Tag: history

Decisions, decisions

personby Gillian Polack
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It’s really hard to decide on what I should post about today. I have diversions.

The first is that I’m in the final throes of revising my thesis to meet the examiners’ comments. I thought it would be a much bigger task than it was. I’ve sent my revisions and comments to my supervisors and then I send the final in and, hopefully, by the end of the week it will be done and dusted save for graduation. I submitted the thesis over a year ago – even for Australia this is slow. I don’t know why it was so slow, but career-wise it doesn’t matter to me (this is not my first PhD and I’m in my sixties) so it’s better the admin slowness doesn’t apply to young students than it does apply to me. Also, between submission and graduation, my first PhD took 3 years. It was not my fault, but it cost me my first career. By me a drink and I’ll tell you the story.

It’s rather nice that lateness doesn’t always carry such costs.

The second is that the submission period for the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion closed yesterday. Many of us are a bit overwhelmed. On 4 June (10 days before submissions closed) there were over 14,000 submissions, which was a record for Royal Commissions. No-one knows the final number yet.

The staff serving the Royal Commissioner is obligated to read every single one of them. And those of us keeping track are wondering what this means. That Jewish Australia matters? That haters have put in many thoughts? We know that haters have oput in some thoughts. We also know that Palestinian Australia put in a 259 page submission. I’ve seen the outline and need to read it because I cannot make sense of it. Or rather, I can make sense of it in and of itself, but not how it helps Australia handle antisemitism. It seems to be arguing that we’re making things up. This is why I have to check. I’ve been told by quite a few people this last week that antisemitism is fictional, but there are so many incidents right now that this is not a claim so much as a misdirection. I need to know why APAN feels the need to spend 259 pages backing that misdirection if that is, indeed what they’re doing.

What I’m supposed to be doing is writing fiction. I lay in bed last night working out things that needed working out, but today have only written a couple of hundred words. We’re in a weather trap and my bones hurt and I keep procrastinating and worrying about Jewish Australia and other groups being confined by wagon trains circling hate.

Let me leave you and go back to my big writing decision for this week: Lincoln or London in the twelfth century for a section of the novel. I want both, but I don’t think both will fit. I also want Cologne and Speyer. Both! Actually, writing this out has made me think: people travelled in the Middle Ages. Why don’t I have someone travelling to Cologne from Speyer? That would give me the words for Lincoln and London. I just need to check concepts and characters and plot and… all the things… except the history. I have most of the research for that at my fingertips because of the non-fiction I was working on recently and that still has no home. All this research pays.

Reprint: Strongmen Doomed to Fail!

personby Deborah J. Ross
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The ‘warrior ethos’ promises victory — history says it leads to defeat

Hitler and Mussolini salute Nazi troops in 1937.
Bettmann/Getty Images

John Broich, Case Western Reserve University

At Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised assembled generals “maximum lethality” and no “stupid rules of engagement.” Under his leadership, the newly rebranded Department of War would “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill.” Troops would be held to the “highest male standard,” he said. “Weak men won’t qualify.”

Hegseth also restricted anonymous whistleblower and discrimination complaints and limited how long past misconduct can be held against a service member, weakening internal rules and oversight processes the military had built over decades.

Months later, with the Iran war underway, he told reporters at a Pentagon briefing that the U.S. was “punching (Iran) while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.” He has also said the U.S. will give “no quarter, no mercy” to its enemies, language legal experts say can constitute a war crime under international law.

Hegseth calls his military doctrine the “warrior ethos.”

Historians of fascism have catalogued similar rhetorical patterns — strongman posturing, contempt for constraint — for decades.

I’m a historian of race and nationalism and author of “Blood, Oil and the Axis,” a book about World War II and nationalism in Iraq and Syria. I’ve studied how fascist regimes fight. At its core, fascism is ultranationalism fused with a cult of masculine strength, racial hierarchy, paranoia about socialism and contempt for democracy. It also has a theory of war: Victory belongs to the ruthless and the ideologically pure. Rules are for the weak.

Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Imperial Japan all built their military strategies on some version of this ideology in the run-up to the Second World War. And in each case, the strategy failed, undone by its own contradictions.

