Letters on Liberty: Rethinking Anti-Semitism

Battle of Ideas festival 2022, Saturday 15 October, Church House, London

ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION

Open debate has been suffocated by today’s censorious climate and there is little cultural support for freedom as a foundational value. What we need is rowdy, good-natured disagreement and people prepared to experiment with what freedom might mean today. Faced with this challenge, the Academy of Ideas decided to launch Letters on Liberty – a radical public pamphleteering campaign aimed at reimagining arguments for freedom in the 21st century.

In his Letter – Rethinking Anti-Semitism – author and commentator Daniel Ben-Ami argues that a misunderstanding of the causes of modern anti-Semitism is stopping us from waging a serious battle to defeat it. He argues that a future free from Jew-hatred can only be achieved through a commitment to free and open debate.

Join Daniel and respondents to try to untangle the different forms of anti-Semitism today, and understand their origins. How much of a role does the far-right play, when contemporary problems of anti-Semitism have often come from the far-left and from Islamist groups? Why is the knee-jerk response to anti-Semitism always linked to bans and censorship, instead of discussion? And why has something colloquially known as the ‘oldest hatred’ seemed to have made such a comeback – if indeed it ever went away?

SPEAKERS
Daniel Ben-Ami
journalist; creator, Radicalism of Fools; author, Ferraris for All: in defence of economic progress and Cowardly Capitalism

Nathalie Rothschild
freelance journalist; producer and reporter for Sweden’s public service radio; producer, Antisemitism Today

Wasiq Wasiq
counter terrorism analyst; founding trustee, Muslims Against Antisemitism

CHAIR
Jacob Furedi
deputy editor, UnHerd; former associate features editor, Daily Mail