Category: nonfiction

Two Hundred Opinions

personby Gillian Polack
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Let me borrow from the earlier posts to remind you that this is post #3 in an exploration of the various ways people currently use the words Zionism and Zionist. Two years ago, I checked with around 200 people and discovered around eight definitions. This is a perfectly normal number of definitions for a single word. In big dictionaries many words have six to eight definitions. This made them easy to work with. These definitions of Zionism fell into three groups. To understand where someone was coming from culturally or politically, all I had to do two years ago was find which group of definitions they used. Technically, those groups establish diacultural traits on the subject: who shares what with whom shows who knows whom and lives in similar worlds.

Right now, there are a lot more definitions than eight. Language is an ever-changing glory (as is diaculture), and when things come into the public gaze and when there are groups actively trying to erase standard definitions and add new ones, shifts will happen quite quickly. When those changes happen in many countries and in many different cultural and political groups, those changes create a really fuzzy world that’s difficult to navigate.

There is just one more post after this, although if it’s very long, it may be in more than one part. In that post, I will introduce some of the current definitions of Zionism as I saw the word used … until the moment I was blocked by so many bigots that I lost access to their language. Tomorrow’s post will be a snapshot of the use of the word from about December 2025 to the end of January 2026. Establishing a snapshot of key terms is one of the approaches to culture that I use as an historian. When I need to analyse a text (medieval or modern or something else entirely) I often make a private snapshot of the use of key words and phases. This gives me a grounding for understanding the views that are being expressed. It also helps me understand the path language takes after that snapshot. Thank my historian self, then, for leading you astray, and not my novelist self.

I borrowed from my own work, because two books urgently need editing and a short story must be written and there is an essay for Patreon and… I have insufficient time to write this post from the beginning.

 

1. Jewish definitions

There are two general classes of straightforward Jewish definitions of Zionism. I’ve included the religious Christian view here because it didn’t come up in my query and it should have. It really deserves its own sub-heading with several categories, but I didn’t have any descriptions of it back then, so I will just note how it fits into a Jewish definition. I’ve left out the Naturei Karta and other extreme variants, because I’m not convinced that one can call it Zionism when there is no nation contemplated unless we’re in Messianic times. Both the Christian and the fundamentalist Jewish are therefore unsatisfactory – I’m sorry.

a) Herzl’s Zionism – an historical artefact, that died in 1948 with the advent of Israel. This was the least common definition of those from my original query. It was mentioned by only two people of the almost two hundred who gave me their thoughts. Those two people explained that now Israel is in existence, there is no need for Zionism. Herzl’s aim was achieved, end of story. The proper use of this definition, one of them clarified, is in histories.

b) support for Israel as a country. This is the most common use of the word and expresses simple support or complex of the existence of Israel as a modern country, and most of those who said “I am Zionist” as part of their definition of Zionism add the proviso that they reserved the right to criticise the actions of the Israeli government and to express their concern about problematic Israeli individuals or groups. I asked for examples. Those people considered problematic were often connected to Netanyahu and Ben-Gvir, or to the West Bank settlers.

Most of those who expressed this view to me were American, Canadian, British, Australian or Israeli, and they represented a wide range of Jewish practice and culture. The Jewish religious practice and culture all link back to Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael. How anyone uses the definitions (because there is variance in their use) depends very much on the relationship between Am, Eretz, and Medinat in their mind. It’s not a definition so much as the expression of a relationship that shows how modern Israel (Medinat Yisrael) fits in with the religious expressions that relate to the land (Eretz Yisrael) and, of course, the Jewish people (Am Yisrael). This complex set of relationships are open to almost infinite variation because we like talking things through rather than dictating belief. They’re also open to an enormous amount of variation because of the complexity of Jewish culture. Even a snapshot of one moment in a Jewish explanation will reflect variants that come from rabbis spoken to, books read, opinions of family and friends and so forth. This is why most of the cute non-Jewish diagrams showing what Zionism is or may be do not actually reflect a great deal of how Jews describe it. Simple words are used to explain this approach to Zionism. The simple words mask a wonderfully fruitful discourse.

The Christian use of it varies according to the nature of the Christian belief. Whether it’s passionate loyalty to a country, belief that the country has the right to exist, or belief that the end of days requires it to exist…it all comes down to Israel existing.

 

2. Russian-origin definitions

The second group of definitions has a fairly straightforward origin. Russia prior to 1917 dealt with its Jews a bit differently to, say Germany in the 1930s. It had extraordinary tough conscription for Jewish boys (my ancestor, Abraham Polack was one) and it also derived from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which itself plagiarised works that were about entirely different subjects. The Protocols have not been out of print since 1903, as far as I know, and wherever this set of definitions of Zionism is used, it harks back to the Protocols. This is intended and carefully crafted prejudice.

The Russian Empire fell, but their rather nasty explanation of Zionism didn’t.

Soviet Russia used the base the Russian Empire gave. It claimed it didn’t hate Jews, just Zionists and any Jew who saw Am Yisrael or anything related. So many Jews lost their religion and their culture and links to family elsewhere in the world… but were permitted to live.

In this set of definitions, Zionism was linked to Western Imperialism, just as now, it’s linked to Colonialism. This has been called ‘sanitised antisemitism’ – a lot of the hate in Australia right now is yet another version of sanitised antisemitism. Good Jews/Bad Jews, purity statements that mean you’re worthy of remaining in a group – these are two traits of sanitised antisemitism.

Even two years ago, this group of definitions of Zionism was a set. Most people thought they were saying the same thing, but, really, they agreed on the bigotry in the heart of the definitions and not on the definitions themselves. In each of these definitions, Zionists are many, many different things, all of which define Jews as ‘other.’ Most of them are used when people want to share hate for Jews without being seen as antisemites. This brings the use of ‘Zionist’ into play: it’s often used as a deniable replacement for ‘Jew.’ This manifests as “I am not a bigot. I was talking about Zionists, not Jews.”

How you tell the difference is to look at what else the person who uses ‘Zionist’ negatively says. If there are no links to Israel and heaps of links to personal actions or to antisemitic tropes, the person is using ‘Zionist’ but talking about Jews.

