December 2022 saw the first-ever White House Roundtable on Antisemitism, with second gentleman Douglas Emhoff, husband of Vice President Kamala Harris, describing ‘an epidemic of hate facing our country’. With Jewish students experiencing hostility and threats on campuses, spikes in antisemitic invective on social media platforms, antisemitic outbursts from some elected officials, public figures and entertainers and attacks on synagogues, does American Jewry have a future? Historian Simon Schama, editor of the Jewish Review of Books Abraham Socher and journalist Zoe Strimpel discuss, in conversation with Jewish Chronicle editor Jake Wallis Simons.

Abraham Socher is the founding editor of the Jewish Review of Books and a professor emeritus of Jewish Studies at Oberlin College. His co-edited edition of Solomon Maimon’s Autobiography was nominated for a National Jewish Book Award.

Sir Simon Schama, CBE is University Professor of Art History and History at Columbia University and a Contributing Editor of the Financial Times. He is the author of nineteen books and the writer-presenter of fifty documentaries on art, history and literature for BBC2. His art criticism for The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for criticism in 1996; his film on Bernini from The Power of Art won an Emmy in 2007 and his series on British History and The American Future: a History, Broadcast Critics Guild awards. He won the NCR non-fiction prize for Citizens, National Book Critics Circle award for Rough Crossings, the WH Smith Literary Award for Landscape and Memory. In 2015 he received the Premio Antonio Feltrinelli in historical sciences from the Accademia nazionale dei Lincei in Rome. His The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words was published in 2015 and the second volume Belonging in 2017. In the autumn of 2016, The Face of Britain, a history of British portraiture appeared as a five-part BBC television series; a book and an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. In 2018, Civilizations, a nine-part BBC television series on world art, of which he wrote and presented five. In May 2019, Wordy: Sounding off on high art, low appetite and the power of memory, was published, and in the spring of 2021 his BBC series The Romantic and Us was aired. At present, he is working on Foreing Bodies, his twentieth publication, and in a new BBC series titled Brave New World.

Zoe Strimpel is an author, broadcaster and historian of gender in Modern Britain. She is a flagship columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and co-presents Hyped!, a podcast that unpicks the hype around recent cultural products. She is the author of What the Hell Is He Thinking? All the Questions You Ever Asked About Men Answered (2010), The Man Diet: One Woman’s Quest to End Bad Romance (2012) and Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘The Single’ (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Jake Wallis Simons is an award-winning British journalist and novelist. In December 2021, he was appointed Editor of the Jewish Chronicle.