Wow, what happened! How did I go from deified to vilified in one short interview? The wolves were waiting, clearly, I really didn’t say anything that a person without a predisposition to jump to conclusions could find wanting.
I have thoroughly covered my fall from grace post October 7 in the through line from proudly wearing blue & white at Mushroom’s 50th anniversary concert celebration in November, to a few weeks later when during an interview on Radio National I was interrogated on the IDF’s actions in Gaza, me, a musician. Not the reason I was asked to speak to the interviewer. BTW. And while the consequences for me were surprisingly far reaching, you might be interested to know that the interviewer lost her gig too. Severe rating collapse apparently.
The fallout in the last 19 months from Hamas’ attempted genocide and mass hostage taking has been a study. Utterly blindsiding in the initial few hours and days, the celebrations for a terrorist organisation, the protests against the democracy it attacked, the flag burnings, the paralysis of the attending NSW constabulary other than to arrest the single Jew at the Opera house. Closely followed by, and unbelievable in its intensity, the anti everything movement to erase Israel’s legitimacy, the denial of reality and the hunt for villains “every stone will cry out there is a Jew behind me, come & kill him” – as the famous Islamic decree states. ’Til we come finally to the acceptance that what we – the Jewish community – once understood as normal life has been snatched away and replaced by something else entirely.
We’re careful, we want to complain and we do but we are aware of being accused of whinging, of whining, we are accused of crying wolf on antisemitism or weaponising the Holocaust to produce sympathy, oh the delicious irony of this Kafkaesque charge. So we stay quiet and get cancelled anyway because staying quiet isn’t enough, the Jew has to renounce Israel to be purified of the Jew taint. Quiet or not, the protests continue, the cancellations tick on, the lies are amplified, the antisemitic incidents are a daily hum.
I have been asked to speak to the more positive side of what this means, or that’s how I understood the request for me to talk to changed perspectives, renewal & transformation. I love a challenge.
I am frequently asked what I think is going to happen? How is this going to end? When is it all going to blow over & things get back to normal? I shrug, no idea. As
the months stretch on and the the smart people who should be able to see sense, instead travel further down propaganda rabbit holes, believing every unbelievable falsity, I have come to think it will not end, at least not in my lifetime. In which case, what else do we do? That’s the 64 million $ question isn’t it.
So I’ll try and answer. I believe in Jews, we have wandered the earth for thousands of years. I believe in Israel, it was born 11 years before me and I have only known the world with Israel in it. Israel is many things but it is definitely not the cause of antisemitism it is the refuge against it. The grotesque insistence of the anti everything crowd to proclaim that out of every nation on earth, many with utterly barbaric human rights records, only Israel has sacrificed the right to exist is, firstly, a clear indicator that these interlocutors are stinking with antisemitism and secondly that they are prey to & promulgating an unhinged, obscene fantasy. Israel is going nowhere. Despite everything that we are subjected to, tested, tested and tested again, we are strong. And when we can be, we are compassionate. The diaspora so far aren’t going anywhere either, but if we have to flee this time we have somewhere to go. Mostly we can look after ourselves and each other and we do, I see it everywhere, more than I’ve ever seen it before. Perhaps that’s because I’m more alive to the community or maybe because the community has stepped up. It feels nurturing, supportive, muscular, essential. The virulence of the anti everything crowd has had a transformative effect on the Jewish community. I just heard Israeli journalist Haviv Retig Gur talk about October 8 Jews. He’s referring to people who thought being a Jew was an accident of birth or a culinary membership, but who have suddenly realised there’s more to it, suddenly found themselves seeking out more Jewy communities, more Jewy activities, more Jewy cultural spaces. Around the world Jews have peered into the deep well of Jew hatred and understood on a cellular level that this is the time to find their tribe. Australian Jews are no exception. I have spoken to many people who are discovering an uncomfortable disconnect between what they thought they were and how surprised they’ve been by the depth of feeling, of connection to what they had barely acknowledged previously. I can think of better ways to discover your Jewish roots but reality checks don’t tend to run on timetables.
