Back when I was a kid, the idea that any kind of authority could stop a person and demand their papers was considered outrageous, the sort of thing that happened in “bad” countries, not in the USA.
I was an Anglo kid, of course – Anglo in the Texas sense of being white and not Mexican American. Black people knew better as did Mexican Americans, including those whose families had lived north of the Rio Grande since before Anglo settlement in Texas in the early 1800s.
These days I know enough history to understand the amount of racial privilege packed into my outrage. Our history is littered with stories of people forced again and again to prove their right to exist while others are accepted even when they’re doing harm.
But I still feel that outrage on behalf of all the persons being harassed by trumped-up semi-cops right now. And I would get very angry if someone asked me for my papers.
I mean, I still get mad every time I’m driving near the Mexican border and have to stop at one of the border patrol stations that are inland from the actual border.
Not that I ever have any problem there. I’m very obviously Anglo and dealing with cops brings out my Anglo Texan accent. But it still pisses me off in a deeply personal way, and not just because I’ve noticed at those places that people whose skin is a little darker than mine end up spending a lot more time answering questions.
In his January 15 issue of his Law Dork newsletter, Chris Giedner reports that the awful woman who is running our Department of Homeland Security (an agency whose very name evokes Nazi Germany in my mind and has since the right wing came up with it after September 11) says anyone in the vicinity of an ICE operation can expect to have to prove their identity.
And of course, even proofs of identity don’t work if they want to abuse you. Or shoot you.
It is reported that a couple of the thugs doing these raids have said to people after the murder of Renee Good, “Didn’t you learn your lesson?” Continue reading “Outrage at the Outrageous”…
I have two draft posts, lurking. They’re serious. Very serious. Full of the stuff of the moment. Half my day is spent fighting against hate, and those posts are about different facets of that.
I need a break. You need a break. We all need a break.
This is the perfect day for a break. It’s only 33 degrees C outside! And there’s only mild bushfire smoke! Positively salubrious. Also, someone has replaced the flag on the Iranian embassy (which is just a few miles from where I live) with the flag of the rebellion.
Let me give you an update on some of my 2026. It might be quite busy. I have 2 books to find homes for, novels emerging from the difficult period, short stories and essays emerging from the difficult period… and a conference the weekend after next where I get to talk about food and Tolkien. I have a meeting with an organiser to introduce them to the types of Jewish writing in Australia so that they can consider them for their annual programme and I have been tentatively approached about possible actual paid work.
This gives me hope.
I’ll let you know about the books and chapters and short stories as they appear. And now I go to consider how Sam Gamgee adoring potatoes is actually a Really Important piece of worldbuilding.
I know that’s not how Thomas Paine said it – he wrote “men’s souls” of course. That’s usually excused by the explanation that “men” used that way includes all of us, but – not to disrespect Paine, who was a force for good in the Revolution – it really means that no one considered the thoughts, or even the souls, of women important.
At the moment, I am angry and depressed over the murder of a woman by an agent of an over-funded federal police agency that shouldn’t even exist, by the various actions against the people of Venezuela, by the way surveillance tech is creeping into all of our lives, and by the efforts (and not just by the regime controlling our federal government, but by local utilities) to slow walk renewable energy and keep polluting.
That’s just the short list for this morning. There are many other things I’m mad about.
However, I interrupt this listing of horrors for an important announcement:
We got cats!
Meet Shadow (female dark gray) and Piper (male gray tabby), our new beloved and chaotic housemates.
Birthday cake made for Chaz Brenchley. Chocolate cake with black-cocoa frosting.
I like to make things. In particular, I like to cook (in very particular, I like to bake). There are other things I do when the spirit takes me: bead, sew, very occasionally, knit. And write. And for all of these things making is rendered easier, not to say better, with the right tools.
I began to think about this after seeing a clip on the internet where someone was asking “what is your favorite kitchen utensil.” And at least one of the people who was asked the question drew a total blank. “Who has a favorite kitchen utensil? Like, a spoon or something?” I can only assume that this person doesn’t cook, and regards the kitchen as a sinister place where wine glasses and bottled water are kept.
