Tag: antisemitism

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.

More Context

personby Gillian Polack
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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

So what is the Jewish community thinking right now? So many different things, but this article by Adam Slonim in The Australian, shared by the president of the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia sums some of it: https://www.facebook.com/lynda.benmenashe/posts/pfbid0S4dFspFfPFJLSinvEewo17cq1pJQNMhnQZ3qLaLci35Qj8ehwcB8skKuHWoM7Bffl?__cft__[0]=AZYKbgPaM44VBpGF3-7O3tHeBoRT__5gkXWnjvplaV9F7Hrx_z9Xqy80jfFTeg-g64wTEiH6KLvvOKD71r6YQJpQWKzlaWruEbYwGgdEpX1yK1afdv_QmsObJ0_dAlkf770&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

And this is some of what it boils down to https://www.facebook.com/adam.klein.7399/ which links to this https://www.commentary.org/articles/eli-lake/asajew-brief-history/

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.

Meanwhile, in Australia’s disconcerting summer…

personby Gillian Polack
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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.

To a Good and Sweet Year (a reflection)

personby Gillian Polack
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First and most importantly, I want to wish you all a good and sweet year. Tonight (Monday at dusk), you see, is my new year. It’s the year 5786.

I’ll be relieved when 5785 is over. It was full of silences and antisemitism. The people who retained me as a friend and as a co-worker also kept me going and helped me find safer paths to travel. I have also made new friends, many who are walking the same fragile road as me. Some of my old friends were silent and will hopefully re-emerge in my life when the hate dissipates (I can hope this because I’ve seen it happen before), some accuse me of things they know I am not guilty of: most just stepped away quietly, without explaining or caring. I am branded as someone to hate. So are most Jews. Ruptured (the book I spoke about last week) is still the best description of how this affects the lives of Jewish Australian women. It’s also broken some of the silences. I have several friends back. They don’t hate, but they had no idea what to ask me or how to ask me or even how to talk everyday, without the filter of hate that too much of Australia accepts. This is the real reason I hope to get some friends back. As more people find words without having to broach difficult subjects, they will realise that I’m still here and that I miss them.

I’ve walked away from some people, myself. Those who accuse and blame. Those who don’t see everyone as human and are part of jeering mobs. Those who agree with the public rhetoric of hate. It’s far, far easier to talk to left-leaning Palestinian activists than to these people. I hate walking away from them: I believe that understanding is the best way out of this shambolic time. Finding solutions that meet the needs of more than one group of people. Dumping slogans. This was what I and my friend did in the women’s movement, over twenty years ago, but too many of those I worked with lean into the slogans right now, which means… they’re not finding ways of making society functional for all of us, they’re sowing distrust and spreading hate.

There is good news. I’m not nearly as alone as I could have been. People are, fundamentally, good. I don’t get a lot of the income from writing I did, due to closing doors, and I only get to give talks or workshops maybe three times in a year, and I don’t get to teach at all (I so miss teaching!) but I can go to professional meetings (in fact technically I’m at one right now, as I write, but it’s a break time) and give academic papers and even keep friends in fandom.

I write for a shifted audience: some of my readers from always, but more Jewish readers. I’m also writing more Jewishly, because I am still that child who, when someone says “You’re a failure” I respond by being the person who annoys them. In this case, being Jewish is the failure-aspect, so I write more Jewishness into my fiction. And my history. I’ve spent all the time since I finished the doctorate sorting out how I got Jewish history badly wrong because I, too, was listening to formulae. I’ve finished the book on it and am looking for publishers. And I get to talk about it (sometimes): I just gave a talk to my local Jewish community on the food culture and the history of Jews in Northern France in the Middle Ages. I only made one of my Rashi jokes, which I felt disconsolate about at the time, but they want me back, so I will be able to make more.

I finished a PhD and wrote a book in 5785. I dealt with far too many bigoted idiots and I analysed the words they used and discovered the sources of their rhetoric. I learned how to de-prickle a prickly pear from a Palestinian activist and we talked about the (Jewish – they gave me references!) origins of the Medjool date. Learning that it’s possible to refrain from bigotry when one is being attacked and is displaced and when life is terrifying insecure gave me back some of my trust.

This activist is looking for the same thing I am: ways of talking and finding solutions. Those who shout and scream in Australia are not the people they trust. I’ve heard them (time and time again) talk about how the marchers in the West have made things worse. This does not make me happy. Good people causing more hurt is not something that will ever make me happy.

