It has been such a long tine since we had good news that on Saturday night when we heard of the release of Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv, it felt miraculous. It was a daring plan, carried out with dedication, precision & courage though with the caveat of mourning for the heroic, commander, Arnon Zmora who lost his life in the battle that ensured to liberate the hostages.
There was jubilation from some quarters but it certainly wasn’t universal. I was momentarily taken aback by the framing of news outlets & commentators with their accusations of ‘continuing genocide’ & rush to believe the figures of over 200 woman & children dead in the operation. The Al Jazeera journalist moonlighting as prison warden has so far been an elusive story in the mainstream press; they would rather scream the deliberate application of double standards, hypocrisy & mischaracterisation to prop up their disintegrating narrative, than report the facts.
I regained my sceptical equilibrium having learnt the hard way, antisemitism is a war that has to be fought even if it can never be won.
I grew up in Melbourne, in the bosom of my Jewish family. I had a patchy Jewish education, Jewish kindergarten but not Jewish day school, Jewish Sunday School, Jewish Summer camp & Jewish Dancing Class in the local Anglican Church. Shabbat dinner every Friday nights with my grandma, 2 nights of seder where my dad would try and get through the service as quickly as he could, eat, and then lay on the couch snoozing. Fasting on Yom Kippur & the regular schul hop on all the high holy days, We’d start in Kew, head to Temple Beth, a quick stop at Toorak Schul to see my Nanna (who hosted a Jewish version of Christmas lunch on December 25), then over to Charnwood Grove to hear the Shofar being blown by Rabbi Lubofsky. We never had pork products in the house though there weren’t too many question asked about what was in the fried rice when we got takeaway Chinese from our local on a Sunday night. While my parents were observant they were not particularly religious, G-d wasn’t a feature of my Jewish education; I believed in Jews & I didn’t need to believe in G-d to do that. If being a Jew was just a religion, I probably wouldn’t be a Jew. We’ll come back to that.
At 18 I bought myself a guitar and started teaching myself to play, farmer’s chords, as we call them, C G, F. (There’s barely a Bob Dylan song you can’t play with C G F.) I joined my first band at 20, it was thrilling to play rock n roll loudly to a room full of music lovers hanging off my every note, all of us working on our future tinnitus together.
We played hard for 8 months and then I ran away to Sydney with the drummer (in a purely professional sense) to form a band. We released an album in 1985 called Domestic Harmony. The debut single from that album became a surprise top 5 Australian hit that kicked a gender equality conversation up the pop charts; unofficially, an Australian feminist anthem – (officially it’s I Am Woman Hear Me Roar). The band was Do Re Mi and the song is Man Overboard. I still perform it because it still means something.
At the beginning of the 1990’s I put out my first solo album, String Of Pearls with a single that was played on every radio station, sometimes simultaneously, despite the film clip shot on an autumnal gold course where I performed in red plaid plus 4’s; It’s Only The Beginning… and in a way it was. Shortly afterwards I met Willy Zygier, a guitarist, a Jewish guitarist, who I employed for the next 9 months of touring. The spark we both felt when I opened my front door to Willy that day has fuelled 33 years of our collaboration on every possible thing there is to collaborate on including 3 daughters, 10 albums and 2 Jewish Music Festivals.
I called my second solo album Bitch Epic & totally owned it. I performed through all my pregnancies, for one tour wearing red sequins with a gold mesh cutout bordered with rhinestones over my belly. I played Patsy Cline in the early 2000’s loving every minute of that glorious singer’s incredible legacy. In 2003 we became an independent music entity, called our new label Intercorps (silent s). Our first release in 2004 was accompanied by a brand new, never before tried, marketing approach. Using the genius of the internet we promoted the Summerware Party, buy 25 copies of our CD & we would turn up to your place to deliver & sign them & play a 4 song acoustic set. We had broken the old marketing mould. It gave us new ideas of relating to audiences. In the mid naughties Willy and I produced a series of concerts called Broad, a direct response to my frustration that “female singer/songwriters” were lumped in together as a monolithic genre ignoring the extraordinary variety of women’s contributions across multitudes of styles.