My initial problem with the question was kind of the opposite. Choose my favorite utensil? Outrageous: they’re all my favorites (and I don’t want to hurt my round Dutch oven’s feelings by preferring the oval Dutch oven, clearly). But as I was working in the kitchen this weekend I realized that, for certain purposes, I do have favorites, and they’re not unreasonable.
This weekend I made a cake for Chaz Brenchley’s birthday. Chaz, if you don’t already know, is a wonderful British writer of mysteries and fantasy (also writing as Ben Macallan and Daniel Fox), who married the lovely Karen Williams (now Brenchley) here in California and moved to the States. Usually when I visit Chaz and Karen I bring some baked goods, because it’s an excuse to bake without having the products in my own house. But a birthday requires something special and cake-like. And Chaz (unlike the man I married) does not turn up his nose at chocolate. So a chocolate cake it was, with dark chocolate frosting.
It was as I was making the cake that I realized I do have some very favorite kitchen tools: my instant-read thermometer, my kitchen scale, my decorating turntable, and my cake lifter. The utility of the instant-read thermometer is pretty obvious: no matter if you’re making fudge or rib roast, being able to know what the temperature of the object is can be crucial. When I bake bread I can be misled as to the doneness by the golden color of the loaf, but my instant-read thermometer will tell me the truth about the interior. If I’m making filling for a cake, the instant read thermometer will keep me from turning the it into something stodgy and unlovely. I use my instant read thermometer daily.
Same goes with my kitchen scale. Particularly for baking. When I was a young, enthusiastic baker, I thought the point was to jam as much ingredients into a measuring cup as possible. More is better, right? Except that the variation between jamming all the flour you can into a measure, and sprinkling flour into the measure and wiping off the extra with the edge of a knife (the preferred method for bakers in the know) can make an actual difference in the finished quality of the baked good. This matters particularly when you’re following a recipe: to ensure success, you want the amount of flour or baking powder you’re using to match what the recipe developer is using*. It’s not that long ago (the late 1800s, I believe) when there was no standardization in measurements: “take a good knob of butter and add to it a spoonful of sugar” where no specification of what either measurement means? Waaaaaay too loosey-goosey. Precision is a lovely thing.
As I was making Chaz’s cake I thought about how comforting that precision is: I may screw things up, but it won’t be by putting in the wrong amount of stuff (it might be by omitting a step, but that’s another essay).
Cake lifter resting on my cake decorating turntable.
Once the cake was baked and ready to be frosted, I got to use two other of my very favorite kitchen tools: my decorating turntable and my cake lifter. Look: did I decorate cakes for years before I even knew these objects existed? You bet. But these are tools that make life easier, and isn’t that a good thing? This weekend I did not, aft first, deploy the turntable: after all, I wasn’t going for a highly finished cake. And the turntable lives in the basement along with a lot of my other cake-making paraphernalia (yes, I have that much. My husband still has his model trains in the basement. Don’t judge me). For a moment I didn’t feel like going downstairs to get the turntable. But as I started applying frosting to the cake I remembered how frustrating it is to have to turn the cake while it’s sitting on the counter, and how messy. I yielded to common sense and brought up the turntable, as well as my cake carrier (yet another indispensable tool for the cake maker). The base of the cake carrier is roughly the same size as the turntable, but if I tried to use it as a cake platter… 1) it would slip right off the turntable, with predictably distressing results, and 2) it would look awful. So I put the cake on the turntable and frosted it. Once all the frosting was in place I could rotate the turntable while scraping the sides, so they look nice and straight and smooth. The right tool for the project, right?
Finally, when I was happy with the cake, I used the cake lifter to lift it off the turntable without damaging the bottom edge of the cake, and deposited it on a platter which could then go in the cake carrier. For years I did the same thing using several standard spatulas, and it just… never worked properly. Fully frosted cakes are heavy, and tend to want to slide off smaller spatulas and… please don’t make me explain further. Things sometimes got ugly
So those are (some) of my favorite kitchen utensils. When I get a new one I frequently have a honeymoon period where every time I use it I am just tickled that I have such a thing. I really am a simple soul. Eventually it just becomes another object in my armamentarium of kitchen tools. But I still appreciate it.
