What I Was Called When I Applied for Asylum in Sweden

“The Jews in this country are suffering from peace damage, you know.”

I was having lunch in Stockholm with my eighty-five-year-old friend Kuba. This was in November of last year, soon after the story broke that I had applied for asylum in my own country on grounds of religious persecution. My argument, as I explained in Mosaic, was that when it came to the basic human right of Swedish Jews to conduct their religious lives freely and safely, our government was in breach of its obligations under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Swedish constitution.

Of course, I was perfectly aware that filing for refugee status in one’s own country might seem like only a stunt, and that my application would be promptly dismissed, as indeed it was. But I had been watching for years as the incidence of Swedish anti-Semitism rose steadily, as violent hate crimes against Jews increased, as moves were initiated in parliament and elsewhere to curtail or ban core Jewish ritual practices like circumcision and kosher slaughter (shehita)—and as nothing was done to counter or reverse these trends, either by the government, by politicians and human-rights activists, or by the Jewish community.