What will 5786 be like? It’s a transition year. We’re in a time of enormous cultural shift, worldwide. Enormous cultural shift inevitably brings the enormous idiots out of the woodwork. They’re a sign, really, that we’re moving into something different.

For me, I’m hoping issues with publishers will be solved and that the delayed books start to appear. I want to finish the book that was on hold because world events meant they needed new directions. And I want to finish that vampire novel. In a perfect year, I get to do more teaching, I get more of my public voice back, and I can take up the offer a friend made to get me to Melbourne libraries safely.

Every time I was in Melbourne this last year, the library day didn’t happen because of protesters outside it. This also happened the year before last. I would probably be safe, friends who marched informed me. They weren’t at the receiving end of the hate, however, and they’re not Jewish.

That’s one of the oddities about being Jewish. Historically, hate spewed at us can begin with words but it often leads to death. The Holocaust was the extreme version, but I am 7/8 a descendant of refugees from well before then, and I have no European family left at all. My family origins are from all over Europe and yet the one thing I’m guaranteed when I travel to anywhere in Europe is that I will not meet relatives. I do not think that marchers will kill me. They might hurt me, though, or shout at me, or push me around. All these things have been done to people I know. It’s not all the marchers. Most of them don’t know about the violence committed 50 metres away. I’m developing ways of identifying the ones who, in the 60s, might have been among the group who sent the letter bomb that crippled a cousin, or in the 70s, sent evil white powders to small Jewish organisations in regional Australia.

We don’t talk about Australia as an antisemitic country, but it has always had that streak. I’ve experienced trickles of hate since primary school, and then those trickles become a stream and right now that stream is flooding its banks, growing into a river of muck. None of this is new. What is new is the realisation that most of those who hate could have avoided hating.

What do I plan for 5786? To fight hate, as I always have. And to fight hating idiots, useful or otherwise. I shall avoid those who judge me for being Jewish or for not thinking exactly as they think, and enjoy the company of everyone who looks at those around them and see human beings. I shall write, and make bad jokes, and deal with my frail body.

This is one thing I discovered in 5785: it is possible to create a good year from a bad one with enough work and enough capacity to deal with the bad. 5786 will be a good and sweet year. For anyone who wants to understand why this is such a daring statement, read Ruptured. Having something I can point to and say, “Read this” reduces difficult moments and some of the misunderstandings and gives that much more energy that I can spend on making that year happen.

May you all have a good and sweet year… even if it takes some work.

Unintended Consequences, or How We Fail to Hear About Good Books

personby Gillian Polack
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Today I’m thinking about how we hear about writers. This is not only for general reading, but also for academic writing. The second, in this case, leads to the first.

One of the subjects academics ask me about or various bods want me to write about is Australian science fiction and fantasy. Until a few years ago I knew when any book was coming out and knew most of the writers and was exceptionally useful. Right now, I’m only useful on some subjects.

I can talk about writers until about 2015, and often write about writers before 1900. An article of mine on Tasma-of-the-many-names was just published in Aurealis, an Australian speculative fiction magazine. I can write about Jewish Australian writers and, in fact, do. I can also write (and do) about the links between Australian writing and the writing of other countries. Also, many books that incorporate history are still part of my terrain because, first and foremost, I’m an ethnohistorian.

Recently, I stopped writing about most contemporary Australian writers. Some I still know a bunch about, but for many I know only the names of their works. Given I have so much else to write about and don’t have the physical capacity to go chasing, I now avoid mentioning certain types of writers. I still consult, behind the scenes, when international scholars want to flesh out their knowledge, but I have to tell them that, “I know about this person and their work, but I don’t know where it belongs.” I no longer introduce Irish fans to the latest in Australian speculative fiction: we talk about other things.

Why did this change?

There are three reasons.

When I let the wider world know that I was not well, two groups of local writers dumped me from their social circles, almost instantly. This marches alongside with when my eyesight started failing and I was no longer permitted to be an award judge. It was apparently too difficult to give me lifts or to make sure that a dinner was reasonably COVID-safe or to find a type of text my eyes could read without making them worse.

These decisions by others makes it much harder for me to find out more about writing from Australia, and especially from Canberra and the Canberra region. Given how much the world of publishing is changing and how we hear about something is often somewhat random, this has significant consequences. If I can’t answer questions at an academic conference, very few of the scholars asking questions look further. They’re also overworked and under stress: this is not an easy decade for any of us.

