Answer The Hate

Message templates

Letter to your representative

For writing to the office that represents where you live. Built to be pulled apart and rewritten in your own words, because a letter sent as it stands here is worth close to nothing.

  • An evening
  • Israel advocacy
  • Anti-antisemitism
  • advocacy
  • institutions

The letter is the smaller half of this. What decides whether it does anything is that the words are yours, and what you do four weeks later.

Start by taking this apart. Correspondence arriving at an office is sorted by topic and counted, and a run of letters that are obviously the same letter is frequently counted once. So treat the paragraph below as raw material rather than as a draft. Keep the two or three sentences that are true for you, delete the rest, and write the joins in the words you would use out loud. A template sent unedited spends your evening producing something that will be recorded as part of somebody else’s campaign. Sending nothing at all would have cost you less.

Then say who you are and where you live, in the first two lines. Not your view. Your standing. That sentence is what turns a letter into something the office has a reason to answer, and it is the one part of this that is worth getting exactly right before anything else.

One issue after that, and one ask, chosen from the bank below for what that office can genuinely do rather than for how strongly you feel about it.

Assemble the three blocks below and change the wording until it sounds like you. None of this guarantees a reply worth having, and some offices answer everything with the same three paragraphs whatever arrives. What is reliably true is that the letters nobody followed up produced nothing at all.

Read writing to your representative first if you have not, for what happens to a letter after it arrives and how to chase one. Where the target is an institution rather than an elected office, raising it formally with your institution has the mechanisms and the escalation route above them. If the answer is yes to a meeting, go to meeting your representative face to face before you accept a date.

Block one

Describe the situation

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

Copy this

I am writing to you as a constituent. I live at 14 Beechwood Rise, in the eastern part of the area you represent, and I have not written to this office before. I am writing about one thing only. Since the middle of April, the entrance to the synagogue on Carlisle Street has been used as a gathering point on Saturday mornings by people who shout at anyone going in, and on 3 June a neighbour of mine was followed to her car afterwards. The police hold a report and gave her a reference number, so I am not asking you to do their work. I am asking you to do one thing that sits inside yours, and I have set it out at the end of this letter.

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 writing because it happened to me. On 3 June I was followed from the station to my front door, and I have spent every evening since working out which way home is the one I can face.
  • I am writing about what this area has become over the past few months. I have lived here for nineteen years and I would like to carry on wanting to.
  • I am writing as a parent. My daughter has stopped telling people at school what she is, and I would like to be able to tell her that somebody with authority knows about it and is doing something.
  • I am writing as the parent of a student. My son does not walk across his own campus in the evening any more, and the university has told us both that this is a matter for somebody else.
  • I am writing in a professional capacity. I have taught in this area for eleven years, I hear what is being said to children, and I would rather put my name to it than keep it as a staffroom conversation.
  • I am not Jewish. I am writing because the people this is happening to are my neighbours, and a street where they are frightened is not a street I want to raise my own children on.
  • I have never written to this office before and there is no campaign behind me. That is exactly why I would like you to read it.
  • I am not asking you to agree with me about the Middle East, and I have no position on it I would want to defend in public. I am asking about what is happening on a road you represent.

Block three

Make your ask

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

Tell me where you standEasiest
Please tell me in your own words where you stand on this. I am asking for a written answer I can quote accurately, rather than a general statement of values.
Put the question for meStraightforward
Please put one written question to whoever is responsible for this, and send me what they say. I have written the question out below so that nobody in your office has to draft it.
Meet usBolder
Please meet me, or three of us who live here, for twenty minutes at whatever regular slot you keep for people in the area. We will come with one request and one page of paper.
Say it publiclyHard
Please say publicly, in your own words and under your own name, that what happened on Carlisle Street was antisemitic, in whatever forum you normally use to address people here.
Back or block the measureHardest
Please support the specific proposal named below if it reaches you, or oppose it by name if you take the opposite view, and tell me afterwards what you did and on what date.

Rules worth holding to

  1. Rewrite it or do not send it. Offices sort incoming post by topic and count it, and an identifiable batch of identical letters is very often logged as one item rather than as many, which is the opposite of what you sat down to do.
  2. One issue per letter. A letter carrying three grievances and a history gets a general reply or none. Keep the rest for the next letter.
  3. Say that you are a constituent and give your address inside the first two lines. That is your standing, and standing is the whole reason an office has to answer you at all.
  4. Ask for something that particular office can actually carry out on its own. An ask outside their power buys you a polite explanation of why not, and nothing else.
  5. Never abusive, never threatening, not one line you would have to explain later. Anger is the easiest thing in the world for an office to file and forget.
  6. The follow-up matters more than the letter. Name a date for a reply, diarise a chaser for the day after it, and chase. Most of these die because nobody asked again.
  7. Keep it to one side of paper. Length reads as feeling. Brevity reads as knowing what you want.
  8. Put the facts in one paragraph and your view of them in another. Blended together, the whole thing gets read as opinion and filed as opinion.
  9. Keep a dated copy of what you sent, and of anything you get back.