For other things–Oh, I could sing you a paean of praise for my thread burner (for beading) or my Oxford Compact English Dictionary (for writing–also an excellent weight when cheddaring cheese). It is an excellent thing to have a tool that helps you do what you want to do.
So what’s your favorite tool? Or tools?
__________
*Even now, when recipes on the internet can come from all over the world, the astute baker keeps track of whether a recipe is written in Imperial measurements, grams, etc. It’s all well and good to measure vanilla “with your heart;” baking soda, not so much.
Last week I gave some of the contexts for current antisemitism in Australia.
This week, so many of the Left are arguing that we don’t need a Royal Commission and so many others are arguing that we do need a Royal Commission, but very few of them are talking about the path Australia had taken to reach the point where Jews were murdered on Bondi. For some (especially on the right) it fits a bunch of their conceptions of the Labor Government, and on the Left, they are being very careful to disassociate the shooters from any demonstrations and other hate and very slow to admit the government cutback on investigations of what ASIO had determined was the #1 threat to Australia. In other words, the government may well have seen this coming.
If they didn’t, then they missed the picture of the shooters marching across Sydney Harbour Bridge. My view is (since I had friends marching) that we can’t assume hate on the part of all marchers, but we need to know how much hate was on the Bridge at that time. We also can’t assume that the march itself didn’t (whether intentional or not) support hate towards Jewish Australians. A group of senior people at the head of that march have been very public with their negative thoughts about Jewish Australia. I follow them on X, because I feel I need to understand them, but I always have to clear my mouth from the bad taste of their thoughts.
If you want to follow these people on social media, begin with the Australian Union Movement (Doug Cameron is a good path into that) – not all unionists are such bigots, but some of the leading unionist are. This is not new.
The historical context is that there was a strong Jewish component in the Australian Left. This was especially true in the 1950s and maybe 60s. In the 70s, more and more Jews hid their identities or turned to being a performative “Good Jew” in order to stay in the Left. I’m not that good at being performative, whatever branch of politics we’re talking about, in case you were wondering (which you were not!) This have reached a curious point since the 70s. Now, the further left someone travels, the more likely they are to be in a nest of joyous antisemites. I wait to see what anyone says about who I am and what assumptions they hold about my existence before I know I’m safe with them. This is not only unionists, but, for family reasons, the union aspect contains certain ironies. I can identify how safe I am with the far right (mostly not, but easy to spot) more easily than with the left.
What I thought might be useful today is not a list of those who hate and claim not to, however, but links to places that open the subject in different ways. I don’t agree with everyone and all the things said, but these citations will enable anyone who also needs to understand to explore further. To cross boundaries and begin to understand modern Australia, rather than being fixated on a narrow view,
I want to begin with something that doesn’t even mention Jewish Australia. Let me link to someone who says this better than I can and then I’ll try to explain anyhow: https://x.com/MatthewNouriel/status/2007975770342506846
The subject is performative politics, directly speaking about this week. When are we helping someone, and when are we failing even to listen?
First thing first (and why I talk about Jewish Australia rather than the people of Gaza) listen to those who are being hurt to determine the nature of the hurt. I cannot speak for the people of Gaza. I can speak for myself.
When we listen, we can help more effectively. And the best help is often in ways that support multiple voices of those under attack. I can attest that most performative people will tell me what to think rather than ask what I’m dealing with. I began to post some of my experiences on my Facebook page to address that a little. For the status of this, see the note below.
Just to make it clear that I’m not talking about extremists, a kind soul put some social media screenshots of more extreme thinking. I have not looked into it (I’m not that well right now and everything’s a bit difficult), and I really hope it’s fake. https://x.com/l3v1at4an/status/2007847171723505810
Next is a bit of background about Labor’s relationship with Islamic preaching in Australia. At the time of the Hilaly furor (1980s, when I was working on a PhD in Sydney), I was treated quite unkindly by performative supporters (‘performative’ is my work of the week) and those who kept me safe were Pakistani Australian, Lebanese Christian Australian, and Palestinian Australian friends. In the early 2000s there were places in Sydney I already I had to hide my Jewishness and spend as little time as possible there, but there was far less spitting hate. It was just as difficult to be a woman in those streets as a Jew. And the streets to avoid weren’t many.