I don’t hear about work now by these groups of writers or those who are close to them until after the work is published. I would have to put in extra work for each and every published book to find out that it has been published and if a book is in my scholarly ballpark. I have chronic fatigue, five books to finish, and I am no longer paid to write articles about groups of books. I miss being a pro-blogger and a literary magazine person, because they gave me paid time to chase things. My paid time is firmly Medieval right now, and does not include modern SFF unless I’m writing something for Aurealis.

Prior to my exclusion, chat told me what was going on and I could chase it and… I knew so much without much effort. My social circles, in fact, were what initially pushed me into writing about contemporary speculative fiction online and in magazines and giving papers at conferences. One of the symptoms of my illnesses is chronic fatigue: I will take that extra work, but only when I can. I’ve had this symptom since my 20s, but it’s only after I confessed to it that it changed what I knew by changing who would accept me in their social circles.

Only a very few non-Australian academics write about Australian speculative fiction. I know many of them. My refocus on subjects that are achievable without make me more ill affects how these writers are seen outside Canberra. It is not intentional discrimination on my part, but if I don’t have time or energy to chase up something new that touches on my areas of expertise I then write on subjects that are just as interesting to my readers, but that don’t push me beyond my capacity. Eustace the Monk is a case in point. I’ve now been asked by a number of people about Eustace, and used the same core research for each inquiry. This enables me to have a full life, despite the illness.

Second, when I was excluded from a particular science fiction convention, the writers who consulted with me there lost access to me. And me, I was no longer in a position to hear about their work while they were thinking about it, because they no longer asked me questions or did my workshops. Work by those writers has to wait, the way work by most other writers waits, for me to get around to it. Since I was first working on a dissertation and now on non-fiction books, and also write my novels, the wait is long.

The first and second reasons added together affect one group of writers in particular. When scholars and fan organisers ask me about most Canberra authors, I tell them what I know, but what I know is no longer insider-knowledge for most writers. I’m not the only one, as local academic jobs in the Humanities are few and far between. Scholarly work about Australian speculative fiction is likely to mention writers’ names in passing than to look at their work closely or to teach it at university. Those who were part of my earlier studies are still getting articles written about them or even being tagged for (paid) academic stuff as a long-term result of that work. I am not doing the research or running academic programmes: I am merely one of the half dozen people who can be asked casually about the subject. That ‘merely’ has consequences for how much attention given to some writers who are probably very deserving of scholarly work and being taught at university. Some writers still get attention, but most writers won’t be seen. This only affects a group of universities, but there are very few universities in the world that teach Australian speculative fiction as a subject. Other courses that include Australian writers will only include the extraordinary,  and most of our fiction will be passed over.

The third reason, of course, is that I’m Jewish. I am no longer included on lists of writers to ask about this or that, because Jew cooties may be infectious.

So many other writers locally have no idea of my work at this point, much less my research. I joke that I’m better known in Germany than in Australia, which is not entirely true. I’m better known in some parts of Germany than in some parts of Australia. I’ve gone from being an Ambassador of Reading for the country, to being left off lists as a writer. This, again, reduces who I see and who I can recommend to others. It has, in fact, a bigger impact that the other two reasons combined. Jew cooties would not be a problem in the writing world if there had been a flurry of activity to replace the Jewish writers and publicists and editors and more. There has not been. We’re seeing an increasing numbers of holes in communication in both the writing world and in academia, and even in bookshop events, simply because of individuals who are too Jewish and whose work has not been replaced.

This is worse in the US than Australia. In Australia it’s my kind of work that’s missing. That’s too big to examine here. Maybe another day.

This disadvantages those who are not leaving me out of things, because I won’t write the general introduction to a field I am not on top of. The result right now? An introductory article I was going to write for an academic journal is not even going to be suggested. Someone else will have to write it.

When we play games with people’s lives, the person whose life is targeted is not the only victim. As a Jewish writer, my book sales are down by 75%. As a Jewish/chronically ill academic, the book sales of those I would have written about are also diminished.

The writing world is complex. Hate and exclusion do not affect just the target: they change what books we know about and what writers we want to read. My recent life is an example this.

 

Update: The chrnoic illnesses have ruled my week and so I put this up unedited. If you read it before 14 August, note that it is now edited! And tagged.