The fascist theory of war

Democracies don’t necessarily fight clean wars. During World War II, the Allies firebombed cities, created internment camps and dropped atomic bombs.

What distinguishes fascist powers from democracies is their contempt for rules based on their sense of superiority. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels announced that the Nazis would claim the absolute right to override democratic constraints. “This contemptible parliamentarianism … is gone,” he said.

Italian dictator Benito Mussolini said it more bluntly in 1936: “We do not argue with those who disagree with us, we destroy them.”

But rules of engagement function as a control system that ties tactical decisions to strategy, law and the risk of escalation. Discarding them tends to produce the atrocities and strategic blowback that lose wars.

Democratic procedure does similar work: Political scientists who studied 197 conflicts from 1816 to 1987 found that democracies won about 76% of their conflicts and non-democracies 46%, in large part because accountable leaders and public access to information force a government to notice when a plan isn’t working.

A fascist regime that treats democratic constraints as obstacles is likely to decide inconvenient information is an obstacle too. Because of this, in fascist governments, loyalists rank higher than experts. Fascist systems don’t remove people for being wrong; they remove them for insufficient loyalty. The man who tells the leader what he wants to hear rises. The man whose report contradicts the leader’s views endangers himself.

Benito Mussolini stands beside Adolf Hitler as they watch a military parade
Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, King Victor Emmanuel III and Queen Elena watch a parade held in Hitler’s honor in 1938. Behind them, from left: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Galeazzo Ciano, Joseph Goebbels and Rudolf Hess.
Bettmann/Getty Images
The closed circuit

Consider Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Before becoming Hitler’s foreign minister, he was a wine salesman whose years in Canada became his qualification for understanding America. He attached himself to Hitler and was rewarded with a top seat in his government, where Ribbentrop’s signature contribution was overruling the diplomats who warned that Americans would fight if pushed too far by the Axis.

The Nazi view prevailed: Americans were too racially mixed, too soft, too consumed by money to be dangerous. When Germany declared war on the U.S. four days after Pearl Harbor, it did so partly on that disdain for what Hitler called a “mongrel nation.” Ribbentrop was among the most consequentially wrong foreign ministers in modern history – he’d also misjudged Britain’s willingness to join the war over the invasion of Poland – still, he kept his job.

The ideology that produced Ribbentrop’s overconfidence also produced the Nazi theory of the Eastern Front: that Slavic peoples – fundamentally inferior and tainted by Bolshevism – would collapse within weeks. But the Red Army didn’t collapse. Hitler fired the officers who reported as much and demanded more of the same operations that had already failed. Operation Barbarossa, which was supposed to take weeks, stretched to years.

Attempting to match Hitler’s conquests and assert dominance over the Mediterranean, Mussolini invaded Greece in October 1940 with shorthanded divisions, in mountain terrain and at the start of winter, because he believed Italian spirit would overwhelm Greek resistance in two weeks. His generals had doubts, but many did not express them. The Greeks counterattacked, but Mussolini blamed his generals’ “insufficient will,” the only kind of failure his theory allowed. Germany had to intervene.

What the leader said happened

Connected to the fascist superiority complex is a contempt for feedback, creating a closed information system that can’t register failure, tolerate disagreement or revise a plan. Strategy requires accurate reporting, even when the news is bad, and the willingness to be wrong. Fascist regimes punish the first and refuse the second.

German high command was still reporting a controlled advance in November 1942 when its 6th Army, some 330,000 soldiers, was being encircled at Stalingrad. Hitler had declared the city practically taken; the press never reported the Soviet counteroffensive that surrounded it. When the remnants finally surrendered on Feb. 2, 1943, it was a turning point in the war – Germany’s first catastrophic defeat on the Eastern Front, from which the Wehrmacht never recovered.

Mussolini bragged about his mighty army of 8 million soldiers while 3.5 million – the real number – were being routed on three fronts in as many years.

Imperial Japan fused racial supremacy with a military code that forbade surrender and treated anyone who did as subhuman. Loyalty to the emperor was absolute; questioning his depiction of reality was betrayal.

In that environment, officers had every incentive to lie up the chain of command when reality on the ground did not match what leaders wanted to hear. For example, after the Battle of Midway, a catastrophic defeat for Japan in June 1942, naval headquarters filed reports that bore little resemblance to what happened. Later that year, the Imperial Navy told Tokyo they had sunk twelve American ships near today’s Taiwan when they had merely damaged two.

