Antony Lerman is a preeminent British Jewish writer, researcher, and a leading international authority on contemporary antisemitism, Middle East politics, and multiculturalism. He is the former founding director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) and currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue in Vienna. A prolific scholar and long-standing co-editor of the academic journal Patterns of Prejudice, Lerman has spent decades analyzing the intersection of racism, state policy, and Jewish communal identity.
Born in 1946, Lerman was deeply immersed in progressive Jewish youth movements during his early life, serving as Britain’s first foreign mazkir (youth leader) through the Jerusalem Institute for Foreign Leaders. He made aliyah to Israel in 1970 but returned to the UK in 1973, subsequently pursuing his education at the University of Sussex.
From 1979 onward, Lerman anchored himself within international research apparatuses, working extensively for the Institute of Jewish Affairs and managing the Rothschild’s Hanadiv Charity. His personal and political transition from an early zionist youth pioneer to an independent structural critic shaped his decades-long career analyzing the sociological evolution of prejudice.
His institutional footprint spans Europe’s premier intellectual bodies; he served as a Board Member of Paideia – The European Institute for Jewish Studies in Stockholm (until 2013) and as a Trustee of the UK Friends of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Furthermore, his governance roles included serving as a Trustee of the Humanitarian Trust and a Board Member of the European Jewish Publication Society.
As the founding director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR), Lerman elevated the organization into Europe’s premier non-partisan think tank analyzing the demographics and social policies of European Jewry. Through his editorial leadership at Patterns of Prejudice, he institutionalized a rigorous, sociological approach to studying global racism, fascism, and xenophobia, resisting the dilution of scholarly standards by external geopolitical pressures.
Lerman authored the definitive text Whatever Happened to Antisemitism?: Redefinition and the Myth of the “Collective Jew” (Pluto Press, 2022). In this landmark study, he details the 30-year political process through which the concept of antisemitism was systematically re-engineered to cast the state of Israel as a “persecuted collective Jew.” His other critical works include his political memoir, The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist (2012), and the edited volume Bad News for Labour: Antisemitism, the Party and Public Belief.
Lerman was a founder member of the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) steering group and a founder member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights (JFHR). These roles were instrumental in creating a structured, institutional counter-weight to establishment Zionist narratives in the UK, providing a robust intellectual platform for those who maintain that human rights advocacy for Palestinians is an intrinsic requirement of Jewish ethical life.