In 2008 Willy & I released an album called Half Man Half Woman. The last song we wrote for this was Take Pity On The Beast, played over jagged guitars and drum loops forming the solid, hypnotic bed of irresistible force that would half carry, half push the listener across an eight minute pilgrimage.
It is not so often you can point to something and say “before this we were this and after this we were something else”. In my experience anyway things happen more gradually, there is rarely such a studied contrast, more a shading of gradation leading from one state to the next.
Willy had the title and the first chorus. It was enough, I ran hard and fast and came up with a full cast of characters, friends, our fathers. For my climactic penultimate verse I sought inspiration from the Haggadah:
When Israel went forth from Egypt, Jacob’s household from a people of alien tongue, Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The Sea saw and fled; the Jordan turned backward. The mountains skipped like rams and the hills like young lambs. What ails you, O Sea, that you flee? O Jordan that you turn backward? O mountains that you skip like rams? O hills, like young lambs?
Is this the description of an earthquake? A mystical vision? The ecstatic response of the Jewish diaspora returning? A natural phenomenon only able to be understood through transcendent rhapsodising?
Questions don’t always need answers to make sense of something. This was sense making in the metaphysical realm. The lines came to me unbidden, after so many Seders, I knew them backwards (which is how they came out) and there we were, in a place I hadn’t glimpsed before. I had written a song with the fullest sense of my being as a Jew. I had finally placed side by side what I did with who I was. It was like a light went on. Before this we were this and after this we were something else.
In 2010, Jewish copyright lawyer & music fan, Gary Holzman, decided to mount the Shir Madness Sydney Jewish Music Festival. He asked us to perform at it & we got invited back in 2012. By the time we played Shir Madness again in 2013 we had released Stories of Ghosts, an album of songs based on a loose dialogue around Torah themes and how they apply in a 21st century context; how these millennium old stories can still speak to us through the poetry of the words, and beyond that, what it means to be Jewish, a meditation on the complexity of what holds us to the earth in an age of rising atheism and rising antisemitism.
The rich vein of material we started mining in 2008 proved to be an enduring well of inspiration for both of us; the conception, connections and creation, full of discussion, dissent, disagreement that included inspiring us to mount the Shir Madness Festival in Melbourne, a roller coaster of a learning curve, but a roaring success for lovers of Jewish music.
I have been a performer/musician/songwriter/producer and most recently author for more than 40 years now, a veteran you could say, (they do say that actually). I’ve been lucky enough to work at many different aspects of making music & music events. And I’m here to tell you the creative process doesn’t get any easier, the true essence of what I do which is songwriting and recording, the process of finding things to say that haven’t been said in quite the same way before is a lifelong challenge. But then I guess if the exquisite torture of the creative process, the tyranny of the blank page, was not so formidable perhaps I would have lost interest. Human beings need challenges.
Jews need challenges. Shavuot is a good time to talk about challenges. Imagine that first Shavuot, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai with 10 Commandments, the first moral laws in human history, laws which form the basis of of our ethical values today. I’m trying to imagine what the rag tag group of grumpy Jews who’d been wandering in the desert for 30 odd years might have said – “What, there’s rules now! It’s not enough we’re slumming it in the desert. You promised milk & honey and instead we get rules? What the hey!?!” Challenging.
In order for challenges to be met, we need values.
What are our values? Our love of life, of justice, of learning, of family. But one value I think is Jewish to it’s DNA is our fondness for debate, for discussion, for argument. It is what sets the Jews apart from other belief systems that are so often hierarchical, where the written word has to be taken at face value and any challenge to it is tantamount to rejection leading to what can range from schisms to excommunication to, in extreme cases, fatwas. It is how the Jewish people continue to thrive, to learn through challenging and debating the finer intricacies of every argument. And the respect for the debate is an inherent part of the learning; to be close minded is to stop learning, to shut down debate is to ensure you no longer have a living, breathing, embracing engagement with the texts and with the communities that are drawn to study the texts.
The collective consciousness & memory of the Jewish people is a powerful force that prevents us fragmenting & dissipating into the larger community. It is easy to understand why Jews have wanted to stick together in hostile environments; through 5 millennium we have survived attacks, sackings, conquests, slavery, persecution, pogroms, the Holocaust, the combined Arab Armies, Hamas & Hezbollah – in every generation they rise against us to annihilate us.
