About the dead in Manchester

Seventy-one years ago, I arrived at Southampton, England, by way of the SS United States for a year of graduate study at the University of Manchester. I lived in the village of Withington, about as far south of central Manchester as the Heaton Park synagogue is to its north. I assume that some Jews attended the university then, and perhaps a Muslim or two, but I only took notice of the Irish (they shared my bloodline), my fellow Americans, a few Canadians, and a lovely Polish girl with whom I fell desperately in love. Really, in the 1950s we didn't pay much attention to each other's religious or ethnic background, though we Fulbright Fellows had had a black waiter on shipboard. (He had us call him Jersey Joe in honor of a heavyweight boxer of the time.)

And now Manchester is home to Europe's latest antisemitic atrocity! It left two Jews dead, three wounded, and their killer killed by armed police, of whom Manchester had none in 1954. The killer's name was Jihad Al-Shamie, recently arrested for rape. We can assume that on Thursday he was globalizing the intifada, as we are regularly urged by students at our better colleges and universities. My younger granddaughter graduated from Yale not long ago, wearing a keffiyeh on her shoulders, as did more than a few of her classmates. Like Greta Thunberg and millions of other young fools, she saw nothing amiss in chanting From the River to the Sea, while not knowing the name of either body of water. Neither did the late Mr Al-Shamie, I suspect.