UK language policy: Promoters, reformers, counterforces
Kurdish supplementary school in Manchester, 2020 What current issues face UK language policy, who are the principal actors in UK language policy, and what drives policy making on language? These…
The ‘Genocide’ narrative and ritual vilification: South Africa’s discursive distortion, and Manchester’s complicity in anti-Jewish violence
On Yom Kippur, 2 October 2025, the United Kingdom was shocked by a murderous attack on worshippers at a synagogue in Manchester. Shocked, but not surprised – such was the…
A storm broke the tea cup: Perspectives on the Gaza conflict
Gaza conflict, July 2025: Israeli protestors in Tel Aviv carrying images of Palestinian child victims and Palestinian protestors in Gaza carrying images of Israeli child victims (images from @HenMazzig) I…
Antisemitism and the fight against racism. My thoughts on the Runnymede Trust report ‘Facing antisemitism: the struggle for safety and solidarity’
Left: Me in a playful mood exploring so-called ‘pride in heritage’; Right: Great-grandfather Rabbi Meir Matras who escaped pogroms in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in present-day Ukraine. In January…
The story of Hugh, or: Why I’ve joined the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism
At the age of nineteen I left Israel to take up university studies in Germany. It was the early 1980s. Israel had launched a military offensive in southern Lebanon and…
Manchester connections, universal roots
My great-grandmother Pepi Bleich-Schwager arrived in Manchester, England in 1899 with her mother Chaje after leaving the town of Skalat in Austrian Galicia (now Ukraine). They travelled via Hamburg with…
Yaron Matras 