JPR News archive
JPR welcomes Jonathan Boyd as Research Fellow

Tuesday 13 Jan 2009

JPR is pleased to announce the appointment of Jonathan Boyd, who joined the Institute in January 2009 as Research Fellow. He will be working on three major projects:

Child Poverty in British Jewry This mapping project is most timely in view of the current economic crisis, and is co-funded by the Shoresh Trust, the Rothschild Foundation, Norwood and a number of individual donors. Our initial findings have shown that the incidence of child poverty in British Jewry is significantly higher than previously imagined, and that it touches all sections of the community, often arising from bereavement, chronic disability of the family breadwinner, divorce, single-parenthood or unemployment.  The project will review what the community is doing about childhood poverty and recommend practical ways in which the current provision should be improved in order to help the thousands of Jewish children who are living below the poverty line in Britain today. 

New Conceptions of Community This project, run in partnership with JDC and with additional funding from the Clore Duffield Foundation, arose out of the major analysis JPR conducted of the 2001 national census data Jews in Britain: A Snapshot from the 2001 Census. Its findings shattered the illusion of Jewish uniformity: it revealed a larger number of single-person households, a higher incidence of mixed relationships and a much wider geographical spread of the community across the country than ever previously thought.  In response, a cross-communal working party has been set up involving leading Jewish practitioners, thinkers and activists, to explore how we rethink the idea of the Jewish community in this new context and develop appropriate policy and programming.

Voices for the Res Publica: Rediscovering the European Common Good This pan-European project, funded by the Ford Foundation and directed by Dr Diana Pinto, addresses one of Europe’s most pressing political and social problems: the loss of a sense of the common good in our pluralist democracies and the search for shared values between different religious, cultural and ethnic communities. The project has developed through a series of national two-day round tables in various European countries (including England, Poland, Sweden, France, Germany and the Netherlands) at which difficult issues are broached in a context of mutual trust, including citizenship, the role and rights of silent majorities and vocal minorities, immigration, integration, the struggle against racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. The next stage will be to publish the papers arising from the round table discussions, determine the common concerns in each country and produce a set of ideas and proposals for strengthening the Res Publica, both at the national and the pan-European levels.

Jonathan Boyd is a specialist in contemporary Jewry and holds a BA and MA in Modern Jewish History from University College London. He is conducting doctoral research at the University of Nottingham in the field of educational philosophy.  He was formerly a Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Institute in Israel and has held professional positions in research and policy at the JDC International Centre for Community Development in London and Paris, the Jewish Agency for Israel in London and New York, the United Jewish Israel Appeal, and the Holocaust Educational Trust.  His writings have been published in various Jewish publications and journals and he is the editor of The Sovereign and the Situated Self: Jewish Identity and Community in the 21st Century (Profile Books, 2003).  He lives in north London with his wife Shoshana and three children, Natan, Ariella and Ely.