Israel and how Conservative policy affected the Jewish community. In September 1999, it was the first non-Israeli newspaper to conduct an interview with Ehud Barak during his term as Prime Minister of Israel. In December 2007, the newspaper published an interview with Labour Party donor David Abrahams. In July 2013, The Jewish Chronicle hosted an audience with UKIP leader Nigel Farage. Farage was interviewed by editor Stephen Pollard, and took questions from the audience. Criticism In August 2016, dozens of prominent Jewish activists including Miriam Margolyes, Ilan Pappe and Michael Rosen signed an open letter criticising the paper for what they viewed as its "McCarthyite" "character assassination" of Jeremy Corbyn after the paper published "seven key questions" for Corbyn, including on his alleged ties to and defence of various Holocaust deniers and on his use of the word "friends" for Hamas and Hezbollah. In December 2019, The Jewish Chronicle published an article by Melanie Phillips which asserted that Islamophobia was a bogus term which provided cover for antisemites. The Board of Deputies of British Jews described its publication as an error, and editor Stephen Pollard acknowledged that "A number of people within the Jewish community, and friends of the community, have expressed their dismay – and anger – at its content." When The Jewish Chronicle faced closure due to financial problems in April 2020, former ANC politician and anti-apartheid activist Andrew Feinstein stated: "The Jewish Chronicles equating of antisemitism with criticism of Israel has put back the struggle against real AS & all racism by years." while the freelance journalist Mira Bar-Hillel considered the paper's potential closure to be "the best news of the day" and referred to it as a "pathetic rag". In July 2021, a letter was sent to the British press regulatory body IPSO requesting a standards investigation into The Jewish Chronicle due to what the signatories believed to be "systemic" failings. The nine signatories were mostly linked to the Labour party, and had either been libelled by The Jewish Chronicle or had complaints about factually inaccurate reporting upheld by the regulator between 2018 and 2021. The complainants alleged that the paper's editorial standards were "shockingly low" and stated that "unless standards there improve there will be more victims, while readers will continue to be misled." Writing in the Byline Times, Brian Cathcart, Professor of Journalism at Kingston University, argued that IPSO had failed to act on