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Professor Jane Caplan - 'What’s in a Name? From ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ to ‘The Holocaust’

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 1:32:00 PM

A talk about language. What is the relation between the terms ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ and ‘Holocaust’? Aren’t they just different names for the same event, adopted at different times? And if they do refer to different events, what exactly is the nature of that difference? One answer can be found in an entry in the USHMM’s on-line Holocaust Encyclopaedia, which describes the difference like this: ‘The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of Europe’s Jews from 1933 to 1945’. Against this, ‘the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” was the last stage of the Holocaust and took place from 1941 to 1945. It was the deliberate, planned mass murder of Europe’s Jews’.

This evening I want us to consider how and why these terms have become attached to the historical events the identify, and to begin with this point: Whereas there has been a good deal of commentary on the origin and meaning of the word ‘Holocaust’, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ is less often discussed, and it also tends to be abbreviated to its convenient first half, ‘the Final Solution’. The ‘Jewish Question’ thereby recedes into unspoken distance, so I’ll be paying particular attention to this.

II NEVER AGAIN

I’m going to start by invoking from another phrase that has become the watchword of Holocaust remembrance: ‘Never Again’. ‘Never Again’ demands that we must never forget the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate Europe’s Jews, nor allow another such genocidal catastrophe to overtake humanity. I’d like to begin by looking at something that is suggested by this phrase, but less explicitly noticed. This is its implicit but silent correlate, ‘Never Before’. If ‘Never Again’ is an injunction for the future, ‘Never Before’ is a description of the challenge that met the first postwar historians, as they struggled to find adequate words for a deed that appeared so overwhelming and unprecedented. This is not an original point: there are now whole literatures on the historical antecedents and parallels to the Nazi destruction of the European Jews, on the necessity or impossibility of comparison, and on the challenge of representation on the grand scale. But what I want to discuss today here is something more modest but no less important. A name was needed for this deed; but what should that name be?

The celebrated historian of the Nazi destruction of the European Jews Raul Hilberg (d. 2007), who began his research in the silence of the late 1940s, reflected on this question more than once:

At the very beginning, references to the Holocaust were cloudy. The phenomenon had no name … There was as yet no word for what had happened … The vocabulary with which to describe what had happened had not yet been developed … The entire process had not yet been grasped.

(Incompleteness p81; Development p226).

Hilberg felt himself confronted by an almost impossible task of historical reconstruction, which encompassed a deed so massive in scope and so unprecedented in character that even its perpetrators found it hard to name. As the scale and enormity of the deed acquired definition after 1945, it seemed to deny historians any conceivable vocabulary or narrative strategy. And no language meant no history, or at best a fragmented history of mass murder and atrocity, told mostly through the postwar tribunals and survivor memoirs. Even when a tentative lexicon began to surface, Hilberg rejected much of it, because he refused as a matter of principle to use any words with abhorrent or belittling resonances. This ruled out, for example, the term ‘extermination’, with its association of the victims with ‘vermin’, or words like ‘murder’ or ‘execution’ with their judicial undertones.

For this reason, when Hilberg finally found a publisher for his monumental study in 1961, the title he gave it was The Destruction of the European Jews, using a blunt but neutral term that carried no pejorative or ethical associations. Hilberg’s choice of language also embodied a deliberate choice of perspective and interpretation: he focussed not on the experience and suffering of the Jews under the Nazi onslaught, but on the decisions, policies, procedures and actions of the bureaucrats in the civil service, the business sector, the Nazi Party and the military hierarchy who perpetrated their destruction. As he wrote: ‘This is not a book about Jews. It is a book about the people who destroyed the Jews’. In other words, it was not a book of Jewish history, but a book about what he called ‘Western history’.

What took centre-stage in Hilberg’s strategy was ‘the vast organization of the Nazi machinery of destruction and the men who performed important functions in this machine’ (Destruction, p.v). When he comes to write about the gas chambers, he describes their installation and use in unembellished factual and objective terms. There are no descriptions of SS men barking orders, or terrified Jews awaiting their fate.

Nevertheless, Hilberg’s manuscript was rejected by several US publishers on the very grounds that he had sought to avoid: viz. that it was too subjective, and also devoted exclusively to a topic of relatively marginal historical importance. As a result, it was beaten to publication by another pioneering study, this one by the British scholar Gerald Reitlinger. Reitlinger’s book The Final Solution. The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939-1945 appeared in Britain in 1953 and in Germany in 1956. Reitlinger was evidently less troubled by Hilberg’s scruples about language, and he was forthright about what was meant by ‘The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem’. It was ‘a code-name for Hitler’s [NB] plans to exterminate the Jews of Europe … used by German officials after the summer of 1941 in order to avoid the necessity of admitting even among themselves that such plans existed’ (p.3).

III. FINAL SOLUTION

Let’s look more closely at that alleged code-name, ‘the final solution of the Jewish Problem’. Towards the end of September 1939, the SS/SD leader in charge of Jewish matters, Reinhard Heydrich, had made a distinction in a memo between the secret ‘final goal’ (Endziel) of Nazi anti-Jewish policy in Poland and the intermediate ‘short-term’ (kurzfristig) stages towards this goal (Heydrich to SiPo chief, 21.9.39; Longerich p253). For those in the know, the ‘final goal’ at this time was the mass deportation of German and Polish Jews into reservations, by methods that would inevitably (and intentionally) result in mass death from starvation and privation. Variants of this distinction surface in later documents (e.g. Nah- and Fernplan, Heydrich Nov.; Longerich p263), and in December 1939 the SD Jewish desk prepared an extensive memo on ‘die Endlösung des deutschen Judenproblems‘ (Longerich p265). A memo by Eichmann from December 1940, entitled ‘Die Judenfrage’, contrasted the ‘initial solution [Anfangslösung] of the jewish Question by emigration’ with the ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ by mass deportation/resettlement (Umsiedlung) (Löw, Verfolgung u. Ermordung, vol. 3, p336).) By the end of July 1941, after many vicissitudes in concept and plan, the invasion of the Soviet Union seemed finally to open a clear path to a murderous ‘final solution’. Hitler’s deputy Göring, using authority given to him by Hitler, charged Heydrich with the task of:

carrying out all necessary preparations with regard to organizational, practical and material matters for bringing about a comprehensive solution [Gesamtlösung] of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe… I [Hitler] further charge you to send me in due course a comprehensive plan [Gesamtentwurf] concerning the organizational, practical and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the desired final solution the Jewish question [Endlösung der Judenfrage].

Now, how and why did this phrase, ‘Final solution of the Jewish Question’, come to be available to SS/SD bureaucrats? Was it a term they coined as a bureaucratic convenience? Or if it wasn’t, where did it come from? And is it best understood as a euphemism for something unspecified and unspeakable?

Although it is now commonly abbreviated as Endlösung, ‘Final Solution’, the full phrase combines two elements:, as I have already said: ‘Final Solution’ and ‘the Jewish Question’. The more familiar half, ‘Final Solution’, is a shorthand for the program that, by 1941, was to embrace the mass destruction of Europe’s Jewish populations. But what about the rest of it – the Judenfrage, ‘the Jewish Question’, or Jewish Problem? This word was in no way a Nazi coinage, and it’s worth looking into its history.

IV: ‘THE JEWISH QUESTION’

The proposition that there was something called a ‘Jewish Question’ was a product of the emancipation of Jews in Europe in the broader transition from a post-feudal to a modern bourgeois political and social order, in which all [male] citizens were treated equally before the law, irrespective of religion or race. As articulated from the late 18^th century, the Jewish Question can be reduced to this: How could anyone simultaneously be fully a citizen while also remaining fully a Jew? Could a Jew be a regular member of civil society, or did he belong to an extraneous community, one that retained its own historic identity and difference? (Toury p95). To put it the other way round, did the price of Jewish emancipation and citizenship have to be the renunciation of the Jewish diaspora’s historic ethno-religious identity?

This was a conundrum debated throughout Europe, but it was given extra salience in 19^th-century Germany. As emancipation took off in the 1830s and 1840s, definitions of the Jewish Question and proposals for its ‘solution’ were canvassed in a lively pamphlet literature, authored by Jews and non-Jews alike. What gave it an extra edge in Germany was the fact that what ‘Germany’ was, and who was a German, were not fully resolved even after the era of unification. As a result, the Jewish Question became part of a larger ‘German Question’, where it remained a matter of contention at a deep political, ideological and emotional level. Open controversy subsided in the mid-century, but it never entirely vanished, and it surfaced again, with a vengeance, in the 1880s and the 1890s.

By the 1880s, the Question had mutated, and so had the character and tone of antisemitism (the term was coined by the journalist Wilhelm Marr in 1879). Germany’s ‘Jewish Question’ had first been articulated as the challenge of Jewish emancipation and civic integration in the modern political order, but its resurgence was powered by the entry of Germany onto the geopolitical stage after 1871, and also by the shock of the long economic depression that took hold after 1873. Jews as a group were alleged to have reaped huge economic and cultural benefits from their new opportunities in modernizing society, to the detriment of non-Jewish Germans. In the hands of the increasingly organized antisemites, this claim was reimagined in increasingly violent terms, pillorying Jewish Germans as the perpetrators of a strategic campaign of racial domination that was poisoning the lifeblood of the German people.

The existence of this ‘Jewish Question’ logically implied the need for an answer, the more so since ‘the Jews’ were conflated in antisemitic discourse with the crisis of modernity itself. Thus the existence of a menacing ‘Jewish Question’ that demanded a radical solution was widely trumpeted in late nineteenth-century Germany. By then the argument was no longer about the terms of Jewish emancipation, but about its allegedly corrosive results. Emancipation had been intended to remove confessional Judaism as a formal impediment to full citizenship. But in the eyes of antisemites this strategy had failed. Jews remained Jews. They were on the march to destroy Germany, and the question for antisemites was how emancipation could be reversed: How could Germany resolve its Jewish Question once and for all?

