Beyond a year of shattered hope

It has been year of shattered pieces, fragmented bodies and fractured hopes. So much has been crushed and damaged for the Jewish people.

It’s hard to let go of the dark images from Kibbutz Be'eri, to unsee the soul-destroying scenes from the Nova music festival, to unhear the terror of the young children speaking from a cupboard while the bodies of their murdered parents lie just metres away. To unimagine the last moments of those six beautiful young hostages executed in that dark, dank tunnel, when rescue was so near.

It has also been a year of shattered innocence – or was it a blissful naivete – for those of us who believed that antisemitism had been banished to the dark corners of humanity, that we were living in a new age of tolerance, akin to Francis Fukuyama’s idyllic “end of history”.

October 7 will take its dishonourable place alongside the attempted Persian genocide in 475 BCE, the Alexandrian pogrom of 19 CE, the slaughter of the Jews of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the crusades, expulsions and countless pogroms in every century and, more recently, the Hebron riot of 1929 and the mass murders at Auschwitz, Belzec and Babi Yar between 1941 and 1945.

The ferocity and pervasiveness of the new antisemitism has sent us spinning into a vortex of doxing and cancelling, a cold and isolating space where rationality appears to have no place, fantasies and conspiracy theories about Jewish monstrosity have no number.

It has been especially hard for the Jewish community in Australia where, for the first time in our long and noble history, many of us today are feeling deeply unsettled, unwelcome, misunderstood and unappreciated. Our proud and iconic Opera House rang with the repellent howls of Jew-hatred even as we were reeling in shock and trauma from the brutal and savage attacks on innocent Israelis.