Published: 5 February 2025
Last updated: 6 February 2025
The Australian reported recently that the Anti-Defamation League has found 20% of Australians hold “an elevated level of antisemitic attitudes”. I am not surprised by that figure, given the relentless campaign of activism against Israel and the increasing incidence of acts of discrimination and violence against individual members of the Australian Jewish community. But I am certainly alarmed.
As an educator who played a pioneering role in implementing Holocaust education programs in Sydney’s Jewish day schools, I am now prompted to ask whether we failed in our mission to design and deliver educational initiatives that would insure the Australian Jewish community against resumption of traditional antisemitism.
I am particularly curious to know whether any research has addressed the extent to which the investment in Holocaust education has provided students with the tools to distinguish between perpetrators and victims. The Israel-Hamas paradigm has made this a slippery and complex area of disputation.
I have not been alone in anticipating a more accurately tempered response to the genocidal attack on Israel on October 7. When addressing the recent Birkenau-Auschwitz Memorial ceremony, Holocaust survivors who have shared their painful stories over and over again expressed their surprise and dismay at the recurrence of antisemitic tropes.
Like me, they had hoped that the sharing of experiences of dehumanisation and persecution would have put paid to the very idea, let alone the overt expression, of antisemitism.
But the message of “never again” that drove a range of educational experiences designed to demonstrate the consequences of antisemitism to Australian students now sounds hollow.