Lateness

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.

In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.

In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.

The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.

What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.

We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.

Farewell to Eden

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.

My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry.  Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.

Changes

personby Gillian Polack
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I’m back from my daring adventure in Perth and Adelaide. I discovered – to my great happiness – that antisemitism in Australia is far more closely targeted than it looks. The bigotry in the media and on the Left surrounded me where I live and so I was inundated and so were many people I know. That inundation is targeted, not at me, but at anyone Jewish. I happen to be local to it and know too many people who share those politics. This is not me, personally (though a part of it is also me, personally) but most Jewish in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra. Sydney and Melbourne have the largest Jewish population in the country, and that has been very precisely targeted with hate, but Canberra? It’s where the politics happen and the media mocks. I’m mostly collateral damage. That’s the good news. The other good news is that, outside Canberra, the science fiction community has a normal mix of politics and does not carry hate. The Arts, however, does carry hate. More and more I mix with other Jewish writers and editors because they don’t demand I hate myself.  There are many writers and industry professionals who do not make those demands, but they leave me alone because I’m either politically perilous because of my upbringing or they simply don’t want to worry about it. “Jew cooties” strike again.

The moral of this story is that we can be trapped in a fishbowl where haters surround us. It’s only a fishbowl. It’s not even a whole city. Most non-Jews in Canberra want to tell me how awful Israel is and inform me about their views on genocide. They don’t want to talk about my end of things, not my murdered cousin, not everyone I know caught up in the war (Israeli and Palestinian) and most certainly not how alone I’ve been in Canberra, because they don’t want to reach out to me as friends. This is the problem I’m facing. Not even our “I talk to the Jewish community” Senator has sorted out how this affects local Jews and that we are the ones forced to explain ourselves every day and remind others that we’re still human.

I’m very glad that this is specific to certain circles in Canberra, even as it hurts to be dumped and deserted and hated. I now have ten days when I rediscovered that I hurt, but am still me, and that I have more friends than I knew and (if I can get past the hate) even have a life. I was less ill when I didn’t have to reach out and hope that the person I emailed wouldn’t come back to me with a demand that I denounce whatever (that day) they wanted me to denounce. And I have chats with taxi drivers to sustain me.

I have been saying for a while that the antisemitism is part of a wider problem of not seeing people for their actual cultures and religions. Jew-hate is a symptom of a wider disease. I was (locally) silenced and left out of things because I am wrong because I’m Jewish and Gillian (some people dislike me, and I may not enjoy this, but when it’s a personal thing it’s not the same thing as bigotry at all) and could see how so many people translate ‘Jewish’ into “Zio’ and ‘person who murders’ and other excitingly false tags and stories. Every time they think along these lines, it’s as if a slab of historical understanding is wiped from their brain, by choice.

I could also see that Muslims in Australia are mostly assumed to be Palestinian Australian (the actions of the certain Pakistani Australian senator do not help with this, at all). So many people assumed that there was a single Muslim voice and vote, when Muslim Australians are… Australian. We are such an independent mob. Why should Muslims not think for themselves? In fact, they did, and voted in a bunch of ways during the election. The media, being its current slow self, did not pick up on this. It also did not realise that so many Australians belong to other religions. The taxi drivers were Hindu, but from quite different parts of India. In Canberra, I’m more likely to run into a Sikh or Coptic Christian, but I have Hindu friends here. The only religion numerous enough to change an election outcome is Christianity. Australia is closer to a secular country than other Christian countries, but it’s still Christian. I lie to explain that the Lord’s Pray opens Parliament and that our ruler is also the ruler of the Church of England, but the truth is that, everyday, Christmas and Easter are times the country stops. Many atheist Australians still live the Christian year. They don’t do it in a religious manner, but they will eat pancakes on Shrove Tuesday and see Christmas Day as a day on which no-one should work.

What does all this mean?

I think we need to reconsider Australia as a country. We should look at the hateful targeting of minorities (Indigeous Australians have suffered and still suffer what Jewish Australians are currently enduring, to give the most obvious example) and not accept the media and the Left as arbitrators of our lives.  In my perfect world, the majority I discovered when I broke out of my goldfish bowl will know to reach out to people like me (my friend Anna did, which is why I was able to safely travel) and connect us again with a safer world. This connection can be done with coffee locally, or a chat, or a movie, or a walk in the park. It’s an acknowledgement that our lives matter and that we don’t have to self-hate in order to be allowed to live. Simple things with radical consequences.

