Being Jewish, conservative and academic at ABC Religion

By the time I joined the ABC’s Religion Department in 1992, at the suggestion of its Head, Father Paul Collins, and not before being grilled by a phalanx of senior RN producers, I had spent twenty years in the study, university lecturing and publishing on religion in Canada, Britain and Australia.

Collins, a Harvard trained theologian with a PhD in religious history from the ANU, knew how vital was scholarship in understanding the nuances of religious life and thought. He believed that after five years in a joint appointment at the University of Sydney’s Religious Studies and Semitic Studies Departments, I was ready to take the plunge, although I was chary of trading the academic life for the media.

Academia is often smug about its superiority to all other forms of knowledge, which brings to mind the Talmudic sage, Rabbi Zadok, who was descended from Zadok the high priest, known to both the Jewish and Christian biblical tradition for his faithfulness to God, loyalty to David and his anointing of Solomon as King in the period of the First Temple in Jerusalem. Rabbi Zadok lived in the Second Temple period and was also known to Jews for his extreme faith (he fasted for 40 years during the Roman occupation) as well as for his dictum in the Talmudic tractate, Ethics of the Fathers: “Do not wear your learning like a crown, or use it as a spade to dig.” In other words, learning should deepen faith and enlighten the world, not bring glory to yourself or be used as a tool for profit.

The proposition put to me by Collins, that religion could be intellectually robust and sensitively presented to a broader public with ears to hear and a willingness to listen, proved irresistible. Already used to field research, where I ventured into the ‘lived religion’ of various groups, churches, sectarian enclaves, cults and temples, I accepted that my intrepid skills, empathy and keen observation would easily translate to the work of producing and presenting programs for the Religion Department at the ABC.

An impressive array of programs was already offered by the department, a great tribute to the ABC’s constitutional commitment to religion and the dedication of my colleagues. While some of them and their programs came and went over the years, the enduring flagship half hour Religion Report was the best “immersion” experience by which to commence my 26 years of programming, producing and presenting. The sheer volume and complexity of religion stories quickly unsettled my academic crown of learning, and I soon realised that scholarship was not only proved in peer reviewed journals and academic tomes but was tested in the currents of living faith, the clashes and conflicts, discoveries and triumphs, fads and fears, personalities and politics that religion was subject to in Australia and around the world.

But why religion, I was regularly asked. For me it was obvious. Religion is the very first global phenomenon that human beings evolved. As such, the great faiths were found scattered across the globe, spoken in new tongues and borne by people of different races, none more so and for longer, than Christianity and Judaism, the first by conquest, the second by forced dispersion. As such, their key belief that we are all born in the image of God, and their founding principle of covenantal responsibility would have enormous influence. The idea that each and every individual, not just anointed spiritual leaders or the heirs of priestly families, is accountable to the laws of the faith, its moral imperatives and ethical expectations, put conscience, deliberation and community at its centre. Knowing that we ultimately stand alone before God and are personally answerable for our acts is fundamental to the biblical tradition. Responsibility cannot be outsourced, nor is lived religion ever separate from the individual experience. It meant that no believer’s story would be the same, and all could teach us something about what it means to have a faith.

Along with the uplifting lessons there were also some sobering revelations. One of the features of the 1970s through to the 1990s was the eruption of novel groups, with self-appointed leaders, whose charisma and powerful methods of control swept up many people into their clutches.  Homegrown cults like the one in Nowra, NSW, run by “the Little Pebble”, who was subsequently jailed for preying on under-age girls, was a common story among many such groups the world over. The mass deaths, as happened in a number of these cults, like People’s Temple, Waco’s Branch Davidians, Heaven’s Gate, Aum Shin Rikyo, and the Solar Temple, as well as the Ananda Marga cult’s link to the Hilton Hotel Bombing in Sydney, plus a raft of court cases centring on groups exercising coercive control, fraud, pedophilia, attempted murder, and medical negligence, was an area I covered in a number of programs, including a series on cults for ABC’s Open Learning.

While cults proved to be a sensational topic that needed to be handled with care, given the vulnerability of their followers and the litigious nature of their leaders, around the same time, another highly fraught issue was rocking Australia’s Jewish community. Following a series made for the ABC by Mark Aarons on the presence of Nazis and their collaborators in Australia, a Special Investigations Unit was established in 1987, which examined over 800 alleged cases. It resulted in a few charges but encountered logistical difficulties and a lack of public support.  However, during its seven-year term and after the publication of its final report in 1994, the interest in Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, the enormity of their loss, their arrival in Australia, some as orphans on the Kindertransport, as documented by veteran religion journalist, the late Alan Gill [1], offered many opportunities to hear the profoundly moving backstories of the Jewish community in Australia.

