My world had never been touched by anti-Semitism — now my friends aren’t talking to me
Hamas invaded Israel days after the release of singer and Jewish woman Deborah Conway’s autobiography. Instead of attending writers festivals and literary conversations, she was cancelled.
I grew up in Melbourne, in the bosom of my Jewish family. While my parents were observant they were not religious, God wasn’t a feature of my Jewish education; I believed in Jews and I didn’t need to believe in God to do that.
When I was growing up and attending my Church of England school, my parents would occasionally ask me if I was experiencing any anti-Semitism. I always said no, I thought they were paranoid, I was dismissive of their concerns. Anti-Semitism was something from history, not something I had encountered.
On October 3, 2023, my autobiography, Book of Life, was released by Allen & Unwin. Four days later the world changed. The invasion of more than 4000 Hamas-supporting terrorists into Southern Israel, murdering, raping, burning, pillaging, kidnapping unarmed citizens, children, women, men, the elderly, even babies, was, as we have all read many, many times now, the worst atrocity and highest death count of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust. We have recently marked the one-year anniversary and there are still some 100 hostages being held. The collective trauma has only intensified.
On October 9, 2023, the celebrations of “resistance” on the steps of the Sydney Opera House were seen all around the world, large groups of angry (mainly) men, screaming “F..k the Jews”. The only law enforcement was turned against a couple of Jews who had turned up on the advice that the NSW government would be projecting the Israeli flag on the Opera House sails in memoriam of the lives lost two days before.
The protests were not an outlier. Ever since October 7, the cankerous wound of anti-Semitism, feebly trying to disguise itself as anti-Zionism, has broken out of the compression bandage that was barely containing it and erupted on university campuses, in encampments, in city streets, in hate filled graffiti – on and on.
Truly it has been sickening.
There is barely a peep from our federal government, there are few to no consequences for all the vandalising of offices, the intimidation of citizens, the hate preached from certain pulpits, the incitements, a kidnap, the doxxing of 600 Jewish academics and creatives, aka the “Zio600”, the protests that call themselves peaceful but don’t feel peaceful in any way.
A few weeks after Hamas’s invasion, Israel began its incursion into Gaza. There were a lot of casualties, there was also a lot of misinformation about the ratio of fighters to civilians in the casualty numbers. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, no combatants were killed, only women and children. If true this was clearly completely tragic, but it wasn’t; the statistics were being massaged and manipulated. “Pallywood” was in overdrive. The old cliche, truth is the first casualty of war.
While the blood libel lies kept metastasising, the Jew hate around the world kept intensifying and the pro-Palestinian activists kept glorifying Hamas as the noble resistance fighting the jackbooted, fascists of the IDF. No one bothered to zoom out for the wider picture, no one bothered to understand any history of the region, the conflict, the multitudes of attempts at peace deals, the ancient connection of Jews to Israel, to Jerusalem. It was all too tempting to simply overlay the coloniser, oppressor, racist canard over the Middle East, point the finger at Israel and say you’re the problem. What a popular game this turned out to be, politics masquerading as a moral position; a reflexive anti-Zionism that is ultimately a recipe for endless war.
Among the left-leaning establishments of the UN, the EU, our institutions of education, the sandstone universities leading the way, journalists, the unions, parts of the medical and law professions, the arts, feminists, the literary world, etc, etc, all climbed aboard the anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist train of haters. And there were so many of them on board all supporting one another, that the conformity, the rightness, the belonging felt so good. Heavens, we haven’t been allowed to hate anyone for the longest time and now, look, what a gift, we can hate the Jews, sorry only the Jews who support Israel. Like a pressure cooker with the steam valve released, the cries of “f**k the Jews” from everywhere under the stinking breath of those in polite society have become indiscernible from the thugs burning flags.
Since October 7 the world has been plunged into an updated Alice Through the Looking Glass. Genocide, the term first coined by Raphael Lemkin at the Nuremberg Trials to describe the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews is now the accusation thrown as a weapon at Israel to describe their defensive war in Gaza; ethnic cleansing, what the surrounding Arab countries did to their Jewish populations after the establishment of Israel, is now the term used to describe the actions of the IDF to remove Hamas from power; concentration camp, the stopover between life and death for the Jews of mid-20th century Europe, built in multiples by the Nazis, is now what they call Gaza.
And despite the blatant lie inherent in the description, in all the descriptions, the world is eager to buy the lies wholesale and then tut-tut at the monstrousness of the Jews who know first-hand what genocide, ethnic cleansing and concentration camps are and yet still inflict them on their neighbours.
So much easier to hate the Jews once you have decided they are just Nazis 2.0.
On November 26, 2023, Mushroom held a 50th anniversary celebration at which my husband and musical partner, Willy Zygier, and I were asked to perform. The audience was a full house at Rod Laver Arena, 12,000 strong, and around two million watching on free-to-air TV. Willy and I wore white suits, blue shirts, he wore a white yarmulke, I wore my oversized Magen David. I introduced It’s Only the Beginning saying Michael (Gudinski) hated what I wore in the video clip for this song (it was plus fours, a clip set on a golf course) but I think he would have loved this outfit.
I had marked us as targets.
A few pics were snapped backstage. There was an outpouring of support from some on our social media pages but the post also attracted some ugly, faintly threatening commentary referencing blood on the white suits of genocide supporters.
A few weeks later, the Sydney Theatre Company’s opening night of The Seagull caused uproar when three of the cast members donned keffiyehs for their curtain call. The fallout was intense; board members resigned, subscribers cancelled, donations were withdrawn.
