My Answer to Antisemitism in Paradise
I am a fifth generation Australian and have lived my adult life in America, but if you ask me how I identify? I say: as a Jew. A Jew whose family has found a haven on the cliffs between the Pacific Ocean and Sydney Harbor. We Jews of Australia are small in number. Chanukah menorahs are not displayed next to the official Christmas trees. We don’t make a fuss or attract attention, and we are scrupulously law-abiding.
On October 9, 2023, the Sydney Police issued a warning. Jews: Do not go to the city. Do not go to the Opera House. Stay at home. My mother and I were on our way to the Opera House when we saw the warning. We are Jews. We turned around and went home.
The Sydney Police warned Jews not to go to the city that night because a pro-Palestinian mob was marching from the Town Hall to the Opera House, and when the mob arrived at the white sails jutting into the Harbor, they rioted, chanting “gas the Jews.”
At the Sydney Opera House and around the world people were celebrating atrocities against the people of Israel before the State of Israel had lifted a finger in response.
Sydney is far from Gaza, as the crow flies. Most people come here to escape ancient feuds. My mother’s family arrived in Australia in 1857, fleeing persecution of Jews in Russia. My father arrived in 1957, having survived as a Jew under Hungarian fascism, Nazism and Stalin’s communism. In Australia, both sides of the family flourished. My father, my daughter and I graduated from the oldest university in the country, the same university where my father taught mathematics for thirty years. I took off class for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. I wore a star of David over my clothes. I never got a whiff of antisemitism.
The day after Sydney Police told Jews to stay home, I walked into the university from which three generations of our family have graduated and where my father taught. The campus is lush, its Oxford-style buildings nestled in parkland. Students come from around the world for the university’s beauty and prestige. That day, every surface was covered with posters in red and green and black, graphic and violent, stuck onto the famous walls and windows, as well as water fountains and direction signs. From one side of the university to the other, under blossoming jacaranda trees, they were celebrating the murder and mutilation, rape and burning alive of Jews. When I asked if the posters were hung legally (a man was putting them up as we watched), security told me they weren’t legal, but nothing would be done till nightfall.
I waited till dark; the posters didn’t come down. I waited again, I called for help. Who was dealing with this abomination? Who was removing it? And I received the customary non-answers, until I understood that nothing was going to be done and no one was going to do it.
The next night my eighty-seven-year-old mother and I spent taking down posters. Our tools included water, scissors, paper. And tape. Our protection was courage. Or at least my mother’s was. My protection was my mother’s courage.
We filled bins with wasted paper and sticky tape and went home.
As soon as we took the posters down, they went up again. Each night, we worked with our hands taking down the work of their hands. They had workers and funds without limit.
They had that and, in our defense, on the front lines of Australia was my eighty-seven-year-old mother and me. With water and scissors and paper. And tape. My mother poured water on the images, softening up the paper, a libation.
Passersby paid us no mind. Two busy ladies. But then a taxi driver without customers yelled at us. I talked politely back, my mother kept working, he yelled more, she kept moving. We went up and down the main thoroughfare removing their propaganda from bus stops, electric poles, postboxes, gas meters, traffic lights, government property, private property. When people threatened us, she stood straight and when they menaced us, and I backed away, she kept on.
A mother with young girls watched from a distance and when we were done, she chided us, “Please keep safe, do not put yourself at risk, those posters are fine, you will get in trouble.” She meant well, but her girls were watching. They saw we were Jewish women, and not intimidated by the men who threatened us.
What had the Jews of Sydney done to the mob calling for their gassing, to the academics calling for their elimination? Germans in the 1930s endured economic collapse and mass unemployment, but Sydneysiders? They are among the richest people on earth, with full employment and fuller bellies, in the most beautiful city. What excuse did they have to gas the Jews?
Sheikh Abdul Salam Zoud of Lakemba, a leading Sydney imam, in one of his speeches, called Jews the “criminal, barbaric, tyrannical enemy,” reminding his audience that, “the Prophet Mohammad, the Righteous Caliphs . . . none of them conquered the world by peaceful means, negotiations, concessions or understandings. They conquered it through jihad for the sake of Allah.” Then I understood. That was the mob’s excuse.
