Dave Rich (Community Security Trust)
"From Corbyn to Covid: How Antisemitism Is Changing For British Jews"
June 16, 2020
Description: For many British Jews, 2019 was a year of fear—fear that a General Election would lead to a government led by Jeremy Corbyn, a veteran anti-Zionist under whose leadership the Labour Party had become a magnet for antisemites and conspiracy theorists. That danger has passed and Corbyn is no longer Labour Party leader, but now the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a new set of antisemitic conspiracy theories that appeal as much to the xenophobic far right as the conspiracist far left. As Britain, like so many countries, struggles with the pandemic and faces an anxious economic outlook, it is likely that antisemitism will continue to adapt to this new and uncertain future.
Dave Rich is Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust, a UK Jewish charity that provides security advice and assistance to the UK Jewish community and supports victims of antisemitism. Dave is Associate Research Fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London and author of The Left’s Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Antisemitism (Biteback, 2016 & 2018). His latest publications include a chapter on “Walking a Mile in Asghar Bukhari's Shoes: Conspiracy Theories, Antisemitism and Extremism” in Campbell & Klaffeds. Unity and Diversity in Contemporary Antisemitism: The Bristol-Sheffield Hallam Colloquium on Contemporary Antisemitism (Academic Studies Press, 2019) and a new Introduction to a second edition of Hadassa Ben-Itto's The Lie That Will Not Die: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Vallentine Mitchell, 2020).
The College of Arts