How I talk to my non-Jewish friends

“How are you?!” A friend I haven’t seen for some months asks me. Her face is one of joyful expectation to hear some piquant developments in my life. Or just inane news befitting a party conversation.

“Not good,” I say, even though you’re not supposed to say such things to the tune of Beyonce, among overflowing drinks. But sometime after October 7, I resolved to becoming a walking advertisement for my people’s troubles, to make our haunted situation in Australia known wherever possible. “You know, it’s not a great time for Jews.”

My friend looks genuinely surprised: “Aren’t things getting better?” She’s a bright woman, I should say. Numerous degrees, a high-powered job. And a caring person. She’s had some tough stuff happen to her, so she's no stranger to adversity. I adore her.

But.

How did our worlds drift this far apart?

I love parties. Years ago, I even organised them for a living in Tel Aviv’s wild nightlife. I love looking at everyone’s fancy clothes and showing off my own. I love seeing my friends loosen up in the darkness, strangers become less strange. I love the undercurrent of flirtation running through even the most mundane exchanges. Parties make me feel young again, irresponsible, sexy.

But.

Partying as a Jew, especially as an Israeli Jew, is no longer for the faint-hearted. Nor is attending any other events that, as a writer, I typically would – book launches, writers’ drinks, literary interviews. Such gatherings have become minefields. The question I always get once I open my heavily-accented mouth – where are you from? – now evokes even more anxiety than it used to.

What do I say? I’m from a place that you might think is committing genocide, even though I know it isn’t? I’m from a country where the government is criminal and the people, who mean the world to me, are suffering collective PTSD? “I’m from the most difficult place to be from now…” I mumble. The party mood slinks away.

Meeting new people has become difficult, but so has navigating existing relationships with non-Jewish people, even the ones I love. It’s nobody’s fault, I suppose, but conversations are becoming increasingly awkward.

The most natural thing to ask a writer is, “what are you working on now?” I want to say the usual pretentious things, like "a novel that explores the nature of desire". Instead, I say: “I’m editing an anthology of essays by Australian Jewish women about how their lives have changed since October 7”... which pretty much kills the conversation. Or makes it grave and uncomfortable. Increasingly, I just stay home.

How to explain to non-Jewish people, including those I love, how I am now? I have several friends who I think of as “honorary Jews”, because they really get it, and we have open conversations about the war waged in the Middle East and on Jews in the Diaspora. But most don’t get it, or at least it seems so, as we avoid The Topic. And why would they?

The situation Jewish Australians have found themselves in over the last 16 months is bizarre. We’ve become the only minority in our democratic, multicultural country that others can detest openly and discriminate against with little impunity; the only minority in constant physical danger; the only minority not allowed to advocate for itself (because lobby…), nor even define itself (because there are bad Jews and good Jews, and we all know who you are…).

This situation has become so normalised that it’s like a glass pane has been erected between us and the rest of the population, but only we are aware of it.

One metaphor that persists whenever I appraise my recent life and which I think my non-Jewish friends might really understand, as we collectively experience this, is that fuzzy period when the Covid pandemic was at its height and somebody hit pause on life.

Since October 7, my life, like the lives of many Jews I know, feels pretty much like this. There is a virus in the air, but only Jews are at risk. Just as the world shrank for everyone in 2020, it has shrunk for us since October 2023. Many public spaces I love are now infested with reminders of how the world just isn’t into people like myself, while also misunderstanding us and our history.

Certain theatre and music venues with their keffiyeh-clad performers and audiences; galleries fond of red triangles; CBDs with aggressive rallies and ubiquitous anti-Israel/Jew stickers and graffiti; university grounds with their anti-white-colonial-settler-Israel-doesn’t-matter-if-this-isn’t-quite-right/anti-evilest-fascists-Zionists/anti-Jews-generally-just-to-be-safe-but-we-don’t-say-it-aloud vibes.

Same goes for places I attend with my children – shopping centres, Luna Park. The risk is always there. What if my boys say something “Jewish”, like practice their Hebrew in public? Face masks will only protect us as far as to cover our Jewish noses. Even hospitals, just like during Covid, are now breeding grounds of danger; apparently, there are staff members there who really, really don’t like Israelis, as they say, and possibly any Jews.