Due to my experience over time, I am always going to look for the views of informed individuals. Those who act on the preaching of extremists need to learn to live in a shared society. Those who do not, are getting blamed for the hate of others. This applies to the Jewish community too, but in a different way. All Jews who are not “Good Jews” are in the wrong, I’m told, and be deported from Australia (for existing, I assume) but are not allowed to go to Israel because the same people want it not to exist.
In other words, hate is not shared equally. Rhetoric counts more than checking things through and understanding. The rhetoric is strong in this one, but at the heart of his clamour there is some really interesting (and worrying) Australian history. https://x.com/MarkWRowley/status/2007965362776945037
As I said earlier, I don’t agree with everything. This is purely to help those who need to understand things from other (Jewish Diaspora) directions. I cannot speak for Israel, partly because I’m Diaspora and partly because I don’t know enough. I do however, as my historian self, see that most people shouting at Israel are doing it from emotional pedestals and without sufficient evidence. This may be pushed as propaganda, or it may come from deep cultural antisemitism… either way, I need to learn more.
I had intended to give you something more balanced and also some idea of the definitions of Zionism that are used to connect people and t push hate (9 definitions so far and– we can’t talk on common ground without agreed definitions, which doesn’t help at all. What I’ve shared today is an emotional rollercoaster, so I shall stop there. If anyone wants me to talk about definitions and how they help us find what we share and where we disagree on heartland matters, and why some of the defintions contribute so directly to violent hate, say so in the comments and that will be your post next week.
Small update: I have been thrown off Facebook (no reason given, nor any apparent way of sorting things out, though I’m still trying.). I am considering what I can do to keep in touch with everyone.
In case you need to contact me directly and I’m still (or forever) banned from FB, ping me in the comments, please, and when I work something out, I’ll let you know.
The only thing inevitable about so-called AI is that it’s creating a huge investment bubble that is going to crash. I don’t know if that’s going to bring down everything or just cause the typical problems caused by crashing of investment bubbles, but there will be a crash.
Nothing grows forever. Sometimes folks say that the only thing that grows forever is cancer, but of course cancer that continues unchecked kills its host.
Use of so-called AI in a multitude of fields is not inevitable. That’s just marketing hype. The whole field is built on hype, starting with the name, because it is in no way intelligent.
What they’re calling AI is software. It’s been developed by several different processes, but the one that most of us are familiar with comes from large language models. That’s what’s behind the various chatbots.
And what that software does is predict words or patterns or images based on all the stolen material that’s been packed into it. It is incapable of thinking or analyzing, which is why it frequently makes up citations or books or other references – it is programmed to recognize what those things look like but since it doesn’t know what they mean or why they’re important, it imitates them.
Which is to say, even when doing what it’s programmed to do, it’s unreliable at best.
There are forms of so-called AI that are useful in the hands of people who know how to use it as an effective tool. But it is not useful for many, maybe most, of the purposes for which it is being sold.
It is particularly not useful for writing or creating art because it has no capacity to think or bring anything new to the process.
I am moved to write all this because of the recent SFWA kerfuffle over whether any fiction produced with even a modicum of “AI” should be considered for awards. SFWA issued one set of rules that indicated that some uses might be OK for purposes of the Nebula awards, and then swiftly backtracked after a number of writers expressed their outrage on social media.
As part of all of this, a writer named Erin Underwood put an essay up on File 770 defending many uses of AI. Many other people have effectively criticized her arguments – Jason Sanford’s overview is an excellent one – so I won’t bother here even though I found her arguments appalling.
Rather I want to focus on the argument that we have to use this error-prone software because it’s part of the progress of tech and inevitable. Continue reading “Not Inevitable”…
In a New York operating room one day in October 2025, doctors made medical history by transplanting a genetically modified pig kidney into a living patient as part of a clinical trial. The kidney had been engineered to mimic human tissue and was grown in a pig, as an alternative to waiting around for a human organ donor who might never come. For decades, this idea lived at the edge of science fiction. Now it’s on the table, literally.
