If you’d told me three years ago that “attend Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion” was in my 2026 diary, I would have asked if you were feeling alright. But here we are. Or here I am, anyway, sitting in an office building in Clarence Street, Sydney, getting ready to read out a story I wrote for an anthology called Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7.
I included this essay as part of my submission to the commission and, to my surprise and abiding alarm, they asked me to read it as part of the first block of hearings.
People keep telling me I’m brave to be here. I feel brave, but I feel scared too. Scared to be Jewish in Australia. That lurching between standing up and shrinking down, divulgence and concealment, is also at the heart of my Ruptured story, which describes my father’s Holocaust history.
He was a child, an escapee from Bratislava on his father’s shoulders, and hidden in Budapest between 1942 and 1945 during a time of persecution for anyone discovered to be Jewish.
There was fear, hunger, vigilance on pain of disappearance and death, a new identity to remember, a circumcised penis to hide at the public baths, bombings, unthinkable upheaval and utter boredom. At one point, when dad was four, his parents were arrested and loaded on a train to Auschwitz. Somehow – he doesn’t remember how – my father was spirited away to hide on a family farm in Slovakia. His parents collected him six weeks later, after a miraculous escape.
None of this trauma was passed down to my siblings and me – or at least, I didn’t think so, until the surge in antisemitism that I’ve felt, experienced and witnessed after the abhorrent October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war, which has ravaged Gaza and killed, injured and traumatised tens of thousands of Palestinian people.
Being Jewish never used to be a big deal for me. A year could go by where I didn’t think about it. I was never religious. My connection to the Jewish calendar was haphazard. My father’s identity as a Holocaust survivor was a pillar of my identity but the Jewishness was light. However, as I’ve discovered, if people come for the Jews, I’ll stand up, scared for sure, all that past trauma jangling in my veins, but here.
Last week I received an email from a royal commission lawyer, asking if we could speak. The word ‘Official’ was in red capitals. What did I do wrong? I ate an empanada in a Colombian cafe I’m reviewing, and went to a haircut appointment. The lawyer and I video-chatted a couple of hours later; my hair, at least, was composed. They found my story moving. They wanted me to read it at the commission in Sydney. I seized with fear, noting the irony of being asked to livestream to the nation a story about being scared to be Jewish in public. I thought about it for a day, lurching between fight and flight, and decided to do it.
In the lead up, I’m moved by how sensitive and caring all the commission’s staff are, how they step me through the formalities with considerate and unhurried explanations. As a taxpayer, I wonder about the money being spent. As a participant, I feel safe and respected.
I fly to Sydney on the morning of the hearing, the fourth day of public testimonies at a city office building. Watching the livestream earlier in the week, I’d seen witnesses doorstopped and photographed. I’m someone who makes bookings in restaurants under made-up names. Being the story is uncomfortable. I arrange to enter the building via another door, avoiding the scrum of photographers. “Do you want to speak to the media after your appearance?” asks one government lawyer. I am the media, I think. And no, I don’t.
The commission rooms are impersonal and modern: a glassed-in reception, a table of support workers, break-out couches, lawyers walking around with huge ring-binders, ante-rooms where witnesses can wait, boxes of tissues everywhere, as though anyone might cry at any moment. In the lunch break, I’m shown the hearing room. It’s windowless and bland, the size of a classroom, with a few rows of seats (“that’s mostly lawyers”) and an arrangement of desks and partitions that creates a functional courtroom layout. “You’ll sit there,” someone says, pointing to a cubicle. I note the water jug and paper cups. Tissues.
The commission’s media liaison person and a chipper public servant with a long, forgettable title – “executive assistant advising to the something something Attorney General” that he translates as “Mr Fix-It” – escorts me to meet The Sydney Morning Herald’s photographer to take the photograph accompanying this piece. Dominic Lorrimer finds good light in Wynyard Park and I look down his camera lens. “I’m going for hopeful Australian, not just some sad Jew,” I say. The wind is icy and fresh. I’m feeling good.
It’s time to head back in. A woman is giving testimony about being told to change her Jewish-sounding name in her work setting. It’s an awful story, a gutting addition to a week of other telling tales. My name is called, and I walk to the cubicle. I breathe, ready to own the moment and read my essay.
You can watch me on the Commission’s YouTube, or maybe you want to buy the book – not so easy to find in mainstream stores – but if you don’t mind a spoiler, I’ll tell you how it ends.
In 1992, I travelled with my dad to his Holocaust landmarks, including the farm in Slovakia. He ducked down in the cornfields, laid out the same 50 years later with a perimeter of sunflowers, not so much playing at being a child as returning to a moment of relative safety, a boy whose childhood was chopped and mangled sinking into one small good simple moment. He stood up into sunshine. “I am here!” he called to me.
