Women Journalists From The United Kingdom

"The key challenge for higher education is to remain relevant in a changing world. We need to partner with employers to ensure that we are developing the talent that they are seeking. We know from employers that many of the key skills they are looking for are so-called ‘soft’ skills (teamwork, awareness and so on), which is otherwise known as emotional labour."

"We live in a world where, as a result of innovation, cognitive labour (which progressively replaced physical labour from the mid-19th century) is now being replaced itself by artificial intelligence"

"Other challenges include maintaining quality and engagement in online learning environments, protecting student and faculty data from cyber threats, ensuring academic integrity, and updating curricula and training educators to keep pace with technological changes."

"Many people work hard to get their names into the newspapers. For Tariq Ali it is enough to fill in an application form to join the Labour Party, enclosing a cheque for £5, and he makes the front page of The Times."

"[S]he once tripped over and fell, literally, into the arms of President Kennedy. In Washington, she was frequently mistaken for Henry Kissinger's wife. On one occasion after her plane, which was also carrying President Nixon, nearly crashed on the way to Minsk, an absent-minded subeditor bylined her Hella Pinsk."

"The journey of my life has been the constant search for escape from the feelings of insecurity as a refugee, which has never gone away."

"More than 64,000 Austrian Jews perished in the Holocaust. The fortunate were able to emigrate, but only after all their possessions had been seized. Several thousand Jewish children were saved and put onto the Kindertransport to Britain."

"Many refugees who fled Austria before or during the Second World War still refuse to set foot there. But I, a Kindertransport survivor, have no compunction about visiting my native country and cannot recall being made to feel uncomfortable there."

"When I started work, women who were doing any kind of political foreign affairs reporting were really very, very thin on the ground. You could really name them all."

"[Willy Brandt] said: "Come back to my hotel room and we can talk." I went back and we sat down and he asked about my background and we talked and we talked and we talked. I didn't get out until three in the morning and everyone on the Guardian thought: "She must have gone to bed with him." Well, she didn't go to bed with him but she became completely reconciled to Germany because she had got to know Willy Brandt."

"With a PR man at his side, the quote would never have got into my notebook, let alone the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, where it ended up. As it was, the Evening Standard didn't even put it in the headline. We were used to him sounding off like that and knew it was ironically meant. But the Americans have little sense of irony, and when the article appeared in a magazine called Dateline, all hell broke loose. It was the last time the Beatles ever toured."

"The lines on his forehead arrange themselves in an odd chequered pattern, like a puzzle waiting to be filled in — or are, perhaps, a reflection of his past."

"Living in Zaire from its neighbor, Congo-Brazzaville. The tower was a medley of gleaming metal tubes and concrete pillars, and its raison d’être was a bit of a mystery: It wasn't particularly beautiful, had been left unfinished for decades, and couldn't be visited. That ambiguity was fitting. The Limete Tower, as it was called, was an exercise in presidential hypocrisy, and a half-hearted one at that. Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire's long-ruling dictator, had commissioned it to commemorate his former boss and onetime friend Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of independent Congo. Lumumba was assassinated in January 1961 with the collusion of Western powers worried about his suspected Communist sympathies and determined to keep him from power. In theory, the monument was meant to glorify a national hero, a martyr to imperialism. But the gesture's sincerity was open to question, because Mobutu himself helped ensure Lumumba's death, ordering him to be flown handcuffed to a secessionist province where he was shot by firing squad, his body then dismembered and dissolved in acid."

"The fact that Hitler and his party came to power from electoral obscurity within two years should serve as a warning just how quickly society can change, how quickly the abnormal can become normal and how the frustrations of a population can change from simmering discontent to a fully-fledged inferno of rage."

"The Holocaust could only happen because the massacre of the Jews of York happened in 1190. The Holocaust could only happen because the expulsion of Jews from Spain was decreed in 1492. The Holocaust could only happen because it was ruled that the Jews of Venice were to be confined to a Ghetto in 1516. The Holocaust could only happen because at least tens of thousands of Jews were massacred in the Eastern European pogroms of the late 18th and early 19th century. And just as antisemitism existed before the Holocaust, those two thousand years of hatred were not erased by the Holocaust."

"And the spread of these antisemitic conspiracies [on X/Twitter] is already having a harmful effect. A recent study published in the Economist found that one in five Americans aged 18-29 believe the Holocaust to be a myth. A different survey found that nearly a quarter of Dutch people born after 1980 similarly believe it to be a myth or the number of its victims to be greatly exaggerated."

"For the Jewish community, with the Holocaust still in living memory, our dream is simple. I know my parents hoped that I would inherit a world free from the anti-Semitism that blighted their generation, and every generation before them. Today it feels that this dream is more distant than ever. Anti-Semitism across the globe is surging. Here in the UK, anti-Semitism has risen exponentially."