While the fervour and the almost religious belief in the accuracy of these definitions are consistent, the actual qualities applied to Zionists varied in 2024. They began from the literature of hate and then found their own paths to express that hate.

In 2025 many of its users do not share their understanding of qualities and explain the word quite vaguely. I was even told “You already know what I’m talking about” when I ask for clarification. Jews are supposed to be marvellously intuitive, I suspect, and also, the person using the word has not considered how to explain it. This explains the passion behind the word ‘Zionism.’ It has the force of emotion without the qualifications of nuance.

Many users, when they talk about matters Jewish and about matters Israeli, follow the classic form of antisemitism. Many don’t. The mix of evil qualities attributed to Zionists changes from person to person. Again, this is passion without clarity. The variants on this usually link with the Russian historical definitions of Zionism. The original of these was the one derived from anti-Jewish propaganda.

 

3. Pure hate

‘Zionism’ according to these people is a word imbued with passion and truth and almost a religious fervour. That fervour contains no love. It is flooded with hate and distrust. Zionists are liars and want to own the world. Zionists are propaganda experts and manipulative and violent.

This group has two categories.

a) It took me a while to realise that, in 2024, when I asked for definitions of Zionism, a number of people gave me a description of an evil individual compiled from their own fears and fears folded into stereotyping and hate. They looked in a mirror and saw hate and said, “These people who are not like me are the cause of that hate because they personally embody the qualities I hate.” These individuals will then apply that definition to anyone Jew who does not follow a route that will demonstrate that they are one of the rare Good Jews. This route often entails expressing active hate for all things Israeli and distrust of Jews in general.

b) Zionism as an evil cult, practising the most evil thing of the moment. Genocide and paedophilia are used a lot right now, for instance. I also encounter worshipping Satan and drinking the blood of children. (By ‘encounter,’ I mean that I have been accused of all these things.) This is irrational hate transformed into the darkest fantasy the person can imagine.

Some of those doing the imagining do a simple translation between their invention and Judaism. Those accusing claim to have read about Judaism and to know it better than me, but when I told them to take their evidence of me as a murderer to the police or when I asked for a definition of Zionism that explains what they’re telling me, they mostly disappeared like snow in summer. Just one person in 2024/5 asked me why I was asking and I linked him to Jewish history sites and… I’ve not seen him hate since. Some of it, then, is lack of education about Judaism, or is education only from antisemites.

The big lesson I learned from exploring these views of Zionism, is that we can’t actually converse until we’re certain we’re on the same page, but that’s another story.

Next up, I’ll talk about current views. That has to wait until Monday, I’m afraid, because I have over 450 pages to edit and the more I can do this weekend, the easier next week will be.

So Much Book

personby Madeleine Robins
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I am reading as a judge for the World Fantasy Awards. It’s… a lot. Even with five judges, and an initial pass where every work gets read by two of us… it’s a very lot. If you can’t find me, look under the pile of words.

It’s made me think about my reading habits when I was a teenager. My father used to accuse me of sucking down books like a vacuum cleaner, and wondered if I even noticed what I was reading. In fact, I did notice: to this day there are passages from books I read at 15 that I could probably recite. And some of those books were not great–they just offered me something I, as a 15-year-old reader, wanted. I read every SF book I could find on the drugstore spinner racks; all the Regency romances, ditto, and the gothic romances (the term meant something different then than it appears to mean now). I was not reading the best literature, as it was defined by the NY Times Book Review and my mother: I was consuming books like Fritos. Some of them had nutritional value; some didn’t.

So now I’m reading to find the fantasy and horror from 2025 that is not only nutritious but is working at a Michelin star level. That’s a pretty high bar to clear. I don’t think most writers intend to write “Frito” books–I certainly didn’t when I wrote my first Regency romance (I wanted to write a book that would give me something of the same feeling I had when I read Georgette Heyer). I think many writers just want to tell themselves and the rest of the world a story, just as many home cooks just want to make a good pot roast and feed the family. Let me note that good home made pot roast is hard to beat. But my brief, as a judge, is to find the Best. To do that I have to keep my eye on my prejudices  (and I’ll note: everyone has prejudices. The trick is to know it, and get a handle on what they are.)

For instance: I sort of wish that the books (well over 200 so far, and there are some I know haven’t arrived yet) came without covers, because I have to keep an eye on how the cover of a book colors my approach to the book itself. There have been a few books where the covers visually promised sophistication and depth that the text did not deliver. Likewise, there have been a couple of books that had frankly uninspiring covers, but were themselves well worth reading. Years ago I trafficked covers for Tor Books, which meant I saw all the artwork before it was put into covers. My father was a designer. My brother is a painter. I have opinions, but I’m putting them into a box for now.

I have a tendency to prefer stand-alone books (or books in a series which are discrete episodes rather than “continued on the next rock” contributions to a very long saga) in part because the further along in a series you are, the more backstory you have to fill in for a new reader (and a writer who doesn’t accept that some readers will come in in media res is just–no, you can’t demand that they go back and find the first three books of your series). So books that come in with the label “Book Three in the Artichokes of Dread Saga” or what have you make me worried.

On the other hand, I hope to be surprised.

That’s really the secret to this process. I long to be surprised and delighted. And I am confident I will be.

 

Three Jewish concepts

personby Gillian Polack
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I promised some folks on Facebook an explanation of the various ways people currently use the words Zionism and Zionist. Two years ago, I checked with around 200 people and discovered around eight definitions. This is a perfectly normal number. Look up the Oxford English Dictionary (its biggest and most detailed versions) and so many words have six to eight definitions. Those definitions fell into three groups. To understand where someone was coming from, it was simply a matter of finding out which definition they related to.

Now, there are a lot more. Language is an ever-changing glory, and when things come into the public gaze and when there are groups actively trying to bring down standard definitions shifts will happen quite quickly. When they happen in many countries and in many different cultural and political groups, those changes create a really fuzzy world that’s difficult to navigate.

I’ll do the best I can to explain what I see, and I hope it helps. I’ll begin (in this post) with 3 Jewish ideas that inform various Jewish views of what Zionism is. These ideas that make it easier for most Jews to determine their relationship with their own definitions of Zionism.

