‘Where do I stand?’ The vexed question troubling Australian Jews

IT’s a simple silver chain adorned with her given name in Hebrew script, and since Mia Kline was too young to remember, it has been part of who she is; a symbol of faith and family and connection to a people and land. Today, she no longer wears it in company she doesn’t know to trust. She keeps it out of sight, tucked away in a drawer, along with a Jewishness she once openly displayed.

The drawer is in a Canberra apartment that Kline, 21, has leased since May, when she was kicked out of a share flat by people she thought were some of her best friends at university. She was called to a house meeting and arrived to find them waiting for her, sitting on the couch, with open notepads. They told her they couldn’t reconcile her views with their values, that the flat was no longer a safe space with her in it.

She left in tears, returning once to pack a bag.

Clockwise from top left: Mia Kline, Nina Bassat, Philip Mendes, Layla Carmeli-Wolski, Zack Shachar and Ryan Borowitz.Credit: The Age

What are Kline’s views that her flatmates found intolerable? They would describe it as Zionism, although this can mean any number of things. For Kline, Zionism in political terms means supporting Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Culturally, it runs much deeper than that. It shapes how she prays, what she eats and when she celebrates. It is intrinsic to her modern Orthodox upbringing and to her Jewish identity.

To turf her out of home for being a Zionist was, in effect, to evict her for being a Jew.

The irony is that, had they talked to Kline about it, her former housemates would have discovered Zionism is a complex, dynamic concept far removed from the flat pejorative that gets tossed about in the vapid maelstrom of social media. Kline explains that since October 7, she has thought deeply about the limits of her Zionism against the human catastrophe in Gaza, the horizon of an expanding war and the popular casting out of Israel as a rogue state.

For her, Zionism doesn’t extend to glorifying violence or rationalising a disproportionate response. It doesn’t bridge the gap between a two-state solution she believes in and the policies of the Netanyahu government which reduce the space for any future Palestinian state, or quell her sense of injustice about inequities between Palestinians and Arab Israelis. Nor does it gainsay the love she feels for Israel.

“It has been an inner conflict for a lot of young Jewish people,” Kline says. “We are too conservative for our left-wing, non-Jewish friends but we are too left for our own family. You kind of fall through the cracks. Where do I stand?

“I’ve had people from all corners of my world – on social media, in real life, my lecturers – telling me that Israel as a state for Jewish people is rife with apartheid, that Palestinians are second-class citizens. It made me question everything.”

Mia Kline: “I have de-Jewed myself, in a way, distanced myself from my Jewish identity in circles which I don’t really know are safe places for me.”Credit: Martin Ollman

Those questions will likely take years to resolve. For now, Kline has withdrawn from publicly addressing them in her classes and is careful about who she shows this part of herself to.

“I don’t wear my necklace any more. When someone asks why I can’t come to a party on Friday night, rather than say I’m going to the synagogue, I’ll say I have a work commitment. I have de-Jewed myself, in a way, distanced myself from my Jewish identity in circles which I don’t really know are safe places for me. My grandparents hid their Jewish identity, and now I’m doing it.”

This is the great discombobulation many Australian Jews are experiencing as they wrestle with fundamental issues of culture, faith and identity within a dramatically altered political and social landscape.

To understand what the past 12 months has meant for Australian Jewry, this masthead sought the reflections of Jewish people of differing age, culture, background and political perspective. They are Mia Kline, a third-year arts/law student and ACT co-president of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students; Nina Bassat, a Holocaust survivor and former president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry; Monash University professor and author Philip Mendes; Sydney-based Israeli-Australian Zack Shachar, whose cousin Naama Levi was abducted by Hamas on October 7; and 20-year-old Layla Carmeli-Wolski and Ryan Borowitz, school friends and leaders of SKIF, a Yiddish youth group.

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That is not my Australia

Nina Bassat says when you are 85 years old, you don’t really shift. Her mind is open to change but her centre of gravity, as she puts it, is fixed. What alarms her most is the way the ground itself has moved, less around her than younger Jewish Australians, who are confronting an intensity of hatred she hasn’t witnessed since she left Poland as a child survivor of the Shoah.

