Published: 17 April 2025
Last updated: 17 April 2025
I am the grandson and great-grandson of Shmuel and Yaacov Inslicht—proud Jewish, left-wing Zionists from Galicia, in what is now Western Ukraine. They lived through the rise and fall of empires, pogroms, the rise of communism and fascism and, for Shmuel, the unimaginable horror of the Shoah. He lost his first wife at Auschwitz. And yet he lived on. So do we.
In 1905, amid the political ferment of Lviv—then Lemberg—Yaacov and Shmuel helped lead a Jewish revolt. When Zionist Jews demanded formal national recognition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the local assimilationist, anti-Zionist Jewish leadership tried to shut them down. At a packed counter-conference in Lemberg’s Jewish Community Centre, Yaacov, representing the Tlumacz community, rose to condemn the establishment. He was dragged out by police on the request of other Jews—along with his son—for daring to speak the truth.
It has never been easy to be a Jew. It has never been easy to be a Zionist, not in Shmuel and Yaacov’s time, when they were among the minority to attend the first World Zionist Congress of 1897 and in the former’s case edited Poale Zion’s Vienna version of Der Yidisher Arbeyter.
And it has never, ever, been easy to be a Jewish, left-wing, or socialist Zionist.
But that is my lineage. That is the tradition I carry forward. And I suspect my forebears would be proud of many things: the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, its survival against impossible odds, and its democratic resilience. They would also be proud, I hope, of my role in co-founding Australian Labor Friends of Israel, alongside Eric Roozendaal and Mike Kelly. Because Jewish identity and progressive politics are not—and must never be—mutually exclusive.