I spoke to many survivors on my programs and what often came across was their humility, their deep sadness, and yet, through it all, their will to live, resounding in the Jewish cry, l’chaim, “to life!”. Nevertheless, I had qualms about these programs too. “People love dead Jews”, as the writer, Dara Horne has pointed out in her 2021 book of the same name. The ongoing fascination with Anne Frank, the travelling exhibition, “Auschwitz”, the litany of films made on the Holocaust are examples of the preoccupation with dead Jews that leaves me uncomfortable. While I am convinced that there is a need to know the history of the Holocaust, and not allow it to be forgotten or rewritten, the view of Jews seen through the lens of the six million dead has promoted a generalised view in the media that dead Jews are “normal”. And that has increasingly disturbing ramifications, for Jews 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz. I will return to that point, but first must address the watershed event that changed everything in the world of religion, especially for Jews.

The optimism that heralded the new millennium, not least the Catholic Church’s Jubilee promise to end world hunger, was quickly shattered on September 11, 2001. The Islamist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania by 19 Al Qaeda operatives, left 2977 innocent civilians dead. It was unique in magnitude, but only the latest in a long series of attacks by Islamist terrorists on Western targets, in America, England, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain and Canada, and which one year and one day later on October 12, 2002, would include the Bali Bombings at Kuta Beach, popular with Western tourists including Australians, which left 202 dead and 209 injured.

The West went into overdrove subduing any potential anger that might be directed at Muslims. In Australia, Prime Minister John Howard allocated $8 million to ANU in 2006 to establish a National Centre for Islamic Studies. At the ABC, producers were encouraged to find good stories, interfaith projects and moderate Muslims, to speak out against the jihadist death cult ideology that motivated these attacks. I did my part on multiple occasions, as did many others at the ABC, but on one occasion when I interviewed a Muslim scholar at ANU and referred to the Islamist identity of the 9/11 attackers, he hastened to “correct” me with “we don’t really know that they were Muslim…”.

Was the ANU professor hinting at the scurrilous conspiracy theories making the rounds in Muslim quarters that it was really the Jews who orchestrated the attack to make Muslims look bad? It would not be the first time the old trope of Jews controlling the world made its way into the Australian consciousness. After all, Australia’s chief Muslim leader, the self-appointed “Grand Mufti” and “Muslim Man of the Year 2005”, the Egyptian born Sheik Taj el Din Hilaly, was fond of quoting the antisemitic 19th Century forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, purporting Jewish world domination. Copies were for sale in his Lakemba Mosque bookstore in Sydney.  Hilaly’s remarks about Jews as “pigs” and “gutter people”, his denial of the Holocaust, and his speech declaring 9/11 as “God’s work against the oppressors”, led to his removal from the Prime Minister’s Muslim Community Reference Group in 2006. But his influence did not wane, when on his death in early October 2023, he was fondly remembered as a man who “reflected and embodied the spirit of the Muslim community in Australia’’ [2].

Let me return to the point I made earlier that dead Jews became the accepted norm. It will ruffle the feathers of those in liberal church circles who piously state that they are against antisemitism and acknowledge the historical reality of the Holocaust, but put simply the death of Israeli citizens by terrorist attacks year-in and year-out was of little or no importance to them. The thousands of missile attacks from Gaza since 2007, even less. The World Council of Churches, for example, in their statements on the Middle East conflict, regularly downplayed or ignored altogether the reality of this situation, which claimed the lives of thousands of Israeli civilians at bus stops, cafes, markets, schools and homes. The WCC always emphasised “the plight of the Palestinians” in their UN funded “refugee camps” (which incidentally are not camps but towns), not their responsibility for deadly attacks.

The statistics speak for themselves, and while some years have incomplete information, the loss of Israeli lives through terrorist attacks from 1948 to 2025, is 5340 people killed and 19,936 injured [3]. These deaths are not the result of declared wars that follow the rules of engagement, but the ambush of ordinary civilians in their day to day lives. Why this matters to almost every Jewish Australian is that most have relatives in Israel, as survivors of the Holocaust or those that came before. I have both. Then there are those with relatives from the 850,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands and Iran in the two years after 1948, or who came from Soviet Russia in the late 1960s to the 1980s, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many Jewish Australians also have children who have “made aliyah”, moved to Israel. Therefore, every terrorist attack in Israel means Jewish Australians frantically check the locations and names of the fatalities and injured.

Yet for the ABC, Israel became a word of opprobrium. The mounting anti-Israel ethos of university lecture halls that flows into the younger generation keen to work in the media (e.g. Professor Tim Anderson of the University of Sydney proudly posted a Nazi swastika superimposed on an Israeli flag) and the liberal churches who prefer to use the term “Holy Land”, meant that even mentioning Israel on ABC Radio required an additional negative gloss regarding its “treatment of Palestinians”. There was never any suggestion that the Palestinian Authority was responsible for the violence and halting of a two-state solution. Their school textbooks funded by the UN Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA teach children to hate Jews [4]. Arafat, who always appeared in battle dress and carried a gun into the UN, was given the Nobel Peace Prize. Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority since 2005, has never held elections.

How did I, as a Jewish producer, fair in this cooling, even frozen environment? I established a program on religious history, The Ark, which ran for six years simultaneously with The Spirit of Things. It covered every possible fascinating story from the history of the world’s religions, including the vast archaeological record in Israel, from the earliest bronze-age sites, through to the periods of the First and Second Temples, to the rise of Jesus and beyond. I recorded six or seven programs while in Israel and produced several others with archaeologists where the mandatory anti-Israel gloss was absent. Hallelujah!