But the Jews do survive and the State of Israel is the living embodiment of our contract to continue to do so. I think we continue to survive because of our innate ability to adapt, to value learning and to value the well mounted challenge to a current orthodoxy, it is part and parcel of a limber mind and a clever people.
Jews are not just a religion we are a tribe, a nation, and for so long a diaspora. We are the people of the book, through an extraordinary history of being conquered, expelled, persecuted, ghetto-ised, of living in a minority in, an often unwelcome guest, in someone else’s country, suffering untold loss we have continued to gather together, to find common ground with our communities, to discuss endlessly the minutiae of life, in religious circles the Talmud, the Mishnah, in secular circles policy, politics, in cultural circles, Seinfeld or Larry David. Cohen or Dylan?
I know rabbis would probably say it is the spark of G-d within us all that draws out this quality of debate, of learning through challenging and maybe they’re right about that and maybe not. We’ll have to discuss it.
When I was growing up and attending my Church of England school in Melbourne, my parents would occasionally ask me if I was experiencing any antisemitism. I always said no, I thought, they were paranoid, I thought it belonged to another time, I was dismissive of their concerns.
Antisemitism was something from history, not something I had ever encountered or felt in any way threatened by.
Fast forward half a lifetime & antisemitism is something I am seeing/feeling/living on a weekly, sometimes daily basis.
How on earth did this happen? How on earth has it been allowed to happen?
The war that began on October 7th with a 4000 strong invasion of the south of Israel by the barbarous, Islamic extremist warlords Hamas & their sympathisers, did not evoke an outpouring of sympathy & solidarity with Israel.
No, the double shock of October 7 was realising that as well as the depravity of that event, the nascent Jew hatred, simmering in the rest of the world, just quietly enough to slip under the radar of the wider public consciousness, could now burst forth like an exploding abscess of revulsion at Israelis & diaspora Jews with the temerity to count themselves as Zionists. With the temerity to think that defending its population was a necessity. “Lie down & take it Jew, this is RESISTANCE.”
Since October 7 the world has been plunged into an updated Alice Through The Looking Glass. Genocide, the term first coined by Rafael Lemkin at the Nuremburg Trials, to describe the Nazi’s crimes against the Jews is now the accusation thrown as a weapon at Israel to describe their defensive war in Gaza; ethnic cleansing, what the surrounding Arab countries did to their Jewish populations after the establishment of Israel is now the term used to describe the actions of the IDF to remove Hamas from power; concentration camp, the stopover between life and death for the Jews of mid 20th century Europe, built in multiples by the Nazis, is now what they call Gaza. And despite the blatant lie inherent in the description, in all the descriptions, the world is eager to buy the lies wholesale and then tut tut at the monstrousness of the Jews who know first hand what genocide, ethnic cleansing & concentration camps are & yet still inflict them on their neighbours.
So much easier to hate the Jews once you have decided they are just Nazis 2.0.
