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Dave Rich is Head of Policy at the Community Security Trust. He is an associate research fellow at the Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (part of Birkbeck, University of London), where he completed his PhD, after graduating from the London School of Economics with a degree in history and politics. Rich's first book The Left's Jewish Problem: Jeremy Corbyn, Israel and Anti‑Semitism (2016), began as his doctoral dissertation. Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world was published in 2023.
2015–2020
- A year into Mr. Corbyn's tenure, there is no trust and precious little dialogue between the Labour leader and Britain’s Jews. The country’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, has spoken of Labour’s "severe" problem of anti-Semitism — a problem that Jonathan Arkush, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the community’s leading representative body, says Mr. Corbyn is loath to tackle.
- Mr. Corbyn himself appears bemused. The mantra he repeats — that he is opposed to racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia (he rarely speaks solely of anti-Semitism) — suggests that he is wedded to the idea that anti-Semitism is chiefly a right-wing phenomenon. It is true that Mr. Corbyn's predecessor as Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was the target of some thinly veiled anti-Semitic slurs from Britain's tabloid newspapers. But the notion that well-meaning people on the left might also harbor bias against Jews seems to pass him by.
- "Anti-Semitism and the British Left", The New York Times (11 September 2016)
- For example, in the Labour code it is no longer likely to be antisemitic "to accuse Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations". The code simply says this is "wrong", as if imprecise or uncivil language is the problem, rather than the prevalence of antisemitic attitudes. Yet this charge, that Jews cannot be trusted or must always be suspected of having a hidden agenda, is central to the old-fashioned, rightwing antisemitism that the Labour party claims to oppose.
Similarly, the IHRA definition says it is antisemitic to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, but Labour's code says this is only the case if there is "evidence of antisemitic intent": a caveat it attaches to all "contentious views" relating to Israel.- "Labour’s antisemitism code exposes a sickness in Jeremy Corbyn’s party", The Guardian (18 July 2018)
- On the Labour Party's refusal to adopt in full the Working definition of antisemitism of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
2021–present
- [On joining the Community Security Trust in 1994 as a researcher] When I joined, the BNP had just won their first ever council seat in east London and Combat 18 were running riot [...] There were car bombs at Balfour House. These things are always there. It can be pushed right to the margins and have no impact on daily Jewish life — which is where we want it to be — but it's still there somewhere, and it rises and falls depending on what is going on in the rest of the world.
- [During the period Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party in the UK] Anecdotally [...] a lot of a people who were involved on the doorsteps and doing focus groups in parts of the country where there are no Jews were coming back and saying, "people are bringing this up without any prompting and people who can't even pronounce the word antisemitism are still managing to articulate that they are aware of it and they know it's bad thing.
- Interviewed by Tanya Gold, as cited in "How the UK's foremost expert on Jew-hate cheered me up", The Jewish Chronicle (16 February 2023)
- See Antisemitism in the UK Labour Party. For the July 1994 bombings, see Balfour House bombing (in North Finchley, then the headquarters of United Jewish Israel Appeal) and London Israeli embassy bombing.
- There is a well-worn metaphor that Jews are the canary in the coalmine, with antisemitism an early indicator of invisible problems in society. I'm not a fan of this metaphor because it presumes the canary is expendable. Nevertheless, it reflects a deeper truth. Antisemitism has a fluid quality, filling whatever space is opened to it, seeping into the cracks and widening them further. It has dominated conversation among British Jews since 7 October to an unprecedented extent – but really, it is everyone else who needs to think about what it means.
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