But it was not all smooth sailing. The ramping up of anti-Israel, antisemitic rhetoric became the norm among the commentariat, who regularly called for the adoption of BDS sanctions against the only democratic country in the Middle East and bogusly claimed Israel was an “apartheid state”.  When a major academic conference on antisemitism was held in Melbourne in the mid 2000s, I produced a program that included views of the far left, the left, the middle and the right – as well as a feel-good story about an interfaith project between Muslims and Jews, called Building Bridges. After the airing of the program, I was called in by Radio National management for the first and only time. Fully expecting to be praised for a job well done, I was told, “we don’t think you should do programs on antisemitism”. Why, I asked. I could not help the fact that my guests all agreed that antisemitism was a problem. Was I meant to find a way to poke holes in that view, perhaps blame the Jews or Israel for antisemitism? I was not told anything specific about complaints received, other than as a Jewish person I was not suited to investigating antisemitism.

Just think about that. Would the same sanction be placed on an indigenous producer investigating the problems facing Aboriginal Australians, or Muslim, Indian or Chinese producers doing stories about experiencing discrimination? I walked away from that meeting shaken.

But not beaten. I decided on a more hopeful focus, such as Jews involved in interfaith work. Australia’s Jeremy Jones z”l and Israeli, Yossi Klein Halevi among others come to mind. But what if the interfaith invitation came from surprising sources? Such was the case when Coptic Christian, Samuel Tadros, Professor of Middle Eastern studies, and lecturer at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, visited Australia. He reached out to the Jewish community as a guest speaker, and I interviewed him about the Coptic experience in Egypt.

Professor Tadros related the catastrophic fate of Copts in Egypt, which he said was only exceeded by the hatred of Jews, who now number less than 10. But it was not always that way.  Tadros related how the newspapers in Alexandria, Egypt during the 1920s hailed the return of the Children of Israel to their homeland as a fulfilment of the Koran’s prediction (Surah 17:4-8), only to change their tune when Egypt became allied to Hitler. He spoke of the popularity of Mein Kampf in the Arab world, the 42-part TV series in Egypt based on “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and the galvanising ideology of antisemitism among disparate Muslim nations. (The same point was made to me later by British author and former Islamist, Ed Husain, author of “The House of Islam: a Global History”.)

Once again, I had crossed a red line. My weekly 800-1000 word article on the ABC RN website summing up the gist of the program did not appear. No matter how many times I asked about it, I encountered obfuscatory words. I was cancelled.

Had I broken the unspoken rule that there would be no criticism of Islam or defence of Israel, especially in the same program? Was the very idea of Muslim antisemitism a taboo subject? It would not be farfetched to think so.

Antisemitic attacks in Australia have quadrupled since Hamas perpetrated the worst terrorist ambush on Israeli civilians on October 7, leaving 1139 dead from barbaric injuries, videoed by the attackers, and the taking of over 200 hostages. Two days later, organised anti-Israel mobs chanting “gas the Jews” and setting off flares at the Sydney Opera House continued around the nation, marching through Jewish neighbourhoods, camping at universities, burning synagogues, destroying Jewish property, doxing 600 Jewish “creatives”, and platforming of kefiyah-clad performers in theatres and concert halls. The extraordinarily weak response by the Labor government and universities makes my experience at the ABC unsurprising.

As I write this the Special Envoy on Antisemitism Report has now been shelved, not to be released until one on “Islamophobia” is prepared, despite having nothing whatever to do with antisemitism. It is yet another example of the confused “equal time” policy that has gummed up our public institutions’ moral compass, which no longer can point to antisemitism as a clear and present danger, full stop.

Rabbi Zadok’s warning against the unethical use of knowledge to glorify one’s self could also be said for those in the media. I have commented on the Lattouf affair elsewhere [5], but the salient point is that editors who do not maintain the best standards of truth in journalism and prevent descent into opinion are hurting the profession. It is a sad fact that in this and in every case of egregious bias and of imams preaching hate, it has been solely up to Jews themselves to seek justice.

During my 26 years and over 1700 programs, including films for Compass, it was a tremendous privilege and a deeply rewarding profession to share religion’s greatest thinkers and humble practitioners, its critics and its champions with an appreciative Australian public. That meant a lot to me, because in the end I was there for them. I am not sure I could be there today.

Dr Rachael Kohn AO, FRSN is a broadcaster and author. She was the producer and presenter of The Spirit of Things on ABC Radio National from 1997-2018.

References

[1] Interrupted Journeys: Young Refugees from Hitler’s Reich Simon and Schuster: 2004.

[2] (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-05/nsw-mufti-taj-el-din-hilaly-dies-in-egypt/102940246)

[3] Summary of Terror ist Attacks in Israel compiled by William Robert Johnston, updated 6 April 2025. https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisraelsum.html

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/unrwa-textbooks-still-include-hate-antisemitism-despite-pledge-to-remove-watchdog/

[5] “Chickens came home to roost” The Spectator, 28 June 2025; Quadrant, 28 June 2025, The Australian Jewish News, 2 July 2025.