Julie Burchill leaves The Independent to focus on learning Hebrew

Independent columnist Julie Burchill is leaving the newspaper after 18 months.

Burchill made the announcement in her column in today’s paper.

She joined the newspaper in 2009 after being signed up to write exclusively for the title by then editor Simon Kelner, The Guardian reports.

Before that she was a columnist for The Guardian and later The Times, which she left in 2006 to take a year’s sabbatical from journalism.

In her column she wrote:

Give the people what they want, goes the old line, and that day is here at last for me and the vast majority of Independent readers as I write my final column.

I leave you with a light heart, well aware that it’s time for me to move over. So I will now concentrate mainly on learning Hebrew and writing my memoir of philo-Semitism Unchosen, with supplementary activity based around lunching, lazing and loafing.

And the occasional foray into journalism, of course – I’d miss my trolls too much if I retired. L’hitraot! as we say in Israel – be seeing you!