“Antisemitism is incurable,” says Ryvchin
18 months after the October 7 attacks, Ryvchin challenged conventional approaches to fighting antisemitism.
Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, has delivered a powerful speech arguing that antisemitism is “incurable” and that Zionism has failed in its original aim to normalise Jewish existence.
Around 300 people attended the B’nai B’rith annual Human Rights Oration at the Glen Eira Town Hall in Melbourne on Sunday, where Ryvchin also received the 2025 B’nai B’rith Human Rights Award.
Speaking exactly 18 months after the October 7 attacks, Ryvchin challenged conventional approaches to fighting antisemitism.
“After thousands of years, it can no longer be characterised as a defect in reasoning that can be untaught,” he stated.
“We are not ordinary. And we therefore have to accept the feelings this invokes in others.”
When asked by the AJN if his view might be controversial, Ryvchin acknowledged it might be, “particularly for those who want clear and compelling answers and want solutions.”
“I’m not in the business of misleading people and giving them satisfactory statements that make them sleep better at night. I think we have to be honest,” he said.
Ryvchin defined the battle as containing antisemitism rather than eliminating it entirely.
“The fight is not to exterminate antisemitism, reduce it to nothing, because that, in my view, is unachievable,” he told the AJN.
“The battle is to contain it, to push it back out to the peripheries of society and the dark recesses of social media, where it can’t do us harm, because at the moment, for the last 18 months, it has materially affected how Jews in this country live.”
On Zionism, Ryvchin proposed that while it failed in its original aim to normalise the Jewish experience, this failure makes “the Zionist project all the more important.”
When asked if Zionism had failed or perhaps succeeded in an unexpected way, Ryvchin responded, “That aim, as I’ve said, of Leon Pinsker [author of ‘Auto-Emancipation’, a foundational Zionist text], of creating this new consciousness of the Jew, changing the way the Jews perceive, making them seem like an ordinary people. That aim, I believe, has failed.”
He continued, “But that failure makes the Zionist project all the more important, because if antisemitism is incurable, if the Jews will always be viewed as a peculiar other and treated accordingly, a national home for the Jewish people is a non-negotiable.”
Ryvchin emphasised that opposition to Zionism is not merely political disagreement.
“When someone opposes Zionism they are not opposing the government of the State of Israel,” he said.
“They are opposing, whether they realise it or not, something essential to being Jewish… the right of those people to survive in a world that routinely slanders, dispossesses and destroys them.”
Despite his sobering assessment, Ryvchin ended his oration on a note of pride and resilience, describing Jews as “a statistical anomaly” whose survival through thousands of years of history “must make us marvel.”
“To hold on to what we are and teach it to our children is the highest form of resistance and the greatest victory,” he concluded.
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