In the wake of all this I was invited to talk to Patricia Karvelas on Radio National. The interview was supposed to be about the equivalence, if there was any, between the STC donning keffiyehs and Willy and me dressing as we did for the Mushroom event. It could have been an interesting discussion but my interviewer was not to be mollified merely with the sartorial and so within a few minutes the conversation turned to Gaza with Karvelas insisting Israel was solely responsible for the high death toll of innocent civilians.
The next few moments became ground zero for my total fall from grace. The haters have relished decoupling a very few words (seven, to be exact) from the context of their intent and wave them as a flag to proclaim my craven disregard for human suffering. The meaning of my words in context, are when Hamas puts weapons in the hands of underage boys to point at the enemy, they use them as fighters and then use them in the childhood casualty count. To say this is a horrendous, cynical exploitation of young lives is a chronic understatement but the mountain of evidence remains unexamined by the pro-Palestine groups defending Hamas as freedom fighters.
So, there I was, a new book, my first book, and a full dance card of author talks, in-conversations and writers’ festivals. And then things started to fall apart.
It seems that many people who patronise writers’ festivals, people who are so fond of debate, who are such warriors for the exchange of free ideas, who support the social justice campaigns for the great and the good are perfectly happy to kowtow to the loudest most disruptive voices and minimise the ideas that a few disrupters find offensive.
Writing WA and Newcastle Writers festival were forced to employ a phalanx of security. Others walked back their invitations, coming up with elaborate excuses rather than fess up to the fear and intimidation, or maybe admit they agree that I really am a genocidal bloodthirsty maniac who enjoys the suffering of small children. A children’s charity I was booked to perform a fundraiser for, cancelled, citing they’d received pushback. Stand up to them, I said, don’t cave to this appalling bullying. They caved.
I was asked to record a program for 3CR but when it didn’t go to air I rang to inquire why and the program host told me I was too controversial. My attempt to explain to him the wider ramifications of his decision were met with profound ignorance and denials that antisemitism existed either currently or historically.
A podcaster who had enthusiastically booked me for her show, rang to cancel for fear of what my appearance would do to her ratings.
At a bookshop in Brisbane I did a hastily organised in-conversation and a gathering of furious, unhinged, protesters turned up. Wailing accusations of genocide, hiding behind their masks and signs of Globalise the Intifada and Zionist = Nazis, they attracted a dozen police who did nothing to disperse them.
But mostly there’s the silence, the events that simply don’t materialise though you were sure they would.
Our theatre shows have been routinely targeted, causing some promoters to cancel our appearances, others to double down in their determination to stand by us while being forced to hire security for our protection. A show in Hobart attracted protesters outside handing out pamphlets detailing my villainy. Inside, activists disrupted our show a number of times, yelling, having to be forcibly removed from the theatre and, at the last disruption, a patron decided to take matters in her own hands, break her wine glass on the edge of the stage before threatening a protester who had just started yelling at me that I should be ashamed.
It was mayhem, a small glimpse into societal breakdown. The glass wielder was sentenced to 49 hours of community service, the protesters remain anonymous and emboldened in their fight for justice.
A few weeks ago the Byron Bay Writers Festival cancelled me. For the second time. On October 31, I was invited to be part of the Byron Writers Festival … “renowned for its relaxed atmosphere and diverse program of stimulating and entertaining conversations. We aim to bring writers together in an environment that nurtures and invigorates them as much as it does our audiences”.
Great, I accepted their invitation immediately. On March 8, I received another message from the “very relaxed” BBWF to say they’re very excited to instead offer me an “out of season event”. I smelt a rat. I am clearly not as relaxed and laid back as the BBWF. I responded that I would far prefer to be in the scrum of the festival proper but I wasn’t given a choice. And then, as I had suspected all along, the very relaxed BBWF that prides itself on offering a “diverse program of stimulating and entertaining conversation” decided I was a little bit too diverse for their sensitive souls.
Oh no, they screamed as they climbed on the chair, skirts and noses held high, “she thinks Israel should be allowed to exist”. They cited the aforementioned incident at The Playhouse Theatre in Hobart as the reason, but without context.
I was left to wonder, had they received threats? Were they nervous to endanger their audiences? Or are they fully on board with cancelling someone who believes Israel should be allowed to exist?
I keep being told I’m brave, but I’m not sure I had a choice. I never felt I could do anything other than stand my ground against the unreason. It is self-defence against insanity.
I have not spoken to some close friends for many months. I don’t know why entirely. I’m sure they know I’m not a bloodthirsty, genocide-justifying lunatic; we have known each other for a long time, you’d think something like that would be tricky to keep under your hat. Nevertheless, they are definitely NOT talking to me. But I can’t lie about something so fundamental to my being, to say, “Hey, maybe you’re right, Israel is an apartheid, colonising, racist, genocidal state that should just disappear”. Nah. Better to find new friends. And I have.
I have also done some soul searching.
My name is Deborah. The name comes from the Book of Judges. Deborah the Judge who sang her troops into battle. I’m not sure how much of a warrior I can be at age 65, (though I’m still a pretty good singer) but I always knew that if I was going to pick a hill to die on, defending the right of Israel to exist would be it.
And the corollary, calling out blatant unexamined antisemitism from all the good, the kind, the righteous, the educated, the clever, the concerned, even among people I could never have imagined would fall for it, then here I am. Anti-Semitism is a war that has to be fought even if it can never be won.
Hineini, hineini. I’m ready.
