Sarah Schwartz

Adapting to every age, it lies hidden below the surface until the conditions of our world allow it to emerge.

Join Professors Ruth Ballant and David Slucky and lawyer Sarah Schwartz in conversation with Simon Longstaff as they examine how antisemitism mutates across ideologies and why it so often flourishes during moments of social breakdown.

This is the 2026 Festival of Dangerous Ideas session on antisemitism.

Good afternoon, everybody.

So Davis Lookie, he's sitting opposite from me, is a professor and the director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation and the Lottie Smorgan Associate Professor of Contemporary Jewish Life and Culture.

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.