In the next post, I’ll describe the three groups of definitions, from two years ago to lay a base for understanding why everything is so apparently chaotic right now and conversations are stymied.

After that, in my final post, I will introduce some of the current definitions of Zionism as I see the word used. Think of the last section as a snapshot of a moment in time. The changes in meaning are that turbulent. Understanding now, however, helps understand future uses of the words. This is (if you’re curious) one of the approaches to culture that I use as an historian. When I need to analyse a text (medieval or modern or something else entirely) I often make a private snapshot of the use of key words and phases. This gives me a grounding for understanding the views that are being expressed. It also helps me understand the path language takes after that snapshot. Thank my historian self, then, for leading you astray, and not my novelist self.

 

Part One: Jewish concepts

The three concepts I want to introduce here are Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael. Not all Jews know them as words, but they hold so much of our everyday together. Our relationship to them shapes so much of our lives, whether we make aliyah or are proud and happy with being Diaspora Jews is probably the second most important one in this context. The most important one… I’ll get to.

Just to make it clear, these are my views of those concepts right now, in relation to the current wave of antisemitism. Jews like to discuss these things and I’d be very happy to see other views in your comments on this post.

Am Yisrael

This is the “O Israel” in our most famous prayer. It’s us, the people (‘Am’), anywhere and in any state. It takes an awful lot to not be part of Am Yisrael. We’ve been in Diaspora and out of Diaspora and in Eretz Yisrael on and off since the Babylonian Empire. This makes it a strong and complex construct that most antisemites rail against but do not understand.

Am Yisrael is the chief reason why so many people were happy to see Herzog when he visited Australia. It had a lot to do with Israel for some Australian Jews, and others were happy to see him for quite different reasons.

If you have a very big family and it’s spread everywhere, it’s meaningful when a senior family member visits to support you in an impossible time. And a senior family member from Eretz Yisrael and Medinat Yisrael (both!) shows us that we are loved and that we will get through this dark time. It wasn’t a religious visit, but the visit was connected, profoundly, to Judaism.

How do we express Am Yisrael everyday? Well, there are the prayers. Many prayers talk about all of us as part of our own nation. Some people call it tribal, but it’s rather more complicated than that, because it’s informed by cultural practice and religious practice and the assumption that the enxt Jew you meet might be a long lost relative.

One element of the cultural side is the welcome most Jews give other Jews. We check if we’re related, if we have ancestors in common or religious practice or recipes in common (so often we exchange recipes as part of this) or if we know each other in some other way.

Jewish culture is often about making connections, and not all of them are within the synagogue. Rabbinical Judaism only goes back 2000 years, after all, and Am Yisrael goes back to our origin, those twelve tribes, those ancient people. We still connect and we still care. We do it in a hundred thousand different ways, but the Shema, with its mention of ‘Am Yisrael’ is still our most famous prayer.

Other Jews will argue with me. This is also a part of that culture. Why? Because the argument and discussion is help connect us and grow our learning and understanding. Some Jews have to agree with everything and some don’t, but Rabbinical Judaism is all about discourse. It’s another form of that connection.

Eretz Yisrael

Eretz Yisrael (Eretz literally means land) is the spiritual aspect of that piece of land everyone’s fighting about. It’s part of the Covenant.

I wish people would stop telling me about the covenant without knowing what it is. It’s a “Yes, we’re going to behave and be good people and learn lots” kind of promise, not “We are holy and special and love ourselves to pieces” kind. It’s also not about going to Heaven or Hell. Judaism has quite different notions of these tings to Christianity.

Eretz Yisrael is best known by Jews who are religious (even slightly) and is part of a conversation that began thousands of years ago. We know this because texts that date back to the time of David and Solomon are also part of that conversation. Most of our religious texts and interpretative texts in some way are part of that conversation. What does that conversation do? It gives us a bunch of cultural tools that express our relationship to the land.

I have spoken with Indigenous Australians about this and we have overlap in some of that culture, especially in the sense sense of country and being custodian. I have spoken to people from the various colonies of Britain (yes, I spoke to myself as part of this) and the US doesn’t have this sense, but First Nations in North America do.

Most Commonwealth countries used to have a different aspect of this sense of land to which we belong: the notion that Britain is ‘home.’ I wrote an essay on that once, and if you’re interested, I can share it here one day. Not on the Jewish side, but on how some Commonwealth folks used to see Britain as “Home’ and their own country as ‘home.’ That’s changed and mostly not true, but it was true for fifty years after Britain released its hold on most of its Empire.

The way Jews maintain the memory of that relationship with a particular piece of land is rather wonderful. The more observant a Jew is, the more connected they are to Eretz Yisrael. Even anti-Zionist Jews who are religious have that connection.

Why is this so? That connection flows through our prayers, as I’ve said, but also through our calendar. We can tell you planting times and harvest times and even our leap year was instituted to align the calendar with the sun because the needs of the land are more important than neatness of numbers. We don’t learn the current year of the land from our calendar. We know the land cycle as it was the last time when that region had Jewish rule. There are so many interesting things inside our calendar – you can trace much of Jewish history by it. Right now, though, the fact that any Jew who uses the traditional calendar knows the farm cycle and lives it every single year means that we are connected to Eretz Yisrael. And it still works. I checked with a chazan (synagogue cantor) friend and he says that the prayer for rain comes after a dry period and the prayer is said and lo, the rains come. If you go to synagogue for the right festival, you know when the rain comes in Israel.

Medinat Yisrael

Medinat Yisrael doesn’t need a long explanation. It is, quite simply, Israel the modern country.

Next time… the groups of definitions and where they come from.

Baggage

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m about to embark on a big essay. As a prequel to it, however, I want to introduce you to a book.

A-many years ago, when I was young and charming, I edited an Australian anthology called Baggage. It’s still in print, published by Wildside in the US. The Australian original was taken out of print when the collapse of Borders in Australia imploded the publisher. Every piece Eneit Press published was special (maybe excepting my novel – I cannot judge my own writing) and the loss of the press shut many doors for readers.

