Josh Frydenberg, Deborah Conway and Alex Ryvchin: Our Australians of the Year fight hatred for all of us
Josh Frydenberg, Deborah Conway and Alex Ryvchin are The Australian’s 2024 Australians of the Year for their brave campaign against anti-Semitism in the community.
None of them thought they would ever have to fight this fight in Australia. Not in our lucky country, land of opportunity and easygoing mores, where old-world prejudices and enmities were to be left where they belonged: far, far away.
But the fallout of the October 7, 2023 strike on Israel destroyed that notion for this nation’s Jewish community. Outrage at the paroxysm of murder, rape and abduction unleashed by Hamas 15 months ago soon gave way to something else – something hateful that Jews in Australia had never experienced.
A wave of anti-Semitic attacks on their homes, synagogues and schools. The doxxing of Jewish creatives, violating their privacy and personal security, exposing them to threats of the vilest kind.
The harassment of Jewish students and academics on campuses nationwide.
And at every turn, bewilderment in Australia’s deeply patriotic, 116,000-strong Jewish community that the country they loved seemed to have abandoned them. The hate-inspired attacks represent more than a threat to social cohesion, public safety and the rule of law. They also challenge the very essence of what it is to be Australian, warns Josh Frydenberg, this masthead’s joint 2024 Australian of the Year.
“For me, this is about much more than the Jewish community and their safety,” he said. “I believe this is Australia’s fight. We are defending Australian values.”
Together with singer-songwriter Deborah Conway and Jewish leader and author Alex Ryvchin, the former federal treasurer has been recognised for calling out the anti-Semitism that surged here after Israel hit back at Hamas and launched its bloody invasion of Gaza 15 months ago.
Congratulating them, editor-in-chief Michelle Gunn said: “The conflict in the Middle East has changed Australia in a way few of us ever thought possible, with the Jewish community targeted and made to feel unsafe in their own country.
“This surge in anti-Semitism is an assault on the values that our nation, and this newspaper, hold dear. It demanded a strong, unequivocal response. Alex, Deborah and Josh were among those who bravely took a stand.”
In calling out this scourge, our Australians of the Year also stood on the shoulders of others who refused to be cowed into silence. The Australian’s groundbreaking coverage of the attacks is studded with their names: Lachlan and Sarah Murdoch, former Business Council of Australia boss Jennifer Westacott, business leaders Steven and Frank Lowy, NSW Premier Chris Minns, Liberal MP Julian Leeser, Indigenous former senator and Olympic gold medallist Nova Peris, former editor of The Age Michael Gawenda.
Many but by no means all of those who spoke up are Jewish. This is fitting, given anti-Semitism is a stain on all Australians. Mr Ryvchin, who arrived here as a child refugee, said to be recognised alongside Mr Frydenberg and Ms Conway was “both a singular honour and a validation of our place in this country”.
He continued: “The fight against those who wish to rid the country of Jews, through firebombs and blacklists, will determine far more than the fate of our community. It will determine whether Australia will remain a free and great country, guided by rationalism and basic decency.”
The fight has come at considerable cost for all three recipients, however.
A home once owned by Mr Ryvchin in Sydney’s east was hit by arsonists on January 17. NSW police and the Australian Federal Police are investigating whether it was a targeted attack, linked to his high-profile role as co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the nation’s peak Jewish organisation.
Ms Conway has lost friends and had shows disrupted or cancelled by pro-Palestinian protesters. Promoters and event organisers have had to shoulder the financial burden of providing beefed-up private security when she performs with husband Willy Zygier, her longtime musical collaborator.
“We’ve tolerated some of the most awful, bullying behaviour – and not just online … because that’s easy to shrug off,” she said. “We’re just two musicians who have taken a position that we’re also Jews, we’re Zionists, and we support Israel’s right as a democratic country to defend itself.
“For that we have been utterly vilified by a small but very vocal minority of the population. And I have been really shocked by how people have brushed it aside.”
Mr Frydenberg, a man seen as a future Liberal prime minister until voters in his formerly blue-ribbon Melbourne seat turned teal at the 2022 federal election, has received “serious” threats of physical harm, which have been referred to the AFP. He wouldn’t be drawn on the details.
But the 53-year-old father of two takes comfort from the belief the tide has reversed against those who fanned the hatred. “Deb, I do think there is a silent majority out there,” he said, after dropping in to Ms Conway’s book-filled home in inner Melbourne to congratulate her.
“There are a lot of great people across the country who are appalled by this wave of anti-Semitic attacks and are now finding their voice.”
“I do too,” she said.
Mr Ryvchin, 41, dialled in from wintry Poland, where he has made a poignant pilgrimage to the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp for the 80th anniversary of its liberation in the closing months of World War II. More than a million Jews and other prisoners were murdered there by the Nazis, a defining tenet of the Holocaust that claimed another five million Jewish lives.