Antisemitic ideology also gathered fresh momentum from the penetration of a new biologized concept of race into political discourse. This embodied the idea that a people was an organic racial community that was vulnerable to physical menaces from external forces. A language of infections and parasites was emerging on the further reaches of antisemitic polemics. With this, Jews could be represented not just as cultural aliens who could never be German, but as physical threats that must be eliminated.

I want to spend a moment more on this. The late 19^th-century pamphlet literature was replete with calls and proposals for the solution of the Jewish question, for a ‘complete and lasting solution [volle und dauernde Lösung] of the Jewish Question’, for a ‘fundamental and final solution [gründliche und endgültige Lösung]’. I’m quoting here from an 1897 text by a complicated figure, Carl Friedrich Heman, a pastor in the evangelical church whose father was a convert from Judaism and himself also a pastor. Heman was a fount of all the usual antisemitic stereotypes; at the same time he collaborated with the Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl and helped him to organize the first World Zionist Congress in 1897. Like others, Heman insisted that ‘The Jewish question can be solved by no one other than the Jews themselves’, which deliberately implies that they are responsible for their Question. He called on the Jews to recognize that only Zionism could deliver a ‘thoroughgoing (gründlich) solution of the Jewish Question’. Zionism offered a geopolitical solution to the question that emancipation had failed to solve in the realm of culture and identity. Thus Herzl’s own groundbreaking publication of 1896, Der Judenstaat, was subtitled ‘Considerations for a Modern Solution to the Jewish Question’ (Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage). Zionism promised to remove the Jewish Question from Germany by removing the Jews.

‘Removal’ was supposedly the antonym of ‘assimilation’, and was a common trope of both antisemites and Zionists. But it was an empty or elastic term, available to be filled with a range of possible meanings, from removal of difference by assimilation, to a vaguer invocation of removal by emigration or expulsion, or potentially something more severe. In my reading for this lecture, I was struck by a characteristic rhetorical move in this antisemitic literature, in which an author conjured the possibility that removal might mean physical destruction, only to dismiss it. In 1933, for example, the theologian Gerhard Kittel listed four possible answers to the Jewish Question, starting with ‘Ausrottung’, a word that is usually translated as extermination. Kittel immediately dismissed this as not a serious proposition. [cf other examples in Jünginger p269] But…. The technical term for this rhetorical gesture is apophasis: pretending to deny what is actually affirmed.

Similarly, Heman, whom I cited a moment ago, put it like this:

‘The Jews are our misfortune!’ we have called into the forest [Wald] of the people. Is it any surprise that the people’s voice echoes back in response: Strike the Jews dead and our misfortune will be at an end! If you don’t want to hear such crude answers you ought not to pose the question in terms that rationally allow only this answer. (Heman, c.p61)

In other words, to frame a political issue as a Question was to insist on the necessity of a solution and to anticipate the most radical possible option. In the words of one historian, ‘The familiar questions of the 19^th century [the Irish Question, the Eastern Question etc] were not genuine inquiries … They were weapons.’ (Beacock LARB). In its most extreme form, the strategy carried the promise that resolving the Question at issue was the key to resolving the ills of modernity itself: a powerful weapon indeed.

This summary of ‘the Jewish Question’ and its ‘(Final) Solution’ opens a somewhat neglected perspective on the (discursive) treatment of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ in Nazi Germany. I have come to think that it is not so much that ‘Final Solution’ was employed in Nazi policy circles as a deliberate euphemism (although I’ve called it this myself). Nor was it that the Nazis add the menacing ‘Final’ to an existing more neutral term (as Lucy Dawidowicz has claimed). In fact, the alleged need for a final or lasting solution of the Jewish Question had been openly canvassed in Germany, and in increasingly violent terms. By the 1930s the idea was already, so to speak, partially domesticated. It was a commonplace of Nazi antisemitic propaganda, where it was combined with the most violent and threatening language, calling for Jews to be treated like infectious bacilli. If Nazi usage filled the word with the most radical meaning possible, I think this is not so much because it was being treated as a euphemism, but more because the word could be exploited as a kind of lexical alibi, a palimpsest of layered meanings, drawing on decades of polemics and threats that were now being turned into action.

III FINAL SOLUTION OF THE JEWISH QUESTION

As a name for the destruction of the European Jews, the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’ burst any remaining restraints on its meaning when it was absorbed into the postwar (west) German and Anglo-European academic and journalistic lexicon. Because it had been employed by Nazi ideologues, bureaucrats, and murderers, it has usually been demarcated by scare quotes. To study the ‘Final Solution’ was to step into this world of Nazi leaders’ decisions, their orders and their bureaucracies, and historians began to pose questions about the precise process by which the Final Solution emerged as policy and practice. Among them: When was the decision to annihilate the Jewish race reached? Precisely when, how, and why did the term ‘Final Solution’ come to bear its eventual certainty of wholesale physical extermination, as opposed to denoting some lesser project of isolation or removal? Was this the result of an explicit Hitler order, or the product of some more diffuse path of convergent decisions and acts?

These questions sidelined other perspectives than those of the Nazi oficials and the structures within which they worked. What explanatory light, after all, could the victims throw on the process of their own destruction? In this ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, the Jews were all too obviously invisible except as body-counts and as the objects of Nazi decisions and acts.

The eventual emergence of the ‘victims’ into greater prominence and agency was one of the conditions for the displacement of ‘Final Solution’ by ‘Holocaust’, and it was largely the product of multiple changes in academic and popular culture which gathered momentum from the late 1970s. Historians and their readerships were no longer satisfied with focussing on the politics and policies of major actors, nor evaluating them in solely institutional terms. We began to consider the experiences of those beyond the traditional circuits of power, the people who were conventionally represented as the objects rather than the subjects of history. We became interested in looking more widely at subjective experience. We asked how people understood themselves and grasped their situations in terms of their own complex beliefs and motives, rather than simply as the targets of others’ ideology and actions.

There is no neat chronology to this uneven process of the expansion and substitution of historical horizons, but I think its essential meaning can be encapsulated in one striking and ingenious example. In her well-known book The War Against the Jews 1933-1945, published in 1975, the American historian Lucy Dawidowicz divided the text into two parts, ‘The Final Solution’ and ‘The Holocaust’. But this division did not, as you might think, reflect the USHMM chronology that I quoted at the beginning of this lecture. Both parts of Dawidowicz’s book covered the entire history from 1933 to 1945. The division was thematic, and Dawidowicz’s language declared this. Part I, ‘The Final Solution’, attempted to answer the question of ‘how it was possible for a modern state to carry out the systematic murder of a whole people for no other reason than that they were Jewish’ (p17). By contrast Part II, ‘The Holocaust’, described ‘the Jewish response to the Final Solution’ (p19). I can’t think of a more succinct way to illustrate the difference I have been trying to explain.

V HOLOCAUST

So far I have attempted to explain the first part of my title, ‘From ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish Question…’, and I’d now like to turn to the second part, ‘…to the Holocaust’.

‘Holocaust’ is a Greek word that entered English and other languages through the Septuagint as the Greek translation of the Hebrew korban ‘olah, a burnt offering. By the 20^th century if not before, the word had lost its exclusively religious meaning, and was also applied in academic and public debate to secular disasters or tragedies, as well as to massacres of both Jews and non-Jews (e.g. Armenians). But the terms adopted by Jewish historians in the 1940s and 1950s reinstated a religious or sacral meaning, and pointed intentionally to a history of suffering unique to the Jewish people. They included the Hebrew words churbn and Shoah, signifying respectively destruction (of the Temples) and disaster or tragedy.

By the early 1950s, Shoah had acquired a capital S and a definite article (the Shoah), as well as canonical status in official Israeli discourse. ‘Holocaust’ then became more familiar internationally through the reportage on the Eichmann trial in 1961, apparently as a mistranslation of Shoah by English-speaking journalists (Michman). The wide publicity given to the trial prompted a new wave of public interest in the history of Nazism and the destruction of the European Jews, to which journalism and popular publications responded (Levin 1968, Dawidowicz 1975). As this literature expanded through the 1970s and 1980s, so ‘holocaust’ too was vested with the additional authority of a capital letter and a definite article, and was claimed for exclusive reference to ‘the’ Holocaust. This word was more rapidly absorbed into the English-speaking world, most notably in the USA, than in Germany. In the USA, president Jimmy Carter convened his Commission on the Holocaust in 1978 to develop plans for ‘the establishment and maintenance of an appropriate memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust’. It was chaired by a survivor, Elie Wiesel, and indicatively its membership was composed almost entirely of faith leaders, not historians.

In Germany, by contrast, ‘Final Solution’ remained the standard term. When ‘Holocaust’ appeared in the titles of foreign books, the German translation was likely to substitute or add the more familiar term ‘Endlösung’, final solution (eg. Martin Gilbert atlas). When the US TV series ‘Holocaust’ was broadcast in Germany in 1979, press coverage felt it necessary to explain the title. (Glasenapp p144).

That TV series is usually credited as another major turning-point in the growth of public awareness of the history of what was now being widely identified as the Holocaust. This popular groundswell paralleled the growing audibility of ‘survivor’ voices, as well as the expansion of academic research. In west Germany, scholarly controversies erupted into public debate in the 1980s and 1990s, as a new generation sought to come to terms with their country’s past (Historikerstreit, Goldhagen; Wehrmacht exhibition). Elsewhere in Europe, national and international campaigns for memorialization proliferated (USHMM finally opened 1993, Berlin memorial 1995). The year 2000 saw the UN Declaration on Holocaust Remembrance, and in 2005 came the adoption of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, which we are observing today.

