Answer The Hate

Message templates

Email to colleagues

For raising antisemitism at work with people you sit next to, written to be forwardable, quotable and still defensible in six months.

  • An evening
  • Anti-antisemitism
  • workplace

The hardest message on this site to get right, because the audience is people you will see tomorrow.

Two things make the difference. The venue, decide between a one-to-one, a team meeting and an all-staff email before you write a word, because the same sentence carries entirely different risk in each. And the opening. Start from what your workplace has already committed to in writing, rather than from the cause itself. Almost every employer has published a code of conduct or an equalities policy you can hold them to, and asking whether an existing commitment is being applied evenly is a far harder question to deflect than a political one.

Assemble the three blocks below. Change the wording so it sounds like you, a message that reads as a template will be treated as one.

Read speaking up where you work first if you haven’t. It covers choosing the venue, judging the room, and what to record.

Block one

Describe the situation

Use this as it stands, or change whatever doesn't sound like you.

Copy this

I wanted to raise something directly rather than let it sit. Over the past few weeks a number of us have noticed a change in how it feels to be Jewish at work, not in any single incident that would obviously breach a policy, but in an accumulation of smaller things: comments in meetings, assumptions about what we must think, and an expectation that we will account for the actions of a government none of us have any connection to. I am not asking anyone to change their politics, and I am not suggesting anyone here has acted maliciously. I am asking whether the standard we already apply to every other form of racial and religious hostility is being applied evenly here, because I do not think it currently is.

Block two

Say why you are speaking

Pick one. Being straightforward about fear or isolation is not a weakness here. It is often the most persuasive thing you can say.

  • I am raising it because I would rather say something once, calmly, than keep saying nothing and get quietly worse at my job.
  • I am raising it because a colleague told me they had stopped mentioning they were Jewish at work, and I did not want that to be a thing we all just knew and never said.
  • I am raising it because we have said the right things publicly about other forms of racism, and I think consistency is the whole point of having said them.
  • I am raising it because I am uncomfortable being the person who raises it, and I have decided that being uncomfortable is not a good enough reason not to.
  • I am raising it because I am worried, and pretending to be more confident about this than I am has not worked.
  • I am raising it because I am new here and I would like to know now, rather than later, what kind of place this is.
  • I am raising it because I have the security to be able to, and some colleagues do not.

Block three

Make your ask

Ordered from easiest to hardest. Choose what you can actually stand behind.

Read one thingEasiest
Please read one short piece I will send round. That's the whole ask. You do not have to agree with it or reply.
Talk to me about itStraightforward
If any of this does not match your experience, or you think I've got it wrong, I would genuinely rather hear that directly than not hear it.
Apply the existing policyBolder
Please look at whether our existing code of conduct is being applied consistently here, and tell us what you find. No new policy is needed for this.
Say something internallyHard
Please acknowledge internally that colleagues have been affected, in the same terms we have used for other forms of racism.
Change something specificHardest
Please make a specific change, to how complaints in this area are handled, to what training says, or to how the policy is worded, and tell us what it is.

Rules worth holding to

  1. Write it assuming one paragraph will be forwarded without the rest. Every sentence has to survive alone.
  2. Say what you want to happen. A message with no ask is a disclosure, and puts the work on the reader.
  3. Do not name a colleague. Describe the pattern, not the person, unless you are using a formal process built for that.
  4. Do not argue the foreign policy. You will lose the room and it is not what you're asking about.
  5. Lead with the standard your employer has already set for itself. It is much harder to argue with than anything you assert.
  6. Do not send it the day you draft it. Sleep on it once.
  7. Keep a copy, with the date, somewhere that is not your work laptop.