A decade ago, scientists were chasing a different solution. Instead of editing the genes of pigs to make their organs human-friendly, they tried to grow human organs – made entirely of human cells – inside pigs. But in 2015 the National Institutes of Health paused funding for that work to consider its ethical risks. The pause remains today.
As a bioethicist and philosopher who has spent years studying the ethics of using organs grown in animals – including serving on an NIH-funded national working group examining oversight for research on human-animal chimeras – I was perplexed by the decision. The ban assumed the danger was making pigs too human. Yet regulators now seem comfortable making humans a little more pig.
Why is it considered ethical to put pig organs in humans but not to grow human organs in pigs?
Urgent need drives xenotransplantation
It’s easy to overlook the desperation driving these experiments. More than 100,000 Americans are waiting for organ transplants. Demand overwhelms supply, and thousands die each year before one becomes available.
For decades, scientists have looked across species for help – from baboon hearts in the 1960s to genetically altered pigs today. The challenge has always been the immune system. The body treats cells it does not recognize as part of itself as invaders. As a result, it destroys them.
A recent case underscores this fragility. A man in New Hampshire received a gene-edited pig kidney in January 2025. Nine months later, it had to be removed because its function was declining. While this partial success gave scientists hope, it was also a reminder that rejection remains a central problem for transplanting organs across species, also known as xenotransplantation.
Decades of research have led to the first clinical trial of pig kidney transplants.
Researchers are attempting to work around transplant rejection by creating an organ the human body might tolerate, inserting a few human genes and deleting some pig ones. Still, recipients of these gene-edited pig organs need powerful drugs to suppress the immune system both during and long after the transplant procedure, and even this may not prevent rejection. Even human-to-human transplants require lifelong immunosuppressants.
That’s why another approach – growing organs from a patient’s own cells – looked promising. This involved disabling the genes that let pig embryos form a kidney and injecting human stem cells into the embryo to fill the gap where a kidney would be. As a result, the pig embryo would grow a kidney genetically matched to a future patient, theoretically eliminating the risk of rejection.
Cross-species organ growth was not a fantasy – it was a working proof of concept.
Ethics of creating organs in other species
The worries motivating the NIH ban in 2015 on inserting human stem cells into animal embryos did not come from concerns about scientific failure but rather from moral confusion.
Policymakers feared that human cells might spread through the animal’s body – even into its brain – and in so doing blur the line between human and animal. The NIH warned of possible “alterations of the animal’s cognitive state.” The Animal Legal Defense Fund, an animal advocacy organization, argued that if such chimeras gained humanlike awareness, they should be treated as human research subjects.
The worry centers on the possibility that an animal’s moral status – that is, the degree to which an entity’s interests matter morally and the level of protection it is owed – might change. Higher moral status requires better treatment because it comes with vulnerability to greater forms of harm.
Think of the harm caused by poking an animal that’s sentient compared to the harm caused by poking an animal that’s self-conscious. A sentient animal – that is, one capable of experiencing sensations such as pain or pleasure – would sense the pain and try to avoid it. In contrast, an animal that’s self-conscious – that is, one capable of reflecting on having those experiences – would not only sense the pain but grasp that it is itself the subject of that pain. The latter kind of harm is deeper, involving not just sensation but awareness.
Thus, the NIH’s concern is that if human cells migrate into an animal’s brain, they might introduce new forms of experience and suffering, thereby elevating its moral status.
How human do pigs need to be for them to be considered part of the human species? AP Photo/Shelby Lum
The flawed logic of the NIH ban
However, the reasoning behind the NIH’s ban is faulty. If certain cognitive capacities, such as self-consciousness, conferred higher moral status, then it follows that regulators would be equally concerned about inserting dolphin or primate cells into pigs as they are about inserting human cells. They are not.
In practice, the moral circle of beings whose interests matter is drawn not around self-consciousness but around species membership. Regulators protect all humans from harmful research because they are human, not because of their specific cognitive capacities such as the ability to feel pain, use language or engage in abstract reasoning. In fact, many people lack such capacities. Moral concern flows from that relationship, not from having a particular form of awareness. No research goal can justify violating the most basic interests of human beings.
