah with my MBA class. I sit proudly at the intersection of Jewish tradition and British public life.

I love my life as a proud British Jew. I love Dance floors. Saunas. Spontaneous chats with strangers. At Glastonbury, I could just exist. I was “the guy with the football shirt” — not “the Jew.” I raved in Shangri-La, danced in the rain at Temple, sobbed in the front row during Lewis Capaldi, and shared Skittles with teens from Bristol waiting for the Ezra Collective as the crowd cleared.

I wandered. I chatted. I watched the sunrise at the stone circle, wrapped in other people’s music and my own thoughts. It was utopia. For a while.

But then something changed. Kneecap, a band whose lyrics glorify IRA violence and whose Glastonbury set included chants of “Brits Out” and hostility toward the IDF. Their platforming wasn’t a fringe act in a hidden field — it was a headline moment, endorsed by the Glasto elite, legitimised by the BBC, and cheered on by a crowd that blurred political provocation into cultural incitement.

I opted out. Quietly. Many of my new festival friends and acquaintances were going to see them. I just said I wasn’t. No explanation. No argument. But I could feel something shift. The conversation cooled. Messages went unanswered. A friend gently suggested we move bars after a donation drive for “Free Palestine” made the atmosphere uncomfortable. We never discussed politics. But she knew. And she cared.

Later that night, I found myself sitting on the grass near Woodsies. I checked my phone for the first time in days and reality came rushing in. Online, I saw tweets calling to “find the Zionists” and “make them feel unsafe.” The comments on Jewish influencer Bella Wallersteiner’s posts  were filled with antisemitic bile. Suddenly, my bright yellow Brazil shirt felt like a star. I didn’t want to be seen.

Earlier, I’d had a strange encounter. Sitting at the front of the stage before Ezra Collective, a woman dressed in kneecap-standard micro-attire sat next to me and, after a brief chat about nothing, said casually: “Oy vey.” It was so out of place it felt like a test. She said it was Yiddish. I asked if she was Jewish. “No,” she said, flatly. I felt it in my bones. We see you. Jew.

I thought back to the stone circle, chasing the memory of the sunrise. I’d been there a few hours when I thought I heard it — a boo, then a hiss, then a muttered slur: “Zionists.” A group passed by. They were trendy, clean, moving through the crowd. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I didn’t. And that’s the point.

That creeping uncertainty — am I safe here? — is the defining emotion I’ve been left with. It wasn’t one big thing. It was the accumulation of tiny signals, looks, silences, absences. A vibe. The opposite of belonging.

I’ve spent most of my adult life working across communities, building bridges, helping young people engage with difficult truths. I’ve always believed in dialogue, in nuance, in British values. But now I find myself asking a question I’ve only ever half-joked about: if the worst were to happen, would the people around me hide me? Would they stay silent? Or would they point — or worse?

Wes Streeting’s comments this weekend — that the Israeli embassy needs to “get its house in order” — struck hard. I once saw him as an ally. Someone who made the right noises, understood nuance, led with empathy. But when it mattered, he echoed the slogans. Another polite step back.

The cultural elite — at Glastonbury, at the BBC, in politics — think they are standing for justice. But what they’re doing is narrowing the space for Jews to belong unless we renounce the parts of our identity they find politically inconvenient. It’s not just about policy. It’s about permission. Who is permitted to speak? Who is permitted to feel safe?

The late and great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose moral clarity is so lacking from this world, warned in his later writings that civilisation begins to unravel when identity is reduced to tribes and universal values collapse into grievance politics. He wrote: “Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime. The hated cannot cure the hate. It would be the greatest mistake for Jews to believe that they can fight it alone. The only people who can successfully combat antisemitism are those active in the cultures that harbour it.”

But that doesn’t mean Jews have no role. We must speak, we must educate, we must remember — but we cannot be expected to do it alone, or in a culture increasingly unwilling to hear us unless we disavow who we are.

Maybe I’m Just a Paranoid Jew

Maybe I am. Maybe I read too much into a look, a word, a silence. But maybe I’m not. Maybe it really is becoming harder to be a visibly Jewish person in the public square. Maybe we really are being told, politely but firmly, to sit down, shut up, and stay out of sight.

I don’t want to be dramatic. I just want to tell the truth as I experienced it. I went to Glastonbury looking for joy. I found it. I also found something else: a quiet, creeping fear that no longer feels irrational.

So goodbye, friends. I don’t blame you. Maybe it’s just me. But I’m not coming back.