“It kind of brings home how relevant all of this is,” he said ahead of Sunday’s commemoration. “When I look at the Holocaust and the millions of stories of torture and abuse, trauma, humiliation and death that were brought upon completely innocent people, obviously nothing that is happening in Australia today can be compared to that.
“But … you know, there is still a common pathology. There’s this kind of sadistic relish to inflict suffering, whether it’s through arson or by the people who were involved in the doxxing of Jewish creatives, they just seemed to take this great pleasure from what they were doing.
“And it kind of reminds me of the sadistic joy that a lot of the Nazis and their collaborators took in their work. Good people might abhor what’s going on, they might be rattled or don’t feel they have a voice or the confidence to speak out, but their silence enables evil.”
Throwing himself into the campaign, Mr Frydenberg worked his contacts on both sides of the political aisle to put together a powerful documentary for Sky News Australia, Never Again: The Fight Against Anti-Semitism. Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and former prime ministers Julia Gillard and John Howard appeared in the program, helping elevate the issue.
“We must reclaim what has been lost,” Mr Frydenberg explained. “We have such a proud record as a multicultural, tolerant nation, but our social cohesion has been undermined by the events of the last 15 months, with anti-Semitism normalised. This is totally unacceptable in this day and age.”
Having attracted more than 500 reader nominations, one of the keenest responses in the 53-year history of our Australian of the Year award, Ms Conway called it vindication of their combined advocacy. As an edgy young woman, she burst on the scene in the 1980s fronting arthouse band Do-Re-Mi, belting out songs laced with references to pubic hair and penis envy; at age 65, the mother of three is still telling it like it is to anyone who will listen.
“I can’t believe it picked up that much momentum,” she said of the anti-Semitism campaign.
“It’s a powerful endorsement of the idea that people are not interested in bringing a foreign war, and all of the trouble and grief of a foreign war, to Australian shores.
“I really believe that’s, in essence, what we’re talking about here. Because it’s one thing to have strong opinions, but it’s another thing to vilify individuals, to start attacking institutions, to graffiti and firebomb and try to destroy people’s livelihoods and all of the other stuff that we have seen going on in the past 15 months, which has been so incredibly disturbing.
“I just couldn’t stand by and watch it happen. I couldn’t.”
Let’s rewind, then, back to that black Shabbat Saturday of October 7, 2023. Like so many of us, our joint Australians of the Year watched the television coverage in horror and disbelief as the Hamas gunmen poured into southern Israel from Gaza, saturating social media with footage of the atrocities. More than 1200 Israelis were killed, two-thirds of them civilians, and thousands injured before the surviving militants retreated with 251 hostages. “There was just this horrible feeling of the community being utterly helpless,” Mr Ryvchin recalled.
The shock was compounded when, barely two days later, hundreds of pro-Palestinian demonstrators descended on the Sydney Opera House, lit blue and white in solidarity with Israel, to denounce the Jewish state. Mr Frydenberg couldn’t believe that police stood by while people in the heaving crowd lit celebratory flares and chanted “f..k the Jews”.
Ms Conway felt like the bottom had dropped out of her world. “I was just reeling … wondering, what kind of country have we turned into? Is our moral compass so broken that the only person arrested on the steps of the Opera House was the one carrying an Israeli flag. I mean, how do you account for that?”
Worse was to come.
The ECAJ logged more than 1800 anti-Semitic incidents over the next 11 months as the war in Gaza ground on, a staggering 324 per cent increase on the same period the year before. And those were only the reported cases; the true figure is unquestionably higher. The attacks on Jewish places of worship sank to a grim new low with the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne’s southeast in the dead of night last December 6, injuring one person and gutting the structure. Prime Minister Albanese, under pressure to crack down on the lawlessness, conceded it was an act of terrorism.
On January 11, the Newtown synagogue in Sydney’s inner west was vandalised with Nazi symbols during an alleged arson attempt. Two men have since been arrested.
The miscreants who went after Mr Ryvchin’s former house in Dover Heights torched two cars, damaged two others, and splashed its white facade with red paint. This week, a daycare centre near a Jewish school and synagogue in beachside Maroubra was set alight, causing extensive damage. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
Did it make Mr Ryvchin rethink what he was doing? After all, he and wife Vicki have three girls at home. “No,” he said emphatically. “I’m not going to live in fear. It’s not who I am as a person and it’s not what I believe this country to be.”
What about Ms Conway? “If I’d known what was going to happen before I opened my big mouth I would have done it anyway,” she laughed.
Mr Frydenberg said the threats he had received would not silence him. Quite the contrary. “It steeled my resolve and is a reminder to us all why it is so important that we all use our voice,” he insisted.
“We need to take the message to the country that what is happening cannot be tolerated. We are better than this.
“We need stronger leadership from our political representatives but also from our civil institutions and law enforcement. With this wave of anti-Semitic attacks, our laws are being broken on a daily basis without sanction. There needs to be serious consequences for people who carry out these attacks.”
Watch this space. Mr Frydenberg has a new project in the works that could make an even bigger difference.
“Our work here is not done,” he said.