If a pig embryo infused with human cells truly became something close enough to count as a member of the human species, then current research regulations would dictate it’s owed human-level regard. But the mere presence of human cells doesn’t make pigs humans.
The pigs engineered for kidney transplants already carry human genes, but they aren’t called half-human beings. When a person donates a kidney, the recipient doesn’t become part of the donor’s family. Yet current research policies treat a pig with a human kidney as if it might.
There may be good reasons to object to using animals as living organ factories, including welfare concerns. But the rationale behind the NIH ban that human cells could make pigs too human rests on a misunderstanding of what gives beings – and human beings in particular – moral standing.
This article was updated to correct the location and date of the first pig kidney transplant clinical trial.
So many posts and thoughts online talk about 2025 and what happened and what a good year it was. So many of my friends have written me cheerful season’s greetings saying “Happy Chanukah” after Chanukah is over (this happens every year) and hoping I had a really good Chanukah and… I’m Jewish, so of course I get these greetings and these thoughts. I’m Australian and it’s a hot summer and most people are very cheerful. I’m Jewish Australian and every single friend who sends me happy notes and telling me I am enjoying the season is ignoring the elephant in the room: antisemitism.
I only knew one person who was killed at Bondi. I know many people who were on that beach, however. I have family who live in Bondi. No-one expected me to be cheerful during the summer holidays that followed the massacre in Israel. Yet this year they stick to happy thoughts and tell me Chanukah is a time of cheer.
What is happening here?
First, Jewish pain in Australia doesn’t count for much, and Jewish problems in Australia are often pushed to the side. This is how Australia reached the events of December 14. The police are more willing to send officers to monitor protests than to send officers for a Jewish beach party when there are known threats against the party. While most Australians disagree with this, there are far too many who have said publicly these last two weeks that Jewish events should not take place in public and that Jews should handle every bit of risk ourselves.
This is familiar turf for bigots of most kinds. It’s pretty standard where there is race bigotry, class bigotry, bigotry due to skin colour, against new immigrants. It’s pretty nasty, whoever is told “It’s your fault, keep us out of it.” School bullies win when the class president says “Sort it out yourself.”
When the non-violent equivalent happened to me in the public service, I lost my career. “You can sort it out between yourselves,” my branch head told me. I couldn’t. Also, it took me far too long to realise that the work community that pranked me and left me out of things because I’m Jewish was part of a wider community that kept telling me that English was not my native language, and that both these things are part of a bigger picture that paints Jews as different and not people to support. Not all Australians… but enough Australians so that one of my friends went to twelve funerals in a week. And back then, we dealt with Molotov cocktails, not guns. Back then, no-one was hurt.
There is a wider context for this.
Jewish Australians have been around since 1788. One of the very first free settlers in Australia was Jewish. Her name was Roseanna or Rosanna. Her mother was Esther Abrahams, who was a very young convict. I am part of a colonialist-settler society and am one of the settlers. That country is Australia. Indigenous Australians are still fighting for equality and safety.
When I compare what happens on a daily basis to my Indigenous Australian friends and myself and my Jewish friends in the present (after the attempts by at genocide and ethnic cleansing in colonial Australia), it strikes me that an important difference between us historically is that Jews can ‘pass.’ This is why public Jewish events are so wrong for some: Jews don’t try to pass and are guilty of being visible. We’re seen. In public. As Jews. That’s why synagogues and Jewish schools and cars that announce “Happy Chanukah” have been targeted recently. Chanukah by the Beach was publicly Jewish. If we went into hiding, I’m told, we’d be fine.
Australia is developing new cultural structures and the prejudices and hate show what those structures are. Too many politicians (especially on the Left) and far, far too many people at the glittering end of the Arts are passive bigots. They are led by active bigots. Those active bigots spoke up loudly and publicly against the shooting, but almost none of them got in touch with Jewish colleagues to check we were OK. I say this as one of their Jewish colleagues. None of the Greens I know and only a small number of my writer and artist friends got in touch with me. Other Australians did. Non-Australian friends did.
