AUSTRALIAN ANTISEMITISM PRE-DATES OCTOBER 7

Last July, Jillian Segal handed down her report on antisemitism.

She made three key findings about antisemitism and education that were particularly disturbing and which help frame why we are here today.

The first finding:

“Antisemitism is evident within schools and universities and has become ingrained and normalised within academia.”

The second finding:

“Education is essential to preventing and tackling antisemitism. We must prevent the normalisation of antisemitism within the education system.”

The third finding:

“Research commissioned by the Special Envoy highlights a stark divide between Australians under 35 and those over 35, reflecting generational differences in media consumption and the perceptions younger Australians have of the Middle East and the Jewish community. There also appear to be generational differences in the understanding of the Holocaust and its impacts on society.”

Disturbing, shocking, but not surprising.

These findings came more than 5 months before the Bondi terrorist attack.

The encampments at our universities didn’t come from nowhere.

You can’t “ingrain” and “normalise” antisemitism within an entire sector of our society overnight.

Antisemitism in this country did not start with October 7, and it did not end at Bondi on December 14 last year—when 15 Australians were murdered on our most famous beach targeted for the crime of being Jewish.

On Christmas Day, less than two weeks after Bondi, a Rabbi’s car in Melbourne was firebombed as it sat outside his home. The crime: his car had a sign saying “Happy Chanukah”.

On 19 January 2026, 5 teenage boys in St Kilda, aged 15 and 16, were subjected to a prolonged antisemitic attack, threatened with stabbing, chased down and almost hit by a stolen ute.

Four weeks ago, the Brisbane synagogue was ram-raided.

These are violent attacks in Australia, by Australians, against Australian Jews.

These attacks came after the ceasefire in Gaza and after the deadliest terrorist attack on our soil.

THE TASK OF THIS GROUP

I have been speaking about antisemitism in education for years.

In 2022, I joined with Labor MP Josh Burns and Independent MP Allegra Spender to form the Parliamentary Friends of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

We wrote to every university in the country and asked them to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism.

Far too few adopted it. Some explicitly refused.

The IHRA definition is important, because if you can’t agree what antisemitism is, how can you hope to fight it?

The IHRA definition has been adopted by the Commonwealth Government. It has multipartisan support. It has been adopted or supported by the Governments of the states.  It is the definition used by the Royal Commission.

If it is good enough for state and federal governments of all stripes and the Royal Commission, it is good enough for our education system.

It is not controversial.  Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism under the definition.

In mid 2023, we launched the AUJS Jewish University Experience Survey, the results of which were disturbing.

Too often we have seen universities where Jewish students are harassed, and Jewish academics are deplatformed, and their offices defaced, hijacked, or urinated on.

The conferences where Jews are silenced, shut down, humiliated, called ‘mutt’ and the word ‘zionist’ is an insult.

The places where antisemitism is excused with the word ‘but’, and where hatred is framed as artistic expression – as we saw just this week with the Sydney Biennale.

The Jewish Experience survey found that almost two-thirds of Jewish students then were experiencing antisemitism on campus. More than half concealed their Jewish identity.

In November 2023, I called for a judicial inquiry into antisemitism on campus because antisemitism had become systemic across the university sector, and I did not believe that the universities were taking antisemitism seriously. 

To the Albanese Government’s shame, they repeatedly voted against my bill and later had to be dragged kicking and screaming to call a Royal Commission into antisemitism in the wake of Bondi.

Today, the fight against antisemitism in education, hopefully, has new traction – but it is not a new fight.

Because of the murder of 15 people at Bondi, there are two processes available to address antisemitism in the education sector and create education settings where the next generation has a better understanding of Jews, Judaism and the evils of antisemitism in all its forms.

The first is the Royal Commission, and the second is the committee led by David Gonski.

Both processes present a real opportunity.

Different types of antisemitism

Speaking in 2016, the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, Jonathan Sacks, had this to say about antisemitism
“Antisemitism is not about Jews. It is about anti-Semites. It is about people who cannot accept responsibility for their own failures and have instead to blame someone else. …

Antisemitism means denying the right of Jews to exist collectively as Jews with the same rights as everyone else. It takes different forms in different ages. In the Middle Ages, Jews were hated because of their religion. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century they were hated because of their race. Today they are hated because of their nation state, the state of Israel. It takes different forms but it remains the same thing: the view that Jews have no right to exist as free and equal human beings.

Sacks demonstrates that antisemitism, like a virus, mutates over time.

As you prepare materials on antisemitism education in today’s context, you must not ignore the modern manifestations of antisemitism. 

You must call out and explain these modern manifestations in your materials.

• the antisemitism which says the Jewish people have no right to a homeland in the holy land,
• the antisemitism that uses nazi imagery or the imagery of old antisemitic stereotypes to describe the Jewish state,
• the antisemitism that judges Israel by a different standard than any other democracy would be judged
• the antisemitism that holds all jews as individually or collectively responsible for the actions of the state of Israel,
• the antisemitism which accuses Jews of being more loyal to Israel or to Jewish people than to Australia.

The modern antisemitism denies that Jews are even victims of antisemitism.

Three days ago, in the opening round of the AFL, all references to Jews and the Jewish community were scrubbed from a speech to honour the Bondi victims.

Reportedly, this was done to be more, quote, “inclusive”.

The need for concrete outcomes from your work could not be clearer. If we can’t even refer to the Australian Jewish community in public, how can we address antisemitism?

You must get this right.

And in carrying out that task, I want to charge you not just as the Shadow Minister for Education and not as a Parliamentarian, but as a Jewish parent and an Australian.