Why is Baggage so important to me today? I asked writers for stories of science fiction or fantasy that discussed the cultural baggage we all carry. I had an initial list of the perfect people to make the best anthology. It had two parts, since I couldn’t ask everyone at once. I emailed the writers on the first part of my initial first (obviously) and all but one of them agreed. The rest of the wonderful authors I had on my list don’t even know they were on my list, which I find sad. I still want to read stories by them. Every single story I was given by those writers is a treasure and thought-provoking and none of them overlap and they created such a fine anthology that I’ve been nervous about trying another.

These are not Jewish stories. For those most part, these are not Jewish writers. Yet the collection is one that will help anyone trying to understand about the current wave of antisemitism. How? It demonstrates, through story, some of the massive differences in the cultural baggage we each bear. What we carry, how we carry it, how much of a burden it can be and how different people see it quite, quite differently. It achieves all this through very well told story. Which means, if you don’t want to jump straight into theory and definitions and cultural analysis, you don’t have to. You can read some of the best short stories I’ve ever edited.

Then I’ll bring in the heavy stuff, either here or on my own blog. In this difficult few years, however, we don’t always need to confront. Sometimes we can simply read and enjoy and find our own paths from what we read. This is why I’m giving you a prologue, which is Baggage.

 

Things Happen

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late!

This is because Australia is antisemitism central again and I’ve been dealing. You don’t need yet another post on Australia’s problems, so let me tell you the story of a book.

Some years ago, I wrote a novel. A publisher signed it up but said “This should be a duology.” I rewrote the first book and added the sequel. Then they went bust.

Shortly after, another publisher fell in love with the duology but said, “I want the rest of the story.” I did the rewrite and the last volume and it became a trilogy. The COVID hit and the publisher ran into so much trouble. I’m still with them for other books, but we agreed I should find a new publisher for the trilogy.

A US publisher has taken on the first volume. If it sells well, then the trilogy will finally emerge. I so hope it sells well. I’ve been quiet about it because this book was having so much bad luck. Not as much bad luck as my cursed novel, but still, much bad luck.

However, we are finally in a “Watch this space” moment. The cover artist has Ideas and the editor is getting back to me very soon.

When there is an official announcement, I promise to share it. In the meantime, it’s about time I talked about my other published work. I might do a series of posts, to remind myself of novels written and books published.

That gives you two reasons to watch this space.

Yes, Things Were Different Back Then

personby Madeleine Robins
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A few years ago, an editor I very much admire said something that made my eyes cross.  I’m paraphrasing here, because I’m too lazy to go look the exact quote, but, in answer to a neophyte writer who wanted to know if she had to do a whole lot of research in order to write historical fiction or historical fantasy, the editor said (paraphrasing, right?): you have to do some, but people are basically people, no matter when/where you set them.

Eyes crossing right now.

The world has changed since I was a young human.  I know this because every time I watch an older movie with my daughters there will be moments when they look at me, dumbfounded.  “Was it really like that when you were young?” they ask (about women wearing gloves to leave the house, or men condescending to female lawyers, sexual double standards, really weird hairdos), and I have to say, well, yes it was.  The far past is exotic, but we think we know what it was like because we’ve seen movies and read books and stuff like that.  But the near past, which we think we know because we were there (for some part of it, anyway) is just as exotic.

Case in point: a few years ago I was given the 1945 edition of Etiquette, by Emily Post.  This book was published during WW II; women were working jobs vacated by men who went off to war; the world had gone through sixteen kinds of sea change since the end of the last world war (voting women! talking pictures! radio! sulfa drugs and penicillin just on the verge of being mass-produced!) and we think we know what it was like, how people behaved, what they thought and aspired to.

Then you read Etiquette and have to revise your thinking. Mrs. Post’s books may have harkened back to a more formal time, but she was still the arbiter of social usage.  Etiquette covers the waterfront, social usage-wise: exhaustive and exhausting information on weddings and advice on the protocol of engagements (“Correctly, the mother, father, sisters,brothers, aunts and cousins of the bridegeroom-to-be should go at once and call upon the bride and her family.”   I’m imagining the terror as this army descends upon the bride’s hapless family, brandishing visiting cards.  Also, Mrs. Post points out that “THE ENGAGEMENT RING IS NOT ESSENTIAL TO THE VALIDITY OF THE BETROTHAL.”  Caps hers).  She’s got the scoop on christenings and, speaking to the modern woman, she includes the wording for an announcement of adoption (“Mrs. and Mrs. Nuhome have the happiness to announce the adoption of Mary, aged thirteen months.”).

The section on funerals and mourning is fabulous (in the enlightened year of 1945 a widow need only stay in deep mourning for a year, with another year of second mourning–grays, I suppose–to follow.  And as always, men get off easier.  “Although the etiquette is less exacting for a man than for a woman, a widower should not be seen at a dance or any large and solely social entertainment for from six to eight months; a son from four to six months; a brother for three–at least! The length of time a father stays in mourning for a child is from four to eight months.”  A child under eight, however, should never be put into black, no matter what Charles Dickens says).  It’s revelatory to anyone who has been to a funeral in the last thirty years; I’ve never been to one where everyone wore black, have you?

And Mrs. Post talks about servants.  The staff for a large house (the Butler is more important than the Housekeeper, but just barely), includes the butler and housekeeper, footmen, chauffeur, cook, kitchen maids, house maids, lady’s maid, valet, tutor, nursery maid–I feel like I’ve wandered into a Lord Peter Wimsey mystery!  Advice is given to those who have persistent trouble with the help.  To her credit, Mrs. Post stresses rigorous firmness and fairness with the help; no taking your bad mood out on your social inferiors, that’s tacky.  And she talks to the woman with only one maid in a small apartment as well: the maid will of course live in, and you should make her room as pleasant as possible, and allow her a decent afternoon off once a week….

And on it goes.  I could quote you passages (“Business Women in Unconventional Situations: Certain jobs–particularly those of responsibility leading to the heights of success–carry with them the paradoxical responsibility of upholding a moral code of unassailable integrity while smashing to bits all rules of old-fashioned propriety!”) until your eyes glaze over.  Mine won’t; this is like catnip to me, a window into another time and another way of thinking.  Emily Post was not writing for the wealthy who had been wealthy all their lives–they knew this stuff.  She was writing for the people who aspired to be wealthy, or upper middle class, or middle class.  The people who wanted to know how they were supposed to be living their lives.

