Professor Jacqueline Rose is an internationally renowned British Jewish humanist scholar, critic, and public intellectual. She serves as the Co-Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
Professor Rose is among the most significant thinkers in contemporary Western academia. Her contributions at the intersection of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, literature, and politics are preeminent. Her academic scope is vast, ranging from seminal studies of Sylvia Plath to re-readings of Kleinian psychoanalytic theory, all revealing her profound insight into the relationship between the human unconscious and power structures. More than a scholar, she is a relentless challenger of orthodoxy, sparking global debates on identity, trauma, and state violence through her extensive body of work. Her books include Sexuality in the Field of Vision (1986, 2006 Verso Radical Thinkers), The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), States of Fantasy (1996), The Question of Zion (2005), The Last Resistance (2007), Proust Among the Nations – from Dreyfus to the Middle East (2012).
As a founding member of IJV, she helped carve out a space for dissent within the British Jewish community in 2007. This was pioneering, as it publicly challenged the “unilateral endorsement” of Israeli policy by establishment bodies like the Board of Deputies, asserting that Palestinian rights are integral to Jewish values.
In this landmark work, she performs a ruthless psychoanalysis of Zionism, identifying it as a political project built on “trauma-driven fear” and “messianic fantasy.” She argues this psychological structure necessitates the violent seizure of Palestinian land and the betrayal of universal justice within Jewish tradition.
Between 2023 and 2026, she has authored multiple essays in leading outlets like the London Review of Books (LRB), fiercely critiquing the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. She resolutely opposes the adoption of the IHRA definition by universities and public bodies, viewing it as political censorship designed to erase the reality of Gaza.
She has co-signed numerous open letters to UK and EU leaders demanding an arms embargo on Israel and supports targeted boycotts of Israeli state-linked academic institutions until the occupation ends. She emphasizes that as a scholar, she cannot remain silent regarding the systemic destruction of academic freedom in Palestine.
In The Question of Zion, Rose argued that Israel is responsible for “some of the worst cruelties of the modern nation-state“.