Since October 7 we have had a glimpse of what our ancestors endured for millennium. It’s not what any of us would have wanted an up close education in, but it’s clarifying; as a glass-half-full person I can see the value of perspective. We’re not literally being thrown down wells or running from bayonets, nor being herded into gas chambers (not yet anyway) but perhaps we can see how we got there. And all of us are scratching our heads still, wondering why the hell, here in the 21st Century, at
the bottom of the world as far away from the Middle East as it is possible to be are we being targeted. Targeted before Israel had even a chance to respond militarily. It is the strongest argument for identifying antisemitism for what it is, a completely irrational catch-all reason to hate. It matters not what the Jews have done, not done, are or are not, the reasons can be modified, the hate remains the same. As Leon Pinsker said in Auto-Emancipation, forcefully putting the argument for Jewish autonomy in 1882 – Hatred of Jews is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration it is hereditary, and as a disease transmitted for two thousand years it is incurable.
In a world where sophistication in technology means AI can drive cars, parse our contracts or make music we want to listen to immediately, a world where humans have explored the ocean depths and outer space, where we can see into people’s bodies without cutting them open, where we can connect with anything & everything that interests us, from the quirky to the benign to the sinister, it is beyond comprehension that the ancient hatred of the Jewish people, rooted in suspicion, in envy, in resentment, lives and breathes new life into new adherents who would never for a moment acknowledge they are the 21st century’s Spanish Inquisitors, Cossacks, Nazis. Au contraire, they are the enlightened ones who understand the true evil of the Jew, as personified by the Israeli and the Zionist but certainly not limited to that. Why otherwise, would the Adass shul be firebombed. The perpetrators remain at large and we don’t know their motivations: left wing radicals, criminals or righteous activists on a mission to rid the earth of the unclean Jew? Whoever they are, hucksters, mobsters or haters, ignorant of history, obedient to the call of their tribe or at least too nervous to challenge the group think, they have read the room to the extent that they might entertain that in some circles they’re folk heroes.
What I have also noticed is the terrible disconnect when we ponder the question “why do they hate us? Why?” I have witnessed seasoned politicians, spokespeople, performers and academics wrestle with this age old nut. Why? Why? Obviously there are plenty of reasons to list but I’ve heard none that are genuinely rooted in reason. They are excuses, convenient accusations to justify the unjustifiable. It makes me weep to see how confounding this question is. We are strong, we are survivors but ask us the question “why do they hate us?” and the feeling is of a child savagely punished for a crime she did not commit.
Leon Pinsker posits the following: "To the living, the Jew is viewed as a corpse. To the native, he is viewed as a foreigner. To the homeowner, the Jew is a vagrant. To the
business owner, he is viewed as a beggar. To the poor, the Jew is an exploiter and a millionaire. To the patriot, the Jew is a man without a country. And for all, the Jew is a hated rival.”
Willy Zygier & I wrote Too Loud more than a dozen years ago, clearly we were sensing the rising tide:-
Too loud, too pushy, too smart, too brash You’re a schemer, you’re a plotter, you deserve what you get Pack your bags again, time to move on You’re not welcome friend, get gone, gone
You’re the headline, you’re the subtext, you’re the reason we’re awash You’re the other, you’re the other and it’s always your fault Pack your bags again, time to move on You’re not welcome friend, get gone, gone Change your name again, find another trade again Go back to where you came from
You’re a spy, an infiltrator, you’re always underfoot And where the hell is your messiah you keep banging on about? Pack your bags again, time to move on You’re not welcome friend, get gone, gone Shove your moral stances, let go of my finances No more second chances for you Take your book for what it’s worth Your children will wander the earth Exiled and cursed for what you do
You’re a victim, you’re a whiner, you’re the most vilified You unite the rest of us to hate that you survive Pack your bags again, it’s time to move on You’re not welcome friend, get gone, gone And when you rise in self defence, build yourself a brand new fence We’ll force you to recompense your foes ‘Cos you keep getting greedier You own Hollywood and the media You assimilate like a chameleon but you show You’re a bleeding hearted socialist you’re a Neo-Con with an iron fist You’re a coward and a recidivist
And you think, you think you’re chosen