I would say to my editor friend: yes, if you want to create a different place, you have to do enough research to understand how the place shapes the beliefs and the behaviors, and vice versa.  If you’re looking at the near past, Emily Post is not a bad place to start.

On Handling Hate with Fairy Tales

personby Gillian Polack
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Yesterday was Tu B’Shvat, which I have a very bad tendency to call the birthday of trees. I’ve been talking about its history all over the place because, right now, I really want bigots to know that they don’t actually understand Judaism or most Jews. How I’m doing this is by being a bit more publicly myself. I was brought up traditionally for Australian Modern Orthodox, which is nothing at all like traditionally for many other branches of Judaism. My Australian accent is completely and utterly Jewish… because we don’t have our own dialect in Australia.

This is not the first time I’ve confused people by existing and, in the process, let them discover Judaism and Jews. I still get conversations from last time. Last time I had to deal with Molotov cocktails and the like and, because it was a less-harsh moment, I wrote gentle articles and shared recipes and began writing Jewish fantasy novels. The novels are still in print. The ones that directly emerged from that flurry of hate were The Wizardry of Jewish Women and The Time of the Ghosts.

I’m attaching one of the articles here. It was first published in Fables and Reflections in 2005. I didn’t feel like 20+ years ago was an easier time, but it was. I’ve learned a lot more about dealing with hate, but also a lot more about fairy tales and Jewishness since I wrote this piece.

I’ve included it to show you how I translated my life into something others could understand, to help them diminish hate. This kind of writing worked back then because there wasn’t such a fury of hate. I wish life were that simple now. Back then there wasn’t nearly as much work by haters to create a whole new language of hate, using old language and old hate.

I like this essay. It’s my mind in a time capsule from 20 years ago. I want to thank Lily for publishing it, but we’ve lost track of each other.

Jewish Fairy Tales

Part One

There are as many interpretations of Jewish fairy tales and folk stories as there are Jews. There are as many interpretations of fairy stories and folk stories as there are people in the world. This is mine.

Ask an Australian Jewish child about their favourite fairy tale. You might be told the story of Yankel and his donkey from a popular children’s book or an anecdote from Fiddler on the Roof. If you’re very lucky, you might get a Yiddish story. Yiddish is the language of the Jews of Eastern Europe, so the Yiddish story might have had its roots anywhere from a village in the middle of nowhere, to a large centre such as Bialystock or Warsaw. Asking that child for a tale may not produce evidence of Bialystocker roots, because you’re just as likely to be informed about Snow White or Puss in Boots or the Little Mermaid: Australian Jews are a tiny minority group, and Australian Jewish children live as part of a wider society and share their tales with that wider society.

I was brought up on all the usual fare – Mother Goose and Aladdin, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Bo Beep, the Three Billy Goats Gruff. Some of these were tales of wonder written by adults for children, like those told by Hans Christian Andersen; some of them were spun for an elegant court like the traceries of Madame d’Aulnoy; and some of them were collected as part of an enthusiasm to preserve oral tradition, like the stories penned by the Brothers Grimm. Some were bowdlerized and some were brutal. Some rang clear as a bell and some were tangled and confused. I heard them through TV and books, through recitations by friends, through bad playground jokes.

Sometimes the stories gained a Jewish twist. Cinderella became Cinder-Esther one Purim* when the story of the ill-done-by girl and her Prince Charming was fretworked into the tale of Esther and transformed into a satirical musical. Mostly, however, we heard the same tales as others – we shared our fairy stories the way we shared most other things in our culture. “Cindereller dressed in yeller” is far more realistically part of my tradition than Cinder-Esther.

When I was a pre-teen I discovered Ginzburg’s magisterial The Legends of the Jews. This book is a compilation of many of the older stories that have become part of the tapestry of our religion.

Reading Ginzburg led me to the astonishing discovery that the most boring murmurs in synagogue during services actually hid fun stuff: the Torah** became a source of tales. It turned out I actually knew the tales, too: Moses and the Exodus, Adam and Eve. And then I found a wealth of tales spun around these core stories. Like fanfiction, the core became a stable centre for a kaleidoscope of stories.

Micha Joseph Bin Gorion collected and translated a volume of these in Mimekor Yisrael, which mocks me from my bookshelf whenever I want to write a short story. It has tales ranging from Genesis to eighteenth century Poland, from human dramas to beast fables. “Everything has already been written,” these tales announce to me, very firmly. “All good tales were told a thousand, two thousand years before you were born.”

Sometimes the tales in Mimekor Yisrael are good stories well told and leave me exhausted with envy: sometimes they’re so moral and drenched in mind patterns that are long gone that I look at them and wonder if I should be writing fairy stories, as Jane Yolen does, and preserve the way we think now as these tales preserve past thoughts. These tales are the old Jewish teaching. They are the fairy tales that make the Law achievable and understandable.

Discovering all this was a miracle for me, but not of great import to anyone else.

Ginzburg alerted me to a mystery. My almost-teen self was a bit puzzled. How were so many key Jewish tales rolled into mainstream culture with no-one remarking? I was faced with Jacob and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and “Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho”. Our tales had the same status as Gilbert and Sullivan in my life and about as much Jewish content.

As a child, I wanted a little sticker that said, “This story started off Jewish.” It would have given me a positive Jewish identity outside the home, rather than an identity which grew in the schoolyard from responding to comments that I was a “dirty Jew”, or the unfunniness of Jewish jokes, or to accusations of having personally killed Jesus. I had to keep my awareness of the Jewish origins of popular culture quiet. I had to minimise damage.

As an adult I found out I had been missing the wood for the trees. Stories from the Five Books of Moses led the way to many more tales in the overwhelmingly huge written version of our oral law, the Talmud. It appeared that Jewish law was a fabric woven from lore – tales told us how to be and led us into deep thought about life and about religion.

This illumination leached some of the happiness from stories I had thought of as charming folk tales. As they gained more Jewishness in my mind, they lost their folk status. It was like the first time I went to a class taught by an Ultra-Orthodox rabbi. This rabbi encouraged us through using stories to join the far right of Jewish belief. I found my mind losing the joy in those tales through trying to understand the law.

