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Michelle Wolodarsky Newhall

ByMichelle Wolodarsky Newhall, Michelle Wolodarsky Newhall

Opinion

I have seen antisemitism growing in the politicised art world for years

One artist colleague of many years shared an infographic that said it was impossible to be antisemitic because Jews weren’t ‘Semites’

May 1, 2024 09:07
BW_Michelle Wolodarsky
3 min read

Ten years ago, I arrived to study Art at the University of Edinburgh. Growing up Jewish in Madrid, most of my peers had been of a Catholic background. This had led me to instinctively think of myself on the basis of everything I was not.

I was a product of my secular, liberal and completely Ashkenazi upbringing. But in the absence of a wider context in which to express this in a group – the minuscule community in Spain was mainly Sephardi and orthodox – I didn’t fully understand what this was. All I knew was that the visual arts would be an environment in which I would flourish, as has been the case for many Jews historically, from Pissarro to Chagall.

So it was, for a time. Fast forward to me at 21, at university in Edinburgh, an active participant of the art school’s political and cultural life. In my innocence, I believed that the secure society I had created for myself was what adulthood in Britain would look like.

Fast forward again to my life as a graduate in post-October 7th London, however, and that could not be further from the truth. The deeply anti-Jewish dialectic taking hold of public discourse in the arts feels dangerous and like a repetition of the past.