Published: 28 May 2025
Last updated: 28 May 2025
I’ve been on the frontline of advocacy work for decades: 17 years as chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, where combating antisemitism was foremost among my responsibilities, preceded by 18 years editing the Australian Jewish News, whose pages I utilised to shine a light on all manner of bigotry, from First Nations issues to Islamophobia to LGBT rights to anti-Jewish racism.
The latter brand of hate manifested in a plethora of ways, all of them pernicious, all of them hurtful.
Yet in all that time, and despite being targeted - both as a community representative and indeed, personally - by antisemitic words and deeds, I never encountered in an open public forum the gutter-dwelling slur that Jews have “tentacles”. Until now.
The venue was the Sydney Writers Festival, which annually features international and Australian authors and attracts thousands of patrons, creating a collegiate environment which is conducive to articulate presentations by current writers and to respectful debate. And is a supposedly safe space.
One such session, a few days ago, focused on antisemitism and featured two erudite speakers - British barrister and author Philippe Sands, best known for his landmark book East West Street, on the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity; and Melbourne author Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, whose book My Life As A Jew was published three days before the October 7 massacre. A thoughtful conversation ensued, adroitly chaired by Michael Visontay, commissioning editor of The Jewish Independent.
Then an unidentified woman rose to her feet during the Q&A segment and brazenly announced that the speakers and the audience were sidestepping “the elephant in the room” – the “tentacles” of Australia’s “Israel lobby”.
Allegations that there is a nefarious Jewish lobby out there are tired and hackneyed, and ignore the fact that lobbying is an integral feature of democracy, whether it be the railway workers’ lobby, the teachers’ lobby or the pharmaceutical lobby. What sent a cold shiver reverberating among many of the Jewish members of that audience was the reprehensible trope that Jewish Australians have “tentacles” and utilise them to unduly bend society to their will, and thrown out so extraordinarily casually, confidently and unashamedly in a public forum of several hundred people.
Comments10
Conor3 June at 12:51 pm
I am not Jewish but did anyone expect anything else from SWF or any of the writers festivals.
Sadly, antisemitism is endemic in Australia. The language is normal. All that can be done is to call it out.
Simon Krite2 June at 01:51 pm
This isn’t about whether Jews have influence, or whether lobbying exists… we know that, and so does everyone else. This is about calling out what was actually said – a dehumanising, grotesque, Nazi-propaganda-grade trope, delivered to a crowd who wouldn’t have let the same bs fly if it targeted almost any other group.
It needs to be named. Loudly! Because if we’ve reached the point where someone can stand up in a packed cultural event and casually toss out “Jewish tentacles” and it’s met with murmurs rather than gasps then we’re already deep into the rot.
SMH, ABC, Any press pick this up? – Or, it’s just not Islamophobia.
philip mendes31 May at 07:47 am
Of course, this term ‘the tentacles’ was popularized by a Greens member of the NSW Parliament in December 2023: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/nsw-mp-apologises-for-inappropriate-words-at-pro-palestine-event-20240206-p5f2pn.html?fbclid=IwAR0HXUiNI9N4U-1myibvw85Zb0TWMs0ckg6gUFjKgVAbiyjZ6pDlBrxfbeQ to imply that Jews secretly infiltrated political movements solely in order to promote their own narrow interests and power. One can imagine that the application of this term to any other ethnic or religious minority in Australia would have resulted in the offender being expelled from the Greens and parliament. Yet, nothing has happened to this xenophobe. In fact, a number of prominent Greens have defended the perpetrator on social media, bizarrely claiming she was in fact an anti-racist. I suspect that it was one of those Greens apologists who uttered those words at the Writers Festival.