The Mail on Miliband: What does it mean to call a Jewish person “un-British”?

We are not so far from a time when Jews were treated as undesirables, when right-thinking people preferred to ignore what was happening to them. We must not ignore the plight of those - the illegitimate, the rootless, the "illegal" - who fall on the wrong

By Daniel Trilling

This is an online extract from this week’s New Statesman magazine, published on Thursday 3 October.

My grandmother left Germany for England at the end of August 1939. She was able to leave because the Nazi official who stamped her passport once a week had taken a liking to her and warned that the following week they would be confiscating Jews’ documents. She was only able to enter England because a friend had gone ahead and procured her a false offer of work, such were the British laws designed to keep out undesirable “aliens”. She wasn’t to return to Germany until some time in the 1950s.