As an Australian Jew who publicly supports Palestinian freedom, I’m targeted by my own community – and neo-Nazis | Sarah Schwartz
Jews should be able to criticise the actions of Israel without risking exclusion from communal life As a teenager, I walked through concentration camps in
Jews should be able to criticise the actions of Israel without risking exclusion from communal life As a teenager, I walked through concentration camps in Poland, where the Nazis industrialised the murder of European Jewry.
That history has shaped not only my Jewish identity, but a commitment to political struggle. It taught me that memory carries not only grief, but obligations: to resist racism, dehumanisation and the silence that permits the erasure of a people.
Today, I’m giving evidence to the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion, established after the slaughter of 15 people at a Hanukah celebration at Bondi beach. Their murders demand an honest reckoning. The question is whether we can confront antisemitism without weaponising Jewish grief or turning Holocaust memory into a political instrument to silence the very forms of solidarity and dissent it should compel.
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