[OMIT Whether ‘the’ Holocaust comprehended other victim groups of Nazi persecution and mass murder still divides opinion, although I think it has become less contentious than it was when groups such as gays or Roma and Sinti were first striving for recognition as collective victims. The UK Holocaust Memorial Day Trust makes a delicate but instructive distinction when it declares that its mission is ‘to remember 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people murdered under Nazi persecution of other groups and during more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur’.]

It’s clear that the word ‘Holocaust’ now commands international recognition, although in deference to Israeli usage the UN Declaration simultaneously refers to it as the Shoah. But some historians remain uneasy about the sacral resonance of the term and prefer not to use it. We felt that it risked identifying the event as somehow ‘uniquely unique’, at a certain level beyond understanding, and almost literally withdrawn from the kind secular ‘history’ we aspire to write. Historians are bound to believe that any event, no matter how horrifying and unprecedented, is in principle subject to the tools of rational historical explanation, and that these will not diminish its enormity.

VI CONCLUSION

When I finished my reading for this lecture, I was left with the conclusion that it’s not that one term is right and the other wrong, but that we should be recognize that both have their problems. As far as the ‘Final Solution’ is concerned, there is obviously something distasteful about using language freighted with its Nazi heritage as a historical marker, and even fencing it round with scare quotes doesn’t seem quite sanitizing enough. And in the case of ‘Holocaust’, I am not convinced by the distinction offered by the USHMM encyclopaedia that I mentioned at the start of this lecture – that Holocaust should denote the entire 1933-45 period of Nazi rule and Final Solution the mass murders of 1941-5. That victims claim the rights of naming – holocaust, nakba, holodomyr – should also obviously be honoured; but even if the religious overtones of Holocaust are no longer so loud, the term needs to be understood more as cultural construction than as historical event (Cesarani).

Still, to look for total transparency in language is a fools’ errand. Instability and indeterminacy are inherent in language; our efforts at precision often fail, yet perhaps do so productively The least we can do is make ourselves aware of where language comes from, what contexts it migrates in and out of, and what unregistered baggage it carries. And I think that in all our efforts at narrative and explanation, language will nevertheless claim the last word.

(Chabad Oxford, 28 January 2026 - not to cited without permission)

Professor Timothy Williamson - 'Becoming a Philosopher'

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 1:20:00 PM

My mother’s mother was an Ashkenazi Jew. To that extent, so am I. I’ll say something about that part of my family – it casts at least a little light on how I became a philosopher.

In my distant ancestry, there were rabbis. One of them tended to a community somewhere in Eastern Europe where the main source of income was smuggling arms across the nearby border. As a result of some treaty, the border moved, so his congregation all had to move too, and he was left without a job.

My great-grandfather was born in Warsaw. He was a feckless character, who wandered around Europe, and self-identified as a philosopher, which conveniently meant that his wife had to do all the work.

He left behind voluminous memoirs, frustratingly so concerned with wallowing in his own sins and hardships that they omit most of what must have been richly colourful experiences.

He had three children, born in Germany, including a son, Nathan, and my grandmother, Malvin, born in the 1890s. They moved to London in 1907, but continued to speak German at home.

My great-grandfather adopted the surname ‘Isaacs’ because it sounded English (to him). He tried to impose some Jewish culture on his children. He describes in his memoir how not even beating Nathan would persuade him to learn Hebrew. My grandmother as a child was too busy riding around London with her friends hanging on to the backs of horse-drawn carts to absorb very much culture from home. In later life, all three children were secular, and assimilated.

The son, Nathan, my great-uncle, was the only member of the family with the skills to keep the family finances afloat. He had to leave school at 16 and find work in a metals trading company. But his real love was for philosophy and psychology.

Nathan joined the army during the First World War, served on the Western Front, was gassed at Passchendaele (one of the grimmest battles in the history of the British Army) in 1917, and was invalided out.

The only story Nathan told about that time concerned his convalescence in the English countryside. He was sitting on a hillside, reading a textbook of psychology, when he found himself being arrested by an army patrol and accused of being a spy. The hillside turned out to overlook an army camp. Worse, he spoke English with a slight German accent, and the book’s illustrations of questions for IQ tests looked to the patrol like plans of military installations. He was marched to the camp, in danger of being shot as a spy. Fortunately, a senior officer was able to recognize that it really was a psychology textbook, and he was released.

After the war, Nathan’s business career prospered. But he did all he could to educate himself in philosophy and psychology.

In 1920 he went to a series of lectures for the Workers’ Educational Association given by Susan Brierley, who had a First Class degree in philosophy from Manchester University, where she had been taught by Professor Samuel Alexander, who was the first practicing Jew to be a fellow of an Oxford or Cambridge college; she had then been trained in psychology at Cambridge.

Nathan bombarded Susie with questions. One thing led to another, and by 1922 she had been divorced by her first husband on grounds of adultery and was married to Nathan (ten years her junior).

As Susan Isaacs, she became perhaps the best-known child psychologist of her generation in Britain. She was also a friend of Melanie Klein, and her ally in the war against Anna Freud and her allies that split the British Psychoanalytic Society in the 1940s (the ‘Controversial Discussions’).

Susie and Nathan together played a leading role in introducing the work of the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget to Britain. Both Klein and Piaget visited the Malting House School, an experimental school in Cambridge in the mid-1920s until its funder went bankrupt. The pupils were mainly bright but troubled children of academics, including the two sons of the philosopher G.E. Moore. The Malting House School inspired a similar but even more chaotic school founded by Bertrand Russell a few years later.

Nathan was serious enough about philosophy to present a series of papers to the Aristotelian Society and publish them in its Proceedings. He also published a book, The Foundations of Common Sense: A Psychological Preface to the Problems of Knowledge (1949). His main theme was that epistemologists and philosophers of mind needed to take more account of what psychologists were discovering. He was surely right about that, and ahead of his time, but he didn’t have the academic training to put his point across really effectively.

In the 1920s Malvin, my grandmother, worked as a typist for a Zionist organization in London, for the money rather than the ideology. Like me, she was a two-fingered typist, so she had to type frenetically to keep up with the touch typists. She married a naval officer (my grandfather). They quickly separated, but my mother Karina was either the cause or the effect of the marriage (it’s not clear which). Malvin was a chaotic single parent who had to work for a living. She was also a political activist, involved in the left-wing Independent Labour Party. Later, when I knew her, the two causes she was mainly involved in were Anti-Apartheid (against the white regime in South Africa) and CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

It was clear to Nathan that Malvin was not able to bring up a child by herself. Fortunately, he was in a position to pay for my mother to go to private boarding schools, (Caldecott House and Frensham Heights, not Jewish ones). She started at the age of three. This enabled her parents to keep up a pretence of a working marriage, aided by the fact that as a naval officer Karina’s father Eric was away for much of the time in the Far East (especially during the Second World War).

Later, my mother, as a teenager, discovered that it was all a façade, and that when in England Eric was living with another woman. My mother made her parents’ divorce so the situation could be regularized. She has always liked tidiness.

Malvin and Nathan’s father died before my mother was born. Jewish culture played virtually no role in her upbringing. With an understandable desire to fit in, she had herself confirmed as an Anglican.

I owe my life to my mother’s preference for dark blue over light blue. On those grounds alone, she supported Oxford over Cambridge in the Boat Race, a big event in London. When it came to applying for university, her allegiance was already decided. She applied to Oxford, got in, and met my father here.

Later, both my parents taught English Literature at Oxford, she as a Fellow of St Hilda’s, he as a Fellow of Jesus College.

My mother once threatened to write an autobiography entitled I Married a Goy, but in truth her Jewishness did not mean much to her.

She and my father did become disillusioned with Anglicanism — we lived in a village outside Oxford where Anglicanism was a form of social climbing rather than spirituality — but then they became Quakers instead. I was brought up in an atmosphere of lukewarm and ill-defined Christianity.

I found Jesus rather wet. Meekness has never been one of my values. Athene, the goddess of wisdom and patron of Odysseus, the most cunning of the Greek heroes, struck me as far worthier of worship, if one had to worship someone.

There was nothing particularly Jewish about my upbringing. Indeed, I didn’t know that I was Jewish until the age of eleven, when my mother took me to the Royal Festival Hall to see an exhibition about the excavations at Masada, and with apparent casualness mentioned it as we went round. The surname ‘Isaacs’ should have been a giveaway, but I didn’t know that it was Jewish.

I have always liked to find ways of not belonging to my surroundings. Being Jewish was another way of not belonging, and as such I welcomed it.

I still have faint memories of sitting talking with Nathan on a hillside, near his house in Sussex, as a very small boy, though none of what we said. Much later, my parents told me that they had been following behind, and heard our voices coming from amongst the daffodils, discussing philosophy.

Nathan liked to provoke children to think; I remember my younger sister’s indignation when he began a story with ‘When I was a little girl’. So perhaps that conversation amongst the daffodils was an initial spark. If so, it was a long-smouldering one, since for many years my ambition was to be an archaeologist.

It would be more impressive if I could say that I grew up in a family where no one had ever heard of philosophy, or at least one where everyone despised it. But, in my family, philosophy was highly respected. Both my parents regarded it as intellectually much more serious than their own subject, English Literature.

Lecture delivered at Friday night Shabbat dinner at the Oxford University Chabad Society - Hilary term, 2026

Lord Hague – 'Resurgent antisemitism and the future of free speech'

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 11:39:00 AM

Thanks for having me here - it’s great to be here with the Oxford Chabad Society - and to see such a strong turnout. I know that the Chabad Society and other Jewish societies around Oxford are renowned for the wide range of welcoming events they offer, from the weekly Friday Night Dinners to the infamous end of term party, Jewbilation.

