Singer-songwriter Deborah Conway has been yelled and hissed at during her concerts and writers’ festivals because of her support for Israel, the Royal Commission into Antisemitism has heard, while another musician feared for his safety after the doxxing of a Jewish WhatsApp group.
The royal commission also heard from a Perth teenager, giving evidence under a pseudonym, as he described a series of hate comments directed at him on Discord in 2024 as he played Minecraft. The comments were written by other students at his high school.
One comment described the teen as a “rabid, filthy, rotten, gut-wrenching, grotesque Rabbi, yarmulke-wearing, bank-owning, iron-doming, Hashem-following Jew”.
Former High Court judge Virginia Bell heard more harrowing stories of lived experiences of antisemitism as the commission sat for its sixth day of public hearings in Sydney on Monday.
Conway told the commission that she regarded anti-Zionism as a “genocidal impulse” and said she had lost several performance bookings because of backlash to her views.
“I think it’s really important to say that I support Israel’s right to exist. I don’t support all of the Israeli government’s ways of prosecuting the war,” she said. “But, you know, we didn’t ask for America to be dismantled because it prosecuted the war in Afghanistan or Vietnam or Iraq badly … I think that idea of anti-Zionism is, in fact, a genocidal impulse.”
Conway also detailed an incident which took place while she was on stage in Western Australia, when “all these people rose to their feet within the auditorium and unfurled their signs and started screaming things at me, and I was shocked”.
At a writers’ festival, her interviewer pulled out, and “there was one person that hissed at me, ‘shame on you’. And I just thought, wow, you know, [that’s] kind of a very strange thing to find at a writers’ festival in a regional town”.
Conway also told of her horror watching pro-Palestinian protests at the Sydney Opera House on October 9, 2023, when the sails of the iconic building were illuminated in blue and white in support of Israel. She said the “glee, the jubilation” from the protesters stunned her.
“I just thought, am I living in 2023 Australia or is this 1933 Berlin?” Conway said.
Asked how her bookings were tracking in 2026, she responded: “There aren’t many.”
Jewish saxophonist Joshua Moshe told the commission about the fallout from the leaking of a WhatsApp group for Jewish creatives he was part of in 2024, which led to the band he had played with for seven years ejecting him from the group.
After the leak, a caller threatened the North Melbourne homewares shop Moshe ran with his wife, telling the pair to watch their backs, and sent a photo of their son taken from social media.
After reporting posts made about him and his family online to the police, an officer told Moshe they could investigate vandalism of their store and the threat involving his son, but not the other posts targeting Moshe because they didn’t “cross the line” into antisemitism.
“There were images of me taken from my press photos as a musician, saying that I’m a Zionist or a Zio, and that I’ve been plotting for the Zionist entity,” said Moshe, who was hit by a surge of abusive messages.
“We were receiving emails, we were receiving Google reviews, Facebook messages. It was relentless.”
Rabbi Daniel Rabin from Melbourne’s Caulfield Shule said many members of his community had asked him if they should leave Australia.
“I think the biggest shock to me was people asking me, genuinely, should they leave Australia? Is this the writing on the wall?” he told the commission.
Rabin said it reminded him of stories from Jewish ancestors in pre-Holocaust Europe who asked themselves similar questions. “And of course, we know the outcome. So to hear such questions is very confronting,” he said.
Sydney Rabbi Menachem Dadon told the commission his 14-year-old daughter was “strong” after she was shot and injured at the Hanukkah event during the Bondi terror attack.
However, he said she cried as she asked him, “Why [do] they hate us so much? Why [do] they want to kill us?”
“We as a society have to think how we came to this place, that [a] father doesn’t have an answer to his daughter,” Dadon said.
Tahli Blicblau, chief executive of The Dor Foundation – which aims to combat antisemitism on university campuses and online – said antisemitism had been rising well before October 7, 2023.
Blicblau, a former counterterror expert with the NSW Crime Commission, told the commission most Australians cannot recognise antisemitic tropes, and people were increasingly less willing to have Jewish friends.
She said events in Australia on October 8, the day after Hamas’ attack in Israel, marked a pivotal moment.
“On that evening, there was a protest gathering in Western Sydney, where the events of the seventh of October were described as a day of pride and courage, one of elation,” she said.
“Cars were driving through Western Sydney, setting off fireworks. That glorification of violence that night, at a time when Israel was still counting its dead, really set the tone for a permissive environment in which glorifying violence was accepted and permissible.”
The research director for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Julie Nathan, told the commission that most criticism of Israel was not antisemitic in itself, “even though a lot of it is incredibly offensive”. Nathan is responsible for collating incidences of antisemitism.
The commission was presented with an antisemitic and sexualised caricature of Nathan, which had been posted online, as an example of attacks levelled at her after publishing the council’s reports on anti-Jewish incidents.
“It was horrifying to see this,” Nathan said. But she told herself, as a researcher, to “pull yourself together … you’ve got to capture this”.
She also told the commission that any criticism that invoked Nazi Germany or anti-Jewish tropes should be counted as antisemitic.
“I have very strict guidelines to determine when something that’s anti-Israel is antisemitic,” Nathan said.
The hearing continues on Tuesday.
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Alexandra Smith is a senior writer and former state political editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.
Angus Dalton is the science reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.