‘If I can help avert a cultural civil war, I will regard my life as well-lived’

There has been “a collapse in reasoned conversations since October 7,” says Josh Szeps. “There’s a worthy instinct on the Left to reflexively support the underdog. Yet many people are confused about who the underdog is.

“We see poor brown people standing in rubble, and our post-colonial guilt kicks in. Then we see a straight white Israeli male with flawless English and an expensive suit addressing US Congress, and we code his side as all-powerful,” he tells The Jewish Independent.

“But that’s a failure of imagination. It’s a failure to see the perspective of a people who were nearly annihilated, given a state and then instantaneously invaded by all their neighbours who came back for another bite in 1967 and again in 1973, followed by the intifada and the second intifada.

“If you’re going to have empathy for the frustrated aspirations of the Palestinians, you also have to have some empathy for the siege mentality that exists in Israel.”

Szeps, 46, says the difference between him and his “leftist friends” is that he doesn’t assign all the blame to Israel. “I give agency to the Arabs. They’re also a player and they make choices.

“There’s moral confusion in much of the anti-Zionist Left in conflating the misdeeds of the Likud and Netanyahu with the existence of Israel and the right of the tiny global minority of Jews to self-determination.

“It’s a tremendous but stealthy shift, from the position that ‘Israel is a flawed liberal democracy trying to do its best’ to the position that Israel is a colonial-settler project that had no legitimacy from day one.”

That shift has led him to be more outspoken, through his Uncomfortable Conversations podcast, which tries to “unpick what is rational and irrational, true and untrue, just and unjust”.

Regarding his departure late last year from the ABC, where he was a fixture of ABC Radio Sydney and the host of the Afternoon Show, Szeps says “October 7 had nothing to do with my departure. But it was emblematic of how divided we’ve become as a culture, how trapped we’ve become inside our echo chambers.

“You can’t extricate this schism from the impact of social media. It’s a bias-confirmation tool. The job of an algorithm is to maximise the time you spend on the app. It does that by pandering to what you believe and demonising what you don’t.

“We think it’s a window, but it’s actually a mirror. The way we’re consuming information is making it harder to have intellectual empathy. It makes more positions seem beyond the pale.”

The media landscape has changed, says Szeps. “One of the challenges in legacy newsrooms is how to foster diversity but retain objectivity. There’s a laudable desire to make journalism less of a middle-aged straight white male-dominated pursuit. But implicit in the call for diverse voices is the assumption that different perspectives can have their own truth. That’s anathema to the news. You’re supposed to be delivering a universal set of facts. 

“On the other hand, when it comes to analysis and commentary, I’d argue we need more intellectual diversity, not less. You want the broadest possible range of views. And they need to engage authentically, with intellectual empathy and courage and nuance.

“Tribal thinking doesn’t cut it. It’s not good enough for pro-Israel voices to cry “antisemitism” whenever anyone protests Israel. And it’s not good enough for pro-Palestinians to launder antisemitic tropes by pretending they’re “anti-Zionist”.

If you tell me, as many leftists have done since October 7, that Zionists are bloodthirsty globalist puppet-masters who are contaminating the native-born population and forcing themselves on innocent women and children, we know that rhetorical move.” 

Obama spoke of “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, Szeps notes. “He was referring to black Americans, but the Left has the same attitude towards Middle Eastern Arabs - the expectation that they’re helpless victims. Everyone deserves agency. And everyone deserves sympathy.”

Born in Balmain, Szeps attended Fort Street High School and “had a great, highly intellectual childhood. I had my bar mitzvah with Rabbi Jeffrey Kamins at Emanuel Synagogue. Mum was raised Catholic in New Zealand but converted to Judaism in a fit of hippy whimsy. 

“Apart from the fact that I briefly wanted to be a pilot, my heroes were television smart-arses. Jon Stewart, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien. I did work experience on the Ray Martin Show when I was 15, and that sealed it.

“But I figured I’d have better job prospects in news than in entertainment, so I went into journalism instead of stand-up. It could have gone either way. I just wanted to wrestle with ideas in public. Now I get to do it with both truthfulness and, hopefully, humour.”

His grandmother’s story had its share of vicissitudes. A Jewish teenage Communist in Poland, she fell in love with a huckster and in 1938 they had the foresight to leave Poland, leaving behind her family, all of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis.

“They had a daughter, her partner joined the French Resistance and she stayed in Paris - until being arrested by the French police. About to be deported to a Nazi camp, she appealed to a guard to let her out to retrieve her baby; the guard complied.

She and her daughter reunited with the baby’s father, she got pregnant with Josh’s father and was smuggled into Switzerland. “My Dad, Henri Szeps, was born in a Swiss refugee camp. It was 1943. Dad was fostered to a Lutheran family in the Swiss Alps and spent his youth there.

“His mother took him back at the age of six, and two years later, 1951, she and a new partner purchased tickets on a refugee boat. The options were the United States, Canada and Australia. “My grandmother chose the one that was furthest away. That’s why I’m Australian. As a lovely wrinkle to the story, we’re very close to the Lutheran foster family in Switzerland. We regard them as family and I see them whenever I’m in Europe.

“Being able to speak to hundreds of thousand or even millions of people, and nudge them to greater empathy, to a point of view that they previously misunderstood, is a laudable thing to be doing,” Szeps reflects.

“If in some small way I can contribute to averting a cultural civil war, I will regard my life as having been well-lived. I’m trying to extricate people from thought bubbles and echo chambers.”