Two years of retreat later, the kamikaze program – which sent some 3,900 pilots to their deaths in suicidal crashes against Allied ships – was the logical conclusion: Let pilots prove their loyalty by dying.The Conversation

John Broich, Associate Professor of History, Case Western Reserve University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue reading “Reprint: Strongmen Doomed to Fail!”…

Leaving and Staying

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I’ve seen some news lately about people who are deciding to leave the United States. Apparently there is a long waiting list of people living in Europe who want to renounce their U.S. citizenship.

There are always articles on how to move to other countries, assuming you have enough money, focusing on which countries will welcome you and what the bureaucracy is, but while these used to be aimed at people looking to retire someplace where their money goes farther, it now seems more politically based.

After the Supreme Court’s horrible ruling this week gutting the Voting Rights Act, I saw some discussion by Black people on social media suggesting it was time for African Americans to go elsewhere. I can sympathize with that, though I doubt it’s a practical option for most.

As for me, though, I’m not going anywhere.

For one thing, the horrible things being done by the grifter and his minions to the United States are, unfortunately, not confined to the United States. I doubt there’s much of any place in the world you can be truly safe from the ravages of these people.

Also, I don’t want to live somewhere where I don’t have the right to participate in public life — to vote, to advocate, to march in the streets – and ties to other people as neighbors and friends. I’d want to be able to speak the language well enough to fit in and complain to local officials.

I don’t have any right to citizenship in another country except what they might allow through immigration, and I doubt I have enough years left to get that done, get really comfortable in the language, and actually become a full citizen before I’m too old for it to matter.

As I have written before, I am not a person with a deep connection to place. Whenever I visit somewhere else, I always think about what it would be like to live there. I’ve visited some lovely places.

Which is to say, I could probably live somewhere else. It just doesn’t seem like a reasonable course of action at this point in my life. And I don’t think running away would solve anything.

Recently it has been pointed out that anyone with a Canadian great-great grandparent can acquire Canadian citizenship. I don’t fall into that category, but I know others who do. And I know of people whose parents and grandparents came here from other countries who have recently acquired passports for those places.

If I did have the right to citizenship in another country, I would go after it, not for escaping the current regime but for the value of having ties to more than one place. Continue reading “Leaving and Staying”…

Introducing Medieval England

personby Gillian Polack
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Once upon a time, I spent an inordinate amount of my life answering questions from writers about the Middle Ages. A friend suggested this become a book and we worked together on this book for a bit, then she had to move on. I was introduced to an archaeologist (Dr Katrin Kania) and the book was much more accurate. My personal style wasn’t there and all the bad jokes had to leave, but, as a reference book for writers, The Middle Ages Unlocked was immeasurably better for Katrin’s share… even though it meant losing most of my jokes. She and I both laughed at each and every jokes as they were gently edited away.

It’s not a book to sit down and rad. It’s a book to check when you want something in particular while it’s technically about England in the High Middle Ages, we included much of France.

If we were doing it again, I’d add whole swards about life in Jewish England. Some researchers have been busy in recent years and we know a lot more about English Jews before 1290, thanks to them.

There were several writers who pushed us to finishing the book: Elizabeth Chadwick, Felicity Pulman… in fact, all the authors quoted on the cover, plus a few extra. Without their support, this book would not have happened. I didn’t want to write it, you see, way back when it was first suggested. My dream book was, in fact, an analysis of Old French epic legends, especially how insults were used and how some of the most interesting people were turned into their own kind of Medieval hero. This might be why I am guilty of writing the literature chapter in The Middle Ages Unlocked and why it just might mention those epic legends. Every chapter I wrote has something that shows it’s by Gillian. The food chapter contains information about pickles, for instance.

Our aim in writing it was to have a book writers could take form the shelf and find out more. Not just factually more, but to understand how we see the Middle Ages and where else they can find things. In the age of AI, it’s a surprisingly useful volume. It doesn’t invent. It doesn’t pull from random sources. The bad side it that when you argue with it, it does not argue back.

