40 years since Lanzmann’s Shoah, his central question remains: When is it too late?

French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was best known for his epic documentary Shoah – a viscerally-confronting nine-hour magnum opus in which he interviewed Holocaust survivors, witnesses and even perpetrators, the faces of his subjects filling the entire screen.

Why the need to make the film, asked a perceptive journalist. Wasn’t everything already known about the Holocaust that there was to know? Why the need to create yet another documentary, let alone one that ran for nine hours and took 11 years to produce?

Responded Lanzmann – there was a burning question which had not been asked: When was it too late? When had anti-Jewish racism reached such a crescendo as to be overwhelming? When was it too late for the Jews of Europe to avoid being caught up in the extraordinary killing machine which was Nazi Germany?

Was it too late when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in 1935, isolating Jews politically and socially, curtailing their civil rights, forbidding marriage between Jews and “bearers of German blood”, banning them from holding government office?

Was it too late when those laws were tightened in 1938, rendering Jews as subjects, rather than citizens, with an incriminating “J” printed on their identity documents?

Or when The Eternal Jew was produced in 1940 – a scurrilous film initiated by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, characterising Jews as parasites squabbling over food and money, and depicting rats scurrying through sewers with the voiceover intoning: “Where rats turn up, they spread diseases and carry extermination. They are cunning, cowardly and cruel, they travel in packs – exactly the way Jews infect the races of the world.”

Or when The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – a publication which falsely claimed to be a record of meetings of Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world – became compulsory reading in German schools?

With each measure demonstrating in turn that the Holocaust was the end-point of a gradation of steps from discrimination to dehumanisation to violence, it was clearly too late when Jews were marshalled into the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz and Vilna; when they were at the mercy of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads; when they were herded onto cattle-cars which transported them to the death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Majdanek.

Forty years have elapsed since Lanzmann‘s Shoah, and his penetrating question presents itself once again. Australia 2025 is definitively not Germany 1935. This is another time and another place. Yet anti-Jewish racism has swept Australia and indeed, manifested globally with an alarming momentum which is both all-pervasive and unprecedented, corroding the social fabric and peaceful diversity that – until recently – characterised multicultural Australia.

The issue is not a conflict thousands of kilometres away, even though some mask the anti-Jewish racism as mere political opinion about that topic; the issue is who Australians are as a nation, acceptance of difference, denigration and mistreatment of minority groups, the conduct that each of us is willing – or refuses – to accept.

A student of crowd psychology, Gustave Le Bon ascribed certain characteristics to crowd behaviour – absence of judgment, exaggeration of sentiment, individuals becoming submerged in the group. 

So when is it too late to call out conduct which threatens minority groups? When does the damage to civil liberties and the assault on human rights become normalised? And so normalised as to be irreversible? Where are the voices of civil society separating themselves from the crowd and demonstrating courage and leadership?

So that a woman felt comfortable standing up at the recent Sydney Writers' Festival, brazenly informing the 400-strong audience that the real problem our society faces is “the tentacles” of “the Jewish lobby”. Allegations that there is a nefarious Jewish lobby are tired and hackneyed; what sent a shiver through many members of that audience was the reprehensible trope that Jewish Australians unduly bend society to their will, tossed out casually and unashamedly as an apparent matter-of-fact in a seemingly educated public forum. Normalised.

So that an Australian university’s report into racism found that of 33 complaints against its staff, only two were investigated. So that far-right agitators who disrupted a military memorial service are reportedly forming a political party as part of a plan to exploit legal loopholes and contest the next federal election.

Australian Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay recently drew attention to "quieter forms of antisemitism... Jewish university students who no longer feel safe on campus, Jewish parents who have told their children not to say they are Jewish if asked in public, Jewish school students who have been advised not to wear their uniforms on public transport.

"How could this be happening in Australia? It is easy for these examples to go unnoticed. Yet for the Jewish community it impacts every aspect of their lives. This is not something the Jewish community should be left to face alone.”

So, back to Lanzmann’s question: When does such a situation become normalised? When is it too late?

This article first appeared in The Australian.