We have seen countless examples of this playing out. The October 9th protests on the steps of the Sydney Opera House in what was supposed to be a memorial for the slaughtered Israeli civilians but which turned into a full throated celebration of the attacks, re-characterised as resistance – as marking the beginning of the end for the Jewish state. And within a few weeks, people who claimed they heard the protesters chant “gas the Jews” were told they were wrong according to – “scientific forensic analysis by NSW police”, and everybody in the media could gaslight the people who heard that chant, as if somehow, “eff the Jews” or “where’s the Jews” were benign. The Jewish Academics WhatsApp group was formed to counter some of the most egregious characterisations of what was being written in publications pushing a hardline anti Israel bias. Relatively quickly the group attracted people who were trying to make sense of the senselessness of what we were all feeling, trying to regain some agency in the brave new nightmare we’d all been plunged into, searching for like minds, solace, comfort. Within months of forming, the Jewish Academics WhatsApp group had been doxxed & became known as the Zio600 group. A number of members suffered terribly because of this doxxing, losing work, livelihoods, friends, having to close businesses & uproot homes, being subjected to appalling online & real life bullying. Anti Israel, pro Hamas graffiti abounds, there is no difference between it & the most virulent antisemitic propaganda. The weekly gatherings of pro-Palestine protesters do not feel like a peaceful plea for the end of war, chanting from the river to the sea is a blatant demand for the extermination of the Jewish state, no-one is asking for the hostages to be returned, on the contrary the posters of the hostages that have been plastered on walls across cities in so many Western countries including Australia, have been defaced and ripped down. The furious university campus demonstrations with demands to ‘Globalise the Intifada’ are not the cries of freedom loving students wanting a 2 state solution, they don’t demand Hamas release the hostages. The mask is off & yet somehow our state & federal leaders, staring murderous antisemitism in the face are frozen in their inaction. Rabbits in the headlights. No-one arrested after the hate filled chants from the Opera House steps, no one arrested after hate filled sermons. No one cautioned after intimidating Jewish students on campus. Au contraire, instead our Foreign Minister has decided to break with decades long bipartisan policy of standing shoulder to shoulder with Israel and instead vote for the creation of a Palestinian State. Hamas begins a murderous war and Australia decides to reward that act of war with a state. Never mind that all offers of a 2 state solution negotiated with Israel since 1948 have been roundly rejected. That’s a minor hiccup according to our wise leadership – Lewis Carroll has your number ladies & gentlemen.
It’s been a crazy 8 months!
On October the 3rd I released my memoir – Book of Life. On October 4th we opened our show at Arts Centre Melbourne; Songs From the Book of Life. Excuse my deviation for a moment but I need to tell you the show, 8 songs around 8 scenes, is a 3 dimensional version of my book, a theatrical, musical distillation of my life with sets, props, interactive footage and choreography. It’s pretty good if I do say so myself. Scene 4 is discussion of Jewishness, my Jewishness, a discussion that by it’s very nature had to include a brief analysis of antisemitism. It was something Willy & I had been witnessing for several decades; hate, moving inexorably with the gathering pace of a stampeding herd. We have written (are still writing) songs addressing these issues. But this excerpt from our show was very direct. And as you might imagine, challenging to perform. After the matinee performance of October 7th, it became an existential howl.
The history of the Jew lurches through chapter and verse of persecution for multitudes of contradictory reasons. We are the wandering Jew, the rootless cosmopolitan, we are the outsider; we are the controllers of finance & industry, of Hollywood and the media, we are the insider; we are insular, infiltrators, untrustworthy, ready to break our vows, we’re arrogant, G-d’s chosen, pushy, weak, loud, stealthy, communist, capitalist, once too oriental, now too white.
Antisemitism motivates its adherents to attribute to the Jew whatever their society deems its most detestable qualities. And throughout history Jews pay with blood. Maybe all a Jew can do is pace the stage & pray.
There I was, a Jew pacing the stage for the matinée on October 7th when our youngest daughter who had recently made Aliyah and was living in Tel Aviv, was texting from her apartment’s stairwell to let us know she was sheltering & safe. It was the first we heard of the attacks. My darling youngest daughter is a party animal and if she had not recently split with her Israeli boyfriend they might have both been at the Nova Festival.
In response to the outpouring of hate heaped upon Jews/Zionists, on November 26 Willy & I performed at Mushroom’s 50th birthday celebration wearing blue shirts & white suits, he wore a white kippah, I wore an oversized Magen David.
Just before we launched into It’s Only the Beginning, I announced to the 15,000 strong audience in the stadium & the round 1 million viewers tuned in on their TV’s that Michael Gudinski had hated my outfit for the video clip for this song (remember the plus 4’s) but I think he would have loved what I’m wearing tonight.
It felt good to represent ourselves, to say sartorially we are proud Jews who will not hide away, who will not bend the knee to the baying mobs gathering in public squares, crushing people online & mounting campaigns to have Jews who support Israel as a sovereign state shunned by polite society.
