"This is not Poland or Lithuania or France, where the locals were only waiting for a Nazi invasion to sanction their existing dreams of domestic Jew-clearance. "

"This is London, where (I cannot speak of it without tears) the working people of the East End stood alongside their Jewish neighbours to fight off Mosley’s blackshirts — rather than, say, posting Instagram stories about how there are two sides to every story. Nor indeed can I pretend that I, fully secularised, church-married with a gentile wife and half-blood kids, would be in the front line, should antisemitic push (of the kind being seen in universities, at The Guardian, in graffiti on schools and Holocaust libraries, and at these almost daily demonstrations in London by the bourgeois jihaderati) come to genocidal shove. But the fact is that the world feels very dangerous at the moment. Very horrible. And in every Jewish family — every single one, mark you — there rumble tales of the prescient recent ancestor who had the sense to get out of wherever they were before it was too late, which is why we are all here, today. There are no good stories about the ones who said, 'meh, it’s all being overblown, that could never happen in Lodz, Kiev, Paris, Salonika.'..."

 
Writes Giles Coren, in "We talk about getting out — just not there/My ancestors fled rising antisemitism before it was too late but I really don’t want to end up in rainy New Zealand" (London Times).

My mother was a doctor not because she was madly interested in medicine but because her father insisted she train for a portable profession, so that should she be forced to leave London in a hurry, she could earn a living (and get a visa) wherever she went. And that kind of attitude gets passed down. It’s why, I think, if you want to get eugenic about it, modern Jews are so very, shall we say, “visible” (one hesitates to say “successful”). Because the ones who got out of the Old Country were those who could read, speak modern languages, had real skills and, crucially, the energy to get up and go. The inward-looking, Yiddish-speaking schmendricks of the Steppe, who preferred to sit by the cholent pot, davening over back-to-front books and taking their chances with the Cossacks, they kind of got weeded out of the gene pool.