She remembers, as a young girl, gathering around a radio with her mother in a Displaced Person’s camp in Bavaria in southern Germany, listening to the United Nations pass a resolution to create the state of Israel, and the exhilaration that followed six months later when David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the new Jewish homeland. It was as much through bureaucratic quirk than choice that she found refuge in Australia rather than the nascent state of Israel. After 75 years in Melbourne, and a long, prosperous and overwhelmingly happy life, Israel still resonates as a safe haven; the promise that if she had to flee a second time, she would have somewhere to go. “This is lived experience,” she says. “This is my lived experience.”

Nina Bassat: “I believe the average Australian is not antisemitic. But the average person does not speak up.”Credit: Simon Schluter

When she was writing her 2021 memoir, Take the Child and Disappear, Bassat was already alarmed by the revival of antisemitism in Europe and other parts of Eastern Europe. In her book, she reflected that while some criticisms of Israel were justified, the nuances of its conflicts were poorly understood and for many, a hatred of Israel had become a hatred of Jews.

“In the middle of the night, when sleep is elusive, I’m afraid, very afraid,” she wrote. “Not for my own safety. I have lived a full and fulfilling life. I am afraid for my children and my grandchildren and for my great-grandchildren. I am afraid for Jews everywhere, not least in Israel. Above all, I am afraid of another dystopian era.”

When read now, this passage serves as a harbinger of what Australian Jews are experiencing. When Hamas launched its murderous rampage across southern Israel on October 7, she was staying with her daughter Sally and her family in Tel Aviv. On October 9, she saw footage of pro-Palestinian protesters chanting “f--- the Jews!” in front of the Sydney Opera House. “I thought, ‘That is not my Australia. It should not be anyone’s Australia.’”

Protesters raise the flag of Hezbollah, a proscribed terrorist group, outside the State Library of Victoria.Credit: AAP

Bassat acknowledges that antisemitism has always existed in Australia. She says the hatred we are seeing since October 7 is different. “It has never been overt, it has never been vicious, it has never been enabled by a lack of government activity. I believe the average Australian is not antisemitic. I get a lot of support and feel more love than hate. But the average person does not speak up. The average person is part of the silent majority. And the silent majority is no use.”

‘Golden land’ no more

Australia before October 7 was nearly unique as a place with no history of significant antisemitic political movements or outbreaks of violence against Jews. When asked to nominate the moment he knew this “golden land” for Jews had lost its lustre, Professor Philip Mendes points to February, when pro-Palestine activists published a spreadsheet containing the names and details of 600 Jewish people working in the arts, media and other creative fields.

Philip Mendes: “It is quite possible to be an anti-Zionist and not an antisemite. But suddenly, people have leapt over that barrier, almost in the way that Hamas did.”Credit: Simon Schluter

He cites this episode of mass doxing, the harassment of Jews at universities and what he describes as a “McCarthyist intolerance” towards Jews within some trade unions, the Greens, the arts and progressive media, as evidence of a political movement intent on marginalising Jewish people. This is felt most acutely by left-wing writers, artists, academics and intellectuals who find themselves ousted by their own political tribe and unable to find publishers, galleries and forums willing to display their work or countenance their ideas.

Having experienced first-hand what this looks like – pro-Palestinian activists targeted his academic tenure with an online petition falsely accusing him of racism – Mendes, 59, says the left has adopted and amplified antisemitic tropes previously limited to the far Right and laments what he sees as the failure of once dependable, institutional bulwarks against racism – the Labor Party, the union movement and the intellectual class – to stop it happening.

The Jewish Communal Appeal, a fundraising body for Jewish organisations and causes, estimates that at the time of the 2021 Census, there were 116,967 Jews living in Australia, which is less than 0.5 per cent of the national population. Australian Jews are overwhelmingly urban, with 84 per cent living in Melbourne or Sydney. Nearly six in 10 were born here, and fewer than one in 10 speaks Hebrew at home. A survey of Jewish Australians conducted by Monash University researchers in the weeks after October 7 found 91 per cent of respondents had an emotional attachment to Israel.