On December 15 2023 I spoke to Patricia Karvelas on Radio National. The original invitation to speak was to be about addressing the difference (if there was one) of the Keffiyeh wearing members of the STC’s opening night of The Seagull & the subsequent fallout of resigning board members and cancelled subscriptions, with what Willy & I had worn at Mushroom’s 50th. The conversation rapidly turned to Gaza with PK insisting Israel was fully responsible for the high death toll of innocent civilians, the figures coming straight from Hamas Ministry of Truth sorry Health. This became ground zero for my fall from grace. The haters have relished decoupling a very few words (7 to be exact) from the context of their intent & wave them as a flag to proclaim my craven disregard for human suffering. The meaning of my words in context is when Hamas puts weapons in the hands of underage boys to point at the enemy they use them as fighters & then use them in the childhood casualty count. To say this is a horrendous, cynical exploitation of young lives is a chronic understatement but the mountain of evidence remains unexamined by the pro-Palestine groups defending Hamas as freedom fighters.
So there I was, a new book, my first book, and a full dance card of author talks, in-conversations & writer’s festivals. And then things started to fall apart.
It seems that many people who patronise writer’s festivals, people who are so fond of debate, who are such warriors for the exchange of free ideas, who support the social justice campaigns for the great & the good are perfectly happy to kowtow to the loudest most disruptive voices & minimise the ideas that a few disrupters find offensive.
Writing WA & Newcastle Writers festival stood by me. Sadly they were forced to employ a phalanx of security to protect me & the audiences, from whatever threats were being made. There were others that walked back their invitations. I don’t know if I blame them or not but the dishonesty is the ultimate gaslighting coming up with elaborate excuses rather than fess up to the fear, intimidation or maybe that they agree that I really am a genocidal blood thirsty maniac who enjoys the suffering of small children.
A children’s charity I had been approached to perform a fundraiser for cancelled my appearance, citing they’d received pushback after the save the date notices had been sent out. Stand up to them I said, don’t cave to this appalling bullying. They caved.
At a bookshop in Brisbane I did a hastily organised in-conversation to promote my book, and a gathering of furious, unhinged, protesters turned up on a quiet suburban street to harass us & all the people who attended. Wailing accusations of genocide, hiding behind their masks & signs of Globalise the Intifada & Zionist = Nazis. A dozen police had to attend but did nothing to shut down the protest.
And there’s the silence, the events that simply don’t materialise though you were sure they would.
Our theatre shows have been routinely targeted, causing some promoters to cave & cancel our appearances, others to double down in their determination to stand by us while being forced to hire security for our protection. Most recently we performed in Hobart. There were people outside protesting and handing out pamphlets of my villainy. Inside activists disrupted our show numbers of times, yelling, having to be forcibly removed from the theatre and at the last disruption a patron decided to take matters in her own hands, break her wine glass on the edge of the stage before threatening a protester who had just started yelling at me that I should be ashamed. It was mayhem, a small glimpse into societal breakdown. The glass wielder has been charged, as she should be. But the protesters are emboldened in their fight for justice. They now blame me for this woman’s actions and defame me constantly. It’s how their vicious antisemitism works. How they think turning 2 Melbourne musician’s theatre show staged in Hobart into a screaming melee could possibly change the course of the war in the Middle East is a fascinating proposition. I’ll wait.
These are interesting times.
I keep being told I’m brave, we’re brave. But I’m not sure we had a choice. I never felt I could do anything other than stand my ground against the unreason. It is self defence against insanity.
I have not spoken to some close friends for many months. I don’t know why entirely. I’m sure they know I/we are not blood thirsty, genocide justifying, lunatics, we have known each for a long time, you’d think something like that would be tricky to keep under your hat. Nevertheless they are definitely NOT talking to us. But it doesn’t hurt. Because ultimately I can’t lie about something so fundamental to my being, to say, “hey, maybe you’re right, Israel is an apartheid, colonising, racist, genocidal state that should just disappear”.
Nah. Better to find new friends. And I have.
I have also done some soul searching
My name is Deborah. The name comes from the Book of Judges. Deborah the Judge who sang her troops into battle. I’m not sure how much of a warrior I can be at age 64, (though I’m still a pretty good singer) but I always knew that if was going to pick a hill to die on, defending the right of Israel to exist would be it. And the corollary, calling out blatant unexamined antisemitism from all the good, the kind, the righteous, the educated, the clever, the concerned, even amongst people I could never have imagined would fall for it. Then here I am. Hineini, hineini. I’m ready.
Antisemitism is a war that has to be fought even if it can never be won.