For most of her adult life, Rachel Riley was only vaguely aware of her Jewish ancestry.
A moderately famous daytime game show television host, Riley, 33, is one of countless unaffiliated Jews in the United Kingdom — a country with 250,000 Jewish citizens and where synagogue attendance is at a historic low.
“When I was a kid my mum would give us pepperoni pizza,” she told The Times of London in an interview published Saturday, pointing out that she didn’t keep kosher.
On Hanukkah, she added, “We’d light the menorah candles but we didn’t go to synagogue and I’ve never done Friday night [Shabbat].”
But after experiencing anti-Semitic abuse online for criticizing Britain’s liberal Labour party — whose far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn has been called anti-Semitic for his rhetoric and anti-Israel views — Riley was compelled to speak out, including in parliament last week, against the proliferation of that hatred and about how it has affected her own family.