Published: 18 December 2025
Last updated: 18 December 2025
The night after the Bondi massacre I performed Federation Square's Pillars of Light Chanukah event. I played two sets of music that I felt very uplifted by. With my brother Adam and Swanny on drums, we went pretty hard.
At the end of the second set, a man waited for me at the front of the stage. He proceeded to tell me that he marches every week with Palestinians, and that he loves me, and that he came to protect the Jews and allow us to practice our faith.
Phew. Thank God for that. Nice one numb nuts.
I think it would be uncontroversial to say that he's not doing a very good job. Perhaps even catastrophically bad.
That's if I put aside the ignorance that went in to him objectifying me in the first place; he knew nothing of my relationship to Judaism the religion, the Jewish culture, the Jewish people, Jewish relationship to land. In saying what he said, he immediately betrayed the fact that he had no idea what he was talking about, and no idea that I knew that.
My Jewish identity is not at all complicated; but if you can't understand the interrelationship between Jewish peoplehood, ethnicity, culture, religion, land, then you should either ask a lot of questions and enliven your curiosity, or shut the fuck up.
In The Who's song We Won't Get Fooled Again, they sing of how the hypnotised never lie. That can only be true if we take the hypnotised to be incapable of lying outside of the limits of their partitioned world view. What they say may be objectively untrue, even as they believe it to be, and therefore they're not lying.





Comments4
Brett Williams11 January at 12:12 am
Thank you for your perceptive and well written and article 👍
Sabina1 January at 09:38 pm
Very sad to read your hateful reaction to a gesture of solidarity.
Kate Bossence24 December at 12:21 pm
I went to your Festival on the 18th of December at Federation Square in Melbourne. I haven’t felt as uplifted musically for many months until l heard your music & singing being played. It was brilliant, uplifting & storytelling of the finest kind that you use music so much in your Culture. Many of my friends are Jewish indeed a couple in particular are very close friends. What you wrote is teriffic & straight to the point of missguided ignorant ppl who haven’t studied Judaism yet dive in with their (very) misconstrued ideas about what they perceive as Jewish Culture.
Thank you to all the musos. As a singer myself the power of healing, strength & unity is always found in music. It was a real privilege being there that night after the massacre at Bondie of 15 beautiful & innocent souls.
You have written masterfully & powerfully & encapsulated what your People have gone through in the last 2 years. An apathetic & pathetic government that (like you said) who are only interested in lining their own nests not urgently addressing the persecution of your People in the vilest ways imaginable.
Ian Grinblat18 December at 06:33 am
Thank you, Simon.
Great piece!