This week in Antisemitism: bringing some of the ideas together in lists

personby Gillian Polack
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This last post is very long. It’s also a bit less clear than the earlier ones. I was going to explain the current meanings of Zionism, updating the previous post. Interestingly, so many people have their own views of the definition and want to correct even the groups made from nearly two hundred opinions. Instead of giving you cute names attached to views of the word ‘Zionism’ (I so wanted to include Mountains of Madness Zionism) I’ll begin with a quick revision that allows anyone to slot new thoughts into the three groups.

Anything that prioritises Jewish definitions of a Jewish concept is going to describe Zionism as related to the state of Israel. Alas, this includes those arguing that it should not exist. Why the ‘alas’ – because all arguments about its non-existence either fail to take into account those who want all Jews dead, or actually celebrate all Jews dying. If they would solve antisemitism and violence against Jews before inventing a county where Jews cannot live, I would have more sympathy with them. If they lived in 1938, they would be helping the building of death camps either literally or socially. When I tried to talk with some of these people, they fell into two groups. One believes that Jews have not really been murdered, ever. The other believes that we should all be murdered and that Israel is a good start. Accepting that Zionism refers to Israel existing is not quite the same as Zionism referring to Israel as a Jewish state that should exist. Many of those who support Israel are now explaining that second part (that it has a right to exist, that Jews need it, that there are ancient links to the land) to distinguish themselves from those who try to have their cake and eat it to, by saying that yes, Israel exists, but it should not.

This is actually not as muddy as I made it sound. If all Jews are to be killed, then Israel doesn’t exist. Using ‘Zionism’ in this way is a false claim. I now try to work out from other things a person says if they give Jews equal rights to other people. That helps explain whether their acceptance of Israel as a country is temporary or false.

In some cases, the thoughts can be attached to groups two and three together. Hate seeps into everything once its become part of general conversation. I can’t explain this as well as I should, because every single person I’ve found who uses the second group of definitions of Zionism with the hate and mirroring from the third… blocks me quite quickly. I’ve looked around, and I’m not the only one blocked and the blocking is not restricted to Jews. Iranian Diaspora activists are also blocked, as are general supporters of Jews and Iranians. Those who combine the second and third group of definitions are creating their own echo chamber. This worries me.

As I said last post, there are an increasing number of personal definitions of Zionism. I’m not even going to try to make a complete list. They still mostly fall into the categories I established last post, so the best thing to do is to categorise them and find out what the person explaining Zionism thinks and where they fit politically and on the hate spectrum. Otherwise we argue about minutiae and the problem of hate ferments all by itself in the background. Also, identifying the groups of definitions helps anyone who is subject to the hate to identify it quickly and address it in the best way for them. For many, this means hiding from the bigots, because there is so much violence attached to certain parts of both the second and third groups of definitions. In others, it can be talking things through and finding common ground. How to deal with local hate would be a whole new post, though. I’ve done it all my life (including advising those in politics, the public sector, and in community organisations deal) and am willing to talk about these things, but not here and not today.

So what am I doing today?

I am about to give simple explanations with simple examples of some very complex stuff. This is only a blog post, after all. I could write a book on each of these, and then another explaining how it all holds together and the history behind it. I am not going to write those books. The book still seeking a home (the history one) shows how we are given narratives that support all the things I’m about to talk about. This post, by comparison, is me dipping my big toe in the water, just to show you that there is water. I’ve done it in form of a series of points, because I am running out of time. Other weeks I’ve had hours to spare, this week I have editing and deadlines and possibly will find time to get dressed later today. Possibly.

The series of points

1. Zionism and its related words rely on a fabric of understanding. Not all Zionists are Jewish, but all Zionism is linked to Judaism. It’s one of the words and sets of ideas that connect Jews to the non-Jewish world.

2. We learn about what the world thinks about us from the way groups or individuals use words related to Judaism. I was told just yesterday that I had tikkun olam entirely wrong… and also two thousand years of historical Judaism. This was from the third person in two days who knew a little, but not enough to know what they did not know. Even with the best intentions, telling someone that they don’t know who they are and that everything they know since childhood is wrong… is not kind. There is a lot more to the ‘splaining and erasing Jewish knowledge of ourselves than the unkindness it manifests.