Bin Gorion wrote down those teaching stories as “Classic Jewish Folktales”. I thought back to the Brothers Grimm and Madame d’Aulnoy and rebelled against the traditional rabbinical teaching method.

It’s only recently that I have realised that the tales in Torah and Talmud and the teaching tales from Torah and Talmud can be both folk and fable. These stories have survived partly because they encourage learning.

Fairy stories are key to Jewish survival. This disturbed me as a teenager, but really appeals to me as an adult.

I have to admit, having learned that lesson I gave up on the legal side of Judaism: my interests are less elevated.

Jewish history is fraught with forgetfulness. We remember the murders and the pogroms and the persecutions and the expulsions with the greatest sorrow and regret. Each time we suffer, our folk culture bends and twists to help us survive. We lose some folk culture, we gain some – we get through.

We lost most of the folk stories of the Medieval English and French Jews when they were expelled from their homelands. The people mostly survived. They went on to create new lives. Their culture changed so much, however, that it’s hard to recognise today.

I started to ponder: what tales of wonder did my family lose when some of my ancestors fled to Australia? I belong to mainstream Australia; the family arrived between the 1850s and 1918. The folkstuff my Bialystocker grandfather taught me were the first words of the Volga Boat Song and a few steps of Cossack dancing. That song and those dance steps were as close to Judaism as “Cindereller dressed in yeller”.

The Moldavian, Bielarus and other Polish branches of the family taught me even less. The only parts of me that have fairy tales to match my origins are the English and the German. My folk patchwork is patchy.

My life since that emotional enlightenment has become a very, very slow voyage of discovery.

Learning about lost fairylands carries particular burdens and limits. It’s like a fairytale where the heroine is forbidden from doing this or that, with no apparent reason behind the forbidding. I reclaim recipes by asking friends, acquaintances and even strangers, but I find it emotionally trying to ask the same friends, acquaintances and strangers for folk stories to replenish my faded past.

Instead, I look at books. My inner self doesn’t forbid me books.

My favourite collections of folk traditions – the ones I’ve brought into my writing and into my life – all have strong links with the Middle Ages. My intellectual reasoning is that I’m more likely to understand the traditions I discover if they fit something I know. My historian self helps darn the holes in the patchwork left by my refugee family.

The stories in Part Two instantly touched my soul and connected me to that Jewish past that had been replaced by “Cindereller dressed in yeller” and Christmas tales. These are the ones that, for me, at this precise moment, need remembering.

Part Two:

Dream of a lament. A mournful melody slowly threading its way through your mind and haunting your life.

This lament was my introduction to the folk stories of the Sephardim. The Sephardim are the descendants of Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492.

The song of Ximena is the cry of a wronged woman. Ximena, standing before the king, calls for justice. The most powerful line of melody is where she sings “Justisia, señor, justisia.”

It’s not a tale of Judaism, since the characters are all Christian. It’s based on a true story: El Cid’s wife was Ximena, and, as far as I know, he did indeed kill her father. El Cid was the great epic hero of Spain, a Medieval giant. The language, however, is not Spanish. It’s Ladino, the language of Jews of Spanish descent in every country except Spain. Spanish Jews were expelled in 1492, the same year

that Columbus went on his epic voyage. 1492 was the end of one world and the beginning of another.

That Ximena’s plaint has lasted hundreds of years of Jewish life outside Spain is a mystery. It’s a tune that haunts on all levels – one of the most beautiful melodies imaginable, one of the great historical love stories, and a tale of non-Jews preserved in Spanish Jewish culture through generations and generations and generations away from its land of origin. I had to investigate the Spanish Jewish tradition.

It’s a vast folk tradition. Many folk stories and fairy stories have survived, some set to music, some not. El Cid is not the only Medieval epic hero who appears – Roland does also. My favourite collections are by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, because, like me, he was a Medievalist who didn’t limit himself to the Middle Ages. He’s one of the leading scholars in bringing this tradition to the outside world. In his collection and the collections of Samuel Armistead I discovered Jewish folk stories in song and ballad.

Ximena had a happy ending, of sorts. She married El Cid.

And these folk stories have a happy ending, of sorts, too. They’re spun into song, so we listen to them and even hum along. Most of us don’t know that we’re singing the folk tales of the High Middle Ages in Spain.

These folk tales entrance me, but they’re Sephardi, the tales of Old Spain. Most of me is Ashkenaz, from the rest of Europe.

Ashkenazim also have our bits of our Medieval heritage preserved in fairy stories. Some speculative fiction writers have written them into short fiction, some teachers use them as educational tools.

I read them in translation and wonder that the relationship between my favourite volume and the seventeenth century is the same as my own relationship with the twentieth and twenty-first. Jews lived in a wider cultural world and the folk stories partly reflect our particular tradition and partly link to that outside world. Even stories with medieval origins show the outside world being seamlessly lined to the inner one.

One story says it all.

A famous Medieval tale is that of Bisclavret. Marie de France told it in the twelfth century. Marie is renowned for her courtly lais – elegant poems. She claimed she told the stories of the Bretons. When I read Bisclavret I feel the darkness of the forests of Brittany as her werewolf-knight is trapped in his wolf form by his faithless wife.

The Jewish Publication Society has printed two little volumes, edited and translated by Moses Gaster. They’re called the “Ma’aseh Book.” The Ma’aseh Book contains the very best of the fairy stories alongside the most educational rabbinical tales. We read of the spectacular beauty of Rabbi Johanan, who shines with light when he uncovers his arm during a visit to a sick friend. We hear the story of the Jewish Pope. We’re told how Rabbi Samuel Hasid saved the Jews of Speyer from yet another outbreak of antisemitism, and we find out the precise reason why you have to untie a bunch of vegetables before eating them.

For me the gem is story number 228, in volume two: “The rabbi whose wife turned him into a werewolf.” Bisclavret in Jewish clothes.

The rabbi had renown and wealth and enormous education and lived in the land of Uz. His wife, however, was bad tempered. The story doesn’t actually call her a bitch, but, considering her husband became a werewolf, it may be the right description.

