Tag Archives: antisemitism

Flying the flag

By Posted in Faith, First Australians, Life Tagged , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments


My father was the eldest of three brothers growing up in the then Jewish suburb of North Carlton.

 

That suburb boasted synagogues, a thriving playhouse, a choir, houses of Torah study and a dedicated Jewish segment in the nearby Melbourne General Cemetery.

 

That Jewish enclave was sufficient to itself. But every shabbat morning, Dad and his little brothers walked the five kilometre round trip to the East Melbourne Shule.* They didn’t choose East Melbourne, their father did. I think Grandpa’s choice was driven by social climbing. East Melbourne was less foreign, more English, hence advantageous.

 

That social climb would always remain too steep for Grandpa, who arrived in Australia alone in 1898, as a twelve-year old, a refugee from Palestine, a boat person, speaking only Yiddish and Arabic. But Grandpa wanted his boys to ascend. So they went. Grandpa himself did not walk the five kms. My Dad explained, ‘Father’s knee was bad on Saturdays.’

 

Have you ever visited the East Melbourne synagogue? (They hold open days and host school groups. In these days of smaller congregations, the cumulative total of visitors might well exceed the tally of worshippers.) If you have seen East Melbourne Shule, you’ll feel sad as I do about the attack. For the shule is beautiful, a small Jewish gem surrounded by the august institutions of Christendom.

 

In conjunction with St Peter’s Eastern Hill, the rabbi at East Melbourne set up a feeding initiative for hungry people in the locality. I’ve been a friend of that rabbi since his family moved in around the corner when he was a boy of four. Nowadays he’s the Jewish Chaplain in the Australian Military Reserve. He takes his flock on a trip to country, guided by Aboriginal custodians. He’s a bloke with a beard who wants to help.

 

This then is the story of a bunch of very foreign foreigners who find their place in Australia. It’s an Australian story, replicated in thriving immigrant enclaves all over this land. And all of us non-Aboriginal groups are new arrivals, all of us more or less recent immigrants.  This is the Australia that nurtured me, the home I cherish.

 

Last Friday night a person attacked that Australia. Since then, solicitous friends who are not Jewish have reached out to us in shock and anger and kindness. They ask are you alright? I reply I feel sad more than I feel scared. I feel sad for Australia, for my Australia, for this place that I love so dearly.

 

***

 

Last week I wrote the following little piece for the newsletter of my current congregation:

“Readers will not know, and certainly couldn’t care less, about the principles that underlie my daily selection of headgear. But permit me to suggest you should know and care, and ponder and decide. ‘Way back in history, there existed in the western world the phenomenon of Jew-hatred. For a good while it went out of fashion. It got a bad name in the 1940’s. 

About the middle of that century, I popped up, and I lived in a world that execrated antisemitism. I walked the halls of my university beneath my kippah and encounteredonly warmth and respect. In Aboriginal Australia, I was a celebrity. The blackfella mob said, ‘You mob, you got your culture, you got back your language, you got your land. Us mob need to be like you mob.’ In whitefella Australia, I prowled the wards and corridors of greater and lesser hospitals and met only honour. 

 

Honour? This was unexpected. For what? – I wondered. If I read the great Australian character aright, we Aussies respect oddity, wherever we sense authenticity. I think Aussies, often ignorant of history, generally devoutly secular, looked at me and thought, this bloke looks funny, but I reckon he’s fair dinkum. 

 

About the year 2000, I began to hear antisemitic whispers. It took me a while to learn these were not whispers or mutterings but a swelling to a roar on social media, a world to which I am a stranger. From that time, when I ventured outside, I began to cover my kippah with a secular hat. I still looked odd, but not so Jewish. I was no longer living my proud Jewish Australian self. 

 

From the time of the Opera House riot of October 9, 2023, I have resumed wearing my public kippah. My kippah asks Australia a question. It asks, ‘Is this old Jew still welcome in your world? Or does he need to piss off back to Palestine?’ 

 

I spend most of my days in gentile company. Wherever I go beneath my kippah, Australia shows me neither surprise nor hostility. Often strangers flash warm, wide smiles of surprise and recognition. Here and there an ockker delivers a small oration: I hate this antisemitism! Or, I stand with Israel. Or, Burning synagogues! That’s not Australia! 

 

In a coffee shop well outside the ghetto, I meet my son for coffee. He wears his Let Them Go t-shirt. In Carlisle Street, flowing beards and peyot (side curls) are all the go, stout Lubavitch Hassidim waddle in their Kapottehs, and broad-chested Adassniks flash their vast public ritual fringes. 

 

I think we all, wittingly or otherwise, are asking the same question. I think the kippah, the beard and sidelock, the pectoral tzitzith, the t-shirt all fly the flag. The flag asserts Jewishness in Australia. It’s not aggressive, but it is challenging. Thechallenge to Australia is that of diversity. Pauline Hanson rejected diversity, and Australia has largely rejected her. I urge readers to consider how you can fly this honest, and decent and respectful and proud flag.”

