‘After Bondi’: a safe space to speak candidly about trauma and hope

Last Sunday I was on an all-Jewish panel at the Sydney Writers' Festival titled After Bondi. Panel discussions with Jewish writers these days are always loaded with discomfort. But this one had an extra edge. I passed two police officers in the mezzanine of the State Library of NSW as I made my way down to meet the others. At the end of our pre-session briefing, we were told that if there was an interruption, we could pause the session until it was resolved, and that if we still felt unsafe, we could leave the stage.

Up till that point, it had not occurred to me that there might be trouble. Perhaps I was, after everything, still naïve. I know that even in private discussions, talking about Bondi carries an inescapable heaviness. But here we were: five Jewish creatives with an invitation to share a perspective on life before and after Bondi. Fraught or not, these invitations do not come along very often.

Musician and artist Jessica Chapnik Kahn, pianist Simon Tedeschi, author Lee Kofman and I were guided in our conversation by our moderator, Michaela Kalowski. Although the session was titled “After Bondi”, Michaela had made the wise decision to chart a trajectory in our discussion from October 7, 2023, to the present day, to show the audience that Bondi did not occur out of the blue.

This was an opportunity, verging on a responsibility, to speak directly to the broader community; a chance to reflect the accumulation of hostile incidents, large and small, obvious and fleeting, that have contaminated life for Jews and for non-Jews, leaving it almost impossible for people to have discussions – let alone disagreements – over Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Palestine and being Jewish.

This day, in the safe space created by the festival, we felt free to speak candidly. Jessica Chapnik Kahn was caught in the shooting at Bondi Beach with her five-year-old daughter. It felt like the whole room leaned forward as she recounted her memory of the day: “There was such a specific sound, those gunshots … and I realised that the people around me were dying and I had to make a choice about how I wanted to die, and how I wanted to guide my daughter to die.”