When the rabbi lost his wealth, he and his students travelled and lived on the generosity of others. All of this is very Jewish. It has nothing in common with Marie de France.

The rabbi – at a stage in his travels when things feel desperate – finds a magic ring and so becomes wealthy again. He comes home, rejoicing. His wife wants to know where he found his money.

From there the story unfolds as a fairy story should: he tells her and she uses the ring against him. He runs to the forest for safety and she bars the door to all his students. Travellers cannot stay and the poor are not fed. She is mean and stingy where a good Jew ought to be generous and giving.

A knight decides to show his prowess in killing the wolf, but is prevented by a charcoal burner. Third time this happens is the charm and the knight tells the wolf he will not kill him. The wolfrabbi promptly embarrasses the knight by acting just like a lapdog and eventually, with the help of the king and a large chunk of deception, the magic ring is stolen from the evil wife and the wolf is returned to full rabbinical glory. The wife is turned into a donkey and proves no nicer as an ass than as a human being.

The knightly and court sections of this tale are pure Marie and show just how strongly the Jewish fairy tales belong with other fairy tales from the same places and times. The tale as a whole though, has its own character, far removed from tales told in the Medieval courts of England and France: instead of adultery, an unhealthy amount of misogynism.

Most of the tales in the Ma’aseh Book are for men or by men, and only occasionally are they comfortable reading for a modern woman. The eternal teenager in me will visit Rabbi Johanan’s tomb one day and mourn the loss of such great male beauty, but the even more eternal feminist in me never ever wants to meet that werewolf rabbi. I keep wondering what the rabbi did to his wife to make her so angry and if some of his amazing virtue and generosity had not been demonstrated at her expense. After all, she was left behind penniless when he spent all their money and took himself off to live in the houses of others.

So in rediscovering some of my own cultural inheritance, I find I don’t like it all. I adore the high romance of Ximena, and feel that, however evil the wife was, a divorce would have shown the rabbi’s nobility better than him giving her tit for tat.

Which brings me full circle. I won’t refuse the ambivalence of the Ma’ase Book, or the sweet melodies of Sepharad. They’re part of who I am: they are Jewish fairy tales.

On reflection, though, I’ll keep Snow White and Cinderella as well. And Yankel and his donkey, the stories of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Snow White, Puss in Boots, the Little

Mermaid and Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. I nearly forgot Mother Goose and Aladdin, Little Red Riding Hood, Little Bo Beep, the Three Billy Goats Gruff: I want them all.

* Purim, Feast of Esther, round about March each year

** Torah – the Five Books of Moses, central to Judaism

*** raised section in a synagogue, the place where the Torah is read out to the congregation

This article first appeared in Fables & Reflections #7, April 2005 pp.56-61, ed. Lily Chrywenstrom. It has been edited to make it more web-readable.

Miss Vickers Does Not Regret

personby Madeleine Robins
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This week got away from me (or I thought it was last week, or something. In these times, who knows?). So here is a post from a few years ago, from my website. I still love Ann Vickers.

I love the work of Sinclair Lewis.  Even though I know better. Even when his prose is didactic and braying and he can’t make up his mind who he most disdains: country folk, city folk, religious folk, doctors, lawyers, academics, politicians. Ever since high school I have felt like I needed to apologize, maybe even join a 12-step program, for my fascination with Lewis. And yet fascinated I am.

Why apologize? Lewis is respectable, albeit not much in fashion these days. He gave us the terms “Main Street” and “Babbit.” He won a Nobel Prize for Literature. He was passionate and passionately observant.  He had a sharp ear for dialect, for the self-congratulating boosterism of early 20th century America, for the moral compromises that even his most heroic characters (I’m thinking of Martin Arrowsmith in particular) find themselves making. And his portrait of America in the toils of a fascist take over, It Can’t Happen Here, is dated, folksy, and scary as hell. Every time I have found myself thinking of an incoming politician I distrust, “Hey, it’s only a few years, what damage can he really do?” It Can’t Happen Hereswims before my eyes.

Sinclair Lewis wrote Main Street and Babbit and Elmer Gantry and Arrowsmith, all of which I love. But my favorite of his books is one that no one I know has ever heard of: Ann Vickers. It’s not that Ann is Lewis’s only heroine. Carol Kennicott of Main Street was his first; and he’s got some remarkable women in Elmer Gantryand Arrowsmith (I love Martin Arrowsmith’s wife Leora; I don’t think he really deserved her, and I’m not sure Lewis did either). But Ann Vickers…

It’s a book that follows Ann from tomboy to Sunday School teacher, to college, to work; she stumbles into a career that works for her, becomes successful–and on the way manages to make mistakes, build a whole life for herself, love the wrong men. Ann is smart but not brilliant; stubborn and strong but not unbreakable; she’s got a powerful moral center but doesn’t always have the strength or direction to change things, but when she does, she raises Hell. And she doesn’t have a plan, not really–she acts sometimes before she considers, and she sometimes wanders onto the easiest course. I found Ann Vickers immensely comforting when I first found it, because when I was in college I didn’t have a clue what I was going to do with my life, and Ann Vickers suggested that I’d figure it out in time.

Reviewers loathed Ann Vickers when it was published in 1933.  Not only does Ann have an affair with a soldier, but she becomes pregnant (and the guy drops her…did I say she loves the wrong men?).  And has an abortion, performed by a doctor who essentially says I hate abortion, but hate even more what the society we live in would do to Ann as an unmarried mother.  The abortion has an effect on Ann–she imagines the child she might have had, even (rather revoltingly) names her “Pride”–but it doesn’t stop her.  She isn’t punished.  Consider how that went over in 1933.  She goes on to be successful–very successful–in her career.  She has an affair with a married man, marries herself, has a child…and at a point when it seems like her world is falling apart (the man she marries is a manipulative creep, the man she loves has been arrested for corruption which might spill over into her work) she finds the strength we’ve seen in her all along.

