At last, a writers festival invites Ruptured authors to speak

Ruptured, a book written by Australian Jewish women in response to October 7, is now in its third print run. The collection of 36 essays, published last August and edited by Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch, is the only book which explores the experience of Australia’s Jewish community since the Hamas terror attacks. As co-editor Kofman tells me, there aren’t that many Jewish writers in Australia, and Ruptured contains a big chunk of them, some of whom are renowned voices.

Yet the anthology has been overlooked by almost all major writers festivals in Australia. Before the Bondi Beach shooting, Manly Writers’ Festival – which took place a few weekends ago – was the only one to have included Ruptured in its program. Previously, another festival complained that its budget was too small to cover travel expenses, so Kofman offered to pay for her own. The festival declined her offer.

Since Bondi, Kofman, a writing teacher and the author of nine books, has been invited to speak at the at the Sorrento Writers’ Festival later this month, and at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May. But none of those sessions are specifically about Ruptured.

The Sorrento session is titled 100 Days After Bondi: Where to from here?, and the Sydney session is similarly called After Bondi. (The Jewish Independent’s Commissioning Editor Michael Visontay is also on the After Bondi panel; he and Kofman will appear on another Sydney Writers’ Festival panel called Writers reflect on antisemitism now.)

One has to wonder – do people need to die before pro-Zionist Jewish writers are invited to Australian writers festivals? As Kofman posted on Instagram last month, “while all writers’ festivals in Australia claim to be inclusive and open to a variety of views, it’s becoming clearer and clearer that this is not the reality, especially when it comes to representing Jewish voices – and not in tokenistic ways.”