The room is quiet while I speak. I hold the space. I stay in my body. When my story ends, the lawyer asks me two pre-arranged questions. “Why are you here?” I tell her, I tell everyone, a shorter version of this. I am here for my father who experienced the worst form of Jew hate. I’m here for my children, who are at least Jewish enough to be persecuted by the old rules. I’m here for my relative whose best friend was killed at Bondi.
I’m here for the warm, horrified group of Jewish friends I’ve gathered around me over the past three years, partly to bear witness to antisemitism both casual and vicious, in all forms of media, on walls and banners and T-shirts, yelled from cars, and dispensed with fire and bullets, partly also to share kid pics and new ideas for how to eat pickles. I’m here for anyone who needs to see Jews standing up.
The lawyer asks me about social cohesion, and I read a truncated version of the following. It’s good to be talking about antisemitism – the testimonies are harrowing, the actions are unacceptable, the hurt is real and so are the bodies at Bondi Beach. But, unfortunately, I don’t believe hate for Jewish people will ebb by airing it.
Legislation can quash some expressions of racism but it can’t dismantle it or dissolve it in the heart. Jew hate is old. It arises anytime there’s unbearable inequity or societal distress, reshaping its insults and slanders according to current lore: Christ killers in the Middle Ages, racially inferior in the 1930s, unspeakable colonists now – a quirky insult when hurled on our own stolen lands. Because this same morphing prejudice has dispersed Jews over and again, we are found in many countries in the world, a convenient minority to malign.
This commission’s remit also includes social cohesion. If Jewishness was the soft ripple in my early life, the push for justice and equity was a much stronger wave.
That was how I was really brought up, with my mum visiting refugees in detention, sitting in at MPs’ offices to plead for their freedom, teaching new migrants English, and my dad working as a psychoanalyst and writer, trying to solve the problems of violence in the world. Now 88, he’s just released the book he fomented as a child in hiding, when he asked a big question: Why do people want to kill us? It’s called Know Thyself, and it’s a very readable theory of our vulnerable brain’s workings, and all the mixed up trouble we humans can create.
As a food journalist for two decades, my own mission has crystallised over the years. Beyond leading consumers to their next dinner, I’m always trying to create connection and understanding and bring a keen awareness to the joy of curiosity, unlocking unfamiliar cuisines, sending diners to new neighbourhoods, sharing the faces and names of the people cooking and creating and slogging through hard days. I aim to decode our differences and thrill in our similarities, whoever we are and wherever we are from. Food is powerful and profound like that. It’s my little effort towards social cohesion.
If Australia really wants to solve antisemitism we need to do better to ensure everyone lives in safety and dignity, has a well-resourced and rounded education and, crucially, a sense of purpose and belonging found in the real, rich world we share, not down algorithmic rabbit holes.
When people are having hard lives, they look for reasons, and blame finds easy targets. I think of a 13-year-old girl Googling “where do Jews live” before stealing a car to run some over. Surely there were multiple missed opportunities for another way for that young life to roll out.
I’m sceptical about the ultimate outcomes of this royal commission but I’m grateful that at least Australia is trying. It’s an unusual intervention in world history, that is for sure. The signal that this matters is important.
I’m sceptical about the ultimate outcomes of this royal commission but I’m grateful that at least Australia is trying.
I take a breath. I’ve read slowly, given my words weight. Commissioner Virginia Bell appears to listen to all testimonies with compassionate attention: I feel held by her skill and experience, the wise face of someone who is trained to weigh stories and facts. She asks me a question without notice at the end of my testimony.
“How did you feel about what happened on October 7?”
A weight that has sat in me since that day surges in all its terror and confusion. October 7, 2023, was a week before Australia voted No to an Aboriginal Voice to Parliament. I tell her – I tell the country – that I see the Australian response to October 7 and the Israel-Hamas war at least partly bound up in a deflected shame for what happened in our local referendum. Rejecting a gesture of repair on these colonised lands has created a specific kind of poison.
And to her question, I was devastated by what happened in Israel on October 7. I’m also devastated by what’s happened in Gaza. I don’t have answers to the big problems of the Middle East, but I think we have an opportunity in Australia to be a place where people gather in community and peace. I want to be part of that. And I hope the commission is part of that as well.
What I didn’t say was that I’m strangely glad to have an insight into how it feels to be part of a minority that experiences racism, so I can have more empathy and be a better ally for anyone who is hated, persecuted or excluded. I still believe Australia can be the country my grandparents chose for a better life, as far away from the old hates as possible, standing up into sunshine. Here.