Here at Oxford, we have been blessed with a strong Jewish community for many decades, ever since Gladstone’s Universities Test Act in 1871 opened up the way for religious minorities to take up academic posts and student roles at universities.^[1] One of the first academics to do so was the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester who served as a Professor of Geometry and came up with the matrix - the mathematical device, not the film.^[2] Later, Oxford became home to Isaiah Berlin, the philosopher who came up with the framing of the Hedgehog and the Fox, dividing those who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (the hedgehogs) and those who draw on a wide variety of experience (the foxes).^[3] In life, it is always better to be a fox. And today, Oxford is lucky to be home to people like Dinah Rose, the President of my own college of Magdalen.^[4]

Section 1 - The Resurgence of Antisemitism (720 words)

I could spend the whole evening talking about the proud and distinguished contribution that Jewish people have made to our university and our country. However, given the recent appalling attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester I feel I should talk to you about antisemitism and what more can be done to address this poison which we find seeping deeper and deeper into our society.

As I set out in my speech on Admission as Chancellor in February, I am proud that “Oxford is a home of free speech within the law, coupled with the understanding that such rights involve a duty to listen to and include others, to have an open mind, and to regard diversity of thought as a strength”. I made clear that at our university “we can debate the big global issues while understanding that those can never be an excuse for antisemitism or any other kind of religious or ethnic hatred, the great evils of history”.

These great evils of history are regrettably alive in modern Britain. While the Manchester attack was shocking, for anyone who has been paying attention over the last two years, it was not at all surprising. Anyone who regularly uses social media will have noticed a significant uptick in antisemitic abuse online, such as posts about how Jewish people are involved in satanic rituals, control the world, and how the Holocaust never happened.^[5] Anyone who has seen coverage of the Palestine marches, where some activists openly support terrorist organisations like Palestine Action, call for an “intifada”, and shout “From the river to the sea”, will have known that antisemitism is becoming more accepted offline.^[6] And anyone who has a Jewish friend will have known that the synagogues they worship at and the Jewish faith schools where they take their children have been forced to hire security guards for many years now.

I recognise that many Palestine protestors merely wish to criticise the actions of the Israeli Government and they have every right to do so. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has argued, “you don’t need to be antisemitic to be against the current Israeli Government”.^[7] A number of the Board of Deputies of British Jews recently wrote to the Financial Times accusing the Israeli Government of “openly encouraging violence against Palestinians in the West Bank”.^[8] Furthermore, I am a lifelong supporter of Israel - in fact the Conservative Friends of Israel was the first political organisation I joined. Yet I have also been highly critical of some of the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But when we see protestors reach beyond criticism of the Israeli Government, to deny Israel's right to exist, to profess support for proscribed terrorist groups, or to claim British Jews are responsible for the actions of Netanyahu - all of which we have seen all too often in the last two years - this is clear antisemitism. And when a significant minority of activists and political figures choose to turn a willingly blind eye to racism in their midst, the spillover from extremist speech to violent acts becomes a matter of if, not when.

Since October 7th, antisemitic incidents have doubled across our country.^[9] One-in-three British Jews reported experiencing at least one antisemitic incident last year. The proportion of Jews that say they feel unsafe in Britain has grown threefold since October 7th.^[10]

While this growth in antisemitism is a crisis and a tragedy for our country and Jewish society in and of itself, it also points towards a wider problem in our society. As Leader of the Opposition, I was fortunate enough to have many discussions with the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, and to benefit from his kindness and wisdom. He once wrote that “historically the emergence of antisemitism into the political mainstream has invariably been an early warning sign of societal breakdown. When people search for a scapegoat like the Jews to blame for their ills”, he argued, “they are displaying the first signs of societal dysfunction and democratic collapse”. Guided by these words, in the wake of the Manchester tragedy, all of us need to ask some profound questions about the state of our country’s social fabric and the way we manage political differences between one another.

Broadly speaking, there are three trends that are driving antisemitism and broader extremism in our country.

Section 2 - Free Speech - From “respectful listening” to “abusive broadcast” (557 words)

The first trend is that the right to free speech has become increasingly decoupled in some people’s minds from a duty to exercise that freedom in a responsible way.

Free speech and academic freedom are vital to the future of our university and our country. As I made clear in my address on becoming Chancellor, “in an age in which ideas will change so rapidly, freedom of speech and of academic work and research will be of paramount importance. We cannot prepare for the turbulent decades to come by shielding ourselves from inconvenient arguments, wrapping ourselves in comfort blankets of cancellation, or suppressing minority views because they conflict with the beguiling certainty of a majority.”^[11]

The United Kingdom, Jewish society, and Oxford University all have a long and proud history of supporting freedom of speech. To return to Jonathan Sacks, in his book Morality he recalled how studying at both Oxford and Cambridge - although we won’t talk about the latter! - was “a glorious experience, thrilling, bracing, mind-expanding”. He attributed this to the fact that our university “was a place where you listened respectfully to views radically opposed to your own, in the knowledge that others would respectfully listen to yours”.

However, this “respectful listening” version of free speech has sadly become less common in recent years. Many people have adopted a less empathetic version of free speech, focused on an individual’s ability to say whatever they like, no matter how incendiary, no matter the consequences. This “abusive broadcast” version of free speech prevents people with different views working through their differences constructively.

We have seen this with the Palestine marches held every week over the last two years. Of course we should support the rights of people to make their voices heard through protest, but to force the Met to police protests on the same issue over and over again, straining our officers’ resources to deal with crimes, including antisemitic attacks, is clearly wrong.

Following the Manchester attack, the reasonable thing to do would be for the activists organising it to suspend their march that weekend. When many British Jews were at an even further heightened fear for their safety from copycat attacks, the activists should have recognised that they had a responsibility to exercise their free speech rights in a less divisive way. Instead, the protests went ahead.

Again, on the recent anniversary of October 7th, protestors should have refrained from yet more marches filled with antisemitic chants. Instead, the marches went ahead. One protestor at an event in Manchester gave a speech warning that they would “continue resisting until the Zionist entity” - in other words, Israel, “has collapsed”.^[12] And of course all of us are aware that a student at Oxford has disgraced themselves and our university with their actions at these marches.^[13] I am pleased that swift action has been taken in this case.

That the activists organising these protests chose not to suspend their activities in the aftermath of the Manchester attack and on the anniversary of October 7th shows the extent to which they have decoupled their right to free speech from their obligation to listen to the views of others. I am therefore glad that the Home Secretary has announced plans for new police powers to control these protests, including allowing senior officers to consider the ‘cumulative impact’ of previous protests.^[14]

Section 3 - Polarisation - The Great Untruths (436 words)

The second trend driving antisemitism and extremism is linked to the decline in “respectful listening” free speech. It is the rise of a deeply flawed and emotive way of thinking which has crept into our society, particularly among younger people.

In their landmark book, The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff sum these up as three great untruths that are driving polarisation. The Untruth of Fragility - the idea that what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker, and that people need to be shielded from arguments that they might find “triggering”. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning - the idea that we should always trust our feelings. This can lead to people interpreting the actions of others in the least generous way possible - every perceived slight becomes a racist or sexist microaggression.

Finally, there is the Untruth of ‘Us Versus Them’ - the idea that life is a battle between good people and evil people. Identity politics contributes significantly to this problem. So too do concepts like intersectionality - the notion that the connection of different characteristics like race and class link to form axes of privilege and oppression - perpetuate grievance and victimhood.

To see how these great untruths connect with the issue of antisemitism, all you need to do is read the account of my fellow Times columnist Matthew Syed of a recent Palestine march he attended. After politely asking activists if they believed Hamas bears any responsibility for the crisis in Gaza, he was met with examples of all three untruths. Protestors immediately began to swear at and intimidate him - the Untruth of Fragility meant these activists saw a mild question about beliefs as a threat to their sense of self. They called him prejudiced and racist, quickly interpreting his actions in the least generous way possible, an example of the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning. And finally, in a subsequent conversation on women’s rights in Gaza, a protester lectured Matthew on the intersectionality of “colonialist oppression” and refused to accept that women were being repressed by Hamas - the Untruth of ‘Us Versus Them’ in action.^[15]

Where have these great untruths come from? Haidt and Lukianoff point to a number of different factors. This includes everything from the decline of academic freedom at American universities, the rise of overprotective parenting, and the spread of medical concepts like “trauma”, “triggers”, and “anxiety” from the realm of healthcare where they belong into wider social norms where they do not.

As such, arresting the rise of these great untruths will therefore require a range of different policy responses, designed to improve young people’s emotional reasoning and critical thinking skills.

Section 4 - Social Media (754 words)

This brings us on to the third big trend that is fomenting antisemitism and extremism, and one of the key culprits that Haidt and Lukianoff have identified as driving the Great Untruths - social media and artificial intelligence.

On the vast majority of social media platforms, AI algorithms drip-feed users with content specifically identified to maximise user engagement with the site. With hate, fear, and anger among humankind’s strongest emotions, these are naturally the emotions algorithms choose to elicit. These rage-baiting algorithms have already been shown to contribute to ethnic cleansing by inciting violence and hatred in developing countries. The UN has concluded that Facebook’s algorithm played a “determining role” in the genocide against the Rohingya in Burma in 2016 and 2017, while the same platform has been accused of contributing to ethnic cleansing in Tigray during the recent Ethiopian civil war.^[16]

A further challenge is what Jonathan Sacks described as “narrowcasting: news filtered to reflect our given interest and political stance” with the result that “we see the world the way other people like us see the world”. By doing so, the models of these social media companies make the “respectful listening” version of free speech on their platforms impossible to achieve.

