Jewish Council of Australia

He's a historian who's been specialising in Jewish life after the Holocaust and he leads the Monash Initiative for Rapid Research into Antisemitism and co-leads the Gen 26 Australian Jewish Community Survey and he's got lots of publications and other things of that kind.

Sarah, Sarah Schwartz, is a lawyer, a human rights lawyer, and founding executive director of the Jewish Council of Australia, which is an organisation committed to fighting antisemitism, but also concurrently supporting Palestinian liberation.

She's also a legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre, a lecturer at Melbourne Law School, And she earned a John Monash Scholarship, which is really, for those of you who don't know, a really prestigious scholarship in 2019 and completed a Master of Laws at Harvard University, focusing on racism, policing, mass incarceration.

I think one of the things we might talk a bit about is the connection between antisemitism and other forms of racism and things like that.

Anyway, we might unpack that down the track.

Yeah, and I mean this relates.

So, yeah, there's different interpretations of what the word Zionism means amongst Jewish communities and there's changing political views and part of the reason why why the Jewish Council was formed was to create space for alternative Jewish views and for Jewish views that are critical of Israel and its genocide.

But also, you know, and this relates back to the question of anti-Semitism and I think it's part of the reason why it is just so difficult to have conversations about anti-Semitism in this moment because we are living in a world in which, you know, In my view, this is the reality that Israel itself uses anti-Semitism as a way to defend itself from criticisms of its actions.