Friends like these: Non-Jewish Australians speaking out against antisemitism

Jennifer Westacott, Chancellor of Western Sydney University

Jennifer Westacott can remember the transformative moment in her appreciation of the extent of antisemitism: it was the realisation that the Holocaust was state-sponsored genocide, that every institution was focused on annihilation of the Jews.

“I’d grown up as a person who was never afraid of the state, who never had reason to fear the institutions of the state,” she tells The Jewish Independent. “Walking through Yad Vashem, I tried to imagine Jews in the camps being aware that no institution would save them. That no intervention was possible. I cannot imagine what that would be like, to know that the entirety of an institutional set of arrangements was focused on one of the greatest, if not the greatest, acts of immorality.”

Westacott, who has spoken out strongly and repeatedly against the upsurge in antisemitism in this country, has joined the board of Josh Frydenberg’s recently established Dor Foundation because she is appalled at “how quickly antisemitism got out of the box, how quickly it was unleashed.

“Multiculturalism has been a tremendous success in this country, but that’s not to say there aren’t things that need fixing. We must be constantly vigilant to guard against fragility and threats to our social cohesion. Antisemitism is a threat to our multiculturalism and a threat to our democracy. We have to keep working at it and ensure that our institutions uphold society’s values. 

“While we have been a successful multicultural society, we have to remember that Indigenous Australians do not share the same experience. Together, as a nation, we have much work to do to improve Indigenous health, incarceration, education and living standards.”