Finally, there is the role of disinformation. This was having a significant impact on Jewish communities even before October 7th. For example, in 2022 analysis by the Oxford Internet Institute found that 19% of Holocaust-related content on Twitter, and 17% on TikTok denied or distorted facts about the Holocaust.^[17] Since then, analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue has documented the role of Iran and Russia spreading disinformation about the October 7th attacks. Meanwhile, both online and offline there are growing conspiracy theories propagated that the October 7th attacks were a false flag operation designed to justify an Israeli attack on Gaza.^[18]

Of course, antisemitic hatred and disinformation is hardly a novel development. The blood libel began in 12th Century England, after Jews were blamed for the murder of a young boy in Norwich. As explained in a recent episode of The Rest is History, the local clergy helped concoct this conspiracy theory so they could venerate the boy as a martyr and attract more visitors and donations to their church.

Tech companies are providing a platform for antisemitic hate and conspiracy theories and spreading them with their algorithms on a scale of which the clergy of medieval Norfolk could not dream. Analysis by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate showed that on X in 2024 alone, they found 679,000 antisemitic posts, involving conspiracy theories about Jewish control, satanic rituals, and Holocaust denial.^[19]

Artificial intelligence will likely make this problem worse. AI chatbots are already used to direct the activities of fake “bot” accounts on social media platforms. There is growing concern about the ability of AI to change people’s views, with a study led by the AI Security Institute finding that chatbots could change people's political views after less than 10 minutes of conversation.^[20] This has the potential to be misused by extremist groups, and Musk’s Grok AI chatbot has already been manipulated into praising Hitler as the best person to deal with “anti-white hate”.^[21]

AI is now also capable of creating convincing deepfake images which could erode trust in all visual media. When the Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945, General Eisenhower told his soldiers to “Get it all on record now … get the films, get the witnesses, because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say this never happened.” Despite Eisenhower’s rigorous documentation, there is a very real risk that AI will destroy the next generation’s ability to believe in any of those harrowing images.

Given the role social media is playing in spreading hate and antisemitism, and the potential for artificial intelligence to accelerate this, finding new ways to respond to these challenges will become more urgent.

The author Yuval Noah Harari has put forward an interesting proposal for achieving this. His solution is to be clear that free speech is for humans, not for automated bots or algorithmic programmes that are designed to turn us against each other. If, he argues, a group of people were standing in the street discussing politics when some robots approached them, entering the discussion and shouting unfounded rumours, the people would give them very short shrift. Yet in the online world we allow robots to speak to us as equals, believe what they say and let them choose most of what we hear.^[22]

Section 5 - The impacts of extremism (390 words)

I have outlined three trends that together are driving a significant increase in antisemitism - first, the shift from “respectful listening” free speech to “abusive broadcast”; second, the great untruths of fragility, emotional reasoning, and ‘Us Versus Them’; and third, the role of technology companies in sowing hate and disinformation.

Government, institutions, and society as a whole must do more to counter antisemitism and extremism. History has shown us what happens when hate against Jews goes unchallenged - it swiftly spills over into real world violence. The spread of the blood libel conspiracy theory across 12th Century England contributed to a series of pogroms in London, York, and King’s Lynn.^[23] In the 14th Century, the lie that Jewish people had caused the Black Death by deliberately poisoning wells led to massacres of European Jews. The involvement of a Jew in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 led to pogroms across Russia. And all of us are familiar with how claims that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in the First World War led to the Holocaust.

As I read my friend Danny Finkelstein’s recent book Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, I was struck by the remarkable efforts of his grandfather Alfred Wiener in Weimar Germany. Alfred worked tirelessly at an organisation called the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith, where he organised mass meetings, published newspapers and books, brought court cases against antisemitism and defended Jews in court. However, while Alfred and the rest of his organisation did vital work in resisting the antisemitism of the Nazis, their efforts were ultimately not enough. The root causes of antisemitism in Weimar Germany were too deeply-entrenched.^[24]

To return to the UK today, we must learn from the past and tackle the root causes of extremism before they become too deeply-entrenched. Doing so will be vital not only for addressing rising antisemitism, but general increases in racially motivated violence which we have seen with the Stockport Riots last year and the clash between Muslims and Hindus in Leicester in 2022.

As our country becomes more multi-ethnic and the world becomes increasingly unstable, with a rise in conflicts, finding ways to minimise these sorts of tensions will only become more urgent. All political leaders need to be very clear in denouncing antisemitism and explaining to their supporters why it is unacceptable.

Section 6 - The way forward (783 words)

So what would a prospectus to challenge the root causes of antisemitism and extremism look like in practice?

First, we need to ensure free speech is coupled with a duty to exercise it responsibly. With specific regard to the Palestine marches, the Government is taking some first overdue steps to empower the police, including allowing senior officers to consider the ‘cumulative impact’ of previous protests.^[25] Going further, Ministers should seek to create a greater deterrent for the hundreds of people that are being arrested for showing support for proscribed terrorist organisations like Palestine Action, by exploring heavier penalties.

More broadly, as a society we need to do more to actively support “respectful listening” forms of free speech. As Vice-Chancellor Irene Tracey said in her recent Oration, “Oxford has a proud culture of freedom of speech” and we must support “the power of speech amid cancel culture”.’^[26] Our university is already showing the way forward on this, through the Vice-Chancellor’s Sheldonian Series of panels which facilitate the free exchange of ideas in a respectful way and celebrate diversity of thought.^[27]

There are plenty of other examples which we can learn from too. In February, the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis and leaders from the UK’s six main Muslim denominations agreed the Drumlanrig Accord, setting out “a new framework for engagement” between Britain’s Muslims and Jews “built on mutual respect, dialogue, and practical collaboration”.^[28] At Dartmouth College in the United States, two academics, one Israeli, one Arab, co-teach a class on ‘The Politics of Israel and Palestine’, designed to give the perspectives of both sides.^[29] Participation in debate clubs in schools have been shown to help children concentrate when listening to others speak and be more confident giving their opinion on issues.^[30]

Second, we need to do more to challenge the great untruths of fragility, emotional reasoning, and “Us Versus Them”. To combat fragility and emotional reasoning, we need to do a better job of instilling resilience and critical thinking skills in children and young people through our education system.

To combat “Us Versus Them” thinking, more must be done to help people from different backgrounds connect with one another. That is why I have called for a form of collective service to the nation or community to be introduced for young people, requiring them to spend time volunteering in our health and social care system, planting trees, or building houses. Not only would this help school leavers develop strong skills and confidence, if organised well, it would force people from different economic backgrounds, different ethnicities, different religions to mix with each other.

And when it comes to the most poisonous examples of “Us Versus Them”, found in identity politics, all of us should take inspiration from Danny Finkelstein’s parents who survived the Holocaust. As he notes in his book “while they had the right to act as victims, it wasn’t a right they were going to exercise”. “Despite all the apparent political power of victim status, often justified, they could see that it was enfeebling”.^[31]

Third, as a society we need to strive for a much better form of free speech on technology platforms. Rather than the current social media business model that relies on addiction and outrage, we need a model that allows for the rational exchange of ideas. As part of this, Yuval Noah Harari has rightly called for a ban on all bot accounts on social media that are not labelled as such, which would make it much harder for hate and disinformation to be spread.

We can also do more to ensure AI algorithms do not actively seek to sow hate and division. In his excellent book Digital Republic, Jamie Susskind has argued that social media platforms should be required to “have reasonable systems in place to encourage civil deliberation on matters of public importance”, which could be defined with increasing precision, over time by Ofcom, parliament and the courts.

And when it comes to AI chatbots, we must act to limit their ability to persuade vulnerable people. As much of their powers of persuasion rely on access to the personal data of the user, one option would be to require AI companies to wipe user data on a regular basis.

Finally, we need to see all public figures, especially those politicians and activists leading the campaign over Gaza, not merely condemn antisemitism, but spell out for their followers why it is unacceptable. Without this kind of total clarity from the Palestine movement’s leaders, it will be very hard to arrest the growing levels of antisemitism among their followers. Failure to do so will not only risk further attacks on British Jews, but also damage support for the Palestinian cause.

Conclusion (129 words)

All of this will require renewed efforts by government, institutions, universities including our own, and wider society. Working together, we can tackle the root causes of antisemitism and extremism.

I would like to conclude with one final reflection from Jonathan Sacks. “Civility is more than good manners. It is a recognition that violent speech leads to violent deeds; that listening respectfully to your opponents is a necessary part of the politics of a free society; and that liberal democracy, predicated as it is on the dignity of diversity, must keep the peace between contending groups by honouring us all equally, in both our diversity and our commonalities”.

With those thoughts in mind, let us all resolve to each do our utmost to restore civility to civil society. Thank you.

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_Tests_Act_1871

^[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Joseph_Sylvester

^[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaiah_Berlin

^[4] https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/-don-t-be-intimidated-

^[5] https://counterhate.com/research/a-home-for-hate/

^[6] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/palestine-action-protests-latest-news-london-manchester-3wctrfmqt

^[7] https://www.newstalk.com/news/ehud-olmert-2184769

^[8] https://www.ft.com/content/6a506d98-40a0-48e7-8e98-2882beb30914

^[9] https://cst.org.uk/research/cst-publications/antisemitic-incidents-2024

^[10] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/oct/02/uks-jewish-community-feels-much-less-safe-since-7-october-attack-survey-finds

^[11] https://www.williamhague.com/chancellor-of-oxford

^[12] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/student-protests-today-latest-news-october-7-pgmfntssf

^[13] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/protester-who-chanted-put-zios-in-the-ground-is-oxford-student-c2kx722s9

^[14] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-police-powers-to-protect-communities-from-disruption-caused-by-protests

^[15] http://thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/pro-palestine-protests-cg3mm5zvg

^[16] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-67275219

^[17] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-07-13-un-report-oxford-analysis-reveals-half-holocaust-related-content-telegram-denies-or

^[18] https://www.isdglobal.org/digital_dispatches/capitalising-on-crisis-russia-china-and-iran-use-x-to-exploit-israel-hamas-information-chaos/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/01/21/hamas-attack-october-7-conspiracy-israel/

^[19] https://counterhate.com/research/a-home-for-hate/

^[20] https://www.ft.com/content/31e528b3-9800-4743-af0a-f5c3b80032d0

^[21] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g8r34nxeno

^[22] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/democracy-depends-on-taming-tech-giants-7f8f3t7nr

^[23] https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Pogroms-1189-1190/

^[24] D. Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, pp. 27-29.

