Renowned Writers – Baroness Neuberger

Every month, as we celebrate the breadth of our alumnae community, we highlight former pupils who have become published authors.

Baroness Neuberger (Class of 1968) is a crossbench peer, social commentator and writer. She is senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue and one of the first two female rabbis in the UK.

Born Julia Schwab, she left South Hampstead for Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied Assyriology. After she was refused entry to Turkey because she was British, and to Iraq, because she was Jewish, she had to change her subject and started studying Hebrew, her subsidiary language, full-time.  She obtained her rabbinic diploma at Leo Baeck College, London, where she taught from 1977–97. She was Britain’s second female rabbi after Jackie Tabick, and the first to have her own synagogue as rabbi of the South London Liberal Synagogue from 1977 to 1989. In 2011, the West London Synagogue (a Movement for Reform Judaism synagogue) announced that she had been appointed as senior rabbi of the synagogue.

Alongside her work as a rabbi, political activist and journalist, she is also a widely published author with more than 12 titles to her name. Her most recent book, Antisemitism: What It Is. What It Isn’t. Why It Matters, will be released in paperback this month.