First, as women discover when we are mansplained, that kind of explanation indicates, to the person doing the ‘splaining, that Jews (or women) are secondary. Less important people. Children who have to be told things because we cannot think for ourselves.

With Zionism, this produces a really interesting quandary. As I said earlier (in different words) some people who use the standard definition of Zionism (Israel’s existence) are anti-Zionist for the same reason they ‘splain. In their minds, Jews are not capable of running our own lives or even knowing our own religion and culture. If we lack the capacity of adults, how could there possibly be a Jewish country?

This is an old form of antisemitism, where Jews are considered to be better off subservient. I know its European origins, but the dhimmi system also implies religious immaturity and gives secondary status to Jews. It’s for our own good that we are told things and that there should be no Israel. We’re not mature enough yet. Or are just made to be ruled by others, especially others like the person ‘splaining.

3. Another link is made by those who have not directly experienced antisemitism. In their eyes, others must be exaggerating for attention. This is where the accusations of playing the victim card and pearl clutching enter. The sense that this can’t be right (too dramatic, or “I don’t see these things”) proves the antisemitic trope of Jews being liars. Perceiving Jewish hurt as false cements antisemitism in many peoples’ minds. The best equivalent I can give is the attitude some men have to child-bearing as painless and natural. Lived experience is not considered relevant in either case.

4. ‘Zionism,’ ‘Judaism’ and a bunch of connected terms are also triggers for people to erase others from their lives. Many of us have lost whole social circles in the past two years, simply because of non-existent Jew cooties. I say “I’m Jewish” and some friends say, “You could not tell anyone” and others disown me for being public about it. I’m a “bad Jew” for making those words mean the wrong thing.

5. This leads to Schrödinger’s Jew, where it’s fine to be Jewish or have Jewish ancestors as long as nothing is visible publicly and there is plausible deniability. Jews can march with other pro-Pals as long as no magen davids are worn and they eat bacon and don’t talk about their Jewishness. This relates to the silencing of most Jewish voices, especially those from the Jewish left. Certain Australian writers’ festivals are really good examples of this.

6. Many bigots say, “We’re hurting too.” Other people have suffered awful things. These people of course need our support and help. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the deliberate destabilising of discussion about Jews, Israel, Zionism by changing the subject. This can be gaslighting.

7. More everyday, is when people refuse to learn about Jewish stories or culture and then fill the artificial vacuum with stereotypes and an understanding of Judaism drawn from Jew haters. This is related to whether Secular Judaism/ Jewishness is seen as an ethnicity or simply a name tag. There are secular Jews, but this is not them.

8. Some people use a modified set of terms to indicate some rather big things: Jews as a problem, the West as a problem, settler colonialism as a problem, for instance. The style of terms is “Zionist entity” instead of “Israel” or “So-called Australia” instead of  “Australia.” Sometimes this comes from far-left people and shows hints of Marxism. Sometimes it comes from those who listen to the spokespeople for organisations link to the Muslim Brotherhood. I see this as indicating that some of the far left may be linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. This may be linked to the groups and collectives where there’s not a lot of shared understanding of Judaism, but much support for Hamas. It also can be linked to using language from DEI, Critical Race Theory, and is often shared by BDS folk in my vicinity.

9. Dehumanisation of Jews. An oldie but just as nasty as it ever was. Watch for how haters talk to Jews and about Jews – check that we’re still human in their eyes. An example from X:  Leon Knight @KnightLeon34974 wrote “I don’t want my kids to suffer any kind of religious indoctrination in their education, but especially not from a satanic death cult like Zionism.”

10. Performative stuff, using slogans and banners and marches tends to (because of its nature), play favourites. One of the worst things about this is that the kindness and support for underdog some shouters claim (I suspect this might include Grace Tame in Australia) is an image and not real. I always look for more than the slogans to find out how people reach those slogans. Almost always, in the case of matters relating to Judaism and Israel, they reflect many of the things I’ve just listed.

11. Statements that look obvious, but that are part of a silencing. “Gazan voices are being hidden” is one of the more interesting statements, because it’s partly true. Very few non-Hamas and non terrorist supporter voices from within Gaza are heard – but those voices are not the ones protested about. Randa Abdel-Fattah and Omar Sakr claiming that they themselves are silenced in Australia and that Jews have loud voices are a more useful example.