Every friend who contacted me is a treasure. Everyone who did not, has made it clear who they are. In some circles, there’s public virtue but not private.
This is shaping Australia: some writers can have books in bookshops, some artists can get grants. Too much Jewishness or the wrong kind of Jewishness and you are, regretfully, pushed to the end of a queue. I’ve been told I’m privileged and White and should step aside and let others who have suffered discrimination take my place in this event or that conversation. This has been going on for about 15 years. More historical context.
It’s not obvious hatred. These people are otherwise good and charming and often witty. They just don’t want Jew cooties and, in the not wanting, create new layers to Australian society to protect themselves from said Jew cooties. It’s fine to have a Jewish friend, but you should not engage in private conversation with them when bad things happen. If a Jew is banned from certain circles, you don’t protest it.
Most Jews are currently lesser beings and our company can contaminate. We aren’t the only ones, but I experience the Jewish side every day, so the antisemitism is something I can talk about. I speak from personal experience.
It began, years ago, with Jewish writers and historians having to be the Ginger Rogers in our society. We had to do everything everyone else did, but better, on subjects others approved of, as if we were dancing backwards and in heels.
This Gentlemen’s Agreement approach to Jewish Australians has been around since Federation. And earlier, but Federation and the infamous White Australia Policy contain clear issues that apply today. Under White Australia, only special Jews were White. Sir Isaac Isaacs, the first Australian Governor-General, was Honorary White. Sir John Monash, who was rather important in World War I… was not. The official war correspondent (Mr Bean) did all he could to make sure Monash didn’t get the job. Even today, military and ex-military will (for the most part) treat Jewish Australians like any other Australian, due to Monash. But my electorate was named after Bean, and the far left and the far right now both shout that Jews need to be deported. The left is too busy hating Israel to come to the aid of Jewish Australians, and I am mostly banned from conversations with politically active old friends and colleagues because I don’t pass their purity tests. (I don’t pass because I refuse to do them, to be fair.)
These Australians are not even close to the whole of Australia. This is a limited number of Australians in a limited number of power blocks. If they weren’t building on the old hates that led – in Germany – to Holocaust, I wouldn’t be so worried. If Chanukah by the Beach had not been one of the worst mass murders in this country in the last fifty years, I would not be so worried.
While I can see where the passive bigotry is leading, it would take 10,000 words to explain. How about just two observations?
The first, is that it’s like frogs in a saucepan. The Left and the Literati and the politicians presenting that passive bigotry are enjoying a bath in the saucepan and we’re telling them the fire has been lit underneath it. Because we’re Jewish, some tell us “You’re the boy who cried wolf” and ignore what we say. These folks also ignored our concerns right up to the moment the shooters started to fire at Bondi.
The second is, if you factor in the history of antisemitism DownUnder, and if you add the history of treatment of others who’ve dealt with bigotry, right now, it looks like we’re heading for a society structured by bigotry.
This is canary in coalmine stuff. Every time antisemitism is rampant here, historically, we develop concerns about people from this background or that: non-English speakers, recent migrants, those from other religions, women. Indigenous Australians have never been let off that particular hook, and the Indigenous Australians I know and who I listen to are divided between those who support Jew-hate and those who fight alongside the Jewish community. I’m pretty sure (since I know some of the hate-supporters) that they have no idea they are antisemites. At least three I know believe they’re supporting people on the other side of the world by putting us in our place.
Some bigots think they’re doing the right thing. So did the guys who designed White Australia, which is the last time we had a divide this big and this dangerous (skipping World War II, because I am reaching my limits on the subject of hate, and these last few weeks have reminded me of how my European family disappeared). World War I and all the Australian soldiers (especially those who came from the various demeaned groups) broke that to pieces. World War I didn’t get rid of it, though. The social structure still hurt Indigenous Australians in appalling ways… and that aspect didn’t even begin to be addressed until the 1960s. It still hurts far too many.
One of the reasons the antisemitism brings down the whole of Australia: it’s never been only about Jew cooties.