But after October 7, violence has erupted against Jews over the world as if it belonged, as if it were normal. Which it is.
Over the months since the chanting at the Opera House, there have been varied attacks against Jews in Australia. In Melbourne, small Jewish businesses have been targeted and destroyed. A man was murdered on his way to synagogue. The Palestinian flag is being raised instead of the national or the native Australian flag on government and academic sites. Melbourne and Sydney teachers staged walkouts from schools, taking their students to rallies holding violent anti-Jewish slogans. Preschool children went on an excursion to the university to chant intifada with the pro-Palestinian encampment. No other cause has warranted this devotion, not Afghanis expelled by Pakistan into the hands of the Taliban, nor the ISIS reign of terror in Syria.
This is not the Australia I grew up in. It is puzzling and also deeply familiar. My father tells us stories of his Hungarian childhood as testimony and warning: of the stones thrown at Jewish boys on the way to school; the prohibition on Jews doing business or shopping in the market; the ghetto where Jews were stuffed until they were sent in cattle cars to death; and after the war, hiding and faking under Stalinist communism, so the authorities would not discover my father was as an observant Jew. These could never happen in sunny Australia, so we thought.
But after October 7, violence has erupted against Jews over the world as if it belonged, as if it were normal. Which it is. Violent antisemitism, in a thousand guises and with a thousand excuses, is the human condition. Which is how the State of Israel came to be born, so Jews could live outside the human condition of antisemitism.
In January I visited Jerusalem. My sister lives there, and I wanted to find out how she was, and how my other sisters and brothers, my people, were—I wanted to see them.
The last day of my visit, my sister took me to the south of Israel where I was witness to the devastation of our communities, and in response, the devotion of the people of Israel to one another. At a crossroads on the entrance to Gaza, the Shuva family has built a way station for anyone who comes, with hot food and clothing, shelter, music, and conversation. A couple was playing guitar and singing, their red-haired baby passed from arm to arm. Young people sat on low benches talking quietly, and when I asked to join, they moved their seats, welcomed me, a foreigner, a stranger; they welcomed me as mourners do at a shivah house. Everyone is welcome to comfort the bereaved.
The next day I wrote a note to Kfir, the littlest hostage held in Gaza, and fastened it to his photograph on the ramp down to the plane leaving Israel. I flew south. Deep south, into the summer of Sydney, and on landing, I walked into a fifth-grade classroom. On the board I wrote the aleph bet and the children copied. I taught them about the holiday that was coming up, the holiday of Purim, in which the megalomaniacal Haman convinces a king to issue a decree of genocide against the Jews of Persia, which the wise Jewish Queen Esther thwarts. After which I taught them about the next holiday, Passover, in which a megalomaniacal Pharaoh of Egypt tries to eliminate the children of Israel by enslaving them and throwing their boys into the river. Which G-d thwarts, delivering them to freedom with an outstretched arm.
At the end of term, I received a note from a young woman of Syrian heritage, my student at university. I felt compelled to check on you, she wrote, and see how you, as a Jew, are feeling. With Iran and Hamas festering, there’s a sense of fear around us, even here in Sydney.
It was the first message I’d received from anyone since October 7 asking how I, as a Jew, was feeling.
Soon my Syrian student and I will sit down to dinner. We will exchange words of empathy and care. We will deplore the hatemongers. And we will not defeat antisemitism. Because defeating antisemitism is not my students’ task nor is it the task of the Jews. My task is to follow the words of the prophet Jeremiah, plant trees, build houses, marry off my children and grandchildren and to teach them about the Exodus from Egypt and the miracle of Purim and the miracle of Hanukkah against the Greeks and the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Crusades and the Spanish expulsion and Inquisition, and—the atrocities of Hamas.
Who speaks about ancient Egyptians except museum curators and Jewish children? Who will remember Hamas except the Jews?
Teaching children. That’s the task of the Jews.
Because antisemitism is ineradicable. Even in Sydney. And so are the Jews.
Viva Hammer holds concurrent positions at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute of Brandeis University in Massachusetts and the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University.