Jonathan Sacerdoti

Sacerdoti was born in London. He is a graduate of Oxford University[4] having studied English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford.

He was a founding trustee of the charity Campaign Against Antisemitism and its Director of Communications until August 2016.[29][30][31][32]

Sacerdoti is a trustee of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's United Kingdom branch.[33]

He is on the council of The Montefiore Endowment, a charity which administers the endowment of the 19th-century British philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore.[34] He also represented the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation on the Board of Deputies of British Jews and has been a member of its International Division.[35]

As a journalist and a campaigner Sacerdoti has made many high profile public statements about antisemitism and other racisms, as well as about the Holocaust.[36][37][38] He has spoken about the racial persecution his father experienced as a child under the Italian Racial Laws[39],and written about the members of the Florentine Catholic Church who hid and saved his father as a child during the Shoah.[40][41][42] He argues that true anti-racism requires individuals to act fairly to protect each other, using the example of the Catholic priests and nuns who saved his father’s life: “When faced with the question of what our duty is as citizens of the world, each of us can choose to make a difference, just as they did.”[43]

He is critical of the use of the acronyms BAME and BIPOC because they exclude Jewish, Gypsy, Roma and Travellers of Irish Heritage groups, and because they create “linguistic opacity.”[44]

He was also critical of Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on The View when she said that the Holocaust was not about race, calling her comments “absolute nonsense” and “outrageous”.[45] He questioned Goldberg’s claims of being Jewish and argued against her use of a Jewish stage name, as well as her writing racist anti-black jokes for a white comedian to deliver in blackface.[46] Sacerdoti also criticised Children’s author Roald Dahl’s anti-Jewish racism, suggesting that his “antisemitic attitudes were, and probably remain, widespread among some parts of British society.”[47]

He has also written extensively about antisemitism in Arabic language TV broadcasts[48][49][50] as well as about positive interactions between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East.[51][52]

Sacerdoti has spoken both as a keynote speaker and as a panellist at international conferences organised by Harvard University, National Chengchi University in Taiwan, the American University in Dubai and Keio University in Tokyo.[53][54] He has given lectures on the nature of terrorism in Europe.[55] He has debated at the Oxford and Cambridge Union.[56]

He has appeared regularly on BBC News programmes, including on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme[57] and The Moral Maze.[58][59] He was a regular panellist on BBC World’s Dateline London.[60][61][62][63][64]

In 2001 Sacerdoti was awarded the Oxford University OxTALENT prize for IT and literature.[27]

In 2010 he was awarded the World Zionist Organization's "Herzl Award".[35]