Spender’s ‘brave conversations’ with students and politicians

Earlier this year, Independent MP for Wentworth Allegra Spender hosted a workshop titled “Brave Conversations” to help people have civilised discussions and disagreements over Israel and Palestine.

The evening was run by two Monash University academics who have created a program that they take around to various academic, education and business environments to dial down the crippling intensity, which has engulfed dialogue about the Middle East since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023 and the war in Gaza that followed.

The initiative was familiar territory for a parliamentarian who represents the most Jewish electorate in the country, with 16 per cent of the voters being members of the Jewish community. She has spent the past two years bringing high schools in her electorate together to engage in just these sorts of discussions.

In 2024, Spender called the principals of about 10 schools in Wentworth, Jewish and non-Jewish, to involve their students in the educational programs created by Together For Humanity, a not-for-profit organisation led by Rabbi Zalman Kastel, that works with schools to combat prejudice, teaching students how to deal with differences. The NSW Board of Jewish Deputies was also involved in facilitating the Wentworth initiative.

Spender says October 7 made her realise that “if you're not working very closely with the Jewish community, you may not understand what has been happening” in terms of hostility towards Jews. “It was much more obvious after December 14, but for a long time before that, it wasn't. A lot of people just didn't necessarily get it. They didn't know the experiences of the kids.

“I felt that non-Jewish schools didn't really understand the antisemitism, but they had a lot of goodwill. I wanted to bring non-Jewish and Jewish schools together, to help build an understanding of the impact of what some of the kids in the Jewish schools in particular were going through, but also what the Jewish kids in the non-Jewish schools were going through.”