"And when eventually the remnants of European Jewry were liberated from concentration camps and hiding places, you could be forgiven for believing that the flame of antisemitic hatred had burnt out. Sadly, 85 years on, we know this is not true."

"The Nazis agreed on, organised and perpetrated the Holocaust. Their actions left permanent scars on humanity and had ramifications still felt the world over. So, however passionately we feel about important and pressing issues of the day, it seems to me that comparing those current concerns to the almost unimaginable horrors of the Nazi period is wrong. These comparisons are wrong when the point being made is one we agree with, and when it is not."

"Haya was marched to an execution spot. To this day, Hannah freezes as she recalls the moment she saw her mother fall, saw blood on the snow, and understood that her mother was not coming back. Hannah was seven years old. Incredibly, Hannah survived."

"There are some days so significant that they change everything. They change how people feel in the moment. They change history. For many Jews in Nazi occupied Europe, the November Pogrom, the November 9 and 10 1938, often known as Kristallnacht was just that for Jews across Europe."

""Giving Holocaust victims and survivors a voice matters", The Times (27 January 2022)"

"Out of a Jewish community of 800 before the war, Roman was one of only four survivors from his town. He was alone in the world."

"He and his family were marked out with the yellow star, they were stripped of their property and their rights, they were expelled from their schools, they were forced into a ghetto, they endured starvation and disease. And eventually, they were deported to concentration and death camps and murdered."

"The seemingly endless book of victim names. The train tracks which brought the victims to their final destination. The gas chambers. Nothing can replace standing at this site, seeing the grotesque reality of the day-to-day function of an extermination camp."

"We have elected Labour politicians suggesting that antisemitism has been "weaponised" – a suggestion that it is being used to promote some other agenda."

"I don't understand how it is acceptable to be handing out such disgusting literature outside Labour's conference quoting one of the 20th century's most notorious antisemites and architects of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich."

"The Labour Party Marxists guide to motions at the conference suggests that at least some of their supporters are party members."

"Social media have been saturated by the harrowing memories of a legacy the British establishment has refused to acknowledge. The plunder of land and diamonds in South Africa, crimes that adorned the Queen's very crown. The physical suffering that continues from violence inflicted by her government in Kenya, even as her reign was celebrated for having begun there. The scars of genocide in Nigeria, events that took place a decade into her rule. In Britain, minoritised people are remembering this Elizabethan era through the lens of the racism that was allowed to thrive during it."

"Hirsch’s focus is not the more violent racism she has suffered; the story of the man who took off his belt threatening to thrash her following a racist spat is only given a sentence. Rather it’s the many micro-aggressions that draw her attention. At Oxford University she was a self-consciously alien presence, irritated by porters who insisted she show her ID as she entered its colleges, while her white student friends were not stopped."

"Pregnant with my first, I remember thinking I’d probably be having a boy, which I put down to inbuilt patriarchal bias – boys come first, in the sexist world that surrounds us. The baby was Rosie. Second time around, my expectation was that I’d have a boy this time, which was perhaps based on the law of probability; the new arrival was Elinor. Third time around, I was convinced I was having a boy, but the person who emerged was Miranda. And by the time I got to Catriona, I was absolutely certain I’d be having another girl – and I was."

"We might also add, to those defending the film on the grounds that it features several Jewish voices, that this is a terrible fig leaf. Would we apply the same logic to people of colour dismissing the legitimacy of claims of anti-Black racism or Islamophobia? One would hope not."

"Whatever your views on Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions – and there are many – [[George Galloway|[George] Galloway]]'s move is plainly an own goal (assuming his goal is to support Palestinians, rather than generate publicity for himself). One reason that many left-leaning Jews don't join the BDS movement is precisely because the boycott is perceived to be about rage against people, rather than an effective political tool. What's the best way to cement that belief? Announce you're avoiding Israelis as part of your commitment to BDS. Cue a flood of "told you sos" from those who say its all about punishing Israelis just for being who they are."

"Every British Jew has their own family story – of emigration and immigration, of threats and losses, but also of community and belonging. My own family’s journey to the UK from Iraq via Israel – two places fatefully touched by the influence of empire – may explain my own lack of shock at the callous, divisive and biased treatment of minority communities by the British political class, Labour included. Remembering Britain's history is not an excuse for today's politicians, or a minimisation of the real and noxious racism that still permeates our society. But it should be a reminder that for many in Britain, the experience of racism is still the norm and not the exception."

"[Following Boris Johnson's three days in intensive care with Covid-19 in spring 2020] A national leader in critical condition is an unsettling jolt, especially in the midst of an anxiety-drenched pandemic. But in Britain’s news media, the prime minister’s condition seemed to crowd out concern for others, and the exaltations of Mr. Johnson dampened scrutiny of his government’s failures."