^[25] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-police-powers-to-protect-communities-from-disruption-caused-by-protests

^[26] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-10-07-vice-chancellors-oration-2025

^[27] https://www.ox.ac.uk/news-and-events/The-University-Year/sheldonian-series

^[28] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/religion/article/british-muslim-and-jewish-leaders-sign-reconciliation-accord-7nzn9kpwp

^[29] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/co-teaching-a-class-on-israel-and-palestine

^[30] https://debatemate.com/schools/impact/

^[31] D. Finkelstein, Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, p. 386

Bernie Sanders' Big Brother Larry Sanders speaks out about Jewish Identity at Oxford Chabad Society Shabbat Dinner

Mon, 9 May 2016 5:09:00 PM

Larry Sanders, older brother and inspiration to US Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, attended a Friday night Shabbat dinner this past week at the Oxford University Chabad Society’s Slager Jewish student centre.

Larry, who studied at Harvard and Oxford, and currently serves as health spokesperson for the Green Party of England and Wales, spoke to a packed audience of close to 100 students and faculty about his upbringing, family and what inspired him and his brother, Bernie, to enter politics. Larry attributed the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the Civil Rights movement as the two inspirations that led him and Bernie to understand that politics is a serious issue - one in which a real difference can be made to the world, both for good and evil.

Larry recalled how he ‘schlepped’ his brother Bernie to political party events when they were younger and joked that the meetings were so boring he almost put Bernie off politics altogether.

When asked about his family’s Jewish identity, Larry affirmed that being Jewish is everything they are, as an inseparable part of their identity. He mentioned that he was disappointed by the negative views towards Bernie’s Jewish identity and said that he thinks it is due to a misunderstanding and possibly a generational gap - Larry and Bernie were born in 1934 and 1941 respectively. He explained that being Jewish for him and his brother is being part and product of a great Jewish civilization that includes both, belief and religion, as well as values, culture and peoplehood, and that everything they stand for is inspired by these roots.

In reflection about the tenacity of his brother’s election campaign, Larry discussed Bernie’s longstanding passion for cross-country running since high school. He commented that cross-country running demands, like politics, a fixed eye on the finish line, viewing ups and downs not as obstacles but as a necessary part of the terrain towards one's goal.

Questions were raised about Larry’s relationship with his brother, what disagreements they may have, which he understandably declined to divulge, and numerous other issues of interest to the students.

Larry was warmly welcomed by Director of the Oxford University Chabad Society Rabbi Eli Brackman and introduced by Oxford Professor of Politics and best selling author Professor Sir Mallory Factor and President of the Oxford University Chabad Society Sam Bodansky (St Peter's College).

Bernie Sanders' Big Brother Larry Sanders speaks out at Oxford Chabad Society Shabbat Dinner about Jewish Identity

Mon, 9 May 2016 4:45:00 PM

Larry, who studied at Harvard and Oxford, and currently serves as health spokesperson for the Green Party of England and Wales, spoke to a packed audience of close to 100 students and faculty about his upbringing, family and what inspired him and his brother, Bernie, to enter politics. Larry attributed the rise of Hitler to power in 1933 and the subsequent horrors of the Holocaust, as well as the Civil Rights movements as the two inspirations that led him and Bernie to understand that politics is a serious issue - one in which a real difference can be made to the world, both for good and evil.

Larry recalled how he ‘schlepped’ his brother Bernie to political party events when they were younger and joked that the meetings were so boring he almost put Bernie off politics altogether.

When asked about his family’s Jewish identity, Larry affirmed that being Jewish is everything they are, as an inseparable part of their identity. He mentioned that he was disappointed by the negative views towards Bernie’s Jewish identity and said that he think it is due to a misunderstanding and possibly a generational gap - Larry and Bernie were born in 1934 and 1941 respectively. He explained that being Jewish for him and his brother is being part and product of a great Jewish civilization that includes both, belief and religion, as well as values, culture and peoplehood, and that everything they stand for is inspired by these roots.

Professor Alan Dershowitz addresses Oxford Chabad Society after winning BDS debate at the Oxford Union

Mon, 2 Nov 2015 6:24:00 PM

On Sunday, 1st of November, Professor Alan Dershowitz addressed a full-to-capacity hall at the Oxford Chabad Society after having successfully debated the Oxford Union.

The much-anticipated events were well attended; a full chamber of 250 people at the union, and around 200 at the Chabad society.

Dershowitz’s accolades are numerous and impressive; a Brooklyn native, he is professor emeritus at Harvard University Law School. He has been called “the nation’s most peripatetic civil liberties lawyer” as well as “Israel’s single most visible defender: the Jewish state’s lead attorney in the court of public opinion.” He is the also the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Dershowitz, a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale Law School, joined the Harvard Law School faculty at age 25 and is the author of 30 fiction and non-fiction works, including The New York Times #1 bestseller Chutzpah and five other national bestsellers.

At the union, Professor Dershowitz debated on “The BDS movement against Israel is wrong”, against acclaimed Australian-born human rights activist Peter Tatchell. The debate focused on whether the BDS movement could be judged on the basis of its leadership, and whether the BDS movement would be effective or the most practical course of action.

During the debate, Dershowitz claimed: “Not a single leader of a democracy anywhere in the world supports the BDS movement”. If you’re going to have a BDS movement, then have it internationally based on human rights offences and lack of democracy”.

Tatchell, on the other side, criticised the lack of action by Israel to come to negotiations, and stressed that BDS will be effective in putting international pressure on Israel to change its policy. Tatchell said: "The institutional inequality faced by Arabs in Israel is the root of radicalisation, and the law of return is to blame”.

Ultimately, Dershowitz won the debate by 133-101, which he later claimed was a “victory of convincing the undecided voters” on the efficacy of BDS. The debate was widely reported in the media, with even Israeli news site Arutz Sheva and American site Breitbart reporting the story.

Later in the evening, Dershowitz attended the Oxford Chabad Society at the Slager Jewish student centre, in a talk entitled the Perl Grunzweig memorial lecture co-sponsored with Stand With Us. Professor Dershowitz was warmly welcomed by Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad at Oxford University, and was quizzed about his early life by student President of the Oxford Chabad Society Samuel Bodansky, of St Peter’s College and Deputy President Fien Barnett-Neefs, of St Catherine’s College.

He answered questions on his early life, recounting how his Brooklyn Yeshiva upbringing and studies inspired him to fight for civil liberties, human rights and the defense of Israel. He also discussed the important role of Chabad in his life and on campus, stating that the best friend Israel has today on campus is Chabad, currently on over 220 campuses worldwide.

Afterwards, he answered questions from the audience, including the role of Jewish organisations in the USA, and some of the motivation behind his books. He also tackled the issue of the rising criticism of the Left against Israel, highlighting the generational and political switch over the past century apropos to Israel. Previously, the Left were the vocal support of the country. Rather than being a “Democrat but a Zionist”, he said he was a “Democrat and a Zionist”.

Overall, this was one of the highlights in the Oxford Jewish calendar, and one many exciting events for Jewish students to look forward to in the diary of the Oxford Chabad society.

The Chabad Society looks forward to its events later in the term, including the Holocaust Memorial lecture, to be delivered by Robert Slager.

Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford, commented that the event with Alan Dershowitz was a great success and will inspire Jewish students to be proud of their Jewish identity and stand up to the challenges facing Jewish students on campus.

Chabad on Campus UK and EU Conference inspires greater growth

Thu, 1 Jan 2015 8:31:00 PM

The annual conference of Chabad on Campus UK and European Shluchim took place this past week with over seventy participants in Altrincham, England. The conference was organized with the support of Chabad on Campus International and represented the major expansion of Chabad on campus in the UK and Europe over the past ten years with representatives now on every major campus in the UK and in many cities across Europe.

The programme of the conference included networking, learning new innovative techniques in Jewish education, as well as discussing ways to further strengthen the Chabad on campus presence on campuses across Europe. Other areas covered included organizational management and fundraising, among other topics. The conference was chaired by Rabbi Eli and Mushka Simon of Chabad on Campus in Manchester.

Rabbi Eli Brackman, Chairman of Chabad on Campus UK and director of Chabad of Oxford, who addressed the banquet on Monday evening, said “the conference was a major success and reflects the enormous growth of Chabad on campus in Europe over the past few years offering thousands of Jewish students a crucial Jewish home away from home while at university.”

Rabbi Yossy Gordon, Executive Vice Chairman of Chabad on Campus International, commented, “the EU Chabad on Campus representatives are an impressive group of young, energetic, passionate Jewish leaders accomplishing a tremendous amount on behalf of the Jewish people”.

The Shluchim left the conference with new tools and inspired to return to their campuses to increase their activities and reach ever more students with dedication and devotion ensuring a brighter Jewish future for Europe.

Please click here to view the pictures.

250 people attend 14th annual grand Menorah Lighting with Lord Mayor of Oxford, Mohammed Abbasi

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 11:44:00 AM

Over 250 people attended the 14th annual grand Menorah Lighting ceremony on Broad Street in central Oxford, with guest of honour, the Lord Mayor of Oxford, Cllr. Mohammed Abbasi.

The highlight of the celebration was the lighting of the giant lit-up 12ft Menorah outside Oxford's oldest college, Balliol College, established 1263. The event was organised by Chabad of Oxford, and supported by Oxford City Council, Oxford County Council, Balliol College, as well as the Oxford Jewish Congregation.