There is so much shouting right now. For every shout, I think we need ten instances of community building. That’s what I’m doing right now. I’m talking to other Jews who have become isolated and scared and bringing them into my suddenly-much-safer place. I’m writing fiction and essays that promote safe paths for people, and affirmation of cultural complexity. I’m still spending an hour a day analysing the rest-of-world, because it’s still not safe, but I’m taking the second hour I used to analyse and using that to analyse from a more productive and positive direction. I’m going to finish books and get them into the world, because that’s another path to reducing hate.

Finding publishers is the tough bit right now. Not all publishers are antisemitic, nor even half of them, but there are other crises happening and Jew cooties mean that many prefer works by someone other than me. Many, but not all – I need to find those who want my novels and non-fiction. Some of this is already happening.

A friend reminded me of a song that tells a story of how big change happened here, in Australia, when we were in a place that we thought we could never get out of. I was not one of the victims then. I was on the side doing the hurting and had no idea that I was part of something that awful. It wasn’t anything I intentionally did, it’s that I didn’t know that it was on me to reach out and be part of change. Vincent Lingiari and his friends and colleagues spearheaded that change when I was in the early part of primary school. Most of my life, then, has been spent seeing what changes can be made when we see people as themselves. A pop song helped and the use of the melody by an insurance company didn’t help at all, so I’m not sure how much today’s children know of what began when I was a child. Let me share that song, because it explains in the best way.

More on living Jewishly in Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I don’t normally share here what I’ve posted elsewhere, but I wrote something quickly for Facebook and realised that it meant more than I realised and so I’m sharing it. I suddenly saw that what I thought was unique and personal, told a story about Australia and Australians and the different places Jews hold in this country. It’s not a full picture, or even close to a full picture. It’s how much of Jewishness is out of sight in Australia and how some of us handle this.

In other places I am still the person I always was, in Canberra no-one wants me to give talks to to be seen in public. Most people don’t hate me, but folks who have known me for years and even decades have recently started demonstrating a whole bunch of reactions to my being Jewish. For some, I’m hurting others simply by being myself: a couple of people have recently informed me of how privileged and white I am and how much of the cause of problems (both in Australia and elsewhere) can be blamed on me. For others, I’m a low priority in their life where previously I was a close friend, and when these old friends cluster or when a group of those who think along these lines get together, if I say something it will be instantly contradicted before anyone stops to consider what I actually said.

A part of this is because I’m forever-unwell and Australia does not handle illness with much style. Most of the change has, however, happened since COVID (which taught so many of us to not be our best selves) and especially since October 7. There are whole social groups and work-related groups I’m now simply not reminded of or invited to because I’m Jewish, and there are others I may share as long as I do not assert myself too much. The most amusing part of the whole shebang (and it really is amusing) is that I am not considered an expert on much at all in the circles that do not want me round. Given that I have two PhDs and another one about to be submitted and all kinds of books written and conference papers delivered and research done and talks delivered and… I am an expert in those topics, this is a very peculiar kind of wilful blinkering.

All of this is local. It has led to big lifestyle changes and those led to some thoughts on Facebook. Those thoughts (with amendments) are the rest of this post.

I’ve talked before about being a giraffe. My giraffehood comes from being the first Jew many Australians have met.

“Oh, I’ve never met a Jew before,” a person informs me, and looks at me as if I am in a zoo. This is why I call it being a giraffe. I’m willing to talk openly about my Jewishness, so I’m a giraffe who answers questions. The questions and comments used to be mostly kind and fair. They are less so right now. At the moment, after the surprise that I’m actually Jewish, I’m informed who I am and what I think and how horrid I am if I don’t use the words they tell me to use and announce my self-hate at once. Once a week, without fail, I’m told that either I worship Satan or murder children. (For anyone wondering, I have not done or ever have wanted to do either of these things.) These questions and comments, when experienced several times a week, make me feel as if I’m on show.

Today something provoked a very different memory.

In the days before COVID and before the current rise in antisemitism (so any time until the end of 2019) I gave talks and was on panels at a couple of larger functions a year on average. Every single time, it being (mostly) in Australia people would chat with me in the foyer or over coffee afterwards. Australians chat over drinks. It’s a part of who we are. Mostly the discussion leads with comments like “I didn’t know Australia had any Jews before” or, on one very special day “Do you really have horns?” When I was much, much younger, children would actually feel my head for those horns.