 

*** 

 

As antisemitism came out of hidingaround 2000, I suggested to my adult children they owed it to their own children to listen and watch, and decide whether the time had come to flee. They laughed then.

 

First the Opera House riot, with cries of Fuck the Jews. That night a carful of young men drove around Melbourne, stopping repeatedly, shouting to passers-by, Where’s the Jews? Where’s the Jews? Policeintercepted them and talked them down. Soon cars and fences burnedin Sydney, then Adass Israel Shulewas burned out. Now the attack atEast Melbourne. 

 

The copycat is at large. Anyone who sets fire to a building with people inside is willing to harm them, to burn them, to see them die. 

 

First, come the words of hate. Inert governments, passive police sit on their hands. The words set fire to hands; then schools burn, then a Jewish MP’s office, now sacred places.

 

The pace of hatred accelerates, the acts of menace mount to violence against property. We have now – following the synagogue fires -crossed athreshhold. Next comes the taking of life. 

 

My children are not laughing today.

 

 

*Shule, a Yiddish term derived from the German word for school, has come to mean synagogue, always a place of religious instruction and learning.

 

 

 

Retrogressive

By Posted in Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

“Progressive” has become a label. People who identify with an underdog claim that title, people who care and work for a fairer world. That would be me.

Progressive people are derided by conservative people by the term, Woke. That would be me. The term Woke is meant to hurt and it hurts me.

Back in the times before it became a label, I used to be progressive. Of course the word progressive is an adjective, like big, or old or green. In the past I wouldn’t have called myself a Progressive, any more than I’d have called myself a Big (which I am not), or an Old (which I am), or a Green. Very many people identify as Greens. I’m green: I’m concerned for the environment and live accordingly. However in Australia, the Greens as a political party are an organised mass movement hostile to Jewish people. (The Greens will deny, hand on heart that they are anti-semitic. But I am a Jew who judges them by the harm they do, not by their ever-so-pure, who-me? intent.)

We Jews hear a Greens voice that allows our people no homeland. The Greens voice that Australians hear is not heard on Hamas terror. It’s a voice that cannot pronounce the word rape when committed by Hamas.

The Greens of course, would claim to be progressive.

So I’m not a Progressive, that proper noun that’s a self-label. In the days when I knew myself as progressive, rape was rape, and rape was always hideous, always condemned, always wrong. In the days when I was progressive, we who embraced the underdog were capable of civil agreement to disagree. In those times those who embraced Palestinian people as underdogs did not vilify those who supported Israel. They did not deny our humanity. That inhuman individual would be me, Zionist, former progressive. 

Progressive people knew once the dignity of difference. We might be Zionist or non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and we could hear each other. We could see the human face of one with whom we disagreed. 

We had not learned to cancel.

Progressives have made progress. They’ve progressed to shouting where previously they’d debate; to shaming where they’d show respect; to cancelling and to doxing. Once upon a time Progressives used to be democrats. The Progressives have progressed far out of sight, so far they cannot be recognised. They have followed the logic of their self-contradiction to their present morass of moral confusion. Many Progressives – in my speculation most of them – mean well. Many are young and are uninformed and susceptible. Some become useful idiots manipulated by older persons, agitators for one cause or another or every cause de jour.

So I am one whose constituency has moved on. I am one left behind, marooned in a once-was world, a world of outmoded values like decency, like openness to the other, like mutual respect. I am stuck in a past where we could agree to disagree.

I guess I have to accept I am not progressive. I need a new noun. Call me a Retrogressive.

Little Old Lady

By Posted in Childhood, death, Family, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 3 Comments

You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

Little Old Lady

By Posted in Childhood, death, Family, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments

You’d see her on the high street every morning, pushing the walker that she really doesn’t need.

She’d walk the 1.2 kilometres to her coffee shop where the staff would welcome her as a sort of celebrity.

At the age of ninety-seven she looks good wearing fashions of women two generations younger. Her white curls are cropped short, her still pretty face opens into a smile that brightens the day. A waiter pulls out a chair for her: What will you have, Helen? The usual?

The usual is coffee and a pastry. If you asked Helen what sort of coffee – a caffe latte or a flat white – she’d look puzzled. I like it how they make it, she’d say, gesturing vaguely in the direction of  the barrista.

Her morning yoga session, a practice of seventy years, keeps her joints moving smoothly. After coffee she’d head back up the high street and make her way to the supermarket. The old lady was heading cheerfully towards her centenary.  

A long life has delivered its burdens. She’s buried partners, she’s watched her daughters grapple with their cancers, there have been the hip fractures, the blocked arteries, the eye that will not work. These burdens she has set aside. Other burdens, burdens acquired in childhood remained buried deeply. 

The old lady kept herself active and cheerful. There were her children and her grandchildren and their little ones. A total of twenty-three descendants lightened life’s burdens. Sons in law and grandsons in law joined her tribe and she embraced them all. The old lady saw her generations, saw her futurity, and life shone. She drank her coffee, she practised her yoga and she walked and walked.