All of these elements can lead to a lack of context and destroyed narrative. More and more people think they know about a subject and they really, really don’t. This makes hate much worse. There are also rhetorical devices that make hate worse by reinforcing certain thoughts or by spreading them. I don’t have time or energy to give you a complete list and big explanations of these devices. I’ll give another list, I think, just so that some of them are more visible.

When people tell hate stories, these are some of the techniques they use

1. Repeat and repeat and repeat an idea or a word. When you say it often enough, then most of us stop arguing with it. This is why marches include slogans and accusations and chants. It’s also why so many interviews of those marching are hilarious. When a marcher only knows the repetitions, they find it difficult to answer questions about why they march.

Query constant repetition and find out what story it’s telling.

In the case of ‘globalise the intifada’ and ‘from the river to the sea’ those who shout it also say that the meanings are benign. There are two sensible approaches to the claim of benign meaning. The first is to look into historical uses of the terms eg if people were killed when other claims of intifada were made then the use is violent and the claim to benign meaning is false, for instance.

The second is to find out if those who insist on using the terms have used others, with less fraught ancestral use. An Australian example is whether anyone shouting ‘globalise the intifada’ has thought about the relationship of the Bondi shooting or of the death of Malki Roth and whether they have changed their language to not hurt the families of those killed. If they haven’t used other terms that don’t hurt people… then those terms are not benign and they’re using the lie of them being benign to spread hate. The best answers to questions about repeated words and what the users intend, then, is in the use of the words, both historically and currently, and also in whether the users are willing to change things so as not to hurt anyone.

2. I know my favourite tool from Medieval French epic legends. Roland was always ‘the brave’ and Olivier was always ‘the wise.’ If you put a single adjective in front of a noun incessantly for a time, then eventually all the people who see it will include that adjective as part of their understanding of the noun. Trump does this all the time. So do antisemites. “Evil Jews”, “genocidal Israel”: no proof, no argument, just the identification of the word with the thought so that we can’t help thinking about a thing in those terms.

This example of “vile Talmud” from 22 February gives exceptionally good context for why ‘vile’ is a problem. “Ashkenazis are such annoying war mongers who follow the vile Talmud that condones the rape of 3 year old non-jewish children. The problem is that even if you murder another 1 million people you will not feel ‘safe’ as you know your time is linked to US support and you are thieves” 3:37 PM · Feb 22, 2026

3. Claims without evidence are true of many bigots in history – saying something does not make it true, and running away when people ask for evidence is one of the ways of discovering there is no evidence. The most common one in my timeline right now is people talking about Israel’s live-streamed genocide. Not a single person I’ve asked (or others have asked) has proivided any link to the live-streaming. Some duck and run, while others say “It’s so obvious, find it yourself.”

4. This links back to my earlier list because it’s to do with how we see words. Some people cannot or will not explain the words they’re using and then say “You know you know this” are adding to hate by creating fuzzy (and negative) definitions. When I ask and explain that I’m looking into definitions and word use, I often get some really interesting examples of Jew hate. This is something that looks innocuous, but may not be.

I don’t assume that lack of knowledge = hate. I find out if the person can and will explain without falling into hatespeech before I make any decisions on this. In other words, there are people who genuinely don’t know standard definitions and are willing to talk. We may not agree at the end of the conversation, but they are not spreading hate.

5. This has come up before: episodic memory, where brief anecdotes take the place of historical understanding.

And this is the moment where we move beyond rhetorical devices and into knowledge-based issues.

6. Bringing debunked knowledge into play and denying scholarly work on the subject. Khazars, genes, that no modern Jews have ancestry in the pre-Roman Levant, that all Jews are converts, that all Jews are… all kinds of things. The blood libel is one of them and I was blocked by someone claiming the 12th century story as true. Others weren’t blocked for arguing, so I suspect that my PhD in Medieval History was what got me blocked. 

7. Who we believe. I’ve noticed, for example, that Amnesty tends to believe Hamas over the Israeli government. The solution for this is to be a critic and scholar. Look at all the evidence. Don’t trust simple data. Not from Amnesty, not from the Israeli military, not from anyone. Question it. Question it deeply and profoundly and very, very critically.