The celebration included a fire juggler, doughnuts, hot drinks, music and addresses by communal, city and university officials and dignitaries, including Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford, Jon Rowland, president of the Oxford Jewish Congregation, Dr. Peter Claus, Access Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Oxford, and the Lord Mayor of Oxford Cllr. Mohammed Abbasi.

The celebration was dedicated to ten years since the passing of the late Dr. Mike Woodin, who was a fellow at Balliol College, head of the Green party and, as a staunch member of the Jewish community of Oxford, served as a key supporter of the founding of the giant Menorah in central Oxford. Green City Cllr. Ruthie Brand offered a special tribute in honour of Mike Woodin.

Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford, who founded the project in 2001, and presided over the celebration, commented that 'it was huge success and beautiful display of communal harmony bringing together the whole Jewish community and people from all religions and cultures to celebrate Jewish tradition and the resilience of Jewish history.

The lighting of the Menorah on other nights of Chanukah included, president of the Oxford University Student Union (OUSU) Louis Trup and former Lord Mayor of Oxford, Cllr. Elise Benjamin.

Statement on the NUS endorsement of BDS campaign against Israel

Thu, 7 Aug 2014 4:04:00 PM

The Oxford Chabad Society is disappointed and deeply concerned about the BDS motion the NUS endorsed this week against Israel. This is unfortunate, as the motion will do nothing to bring peace and only deepens divisions and increases tension on university campuses in the UK among the diverse student body.

We hope that reason rather than hate will prevail and this motion will not be followed through by Student Unions allowing room for constructive and respectful dialogue among all students regarding the complex issues of peace in the Middle East.

If you are a Jewish student and have concerns or feel in any way threatened on campus in Oxford or elsewhere in the UK please contact your local Chabad on campus Rabbi for support or advice.

Email: info@oxfordchabad.org to be put in contact with your local Chabad on campus rabbi or call: 07772 079 940.

Spoon-bender Uri Geller celebrates Shavuot with Jewish students at Oxford University Chabad Society

Fri, 6 Jun 2014 10:45:00 AM

Spoon-bender and mind-reader Uri Geller, together with his family, celebrated Shavuot with the Jewish students at the Oxford University Chabad Society for the first time.

Uri Geller surprised a room full of students at the Slager Jewish student centre in central Oxford with a late-night appearance and spoke about his spoon-bending skills from a young age, his ability to fix watches from a distance and took questions about his alleged work for intelligence services and the power of positive thinking.

His talk was then followed by what must have been a first for a show by Uri Geller when he made the festival Kiddush - blessing on the wine - in celebration of the holiday.

The evening began as a traditional Shavuot cheesecake and blintzes buffet with an excellent line-up of talks by scholars and students in Oxford. The programme included a lecture by Oxford Professor of Law Joshua Getzler on the classification of the Decalogue, a reading by English student Efraim Carlebach, Pembroke College, of his great-grandfather, who was killed by the Nazis, Rabbi Dr. Joseph Carlebach's pre-War work on Jeremiah and Jewish morality, as well as talks by directors of Oxford Chabad Rabbi Eli and his wife Freidy Brackman on psychoanalysis and Judaism and perspectives on women and Judaism respectively.

Darren Vanning of Oriel College, Oxford, commented that it 'was a very entertaining Shavuot evening celebration'.

A further inspirational evening was held on the Friday immediately after the holiday with the hosting of Iraq War Inquiry member, Professor of War Studies and Vice Principal of King's College London, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, who will address the students at the Oxford Chabad Society Shabbat dinner on his latest book 'Strategy: A history' in relation to Jewish history.

Close to 1,000 people attend Oxford's first Jewish Fair in Central Oxford

Tue, 20 May 2014 4:45:00 PM

Close to an estimated thousand people attended Oxford's first Jewish Celebration Festival that was hosted this past Sunday, 18th May, in central Oxford on Broad Street outside one of Oxford's oldest colleges, Balliol College, in celebration of Lag Baomer.

The Fair was organised by Chabad of Oxford with the support of Oxford City Council, in partnership with the Oxford Jewish Congregation, as well as the kind support of the Israeli Embassy in London, CST, Heritage Lottery Fund and Flaggs College Store Oxford.

On offer was UK's leading Klezmer band 'She'Koyokh', talented award-winning harpist Fien Barnett-Neefs, Israeli food, a rich variety of Jewish books from Steimatzky and Joseph's bookstore London, as well as a Jewish poster stand, various crafts for children of all ages, pony rides and an expert Jewish scribal stand.

In addition, the acclaimed Oxford Jewish Heritage Exhibition, sponsored by Heritage Lottery Fund, was exhibited, drawing much interest from hundreds of people fascinated to learn about the Jewish heritage of Oxford going back to medieval times.

The Fair was opening formally by the Deputy Lord Mayor of Oxford Councillor Tony Brett, Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford, Vice President of the Oxford Jewish Congregation, Jonathan Bard, and President of the Jewish Society Aya Abrahams. The opening was preceded by a ceremonious announcement in honour of the occasion by the Town Crier Anthony Church.

Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford and organiser of the Fair, said ‘the Fair was a great success beyond all expectations and it helped raise much awareness and pride of Jewish life in the city’.

The Deputy Lord Mayor Tony Brett commented on his blog, ‘I had the great honour of opening this event today. It was great to see so many people there - what a wonderful success!’

Councillor Bob Price of the City Council said, ‘he looks forward to it becoming an established part of the City calendar.’

Science student Joachim Behar commented: ‘it was a lot of fun - thank you for organising such a wonderful event.’

A Faculty member commented: ‘It was an excellent event, achieving something unprecedented in Oxford.’

To view pictures of the Fair - Click here

Mazal Tov! Wedding of Daniel & Rina

Thu, 8 Aug 2013 3:25:00 PM

Lord Janner praises Chabad on Campus UK (full speech)

Thu, 1 Aug 2013 5:08:00 AM

Lord Janner's Speech at Chabad on Campus UK and Europe Reception

The following speech was given at the Chabad on Campus UK and Europe reception in London on Wednesday, July 24, 2013. Lord Janner of Braunstone, vice president of the Jewish Leadership Council of the UK, is a British Labor, politician, lawyer and author.

Ladies and Gentleman – My friends

Thank you very much for asking me to speak at this evening’s Chabad on Campus event. I am delighted to be here. Being Jewish has always been, and continues to be, one of my proudest attributes, of who I am. I stand up in my personal and professional life – proud to say I am Jewish, and even to say, I am a British Jew!

But I know this isn’t always easy to be Jewish – especially on campuses throughout the UK and many other countries. Anti-Semitism is still around us, we cannot escape it – and it is even harder to understand, why? - Why we are persecuted just because of who we are?

Over my life, I have experience hatred that cannot be understood, or even accepted. At the age of just 18, I started my National Service, and became the youngest War Crimes Officer of the British Army of the Rhine. This truly changed my life.

“I remember being asked by a colleague: “Don’t you want to do something useful in your army life?” – I replied:“But I don’t speak German” – “So learn it” he told me, and I did.

I travelled around with a gun, in a small car in Germany - with a driver, arresting Nazi criminals – and I wasn’t scared. We would pick up war criminals from their homes, just telling them and their family that we needed to discuss some business, but they would be back home by dinner. Of course, they never did return home. Instead they were taken to prison, before their trial.

What sickened me the most was that they were ordinary people, who had taken pleasure in killing ordinary Jews and gypsies, ordinary socialists and gays, and ordinary civilians, in Nazi occupied land.

Today, the Jewish community in Europe is more protected and accepted, however there is a rise in the Far Right in Europe, and Anti-Semitic attacks are still too regular.

But it is wonderful to see that here in the UK, how our youngsters who go to universities are able to feel free and happy to be Jewish – more students are openly say that they are Jewish, instead of shying away from the part of who they are, because of fear.

I want to read a quote from the 2011 National Jewish Survey, which I think really does emanate in many ways our past and present Jewish students. And I quote;

‘Jewish students are comfortable being openly Jewish at British universities, despite having concerns about attitudes to Israel on campus. Their commitment to Israel and the Jewish people is robust.’

This is where I feel it is so important for Jewish organisations to engage and encourage Jewish students at university – to allow them to feel a connection to their religion or culture – as many of students live away from home during university, which is a whole new, and often, incredibly wonderful experience in its self. I was proud to be the Chair of my Jewish society in Cambridge, many years ago!

There are many different ways to support and develop our Jewish students at grass root levels on campus - by working on interfaith, education, networking or simply a confidant when things get tough. And, Chabad on Campus has developed this over the years and continues to grow in helping our Jewish students. It is a remarkable and important role.

Finally I want to mention our Jewish State, Israel – a constant hot and prominent topic within universities – and I know that many students have experience their ups and downs supporting, a country that has a right to exist.

I, like many Jewish Parliamentarians are proudly speaking for Israel all the time, and I have experienced shocking attacks from Parliamentarians, who are seen as distinguished members of society.

I have successfully been slapped twice by a Peer – because of an issue that was happening in Israel at the time. The Peer came up to me and picked me up by my shirt and said “your people – you Jews...”and then slapped me one side of my face and then the other side. And, I just stood there – I did not hit him back, but just waited and listened. Violence is not the answer.

Instead, I continue to work to promote Israel and reminding people it is a democracy. Their government is voted just like here. Our British government isn’t whom I voted for!

My friends, I have spent much of my time building bridges between their communities, working together on our similarities and differences – this can start at any level, including within our universities. Discussing how we live, and more importantly, how they can live happily together.

Whether you say Shalom or Saalam – this single word “peace” is to which we must always return. No one would argue against the rights for the Palestinians people to have their own home, and this is so true for Israel, too. We must all learn to work together and to live side by side.

To conclude, we look back at the challenges we the Jewish people have faced and continue to encounter – and it is wonderful that organisations such as Chabad on Campus are here to support, encourage and welcome Jewish students throughout the UK and worldwide to network and feel safe, through their university life – and I am sure even after the studying has finished.

