I\u2019m sorry I missed last week. Jewish Australia is a bit\u2026 different. There\u2019s a Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. I\u2019ve submitted 22 pages to it and keep thinking I missed critical things. Last week was the first of the public hearings, and by Monday morning 9,400 submissions had been made. There are so very many that the open period for submissions was extended by two weeks. This is a vast number, for the whole population of Australia and all its territories is significantly less than the population of California. We fit somewhere between the population of Florida and Texas. If you printed the submissions and handed them out to random Jewish Australians (using the Monday morning numbers, weeks before submissions close), one in eleven would receive an interesting document to read.<\/p>\n
Antisemitism is pretty bad here, and whatever the Royal Commission decides will determine our future in many ways. In equally many ways, our future rests on how the rest of Australia feels on hearing just how difficult life has been for Australian Jews.<\/p>\n
Even checking up on what is said in the first lot of public hearings was exhausting. So many reports had me nodding alongside, think, \u201cYep, that\u2019s happened, and oh yes, that too.\u201d I am still annoyed by the people who accuse Jews of complaining too much or of clutching pearls or of being perpetual victims, or of being guilty by dint of being Jewish. In a perfect world, they would stop and listen. They would also not tell me, when I quietly let them know some of the worst incidents, \u201cBut what about Gaza?\u201d So many are saying, \u201cIf every Australian Jew disassociated themselves from Israel, then there would be no antisemitism.\u201d This is oddly funny, because other times and other places when there have been hate we\u2019ve been told the same thing. Convert to Catholicism was the argument in 15th<\/sup> century Spain. And then came the definitions of impure blood and Judaicising. Some of those who had done the denial as asked were burned alive as Christians because their denials weren\u2019t believed.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a very strange month.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m sorry I missed last week. Jewish Australia is a bit\u2026 different. There\u2019s a Royal Commission into antisemitism and social cohesion. I\u2019ve submitted 22 pages to it and keep thinking I missed critical things. Last week was the first of the public hearings, and by Monday morning 9,400 submissions had been made. There are so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[636,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-life-experiences"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4607"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4608,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4607\/revisions\/4608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/treehousewriters.com\/wp53\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}