Until the day following October 7 this year. That day she read how the mob in Sydney cried Death to the Jews! Gas the Jews!  Her eldest great-grandchild had told his hijab-clad workmate he was a Zionist. She had replied, You deserve death. On the TV news the old lady watched the mob in Dagestan hunting for Jews.

Now the wounds of childhood in Danzig burst open, an abscess of humiliation and terror. The old lady said, I can’t remember a single happy day in those eleven years… We were the lucky ones, we caught a boat to Australia. All my cousins who remained, perished. Cousin Josephina was burned to death in the Synagogue. And now they’re burning Jews in Israel!

If you walk the high street today you won’t sight the little old lady with her walker. She’s not to be found in her coffee shop. She awakens to a day of heaviness. The news appals. Her mind swims and fails. The new griefs and the old griefs literally drive the old lady out of her mind. She says, I have nothing to live for. There’s nothing for me to look forward to.

My Kippah Speaks

By Posted in death, Faith, Life, racism Tagged , , , , , , , , 22 Comments

In 1964 I left my Jewish school and my kippah entered the world. My kippah was the first to appear on a university campus. My kippah spoke to the world. My kippah said, I sit on top of a person who is Jewish. I’m a symbolic expression of that person’s belief in a higher Being.

 

My kippah asked a question of Australia: Can you accept me, can you like me, can you see the person beneath the kippah?

 

An answer came from the man on the train. As the red rattler rattled its way to Oakleigh, Howard Goldenberg nodded off. His sleep was disturbed by a light percussion on his head, a tap, tapping of a newspaper rolled into a cylinder. Howard woke up, he looked up and saw a man standing over him. The man held a furled newspaper above him. The man spoke. He said, Good on you son. You keep wearing that – another tap with the newspaper – you keep wearing that; it’ll never let you down. With that the man turned and exited the train at Hughesdale Station.

 

On campus came a similar response. Here too, my kippah spoke. It said, Beneath me you see a proud Jew. He ventures to hope that the country he loves will love him.People on campus, students and staff alike, were united in their rejection of racism. They knew of the Holocaust. Antisemitism was dead. Never again,said the campus. The campus was yet to learn the mantra, Zionism is racism. The campus embraced the kippah and its wearer.

 

Emboldened, my kippah travelled all over Australia, meeting occasional puzzled looks and many more smiles. My kippah said to Australia, what it had always said, beneath me you see a proud Jew, a happy Australian.

 

 

 

Around the turn of this century, my kippah started to hide beneath secular headgear. No longer sure of itself, my kippah often took shelter, whispering to itself, Never Again has become Once Again. Jewish schools hired armed guards; outside synagogues, men in kippoth with walkie-talkies patrolled the streets.

 

Windows were broken, swastikas appeared, Jewish graves were defaced. A Neo Nazi group showed its face. In 2022 they numbered one hundred thousand. Social media became antisocial media. My kippah remembered Darkest Europe. It decided to go underground. It sat atop a proud Jew, now intimidated. It peeped out and saw a community polarising, fragmenting. It saw and it cried the beloved country.

 

 

Until October 7, 2023. Following those acts of depravity my kippah came out of hiding and found its voice. It exclaimed, beneath me you see a proud Jew. Beneath me you see one whose family has been proudly Australian and proudly Jewish since the 1840’s.

 

My kippah showed itself and asked every Australian it encountered, Can you love me? I’m a Jew. I’m a Zionist. I’m Pro-Palestinian. Can you weep with me for what’s happening to community here?

The Blood-Dimmed Tide

By Posted in Life, Opinion Tagged , , , , , 4 Comments

We have seen the great times. We who lived in the second half of the twentieth century have seen many of the great scourges of history defeated. We saw the eclipse of contagion.

 

 

Enter Penicillin, bacteria retreat. Viruses, still invisible, suddenly become preventable. Smallpox, killer of more Australian Aborigines than massacre, disappears from the planet. The Spanish Flu of 2018-2019, which killed more humans than the war to end all wars, was the last pandemic of influenza.

 

Louis Pasteur

Alexander Fleming

 

In 1946 my father, a country GP, administered what was possibly Australia’s first non-military dose of penicillin. The patient, an eight-year old boy in pneumonia crisis, was likely to die within a day. Six hours after the penicillin injection, my father found the boy’s bed empty. The child had left the ward and was found in the hospital’s kitchen scoffing down scones.

 

 

After the Shoah a world in shock vowed ‘never again’. Civilised humanity turned its back on antisemitism. A Jew living in the post-war decades walked the streets of the West free from the violence and contumely that stalked us for two thousand years.
 
We have seen the great times. Bacteria have fought back against antibiotics; they are in fact, winning. The anti-vaccination movement threatens the safety of all the world’s children. In the world of alternative facts, fear defeats trust, hate emerges from its cave. In Poland, in Hungary, a Jew knows better than to walk the streets wearing a kippah. Visiting Paris or London, and even in my home country, Australia, there are suburbs and streets where I will not wear the kippah that I wore during the decades of sunshine.

I have lived and prospered in a lacuna of time when History paused. Now it rises once again and bares its teeth. I tremble for our grandchildren.