The director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit at Monash University, Mendes is both a Jew of the Left and an authority on what this means. A decade ago, he wrote Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance, a study of a relationship that stretches back to the French Revolution but one that began to fracture after the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel emerged as the major military power of the Middle East and occupier of a significantly expanded territory.

Mendes says the antecedents of what we are seeing from the political Left today can be traced back two decades to the start of the second Intifada and the global Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement that it spawned. This is when he first saw the blurring of anti-Zionism and antisemitism and legitimate criticisms of Israel sliding into open hatred of Jews. He says it has now metastasised into something more potent and mainstream.

In July, Mendes spoke at a Labor Party forum and accused the ALP, the union movement and other progressive organisations of being bystanders to a serious problem. He contrasted this with how the Australian Left responded to an outbreak of Jew hatred in the early 1960s, when swastikas were painted on public buildings across Australian cities, causing union, Labor and church leaders to declare solidarity with Jewish people. Mendes told the forum that since October 7, they had said the right things but done little. He said a minority on the left, including some Greens MPs, had “implicitly aligned” with antisemites.

“It would have been unthinkable before October 7 for anti-Zionism to suddenly, openly converge with antisemitism in a way that is similar to old school, far-Right antisemitism; conspiracy theories about Jews dominating the media and finance and politics and a Greens MP talking about Jewish tentacles reaching everywhere,” he tells this masthead.

“It is quite possible to be an anti-Zionist and not an antisemite. But suddenly, people have leapt over that barrier, almost in the way that Hamas did.”

Frozen in time

For many Australian Jews, Monday’s anniversary will be a time of reflection, commemoration and solemn contemplation. For Zack Shachar, the horrific events of that day remain in the present; an ongoing terror attack from which his cousin, Naama Levi, is yet to emerge.

Shachar, 48, moved to Australia from Israel 14 years ago with his young family for what he thought would be a few years spent working and living abroad. Instead, he fell in love with Australia and the life it offered, became a citizen and stayed.

Zack Shachar: “We are still stuck in October 7. We are still there.”Credit: Steven Siewert

On October 7, at 2.39pm Sydney time, Shachar started receiving missile alerts on his mobile phone. He still has a security app downloaded so he can check in quickly with family in Israel during times of attack. An hour or two later, he started to see videos of Palestinian militia driving through Israel. Then he saw a video of Naama, barefoot and with the seat of her tracksuit pants bloodied, being pulled by the hair and loaded into a Jeep. At first, he didn’t recognise the young woman as his teenage cousin.

Since that moment, Shachar has waited, prayed, advocated and agonised for Naama’s release. Every Sunday, he travels from his North Shore home into central Sydney to read out the names of all the hostages still being held by Hamas. For him and family members of other hostages, the past 12 months have been frozen in time. “All we want is to bring them home and continue with our lives,” he says. “We are still stuck in October 7. We are still there.”

As he explains this, his phone keeps beeping with alerts from more missile attacks, these ones launched into northern Israel from Hezbollah-controlled southern Lebanon. When asked what it is like for his life to be moored to such terrible events, Shachar’s response is laced with sadness and anger. “It is very simple to explain. Think that she is your daughter or your sister or your friend and she is 20 metres underground in a tunnel with no access to a shower, to a toilet, to clean water and food. Think about that.”

As an Israeli immigrant, Shachar feels an isolation beyond that of other Australian Jews. He says he feels Australian but not supported by the large South African diaspora that dominates Sydney’s Jewish life. “Some friends are really supportive. Some, including Jewish people, have tried to disconnect themselves. Even though they are Jewish, even though they know Naama is related to us and being held hostage, they don’t want to discuss it with us, they don’t ask about it. They know who I am but they turn their heads and continue to walk.”

His family have talked about what to do when the war is over. If things stay as they are, if more Australians are not willing to make Jewish people to feel welcome, they will return to Israel or go somewhere else.

The ‘good Jew’

Layla Carmeli-Wolski knows that sometimes, to get people to see beyond their prejudices, it helps to play the “good Jew”. This requires an acknowledgement of the horrors Israel is inflicting in Gaza and southern Lebanon, expression of empathy for Palestinian people, condemnation of Israeli’s creeping annexation of the West Bank and denunciation of the Netanyahu government. This is the price of entry to any discussion about the conflict with her young, progressive, non-Jewish peers. It is only then that she can try, ever so gently, to also humanise Israelis killed and displaced.