The geographical limit to venture out during lockdowns was five kilometres, and for many Jews today the self-imposed limits are not much greater. In Melbourne, we huddle on the south side of our river. On the other side are the progressive inner-north hipster suburbs filled with vegan cafes and those same anti-Israel/Jew stickers, graffiti and vibes. (A Jewish friend tells me how she drove with anticipation to a much-coveted creative workshop on the other side of the Yarra only to find her purple-haired tutor sporting Hamas signage…)

We keep retreating. Almost every day there is news about expanding Jew hatred, as yet another place becomes out of bounds. Today’s update is that in a mosque in Heidelberg someone is selling t-shirts calling on people to “bash Zionists” – aka any Jew who support Israel’s right to exist, ergo most Jews.

I become weary of Heidelberg. Just as I have generally become weary of other people as potential antisemitic virus carriers (would they buy such a t-shirt?). It becomes easier to spend time with “safe people” – my “honorary Jews” and other Jews, who feel as haunted as I do. This shift goes against my grain as up until recently, my friendships and social affiliations had always been vastly eclectic rather than tribal.

It’s not all self-exile, either. In some professional spaces, I am no longer welcome. Publishers are sometimes upfront that they are no longer interested in “Jewish stories”. There have been some calls to cancel me – an Israeli-Australian writer, I am an obvious target.

Many writers’ festivals and organisations with whom I’ve worked regularly for years no longer invite me to teach, even though my courses almost always sell out, nor to appear at their events. I still work a lot, but much of this work is private. My teaching spaces are often confined to my study, to the electronic glare of Zoom. And when I do teach outside of home, I now look nervously over my shoulder.

I’ve always felt ashamed to admit it in the face of so much suffering, but in many ways I enjoyed lockdowns. I spent the months before Covid rushing around Australia, promoting two recently-released books. When the pandemic began, I felt devastated at the cancellation of nearly 40 engagements. Soon after, however, I began feeling strangely buoyed.

My external life shrank, but what I feel is my truer self – the daydreaming, creative, introverted one – unfurled her wings. Away from the promotional circuit and with the obligatory socialising banned, I could slow down and focus on what made me happy. I wrote my next book. I spent time with my family and close friends. I gardened and cooked comfort food.

To some extent, my current shrunken life is again conducive to introversion and meaningful relationships. Almost all of my “non-Jewish friendships” (I hate to think of them in such divisive terms, but how else to say it?) have survived the last 16 months and this makes me treasure them even more.

Now, for the first time ever, I feel connected to the Jewish community, bonded to them as viscerally as embattled soldiers bond. The writing space is there, too, although with my current poor publishing prospects, I have to reframe my artistic aspirations from ambition to interestingness and meaningfulness. The sadness about writing into a hypothetical void, or to a small audience of “my people” notwithstanding, this isn’t such a bad outcome.

Creatively, this feels liberating. I have little to lose now, so I feel freer than I’ve ever felt in my 25 years in Australia to be myself on the page in all my complicated Russian-Ukrainian-Israeli-Australian Jewishness.

The daily simplicity of a lockdown life was often soothing and so it can be now in the warm womb of our home, with its merry greenery of houseplants and our gigantic, deep couch – one you never want to leave. I cook a lot again, just like during the pandemic. The smells of soups and cakes, and the bustle in the kitchen – the geographical and emotional heart of our home – make me feel alive.

They create an illusion of richness, plenty, the lack of lack. As if the city laying outside my windows is still my city. As if the larger world of creative, supposedly progressive people is still my world. As if my future is still expansive. Except none of it is true.

In 2020, when my engagements were cancelled and my book sales slowed down, it was the same for many of my peers. Lockdowns were everyone’s lot and FOMO went into hiding. But now it’s just Jews who live the pandemic. As I write this last sentence, I resolve to try harder to not go gently into that not-so-good night.

For starters, I now know what to say the next time someone asks me how I am: I’m in lockdown again.