One of the reasons Hamas does not get questions and their clear statements that they prefer their Jews dead are accepted is because of that mirror I mentioned in the last post. Hate gets reflected onto Jews and therefore the assumption is that all Jews are murderers and Hamas is a resistance movement. This is why we all fatalities in a given day attributed to the Israeli army on social media, while the (non-Israel) observers say “Hamas killed 20 people from a family that opposes it” and those fatalities are still attributed to Israel by most media. We don’t know how many people were killed by whom… hence the need to question.

8. Jews as aliens in all places. This is enhanced by how many stories are framed. eg SBS Australia leaves Jewish food off its food page except for certain select recipes. There are no regular articles or recipes, but there are for other Aussie minorities. (SBS is the multicultural broadcaster, so this goes against one of their core values.) And… this is what the book is about, the one I need to find a publisher for.

9. Jews having ‘hidden motives’ – even the most literal person (that would be me) is told regulatory “You don’t mean what you say. You’re hiding your secret agenda.” This is closely linked to those forcing Jewish culture to be hidden, obviously.

Much hate is being couched in very precise language eg previous post and the differences Zionist/ism can have. Much hate revolves around whether Israel should exist, whether Jews should be allowed to live but hidden under “We support those who are being hurt by evil” ie Gazans/Palestinians. Defining that hate and defining Jewish concepts that help reveal that hate (see previous posts) helps us see whether the conversation hides the hate or whether it’s less or even non-problematic. I have had good conversations with supporters of Gazans where those supporters do not use the 2nd and 3rd groups of definitions of Zionism ie do not bring antisemitism and antizionism into the conversation. Identifying this can be as simply as seeing if Zionist/Zionism/Israel/Jew are used pejoratively.

The three most obvious paths for identifying this are:

1) through the David Duke use of zio and its descendants, such as ziofascist, which I tend to think of as ziomostthings. The hate in the doxxing of Australian creatives in 2024 was really clear, for instance, because they were called the ‘zio600’ by haters. Some of those haters sent death threats. When name-calling stops being passive, then we’re all in trouble;

2) Through the Nazi terminology and evoking Nazi history. Last week I saw “Your grandparents were lampshades and soaps” three times, but more common is “You should be dead.”

3) Through the Protocols and its various descendants.

 

Adam Louis-Klein talks about us entering the antizionist era. His work and the work of those who talk with him and about his work is documenting the changes he observes. I don’t always agree with him, but I’m not going to do a giant summary of either his work or my thoughts on it. I’m not even going to give you a small summary. Instead, I’m going to suggest that he and his circle are lucid and thoughtful and worth looking into and forming your own opinions about. What is important right now, here, is what his work does to words like ‘Zionism.’

Right now, uses of ‘Zionism’ can be generally grouped, but within that group there is total mayhem. We’re moving past this moment of total mayhem (and he is one of the reasons why), and into new definitions that are shared by some and other definitions that are shared by others. Diacultural groups are changing, day by day.

Some of the constructs of hate will adapt to meet Louis-Klein’s work (and that of others – he’s an example, not the only scholar in the field), because they are challenged by them. The second group from the third post (that sounds so strange) will change even more, because Louis-Klein and company are uprooting their work and bringing it into the clear light of day. And some won’t care, won’t look.

The propaganda arm of whoever is propagandising will find other ways of sharing hate for Jews for as long as we’re a handy target. And as long as antisemitism exists, we’re a target. It’s nothing to do with Judaism (as the Zionism definitions show) and everything to do with pushing this society or that in this direction or that. When people decide not to be pushed in that direction, the hate diminishes.

This week, quite a few antisemites preened and gently threatened in my direction. More public Jews (I’m only semi-public) get regular and very nasty direct threats. There is an element of narcissistic show-off in Jew-hate, and that element has led many people into dark places since October 7. It has also caused many people to move gently away from once-friends who happen to be Jewish, lest the Jew cooties infect.

The microcosmos of antisemitism is like a teenage schoolyard in a really bad school, with bullies and mean girls and that boy who jumps off the roof because he wants to show off.

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.

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.

History and fiction and time out from hate

personby Gillian Polack
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I found my missing post. Here it is!