Layla Carmeli-Wolski and Ryan Borowitz. “There was no place for sympathy for Jews – even a day,” she says.Credit: Simon Schluter

Carmeli-Wolski, 20, is well-equipped to do this. As a leader of SKIF, a secular, social democratic Jewish youth movement that celebrates Yiddish culture, her Jewish identity is diasporic rather than entwined with Israel. Her political views are progressive and her empathy for Palestinian people genuine. She has also seen a side of Israel most Jewish people haven’t.

The daughter of an Australian Jewish scholar and Israeli mother, she grew up speaking Hebrew and Yiddish. At the age of seven, they moved to Jerusalem. While there, she went to Hand in Hand, a school that takes enrolments from Jewish, Arab and Christian families and teaches its classes in Hebrew and Arabic. She remembers passing through Israel Defence Forces checkpoints to go on play dates with Arab friends and sitting through “unlock your heart” sessions in class, where kids would gather in circles and talk about their feelings. “We were children, so we didn’t understand the conflict, but we understood that we had different experiences of Israel.”

A few weeks ago, a group of young women sitting near her at Monash University turned to Carmeli-Wolski and asked her what it felt like being Israeli when her country was committing atrocities. “I did feel like I had to play the good Jew to get them to listen to me,” she says. Once they did, they realised their understanding of October 7 was very different to what Carmeli-Wolski had watched and experienced, when missiles were landing near her grandmother’s home in Israel. They compared their social media feeds from the day and discovered one bore no resemblance to the other.

As she relates this story, Carmeli-Wolski is sitting in the shade of Melbourne’s Caulfield Park with Ryan Borowitz, a fellow SKIF leader and a friend since primary school, when they both attended the Yiddish-speaking Sholem Aleichem College in nearby Elsternwick. Borowitz’s Jewishness is a complex matrix. Both his parents are half-Israeli, but they sent him to a Yiddish school because it was more affordable than other Jewish schools. His great-grandmother, who died when Borowitz was 12, was an Auschwitz survivor from the then-Czechoslovakia. One of his great-grandfathers fought, and was killed in, the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Borowitz, 20, describes himself as a critical friend of Israel. “Because I am not connected to that Israeli culture, I can contemplate challenges to the state and the idea of living Jewishly without the state,” he says. Despite this, he is reticent to be too critical in front of people who aren’t Jews.

Israelis protest for hostage release and against the Netanyahu government during a demonstration in Tel Aviv in early September.Credit: Bloomberg

Since October 7, there has been a change in these two young Australian Jews. Carmeli-Wolski describes feeling paralysed when she started reading Israeli media reports of the Hamas attacks, then dismayed and confused when she saw responses from people she followed on social media. “There was no place for sympathy for Jews – even a day,” she says. Borowitz remembers taking a train to Flinders Street Station shortly after the attacks and seeing neo-Nazis demonstrating beneath the clocks. “I felt for the first time uncomfortable being Australian. I love this country but I have contemplated, can I live here in 20 years’ time?” The experience has left each feeling more connected to the people of Israel than they were a year ago.

‘For a lot of Israelis, their Zionism is about making Israel a better place through criticism of the government. In Australia, for the vast majority of the Jewish community, their Zionism is staunch support of Israel. When someone asks if I am a Zionist, I don’t know what they mean.’

Layla Carmeli-Wolski

Three months ago, Carmeli-Wolski travelled to Israel to see her grandmother. She joined a mass protest in Jerusalem gainst the Netanyahu government. “To see those progressive spaces in Israel gave me a pride that I don’t feel in the pro-Israel movement here and a pride in my connection to Israel,” she says. “I was marching next to people with signs saying end the occupation and other people with signs saying free the hostages.

“For a lot of Israelis, their Zionism is about making Israel a better place through criticism of the government. In Australia, for the vast majority of the Jewish community, their Zionism is staunch support of Israel. When someone asks if I am a Zionist, I don’t know what they mean.”

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