Here in the UK, we are safe to stand up and say “I am Jewish” – and to even say “I am a British Jew”. I say we must always say, “I am proud of who I am” because if we loss this, than we are not our true self.

It was a pleasure to speak to you tonight – thank you.

Chabad on Campus UK and Europe celebrates growth

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 6:22:00 PM

Chabad on Campus UK hosted a successful mid summer reception in Regents Park Central London this week celebrating the enormous growth of Chabad on Campus over the last year serving the many thousands of Jewish students in the UK and Europe.

Chairman of Chabad on Campus UK, Rabbi Eli Brackman, announced that for the first time there are eighteen full time Chabad student centres serving Jewish students across the UK and Europe, and commented that part of "the role of Chabad on Campus is to infuse pride and joy into being Jewish on campus, while simultaneously being at the forefront in helping students overcome the many challenges that face Jewish students on university campuses in Europe today”.

Addressing supporters and friends of Chabad on Campus UK, guest of honour Vice President of the Jewish Leadership Council of the UK, Lord Janner of Braunstone QC, spoke of the vital work of Chabad on Campus in a difficult climate on campus and characteristically humoured the audience with anecdotes about his life long work as a proud Jewish voice in the House of Commons.

Keynote speaker was communal philanthropist and founding supporter of Chabad on Campus UK and Europe, Mr. David Slager, who spoke about the dedication and devotion of Chabad on campus rabbis and their wives, inspired by the teaching of the Lubavitcher Rebbe of blessed memory.

In tribute to the work of Chabad on Campus UK, a number of Jewish students addressed the evening in appreciation of having been served by Chabad while at university, including Daniela Doffman from Nottingham University and Frederick Levy from Southampton University. Daniela spoke about the pleasure of having a warm home away from home for Jewish students on campus, as well as to be afforded the opportunity to deepen her knowledge in Judaism in such an open and non judgmental atmosphere.

Announced during the evening was the opening of a brand new student centre serving Jewish students at Brighton University and South East campuses.

The reception was chaired by Rabbi Mendy Lent of Chabad at Nottingham University and honourable hosts for the evening included Mr. Allan and Birgit Freinkel, Mr. Edward Black and Vardit Lunzer.

Musical entertainment was performed by the Oxford Klezmer group.

Tal Ofer commented, “it was a great event and a tribute to the fantastic work of Chabad on campus. May they go from strength to strength.”

Chabad on Campus UK centres include: Birmingham, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Central London, East End of London, South London, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford.

Chabad on Campus Europe centres include: Amsterdam, Holland, Berlin, Germany, Debrecen, Hungary, Florence, Italy, and Paris, France.

For more information about Chabad on Campus visit: www.chabadoncampus.org.uk and www.chabadoncampus.eu

Click here to view pictures of the reception

Grand opening of new dining hall and lounge for Jewish students at the University of Oxford

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 6:49:00 AM

Chabad of Oxford hosted this week the grand opening of a new dining hall and lounge for Jewish students at the Chabad House of Oxford, enabling many more students to be hosted in comfort and elegance for Shabbat and Holiday dinners and its varied stimulating events throughout the year.

The hall, together with its adjacent student lounge, was dedicated by the Tajtelbaum family and the Slager family, and was opened amid great celebration in the presence of the Lord Mayor of Oxford Cllr Dee Sinclair, President of the Oxford University Student Union David Townsend, members of faculty, as well as about 100 students and local community members.

“Oxford Chabad has served me, as well as countless others, with a really important community, Jewish learning environment and opportunity just to engage in stimulating conversation in a Jewish atmosphere”, enthused David Poritz, Rhodes Scholar and deputy President of the Oxford University Chabad Society. “This new hall will serve as a place where the community can come together to host ambassadors and high profile scholars, as well as to serve as an environment for really important student learning,” he predicted.

The Lord Mayor of Oxford Cllr Dee Sinclair commented with equal enthusiasm: “Chabad in Oxford obviously forms a very important part in the Jewish community and it’s very clear to me how much love and care has gone into its development.”

David Townsend, President of the Oxford University Student Union, congratulated Oxford Chabad, saying that he knows that this is going to be a very valuable place for the students in Oxford for the years to come: “Part of being a student in Oxford is having not just a rich academic life but also a social life, an emotional life and indeed a religious life, all of which the Chabad Society provides so well.”

The keynote speaker was philanthropist Mr. Mendel Tajtelbaum who dedicated the hall in memory of his late father, Yitzchok Tajtelbaum, an Auschwitz Holocaust survivor. Mr. Tajtelbaum said he is proud to be involved with the development of Chabad at the University of Oxford. He movingly related how his father would share his daily single piece of bread with others in Auschwitz and inspired the students to recognise that although people have plenty today, we should always share what we have with others, whether materially or spiritually.

Anatolij Glemson, student at Balliol College and recipient of the newly established ‘Oxford University Chabad Society Ambassador Award’ told listeners that it was the open minded atmosphere and intercultural and Jewish academic exchange at Chabad of Oxford that really attracted him. “When I came to Oxford, Shabbat dinners at Oxford Chabad were one of the first things that I found out about and it really helped me integrate into Oxford and find new friends.”

Rabbi Eli Brackman, director of Chabad of Oxford, commented that “the new hall and lounge will help serve the Jewish students in greater comfort and help us build on the great success that has been achieved so far, reaching out to a broad spectrum of students from all background and continuing to inspire strong Jewish student leadership at Oxford impacting Jewish life for generations to come,” he said.

Leader of the Labour Party, Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, who studied in Oxford, wrote in a personal message to Chabad of Oxford: “I want to congratulate Oxford Chabad on the opening of the new Jewish student dining hall and lounge at the Oxford Chabad House Jewish student centre. I know how much Chabad does for the Jewish students at OxfordUniversity, actively demonstrating care, kindness and community, values which have been at the heart of Judaism for generations. I hope and trust that your long tradition of hospitality at Chabad House will continue for many years in the future.”

Keynote address: Mr. Mendel Tajtelbaum

A very good evening to everybody! First of all, we offer our respect to the Lord Mayor, President, congregation and students. This hall is dedicated to the memory of my late father so I thought I would share a few words about my father with you all. It says on the dedication that he was a remarkable man and he survived the Holocaust. As this hall is dedicated to serving food and meals to the Jewish students, I would like to share a story about the Holocaust related to food.

In Auschwitz and other concentration camps the rations were very, very small. People got very little food and the average person got if they were lucky one piece of bread and some water to drink or a cup of soup which, my father told me, was more like water than anything else. That’s what they got.

I remember when I was Bar Mitzvah at thirteen. A friend of my father, who was also in Auschwitz with him and later went to live in America, attended the event. He shared a story about my father which he had seen with his own eyes. “When we were in Auschwitz,” he said, “we would get a piece of bread every single day – we were starving, dying from hunger – the minute we got the bread we would eat it in one second. But your father took that piece of bread and divided it and one half he ate and the other half he broke into little pieces and he gave it away. He saw people dying from hunger and he gave them a little bit of that bread.”

I asked my father whether it was true - and he said yes. I’ll tell you where I got that message from. They were at home in Poland, nine siblings. My father and my late uncle were the two survivors. It was once a very cold winter evening. It wasn’t like today, nice luxury meals. They had one big pot of soup for supper. Their mother would get up in the morning, cut up the vegetables, put it on the stove and let it cook the whole day. On this very cold evening they were all round the table, all nine of them, with their parents. They all sat down, and the mother gave a bowl of soup to the father and the oldest child and gave every single sibling a bowl of soup, then gave one for herself, then sat down and they ate supper together. The pot was empty: everyone got one ladle, and there was exactly enough for the whole family.

Suddenly there was a big knock on the door. It was a poor man begging for food. He was starving but there was nothing to eat in the house. That big pot of soup - it was like a goulash soup - was empty. There was nothing in the house to eat. My father looked at my mother and asked her what she was going to do. She told the poor man to go in the next room, wash his hands and face and come and join them. When he was not looking she took an empty bowl and went round to everyone’s plate, took a spoonful out from one, then the next one a spoonful out, then the next, until all the nine children, herself and her husband, which is eleven bowls, had given one spoonful each, and another bowl was full.

I thought I would share this story with you today. Today we built this beautiful hall, where Rabbi Brackman and his wife will be busy hosting guests and students from the university and the congregation every Shabbos. They come together and I am sure that there is always plenty, plenty of food but students know sometimes maybe a lot extra come – and then it’s good to share. You have, I’ll have less.

That’s why I am sharing this powerful story with you. That was where my father got that message from. I once asked my father: how could you in Auschwitz give half your bread away? Where did you get that from? That’s not an education that you can teach somebody. It’s a message that a child sees at home, that he takes with him forever. That was the message that my father saw at home. He saw how his mother took one spoonful, it was only one spoonful, but from all the eleven bowls, one spoonful makes up a bowl. That was the message that he took with him to Auschwitz. That was how he was able to share his one piece of bread.

Of course we are no longer living in those times. Today there is plenty, it’s not a problem. So we gave this hall today in memory of my father who did struggle for food…. May this hall be a hall where the Brackman family will have loads of visitors from the university, from the congregation, people who will come in feeling empty and walk out full. But not just with full stomachs but filled with spirituality and the beauty of Judaism.

Shabbos is a special time. You come here on Shabbos, you bond with friends: everybody is busy during the week, working or studying, or taking exams. Comes Shabbos, it’s a cut off. You can’t work, one can take a break from one’s study and find time to come to have good meals, good food, good singing, good company - that’s very special. So I want to thank the Brackman family very much for allowing me to be involved in this. Very often one gives charity, and one gives and one walks away. Here I am happy to be involved with this organisation and would like to thank you so much for allowing me to be part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you!