Antisemitism in the Post-October 7 Discursive Space with Yaron Matras

Noted linguist, Professor Yaron Matras, and Schusterman Center director, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, will have a conversation based on Matras' 2024 publication: ‘It’s all about context’. Antisemitism in the discursive space post 7 October. In: Freedman, Rosa and Hirsh David, with Lanir Zafir, Odeliya. eds. Responses to 7 October: Antisemitic discourse. London: Routledge. 100-106.

Yaron Matras is an Associate Fellow of the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism in order to foster critical reflection on antisemitism in a universal context. He is also an affiliate of the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics at the University of Birmingham, the Department of Hebrew Language at the University of Haifa, and the Institute of Asian and African Studies at the University of Hamburg. Perviously, he was a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, focusing on language documentation and in endangered languages. He served as Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Romani Studies (with Liverpool University Press), series editor of Language Contact and Bilingualism and series co-editor of Empirical Approaches to Language Typology (both with Mouton de Gruyter publishers).

While at the University of Manchester Matras founded and led the Manchester Working Group on Language Contact, the Romani Project, and Multilingual Manchester. He set up digital resources for the dialectology of Romani, Kurdish, and Arabic, co-initiated the Romani Virtual Library and the Romani lexical database Romlex, and set up online resources for endangered languages and contact linguistics as well as the mobile application and virtual map of linguistic landscapes Linguasnapp. He also initiated the Multilingual Museum project. In 2024 he contributed to the drafting of a passage on language rights in the City of Hamburg’s Strategy for Combatting Antigypsyism, leading to the local government’s decision to recognise Romani as heritage language in the city’s schools.

Some of his more recent books include Speech and the City: Multilingualism, Decoloniality and the Civic University (Cambridge University Press 2024), A Grammar of Domari (Mouton de Gruyter 2012), Language contact (Cambridge University Press, 2009; second edition 2020), and 'The Romani Gypsies' (Harvard Univ Press, 2015).

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