Shirley Leader
Chair, Resource Committee
Shirley brings to the Board a background in Human Resource Management and Management Consulting as well as a second career in teaching and lecturing in English as a Second Language.
She has a commitment to education – that of others as well as her own. Since 2017 she has been a volunteer guide at the Sydney Jewish Museum. She has taught Holocaust studies to Year 10 students at the Emanuel School.
She participated in a study tour of Berlin and Poland with the Sydney Jewish Museum. She recently earned a Professional Development Certificate in Teaching about Contemporary Antisemitism from Echoes and Reflections, a partnership between ADL, USC Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem. She also has a Certificate in Holocaust Education awarded by UCL and Yad Vashem.
Shirley also has a keen interest in the literary representation of the migrant and diaspora experience and undertook a research project into the fictional and non-fictional writing of post-colonial and diaspora writers, including the Jewish diaspora in Australia. A separate research study examined the literary controversy ignited by Helen Demidenko and the context of historical revisionism and Holocaust denialism in which her writing was situated.
Shirley has a BA in English and French, a Post Graduate Diploma from the Wits Business School (South Africa), an MA in English literature and an MA in Teaching English as a Second Language, both from UNSW.
Shirley lives in Sydney. She emigrated to Australia from South Africa in 1988 and arrived in Australia on bicentennial day. She has children and stepchildren who have established their families in the Hunter Valley, Melbourne and the United Kingdom.