Every second chat (again, on average) someone would look around to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot. They would confide in me. Sometimes they had Jewish parents but were brought up Christian “for safety”. Sometimes they were happily non-religious, but knew that their parents had been Jewish and were curious. I have enjoyed many conversations about how OK atheism for different branches of Judaism with this group of interesting people and even more conversations about why parents would choose to leave the Judaism behind and even to hide it. Sometimes those who confided in me were practising Jewish but didn’t know anyone outside their family because it was safer to be not-Jewish when out in the world. Most of these individuals had parents who were Holocaust survivors. Some were from other backgrounds but their families had also memories of persecution, often very recent. The real discussion began when they discovered we could talk about these things but that it wasn’t the whole story. I was brought up to understand that the persecution is a part of our history but (sorry Cecil Roth) the lachrymose version of Jewish history hides so much more than it explains. My history self is working on this reinterpretation of Jewish pasts for the next little while, and that’s partly because it was so important to the individuals who came to me and talked about Jewishness in secret.

I was a different kind of giraffe for these folks. I was the Jew they could talk to safely. I never tell enough about them for anyone to be able to identify them. I have many conversations after panels and after giving talks or keynotes, and these people were among the many. Their privacy is important. No-one hides such a large part of themselves without very good reason. I use my not-very-good memory to forget their names and where they live. I would have to work hard to remember those details and I simply don’t try to remember. This has led to me being very forgetful of names and addresses and friends have to always remind me, over and again. This is not a large price to pay for the safety of others.

Occasionally (like now) I will mention their existence. I’m often and usually the first person they have every spoken to outside their immediate family about anything Jewish.

The number of people who shared their confidences with me diminished somewhat when the Australian census changed its collection style. The number of people who admitted to being Jewish in Australia also dropped dramatically. It was no longer possible to guarantee addresses and names would be detached from information collected and so identifying as Jewish carried different baggage to earlier. I suspect there are many Jewish Australians whose background is not known to the Bureau of Statistics any more. I once estimated that there were around 200,000 of these people, but there is no real way of knowing. Since I don’t think those who let me know they’re Jewish are more than the tiniest % of those who don’t talk about being Jewish Australian, I know the thoughts of a few dozen people, not of everyone who hides their Jewishness in Australia.

The number of confidences diminished to zero after October 7, but this is partly because I’m no longer invited to give many talks. I’m the wrong kind of Jew for Canberra or East Coast Australia, or my expertise is no longer valued, or people want to avoid problems, so I’m not invited to the sort of meetings where someone can seek me out quietly and find out more about their heritage.

What I miss most about those conversations is the recipe-swapping. I have two really wonderful Crypto-Jewish recipes that I’ve dated to the 17th century from a person who identified publicly as Latin American Catholic. I gave them information about books and websites where they could place their heritage and understand it better without having to break their public face. This was a win-win. Once a year I cook a 17th century Jewish recipe from that hidden tradition, to celebrate how much this person knew (and still knows!) and how amazing it was to hear about it. (I also cook these dishes to honour those who were murdered at the command of the Inquisition, and this is my normal public reason for cooking: today is not normal.) At moments like that I understand why I might be a safe person to talk to about things.

Since October 7 and the diminution in places in Australia that want to hear me, there has, as I’ve said been no-one sharing these secrets. This means that there are fewer people who touch base with those who are isolated and scared. Those who found comfort in me chatting about how to write family stories or how to teach cultural differences respectfully or how to interpret foodways or all those stories about the Middle Ages are not going to talk to a rabbi or visit a community centre when hateful slogans are painted on the walls or there was a fire bomb or anywhere where there is a crowd chanting Jewhate slogans outside.

Australia has always been somewhat antisemitic. It was also one of the important places where Shoah refugees came. It’s always had a Jewish population that feels safer unseen. Moments when strangers can reach out and share their identity are so very important, given all of this.

I think one of the reasons I was considered safe might have been because it’s not been wise to wear a magen david in Canberra for about 20 years, so I wasn’t flamboyantly Jewish… I was just Jewish. Or it may be for another reason. Thinking back, I had my first conversations along these lines when I was pre-teen, so it may be something about the way I hold myself. I honestly don’t know. Several people have said it’s because I talk so much, so maybe it’s that.