Because if you fail at your task, it will have devastating consequences for the Jewish community and for our country.

A UNIQUE AND RESILIENT FORM OF DISCRIMINATION

I want to say a few words about the peculiarities of antisemitism.

Because antisemitism is not the same as other forms of racism.

It is unusually conspiratorial and scapegoating.

It often relies on ‘coded’ forms to self-perpetuate. You will all have heard them. The references to a so-called ‘Jewish lobby’. To ‘tentacles’. To ‘bankers’. To ‘zionists’.

These tacit forms of expression sit alongside the open harassment and violence but help antisemitism to manifest as insinuation, symbolism and collective suspicion.

Antisemitism is littered with recurring tropes that view Jews as being powerful, greedy, secretly controlling the world, collectively responsible for historic or present evils.

These tropes are pernicious and false, but effective.

They make antisemitism uniquely resistant to modern efforts to tackle other forms of racism – which are often rooted in considerations of equity and power.

Because antisemitism is as much as anything else a portable lie of hidden power—a lie about corruption and coercion and disloyalty—that can be transplanted into virtually any context.

These motifs allow antisemitism to be dressed up as justice. They allow hostility to Jews to be experienced as virtue.

And institutions fail where they misread a conspiracy-laden moral narrative as an ordinary form of prejudice or political disagreement.

REFRAMING ANTISEMITISM EDUCATION

With that context in mind, I want to turn to the question of antisemitism education.

Because for decades, the focus of antisemitism education has been on Holocaust education.

Jewish communities—with the backing of governments across the Anglosphere—believed that if people were taught about the Holocaust, that would change their minds about Jew-hate, and armed with the knowledge, people would change their ways.

Holocaust education has played a part.

But if what we are seeing now is a guide, it has not achieved the desired effect.

Holocaust education has had four drawbacks.

First, it has not penetrated.

Holocaust denial is on the rise. And at different times, the community has had to battle to keep Holocaust education as part of the curriculum; to make sure it is taught properly, or at all.

Second, the magnitude of the Holocaust itself has a distorting effect. I suspect that, for too many people, the sheer scale of the tragedy has warped what antisemitism is seen to be about. Too often, modern manifestations of antisemitic incidents or tropes—whether they are blood libels or simply antisemitism masquerading as antizionism—are simply not recognised by the broader public.  

Third, it often fails to take into account that the lesson from the holocaust is the particularity of its Jewish victims. Holocaust education often encourages students to put themselves in the shoes of a victim and imagine if the victims were “just like them.”

But the real point of teaching people about the Holocaust is not how we treat people who were “just like us” but how we treat people who are not like us at all.

Finally, focusing solely on Holocaust education means most students will learn nothing more about Jews than that they suffered during the Holocaust. It warps the students’ understanding of who the Jewish people are; it frames them only as victims of an event which occurred in the 1930s and 1940s with no further context.

A DIFFERENT WAY FORWARD

There is a talmudic idea that you pick up a gemstone and you see how the light refracts against it from different angles. It is an analogy about the need to look at difficult problems from different angles in a new light. I think that, if antisemitism education is to be effective, it needs to start from a different place.  It needs to start with Jews and Judaism before it considers the different indicia of antisemitism and how antisemitism changes over time

In my view, the person writing about antisemitism from the most original and arresting perspective today is the American academic Dara Horn, the author of People Love Dead Jews.

Dara Horn has recently established the Tell Institute to reframe conversations about Jews and antisemitism.

She wants to turn the tables on antisemitism’s “foundational lie” that “Jews are destroying whatever their societies value most.” By teaching people about the basis of Jewish civilization it makes it much easier to expose the lie.

The Tell Institute is producing materials for schools and educators on how to teach people about Jews and antisemitism, with the focus starting not on antisemitism but on who are the Jews, the core ideas of Judaism and how these “civilisation-defining ideas shaped the persecution and resilience of Jewish communities, [and] the influence of these ideas on broader societies.” Her materials seek to enable students to recognise the historic patterns of antisemitism that are again being experienced today.

The Tell Institute is currently piloting curricula for schools and educators, and the initial results have been very promising.

I want to encourage the Gonski Panel and the Royal Commission to engage with Dara Horn and her approach. 

It’s the approach I would adopt if I were the Minister.

Because it is not enough simply to educate people about the ways jews are hated and murdered.

What we need is education about who the Jewish people are, what they believe, and what their contribution is to Western thought.

Because ideas like the sanctity of life, human dignity, equality, a life that has purpose, civil debate that seeks the truth,  the conception of a God who demands righteousness rather than arbitrary sacrifice, the rule of law, the need for a society of laws for human flourishing, and what Dara Horn describes as an anti-tyrannical non-conformist monotheism – these are contributions to Western societies that have deep roots in Jewish philosophy and they remain fundamental to our society today.

Avoiding or erasing those topics from education means even well-meaning people have no knowledge of Jewish people and history — and are primed for antisemitic sources to fill in the blanks.

Avoiding these topics outsources teaching about Jewish people – and, in particular, it outsources that teaching to social media.

The results – as we have seen here and abroad – have been horrific.

So, I ask this of you

Help put the Australian people in the position to answer these questions:

• Who are the Jews?
• What do they believe?
• And what is their contribution to our civilisation?

Then, when you tell them about the mutating virus of antisemitism, they are better able to recognise it and more inoculated against it.

You have an opportunity, now, to go beyond mealy-mouthed platitudes about abhorring all forms of racism.

You have an opportunity to fight against the perverse and unique framing that allows antisemitic action to be seen as virtuous.

You have an opportunity to make Australia a global leader in the fight against antisemitism

But the window is narrow.

Do not waste it.