She doesn’t apologize.  She’s a tremendously human person.  Where Carol Kennicott of Main Street ends the book at a standoff with her husband and her life in the tiny city of Gopher Prairie, the Ann Vickers Lewis leaves us with at the end of the book is heroic–The Woman, as Lewis styles her. Lewis can get a little icky when he’s moved or lyrical–he’s much better when he’s angry, pointing out hypocrisy.  But I can forgive his style for love of Ann.

Golden threads and weirdness and Australia.

personby Gillian Polack
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I haven’t forgotten that I was going to introduce tsedakah last week. Stuff happens. And then more stuff happens. Much of the stuff has links to matters Jewish.

First we had the Bondi murders, and then a major literary conference fell to bits largely because of internal clashes about ethics. These internal clashes became a national mess. And now, Parliament’s back early and we had so many kind words about those lost at Bondi, and a national day of mourning later in the week and I think the whole country is confused. The latest political opinion poll suggests this. A far right party is coming out of the shadows and making one of the two largest parties in the country scared. The far left has most of its old vote, but not all. And our prime minister has lost most of his personal support: if Labor want a safe election next time, they might need to change their leadership. Or not. Labor is stubborn and full of factions.

All this pales compared with what’s happening in the Middle East, in Iran, in the US, and even in the UK. But it’s our mess, and we must handle it. One thing I would like to see us return to is civil society. Discussions and analyses rather than street marches.

Why? The big Sydney Harbour Bridge march last year had a lot of wonderful people doing what they thought was the right thing. Marching alongside them in support of Gazans were the Bondi shooters, and the rather antisemitic writer who upset the applecart in Adelaide and led to one of the most important writers’ festivals in the country being cancelled. Marching alongside this writer was almost everyone I’ve seen who is loudly and opinionatedly antisemitic. Many of these individuals were grouped near a guy holding a picture of Khomeini. I don’t know if it was a photo op, or if all these people actually work together, but the cluster of them in the most famous photo of the march indicates a cluster of problems.

It’s going to be difficult to roll back the performative and to return to the Aussie politics I used to know. I’m not connected in the way I used to be. I was pushed out of the behind-the-scenes stuff through being too Jewish and too ill. Australia admires health. It also has this really stupid habit of sweeping people who belong but should not be heard under the front stairs.

Why am I thinking of front stairs?

I’m back in the Middle Ages this week and ought to be talking about foodways, but have been focused on trying to understand our current very strange politics. What happens when the Middle Ages is there and I try to pretend it isn’t? Literary references happen, most frequently.

The boy under the stairs was Saint Alexis being holy. I’m probably under the stairs, but being sarcastic. The sarcasm means that old friends and new sneak in to join me, and we watch the goings on and are surprised at how people we know to be intelligent get caught up in performance and leave a goodly portion of their intellect behind.

Tsedekah is much nicer, but must wait until life is less exciting.

Just for the record, I could have gone to Parliament House and heard all the sorrowful speeches today. Instead, I watched the second last season of Stranger Things and I did some work and filled in all kinds of questionnaires. I decided it was not wise to hear those who ought to have sorted out the hate when it was straightforward being terribly sorry at all the murders. All those people should still be alive. Synagogues and mosques should not be burning. And all the time we spend trying to find that bolted horse could have been spent in doing so many things that Australia needed.

It will be Purim soon and gifts to two charities are traditional for this festival. I’ve chosen two that are important to me. It’s early, but all this thought led me to think what I could do. One charity gives reading to children. Those children are very rural and living on the land of their ancestors. They do so much better when they have books that concern themselves and are written by people they know in the language they speak. The other is for OzHarvest, which helped me out when I was under the poverty line. It rescues food and makes sure that food reaches people who don’t have the money to buy it.

Maybe around Purim will be an appropriate time to explain why the books are more Jewish as a gift than the food. Not more Jewish. I’m explaining badly. Ranked more highly as a type of gift. You’ll have to wait until March for the explanation.

Tomorrow is research-for-writing. I am interviewing a group of Jewish teenagers for a novel. A rather special novel, and one that I was not expecting to write. It’s not a guaranteed publication, but it’s a guaranteed “I’d love to see this if you’d consider writing it.” It’s the kind of book I’ve been saying we need for the last 20 years, one where Jewish Australia is shown as the driver of a story about Jewish Australians. The US has many YA novels that do just this for Jewish readers, but Australia, far less so.

I’m also finishing a short story where the King of Demons meets a very English vampire in Sydney. I have other fiction happening, including a novel emerging later in the year, but this week everything is Jewish.

The more hate there is, the more I write Jewish stories and Jewish history. Hate has reinforced my Jewishness ever since I was a child. When I was accused of eating baby’s blood in unleavened bread (in primary school), I taught the accusers basic kashruth. These are the type of stories I always tell.

What I don’t always tell is the reason I learned the Grace After Meals (the long one, all in Hebrew). I was so annoyed with several bigots and I decided I would say it every single lunchtime until the haters stopped bugging me. I kept saying it even after they stopped bugging me. Also they would have stopped bugging me anyhow, but I didn’t know this until it happened.

They didn’t stop because I could babble in Hebrew. They stopped because I became the high school student everyone else needed to ask questions of, especially in the lead up to exams. I could teach and I remembered everything teachers’ said and I understood it all. This gave me a place to belong, a role that was so very much mine. After I put the siddur away, someone would sit next to me and ask “Gillian, do you remember the calculus from yesterday?” or, a couple of years later, “Gillian, tell me about this piece of Chaucer.”

What most Jewish Australians have been pushed out of are those places we belong in the wider community. Since Australia is so secular, this is rather more important than it looks. Changing definitions, not listening to our voices, not publishing our books, telling us we have to leave our home country because we’re Jewish, accusing us of all kinds of impossible crimes… this all smudges together and makes an everyday that’s very difficult to handle.

Every single Australian organisation that still accepts me as Gillian (right now, my professional Medieval one, the Tolkien folks, and the Perth science fiction convention) gives me a golden thread to hold and to guide me through this labyrinth. Every single one that cuts off that thread (more than one writers’ organisation), leaves me stumbling. I find my balance within Jewish Australian culture, because that’s the place where my identity is not questioned.

As has been said so many times about Australia, we’re a weird mob. This is just another facet of that weirdness.

Summer

personby Gillian Polack
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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.