I logged in, expecting to tell you how the hate in Australia (which began as antisemitism and is now extending) is so tightly focused that your best friend might be bullied and you might not see it. When I’m alone, that bullying eats up a chunk of my day each and every day. This last week, however, it was less than a minute of each day and it was not every day. I was able to talk work with colleagues. When I sat down here, it struck me that I don’t often talk about that side of my life.

I used to. I used to be the kind of irrepressible historian who got excited for everyone. I’m still that historian. I don’t get to talk about it so often, is all.

Instead of dwelling on the bad side of life, then, let me find one page of notes from one day of the conference (one in forty-five pages of notes from the conference) so that you can enjoy history with me. We all need time out from hate, after all and every single US reader here had a lot more trouble to handle in the every day.

Some of you know that one of my novels (Poison and Light) is about how future humans use the past to hide from a present they found uncomfortable. Right now, a group of Australian scholars is examining how people in Early Modern England (and elsewhere, but the papers I heard were on Early Modern England) use history to imagine the future. The discussion was wide-ranging. They talked about witches and about ghosts, about predicting disaster and about what happened when the disaster failed to occur, about pamphlets and politics and poetry. It was the perfect panel for fiction writers and an exceptionally strong example of why fiction writers should get to know Medievalists and Early Modern scholars. Every other minute I thought of a writer who should have been there, asking questions about the ghosts and about the politics. The worlds they explain and the concepts they explore help us understand what we write and help us write it the best we can.

How does this understanding work in practice? My notes have an outline describing how the chair (and the head of the research project, who of course I talked to afterwards and of course we’ve planned to meet to talk about the science fiction side of things) breaks down the concepts of Imagining the Future into categories that can be explained.

She spoke about writing that give models of temporality: utopias, dystopias, and the mundane. Think about how these categories fit modern science fiction. Poison and Light is half-dystopia and half mundane, because all of my fiction talks about the lives of individuals and so the mundane is important to them. China Mieville (to my mind) writes dystopias and so does Sheri S Tepper.

But who writes utopias? I can think of earlier writers, like Sir Julius Vogel. Help me out! Who is writing now and has written a utopia that brings history into the future? We were given the theory of Star Trek, because it claims to be in a perfected future (at least for humans) but the reality of Star Trek is not utopian. Star Wars is, however, dystopian. It’s much easier to find examples when one looks to television. But I want to talk about novels!

She then moved to scales of temporality, whether the novel is set near (Earth!) or far away (Poison and Light again, since it’s in a solar system far far away – I may have attended the conference as an historian, but during this panel I felt so seen as a writer). With TV, my mind goes straight to the Jon Pertwee years of Doctor Who and compares them with (of course) Star Wars … again.

Why is the near and far important? Because so much of historical writing is used to discuss this apocalypse, or that. How far is apocalypse from our everyday? Much further, if it’s not on Earth. And here Poison and Light fails. It’s set far away, but Earth faces apocalypse while the people on New Ceres pretend they live in the eighteenth century. (I’m seeing this now with the lucky souls who are not enmired in hate – they are the people on New Ceres, while most of us are, alas, on Earth.)

I keep thinking that this whole project can help me understand my own New Ceres universe. I’m writing a second novel set on Earth next year, where the 14th century and the 17th century and how we deal with post-apocalypse join the party. My project echoes the ideas of people hundreds of years ago as humanity faces a bleak present. Where some people find refuge in fancy dress, others find refuge in explaining the world through ghosts and looking at neighbours as if they themselves are the catastrophe.

The last category asks whose future it is. Is it personal and everyday? Is it national? Is it a global future (my New Ceres again), a human one… or is it post-human.

The experts were historians and literary historians and most of the examples (by a long, long way most of the examples) belong to our past. The categories were however, really handy for questioning and understanding science fiction. And now you know why I will not give up that side of my life. I have learned so much in such a short time, and my fiction benefits.

Every time universities lose these experts, we lose the benefit of their thought and learning… and our everyday suffers.

Let me go away and think about what our lives would be like if we didn’t have these little injections of learning to help us tell better stories. No, let me not. Let me go away and write more fiction, celebrating the worlds of both historians and writers.

Lateness

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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.

More on living Jewishly in Australia

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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.