A qualifier. I have an ambivalent relationship with G-d’s existence or otherwise. I don’t need to formalise that with a label, but lately I have spent a bit of time thinking up a different way to see things. Indulge me, no doubt there will be plenty of vigorous disagreement but here goes. It is tempting to credit some kind of miracle to the fact we are still here despite so many attempts to enslave us, expel us, convert us, persecute us or ultimately, to eradicate us like a plague. A short list of the biggies includes the Egyptians, Seleucids, Romans, Crusades, Spanish Inquisition, Pogroms, Nazis, Stalin, Soviet Union, Egyptians (take two), Iran, Jordan, Syria, PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Houthis, BDS, The UN, The Human Rights Commission, The International Criminal Court. And what I get from all this frenzy of attempted annihilation (think Coyote versus Roadrunner) is a kind of strange negative feedback loop – maybe there is a G-d, one albeit with a crazy sense of humour, but an unknowable G-d that for unknowable reasons has allowed anti-semitism in it’s multi- various forms, to infect generation after generation in countless places, sometimes even where there are no Jews. Because, maybe, to be so maligned for so long by so many, means that we have fought so hard to still be here. It’s harder to take life for granted and wallow in a meaningless existential crisis when every few decades you find yourself as enemy of the people yet again. That is fire in the belly right there. If only the anti-semites could work this out, could stop this intractable senseless hate, we Jews might breed ourselves out of existence. Who knows? But as an argument for the existence of G-d, I find it strangely compelling.
So what have we got post October 7, a traumatised Jewish community finding resilience, finding each other at talks, online, in art spaces, supporting one another in public life, going in to smite the Zombie Apocalypse for one another, when they gather to spread their venom. We have extended our community by welcoming in all the October 8 Jews, and that is an incredible thing, a beautiful extension to the family, like dreaming about an old family home where you suddenly stumble on a door that leads to whole new wing, full of light and warmth.
We Jews know how to do this. Ok, the majority of us have not personally experienced the trauma of murderous antisemitism, certainly not before October 7th 2023 but the stories have been passed down, they are familiar. From Pharaoh to Haman to the Macabees on Masada to Antioch to the horrors of the pogroms and the Shoah. As a people we are sadly well acquainted with enemies who would like to exterminate us. It’s lodged in our ancestral memory, as is the understanding that we have
survived, that we have done so again and again, that we rebuild, that we learn, that we grow. And with Israel in existence, a state of our own, with an army that defends us, a moral army, we will win against our geographical enemies. The terrain is quivering with stop start deals, mixed messages, fluid allies, but undoubtedly things are moving in the right direction even if it is two steps forward one step back.
My great hope is that as a community, we recognise that while we all want to move toward a lasting peace where Israel gets to live securely within its borders and her neighbours get on with pursuing health & prosperity for their populations, we have to acknowledge the sometimes vast schisms of how each of us believe these aims can best be accomplished. There is enormous breadth of opinion here, it is the source of most of our internecine squabbling. And we’re just the diaspora.
Obviously some humility goes a long way, if only the anti everything crowd could adopt some though they appear incapable, constantly grandstanding on positions that fall in a heap with any kind of interrogation. But let’s not talk about them. Let’s talk about us.
It’s Shavuot, the day when G-d offered us the Torah and we the Jews decided to accept our covenant with Hashem and everything that went with it; the responsibility to engage with Torah, to learn, to study, to dispute, to perform mitzvot, to find a way forward.
And we are. We are battling to make sense of the moment, we are in many ways being shunned from spaces we were previously welcomed in, I want very badly for us Jews, despite our enormous divergence of opinions to recognise that we stand stronger together, that we can brook each others vastly different approaches, remain Zionists and get out of this thing with strength and dignity, not despite the differences but because of tolerating and accommodating the differences.
We have treasures to offer any community we are part of, if they are wanted. But if not we have them to offer to each other. I believe in Jews, I believe in our inherent resilience, in our endeavours, in our creativity, in our compassion, in our intellect, in our energy to want the best of ourselves and in our ability to recognise the true north of our moral compass.
Is that optimistic enough?