"But Mr. Johnson had set a terrible example at work, breezily claiming he'd shaken hands with Covid-19 patients, crowding into Parliament and undermining health messages with his joshing delivery. Meanwhile, dozens of doctors and nurses were dying of the virus, among them several of the thousands who had answered the government call to come out of retirement to work in the N.H.S. during the pandemic. Reports emerged of staff members "bullied and shamed" into treating Covid-19 patients without the equipment needed to protect themselves, which the World Health Organization had warned in early February would be needed in vast supply."

"[[w:Noam Shuster-Eliassi|[Noam] Shuster]] worked with a women's health organisation in Rwanda before becoming a co-director of the Israel programme at Interpeace, a peacebuilding organisation set up by the UN. Shuster concentrated on a project working with Jewish settlers, the ultra-Orthodox and other groups either resistant to or excluded from standard peace camp initiatives. For Shuster, reaching out to such communities was a key part of conflict resolution, but the UN disbanded the project in 2017."

"She started writing jokes, in Hebrew, Arabic and English, trying to communicate the topics and ideas she had felt unable to broach within the confines of the peace industry. "You start with open mic slots, you bomb, you fall on your face a million times, you sharpen your material,” she says. But there was a receptive audience for a half-Iranian Israeli woman cracking jokes about the absurdities and injustices of Israel's decades-long military occupation."

"[On Oh Jeremy Corbyn: The Big Lie] The film does make central an argument based on antisemitic conspiracy layered upon conspiracy. First, there is the idea that Jewish groups within Labour and in Britain are de facto pro-Israel fronts. Then, that such groups nefariously exerted outsized power – “orchestrating” the demise of a Labour leader, no less – and that Israel was pretty much behind all of this. Hence claims of Labour antisemitism were only ever false – indeed they are exclusively referred to as "smears" throughout the film’s narrative voiceover."

"Proponents of the "smears" and #itwasascam narratives tend to see two oppositional camps: either you are a genuine socialist and sincerely committed to the Palestinian cause, or you are an anti-Corbyn liberal washout and advocate for Israel. This false dichotomy must be rejected outright."

"Everyone can, hopefully, agree that a connection to Israel should not make British Jews a target for antisemitism, which spikes every time that tensions in the region escalate. We might also agree not to infer that anyone with a "connection" to Israel automatically supports the state's violent policies towards the Palestinian people. But from there on, things get murky. One can passionately disagree with a British Jewish person’s appraisal of the Gaza war as "self-defence", but not be motivated by anti-Jewish hatred. One can be distressed by the apocalyptic images coming out of the Palestinian strip and wonder how anyone might justify such horrors, yet not be fuelled by antisemitism. But the different motivations lying behind criticism have been terribly conflated amid a fearful Jewish minority and its established leadership."

"Omnipresent on our screens, the redoubtable Shabi is one of the few Corbyn supporting commentators to be taken seriously by the media. Thoughtful and fluent, she deserves her massive rise in this year’s list."

"Shabi contends that the need to show a united front against the common enemy has meant that Israel has taken a long time to confront this discrimination [against Mizrahi Jews] and develop the equal opportunities so familiar to us in modern Britain. What is more, she argues, consigning the Mizrahi Jews to a lower status than Ashkenazi Jews has resulted in a huge missed opportunity for improving Israel's relations with its neighbours."

"Israel has changed radically since the days of its Ashkenazi founding fathers and mothers but Shabi's important book is nonetheless a wake-up call to modern Israeli society. For a nation to be able to call itself a true democracy, all of its citizens must feel equally enabled and valued."

"One doesn't just happen upon a belief that work must be meaningful, that our endeavours must be towards the well-being and betterment of our fellow human beings. It is something that is taught. And this college, is one of the places I learned that lesson."

"“Ellah is the best of the best when it comes to commissioning and editing. We are thrilled that she is joining Canongate. We need books that look beyond the horizon if we are to understand the challenging ways in which the world is changing, and those are the books that Ellah has found instinctively for more than two decades. I can’t wait to see which writers she champions first.”"

"“I particularly valued her chairmanship of the last Prize Dinner, where her exceptional knowledge of African literature was strongly displayed, as was her deep friendship with her fellow authors. I look forward to reading more of her work.”"

"“Her work has a strong international focus and interest, particularly in relation to Africa where she is closely involved in the recognition and reward of creative literary talent and with the development of relevant skills.”"

"You can’t always change a government or stop the government from taking resources that should be dedicated to education but you can as editors work together to professionalise and set up standards and to attract all this to you"

"People may say there is no reading culture but people always read newspapers, we are always in conversation and people spend money for example on locally produced DVDs in Nigeria. Making books affordable is the biggest thing because for example if someone produced pulp fiction that is written really well and was not costly, that would improve the reading culture"