When I first started having those conversations I used to feel so guilty, because I couldn’t understand why these people hid their identity. I always kept everything secret because someone had asked it and because I respected them.

These days, life in Jewish Australia is far more problematic. I can see the wisdom in being a hidden Jew.

Finally, results from Australia

personby Gillian Polack
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I intended to give you the results of the Australian elections today. I kept putting it off to see if we would know more but we don’t, so this the wider picture. These are the results, then… sort-of.

Labor had a small victory, that looked on paper like a landslide. They have the Lower House but not the Upper. They’ve gained quite a few more seats in the House of Representatives, but many of them were gained by slender margins and some of them (my own, for instance) are still borderline and the votes are still being counted. It’s as if most Australians looked at the candidates and looked at elections outside Australia and said “We’re going to make our preferences matter.” When a single electorate goes to layers of preferences, counting is slow and it has to be revisited when the seat is a close call. This is happening all over the place.

In the Lower House, we voted out the leader of the Opposition and quite possibly the leader of the Greens in his/their own seats, plus gave their parties fewer seat. Dutton (Opposition) gave a graceful speech to cede everything. Bandt (Greens) is still claiming a Greens victory. He has between 0 and 2 seats in the House of Representatives That Lower House), dropping from four, but he’s focused on the number of primary votes his party received over the whole country, I suspect. They’re down, but not by much. My assessment of this is that a large number of voters do not see the hate that I see. Enough do, and so the Greens are diminished, but, unlike the elves, they’re not so diminished they will not go into the west. The far right Trumpet of Patriots, on the other hand, got so few votes that I look at the data and think “Are there any far right politicians in this parliament at all.” Our far right is the right end of the US Republican or the UK Tories, if that helps.

As I read things, most of the controversial far right and left didn’t get enough votes to get lower house seats. This includes a handful of virulent antisemites. Those candidates trying to push extreme views (not just hate of people who happen to be Jewish) also didn’t fair as well as the pre-election polls said. Our House of Representatives contains far less hate than I had expected. This is a good thing.

While the same pattern applies to the Senate, the nature of the Senate vote (namely the quota system) mean that the changes are less. The far right is diminished, but not nearly as much as in the Lower House. Greens will still have a lot of power, and may be led by someone who really, really hates Jews. In some ways the Greens holding balance of power is good: if they vote wisely, they can be a curb on extreme policies by the government, and, if they go back to the roots they’ve been avoiding recently, will also push for environmental care and social justice. This is not, however, what they did in some significant votes in the past, so the Senate may become just a mess. Everything depends on the Greens paying attention to Australia and not their inner voices.

An update on antisemitism: it’s worse this week both on the right and on the left. Voters are not the loud voices in Australia, because of our system and because we’re part of the western world’s set of shouting matches between so many people who refuse to think for themselves. This hate is largely the usual mob trying to share their bigotry. The big thing is that Australia as a whole has voted against hate and also against a Trump model of government. We remain our ratbag and mostly centre-left self. We no longer, however, have a functional left wing party (Greens are now far further left than they used to be) and we don’t have any functional right wing party (the Coalition is very close to Labor in many ways and we did not put the far right in their place). The outcome of our next election may well rest on whether anyone’s clever enough to change this.

The path our voting took supports that sense reported on in newspapers of most parties sucking right now. It also supports my view of Australia, which is that the quiet majority do their own thinking and we will not know what that thinking is until election day. This time they’ve voted for social cohesion and stability. We often do that. What looks to the world like the left, is actually the most stable option for us.

If any of this appears self-contradictory, it’s because the big thing Australia has done is quite extraordinary. It has said “All the elections outside Australia are not our story.” Australians write our own story, it appears.

For me, this means, despite the massive increase in antisemitism, we’re not following the 1930s German route. We have a lively and dangerous far right and far left, and an enormous amount of antisemitism, but the voters have said, “Not in my parliament.” We’re not doing what we did in the Morrison days, and following the US path, either.

I don’t know where we are going, but that’s a big improvement on last week. Better not to know than to know that Jewish Australia is walking into hell. We are not. Not safe. Not comfortable. Not loved by extremists on either side. But we are part of Australia and Australia itself says so. Every single Jewish candidate received a normal level of votes. None in office was thrown out of office. The question now is will the far right and the Greens accept this and reduce their polemic. If they do, then the hate will reduce and Australia will be a lot safer and I can return to my own life. I have books to write…