‘Cry-baby antisemitism’: the resistance to Jewish voices 

“Cry-baby antisemitism.”

“Weeping about whiteness.”

“Infuriating, enormously selfish and delusional.”  

These are some of the comments that Ruptured, a book amplifying Jewish voices, elicits in 2025. They come from corners that champion ‘safe spaces’ and ‘cultural sensitivity’, yet drip with contempt for Jews.

“I'm broken, devastated and unable to articulate a sentence about these f^&*ers," says another. This is just a sliver of the vitriol sweeping Australia’s social and cultural landscape under the guise of social justice.

But, to echo a famous Australian chest-beater, “I don’t care, babes”. Let me explain. 

Together with my co-editor, Lee Kofman, 36 courageous Jewish women, and many others who supported the project, we brought Ruptured into the world to defy the silencing of Jewish voices.

Even before there was a war in Gaza, when Israeli women were mutilated and raped on October 7, the sexual violence used by Hamas was met by the silence of leading feminists and women’s organisations. The blood was hardly dry when the denials began, despite the footage that Hamas gleefully shared. And then it got confusing – some denied, some belittled, some decided that those women deserved what they got.  

‘Resistance by all means necessary’ and ‘From the river to the sea’ became sanitised human rights slogans in the West, which we Jews were accused of misinterpreting to dodge difficult discussions about the Israel-Hamas war. Wilful misrepresentation of people based on their assumed politics and a false definition of the Jewish movement for self-determination, Zionism, became du jour. ‘All Zionists are terrorists’ has been absorbed and normalised on the streets of Melbourne and Sydney, messaging that has been given moral valence in an age of disinformation.