Freedom Rides: Allyship for dark times

Three years on from October 2023, the world has become a darker and scarier place.  

In Australia, the 2023 referendum “no” campaign unleashed a shocking level of racism and bigotry into Australian public discourse. Neo-Nazis spread the lie that the referendum was a Jewish conspiracy and marched in the Melbourne CBD with a brashness not seen before. In the words of Marcia Langton, it caused a “surge in race hate and antisemitism.” 
 
We have witnessed a period of growing polarisation and decaying social cohesion, marked by rising racism, antisemitism, support for populist politicians and political violence. 

To resist the forces of hate and disharmony, we must safeguard and protect the rights of all minorities. Community safety and respect are not zero-sum.  
 
As Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, articulated, “Racism is deeply embedded across our society. It’s pervasive; it affects many different cohorts ... we have got a fundamental problem within our structures that needs to be fixed ... what you want is solutions that lift everyone.” 

It was this ethic that informed the involvement of many Jewish Australians in the influential 1965 Freedom Ride. Students at the University of Sydney formed “Student Action for Aborigines” (SAFA) to fight against discrimination against First Nations Australians. They devised a “Freedom Ride” – a two-week bus tour of northern NSW led by prominent Arrernte Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins and including several Jewish students.  

SAFA’s Secretary Jim Spigelman, later Chief Justice of New South Wales, was born in Poland in 1946. He reflected that his involvement “came from my Jewish background that racism had a very high salience … my involvement was obviously determined by my personal background as the child of Holocaust survivors, that any form of racial discrimination was abhorrent.”