The Daily Telegraph film exposing campus antisemitism
The Daily Telegraph editor Ben English says campus antisemitism is one of the defining stories of our time.
For The Daily Telegraph‘s editor Ben English, the documentary Teaching Hate is more than the product of a six-month investigation into antisemitism on Australian campuses. It is, he says, a story of our times – and one that is deeply personal.
The film, hosted and produced by Suzan Giuliani and filmed by Jeremy Span, examines the experiences of Jewish students and academics at Australian universities through the lens of their own testimony.
It has drawn the praise of Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin, who called it “a vital piece of documentary filmmaking examining the dire state of our institutions of education”.
“Congratulations Ben and Suzan Giuliani for this fine journalism and important investigation,” Ryvchin said.
English said the decision to devote significant resources to the project stemmed from a conviction that the story had not been told properly, or through the eyes of the students who lived it. He invoked the writer Dara Horn, who has observed that Western societies are far more comfortable commemorating the atrocities of the past than examining what is happening in their own communities now.
“There needs to be a sharpened awareness of the insidiousness of antisemitism and the creep of it, and the incremental pervasiveness of it, and so it needs to be called out frequently and unremittingly,” he said.
At the heart of English’s thinking is a belief in the power of stories. “The most powerful lessons for us are stories,” he said. “It goes back to the Bible. The lessons that survive the passage of time, our rules for living, are most potent when they’re told through the lens of a story.”
With the film’s release coinciding with the Royal Commission examining university campuses this week, he added, “People are going to see the faces, they’re going to hear the voices, and that’s hard to ignore. That’s hard to dismiss.”
English called university campuses “the tip of the spearhead” when it comes to the “cultish infiltration of ideology” in Australian institutions.
“Hate is taught. Babies aren’t born with hate,” he said.
His hope, he said, was that it could also be untaught, however difficult the task.
He was scathing about the University of Sydney’s decision in 2024 to negotiate with anti-Israel encampment protesters to have them leave its lawns, saying it had legitimised and emboldened those responsible.
“These were encampments of hate. The level of ignorance among students is breathtaking. The level of incuriosity,” he said, describing it as a measure of the radicalisation that had occurred.
English believes the mission is not necessarily a pro-Jewish stance but a pro-Australian one.
“This isn’t an attack purely on Jewish people; it’s an attack on Australians and Australia,” he said. “If we walk past this, if we tolerate this, if we dismiss this, if we forget this, then pretty much we are writing our own demise. This is a crisis of our nationhood that we haven’t seen since Federation.”
He recalled growing up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, surrounded by Jewish friends, bar mitzvahs and Shabbat dinners.
“I didn’t even think of these people as Jewish first,” he said. “It’s just, you know, do you get on? Do you like footy? Do you surf? Do you want to have a drink? That was all taken for granted.”
Following October 7 and seeing the Opera House riot, anti-Israel marches and university encampments, he said, “I found it just so deeply upsetting and dispiriting.”
He said October 7 and the Bondi Beach attack of December 14 had affected him profoundly, recalling driving to work on the day of the Bondi attack thinking of his Jewish friends, and later being struck by how moved they were that he had bothered to check in on them.
English’s enthusiasm for the project also draws on a personal history. His grandfather was born Jewish. His grandfather’s sister had two boys who tried to flee the Netherlands during the Holocaust, only to be stopped by the Nazis at the border and put on a train. They were dead within hours, murdered at Auschwitz.
“I don’t know anything about them,” English said, explaining that he had learned of their fate only in passing, from an aunt at a wedding some 25 years ago.
He said he has unfinished business of his own: a resolve to uncover the story of the family he lost.
“I’ve made that commitment to myself to explore that further and to find out more.
“It’s so important, so I can’t forget, and also I want to be able to pass down the stories. Like I said earlier, it’s the stories – they’re the ones that stand the passage of time. So I need to find out mine.”
Teaching Hate is available to view at dailytelegraph.com.au
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