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.
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.