Many Australians have always fought the hate and the fear and the cooties. Some Indigenous Australians are so much more capable than I am, and work for their own communities and for others who hurt. One of my heroes is William Cooper, a Yorta Yorta elder, who, when he and his family and friends were all not-quite-citizens marched to the German consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht and let Germany know what they were doing to their Jews was evil.
If you read his biography, you get a sense of what he had to handle in an almost-impossible everyday and how extraordinary he was… and why it’s so problematic that Australia is returning to this particular outlook.
I see so many otherwise intelligent people saying “The shooting was over two weeks ago – let’s spend the next 20 minutes on another crisis” when this crisis is linked to the other they then describe. I hear others saying “It’s the Jews’ fault,” and yet others explaining, “Jews are liars and shot themselves at Bondi. Look to Mossad.” There is passive hate, active hate, aggressive hate – every single bit of hate that’s shared, adds to the Jew cooties and changes the country.
This is why I couldn’t post last week. Getting through this is a full-time job because we don’t have enough words for it because those who have words are part of the problem. It’s a very Australian antisemitism. Like Australian Christmasses, it happens upside down to the rest of the world and is connected to the lives of so many people on our continent. I’m scared for myself and my family and my Jewish friends, but I’m also worried for Australia. My metaphors are still inept, but when a society changes this much it’s really, really bad.
Every year in December, Aqueduct Press invites its authors to share the books, movies, music, plays, and assorted related things that moved them in 2025. A new blog post is put up each day until they run out, usually some time in January.
One of the best things about these lists is that they’re not restricted to work that came out in 2025, which means they can and do include a lot of older books, etc.
Mine went up last Saturday. It’s all books because I seem to be doing more reading than anything else these days even if I did venture out to hear Ruthie Foster in concert.
I recommend reading them all and making a list of things you want to check out!
This is the Japanese edition. I am reading the English translation, not this version.
One of the (many) reasons to browse bookstores is that you stumble across books that you never heard of and would not have known to look for because it would never have occurred to you that you wanted to read a book about that particular thing until you stumbled across it.
Right now my morning book is one that fits that description. It’s called The Fall of Language in the Age of English, by Japanese writer Minae Mizumura (translated by Mari Yoshihara and Juliet Winters Carpenter). I’m sure I bought it at East Bay Booksellers, because they sell a lot of small press and academic books and are a very likely place to run across the books you didn’t know you wanted until you picked them up.
I’m not 100% sure I bought it there because I’ve had it awhile and just got around to reading it. (Yes, I do that all the time. Doesn’t everybody?) It is a perfect book for my daily reading practice, which requires books that are best read a few pages at a time because they give you something to chew on.
(I should note that this daily practice of reading for about 15 minutes in the morning is far from the only reading I do. It is in a way of reading akin to meditation, which is very different from diving into the world of a novel.)
This book is about writing in national languages (and what constitutes a national language) when so much of the world’s written work is written and published in English, which is a universal language in much the same way that Latin was a few centuries back. But it makes its points slowly, clearly discussing important points along the way.
The whole book is fascinating, but here’s the concept that got to me on a personal and gut level as a writer:
The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one’s bidding.
This, I think, is the essence of being a writer, the combination of having something you want to convey – be it a story, a philosophical approach, an understanding of the world – and struggling to find the right words for expressing it.
(The term “fine literature” makes me, as a science fiction writer, uneasy, since it is often used to exclude many pieces of writing I consider very fine indeed, but I define it more broadly as work that aspires to more than basic communication.)
This is in no way the same as learning how to apply the rules of grammar, though understanding them is one of the underpinnings of writing. It does, however, require a deep and abiding familiarity with the written language you use.
It was as I was making the cake that I realized I do have some very favorite kitchen tools: my instant-read thermometer, my kitchen scale, my decorating turntable, and my cake lifter. The utility of the instant-read thermometer is pretty obvious: no matter if you’re making fudge or rib roast, being able to know what the temperature of the object is can be crucial. When I bake bread I can be misled as to the doneness by the golden color of the loaf, but my instant-read thermometer will tell me the truth about the interior. If I’m making filling for a cake, the instant read thermometer will keep me from turning the it into something stodgy and unlovely. I use my instant read thermometer daily.
