Published: 4 June 2024
Last updated: 12 June 2024
Several years ago, I was having lunch with colleagues from the writing and publishing universe. We were talking religion when one of them said, laughing, ‘My kids believe in all Gods! And I tell them, I don’t care what you believe in. Allah, Jesus, Buddha…’ He named more divinities, yet someone conspicuous was missing. I had to ask: ‘And what about the Jewish god, isn’t he invited to the party?’
Silence spread around our table until the liberal father gathered his wits and told me he doesn’t like what religious West Bank settlers do to Palestinians. I don’t like it either. I also don’t like Catholics sexually abusing children nor ISIS burning people alive nor other atrocities perpetrated by various godly representatives on earth. Nobody comes out clean if you look into it; yet the only god excluded from that family’s festivities was mine.
Which was kind of reflective of how I’ve come to feel amidst the increasing celebrations of diversity in Australia, particularly within my tribe – the literati. The tribe in whose gatherings I’m often the only Jew and always the sole Israeli. To my knowledge, I am the only Israeli-Australian author with some sort of a public profile.
For years I’d thought Australia, where I moved to 25 years ago, was my salvation. Not only a political haven, but a Mount Helicon teeming with muses. My first three books were in Hebrew and published in Israel, but in English I developed a stronger writer’s voice. Here I was also exotic enough to stand out. My accented public readings were exotic.
My stories were exotic. Some of them were about another part of my twice hyphenated identity – my childhood in the Soviet Union. I felt ambivalent about those works, thinking how risk-free and irrelevant it was to write about Russian antisemitism in Australia where such vile behaviour would not have been tolerated… I miss that naiveté!
Comments12
Miodrag Kojadinović24 June at 04:59 am
I only now heard of your text (linked on Erika Dreifus’ Machberet blog) and it was worth reading, as it informed me, reasonably, not overly emotionally, certainly not in a schmaltzy fashion, and yet still touching. I learned from it, or should I say: it confirmed my prejudices?
For I have always thought that as a former penal colony of people who once their punishment was over treated the people they found in Australia, original inhabitants, with disdain and extreme racial discrimination, a country so inferior in every way to the neighbouring New Zealand (female suffrage, use of Maori language and general treatment of the Maori compared to abuse and terrorisation of Aborigines, the way a human right, the same-sex marriage, was not made into a silly voting issue, the fact their preime minister nonchalanatly breastfed her baby in parliament)… to wit: Australia simply cannot do any better.
Granted, I have never set foot there. Wish I had, may be too late now that I am in my 60s (not sure I can travel that long any more, have done my share between Asia and the Western Hemisphere and Europe where I spent the bulk of my years). Perhaps I would be positively surprised, but I doubt it, and your text adds to that doubt.
I did a kind of always expect the USA woke movement to be as infantile as it is, overprotected by the malevolent, but still a nanny state, but I guess I in a way hoped Australia in its remoteness and lack of that level of social control USA have would have had to grow up to at least the level of a 20-year old stealing sheep in a billabong, as cookaburras laugh, but I guess the country/continent has stayed in its early teens, mentally, just as my Canada’s southern neighbour has.
Ah well, oy-vey…
Beverly Goldfarb14 June at 08:43 pm
Thank you for articulating this view, Lee. I feel like I am attacked by all sides these days, and have become mute and sad.
Jane Messer13 June at 07:27 am
You’ve broached so much complexity, with such thoughtful, measured prose amongst the tumult. Thank you for helping me think more deeply about the politics and the emotions that we’re grappling with. Thank you for speaking out.
Natasha Cica13 June at 07:26 am
Dear Lee
Thank you for writing this. I have posted a version of this comment on social media.
My experience is not the same, and I am not Jewish.
However, there are many commonalities in being of Serbian/exYU background and also Australian, in terms of how my own perspective is received.
I have been deplatformed from a range of cultural spaces in Australia in recent years as a consequence – after a grinding and extended period of gaining a basic toehold. All have been publicly funded spaces.
I have twice co-edited Griffith Review – Tasmania: The Tipping Point? (2013) and The European Exchange (2020). Both proactively platformed marginalised and emerging voices as well as recognised opinion formers, were extremely well received and changed some games. These included a great piece of fiction by you, and a great piece of non-fiction by Irris Makler about the legacy contribution of the descendants of Holocaust survivors to Australian society. Since then, I have been deplatformed there as well.
The state of public conversation in Australia is fairly dire at the moment. I do still care about it, which is the only reason I am speaking up about this. I might not care about it for much longer. There are other places to work and live.
In my own view, Australian cultural gatekeepers need to move past fetishising the ‘other’ (as stereotypically bad/good and always exotic), move past a leaden focus on maximising cultural safety – and better embrace cultural risk. That kind of risk is the entire basis of the successful parts of Australia’s multicultural project.
Thank you again, Lee, for all the work that you do.
Pauline11 June at 10:47 am
Thank you for articulating the feeling for many.
Stuart7 June at 11:55 pm
Lee, this is such an extraordinarily written article. You write so beautifully.
Sara Tiefenbrun5 June at 11:50 am
Thank you Lee for your bravery in expressing what’s happening right now.
Ian4 June at 11:27 pm
Lee,
A factor which you have not mentioned but I think is present, is the “Australian politeness”.
People who have decided that Israel is evil – and because you are a Jew, also you – they will tell you upfront that they disagree, violently oppose, boycott, whatever, but they refuse to engage in any serious discussion.
Frustrating!
Romaine4 June at 11:46 am
Thank you for writing this, so moving.
Elaine Davidoff4 June at 11:37 am
Beautiful piece Lee, moving and brave, as you are.
Steve Israel4 June at 08:42 am
Lee, thanks for this. It’s an eye-opener for me and I am so sorry to have heard it. I am an Israeli who visited Australia a number of times in my work as a Jewish educator and I enjoyed not only the Jews that I encountered in the community but also the laid-back liberal and welcoming atmosphere that I felt around me in Australia as a whole. This was in contrast to the atmosphere in other places that I visited.
I am so sorry that either I was superficial in my optimistic judgments of Australian society then or that the climate has changed in such extreme terms, bringing it into line with other, harsher, places.
I’ve always argued against the automatic resort to “Anti-Semitism” as the label to explain hostility to Israel and it’s still hard for me now. I tended to emphasise ignorance and jealousy as factors to explain some of the criticism in addition to the genuine justified criticism that has to be rightly made, in my mind at aspects of the Israeli reality. But it’s getting increasingly hard to deny the evidence. I don’t know you or your writing (my loss, I’m sure) but I’m very, very, sorry that you have to encounter the reality you describe. We’re all hurting in different ways at the moment. I’m genuinely sorry to hear that it’s reached Australia.
Michael Gawenda4 June at 08:06 am
Brave and beautifully written. Such a fine writer’s voice.