Debra Messing joins Sydney as JCA launches largest appeal

American actress and Jewish advocate Debra Messing told attendees at the JCA Annual Campaign Event that after October 7 standing up for the Jewish community was no longer an option.

Appearing in conversation with Sky News journalist Sharri Markson, Messing, who grew up as one of three Jews in her school system in Rhode Island, said she hid her Judaism as a child after experiencing antisemitism, including a classmate using an antisemitic slur, a swastika being painted on her grandfather’s car and property damage at her home.

“I learned very quickly that in order to feel safe I had to stay silent about my identity,” Messing said, recalling that on Jewish High Holy Days, it was easier to say she was sick than to deal with the hatred that would follow the real explanation.

She said she had later asked for her character in the television series Will & Grace to be Jewish.

“I want her to be as Jewish as possible, I want everything,” she said. “I recognised that while we were trying to change hearts and minds around the gay community, that there was an opportunity to change hearts and minds around Jews and the Jewish community, and I felt like it was my responsibility to do so.” Messing explained that she started receiving letters from young females, expressing their gratitude that they could finally see themselves reflected on mainstream television. To this day, she said, it’s one of the things she is most proud of.

Messing said the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel had changed her life. “I feel like my life is everything before October 7, and then everything after. I will never be that person again,” she said, recalling the moment she found out about the attacks.

“I just remember sitting in my kitchen watching the news and just going cold, just feeling paralysed. The shock was instant, the trauma was instant, the fear was instant, and the grief was instant, and I expected the entire globe to mourn with us,” she said. “The next day I saw the Sydney Opera House, and that was the moment that I realised that we were alone and no one was going to mourn for us or with us.”

Messing shared that her intense desire to stand up for the Jewish community was instinctive, having seen her parents do the same for her entire life. She expressed remorse that she hadn’t spoken up so much beforehand.

“For 20 years I have been very vocal for every marginalised community except the Jews. I realised that I had come to believe that Jews didn’t need support, and I think it’s because I felt like if I asked there would be no response,” she explained.

So, she became a global advocate, explaining that she was finally able to visit Israel for the first time just two months after the attack, saying she felt compelled to bear witness, and explaining that she believed that being able to share the videos and interviews would help further her advocacy work.

“I fell in love with Israel. I felt safer there than I felt in New York City, which is really kind of astounding to me. But then I was able to go online and to the people who were saying ‘you’re a liar’, and I would show the videos, and I would show the interviews. And I would say, ‘until you get on a plane and you go to Israel, and you see for yourself, and you have your own lived experience, then you can talk about it, but until then, you cannot call me a liar, because I was there’.”

Despite this, she said, it’s the responsibility of the Jews of the diaspora to be “louder and stronger and prouder than we have ever been in the history of the Jewish world”.

“They want to silence us, they want to scare us, they want us to feel shame. And if we allow them to make us feel like we can’t wear our Jewish star around our neck or our kippa or whatever it is, t-shirts showing Jewish pride, because for fear of being attacked they win. And so, whenever I start feeling scared, I try to remember again our ancestors and how they fought and how strong they were in their small numbers. And I feel like the Jewish community in the diaspora is is more united than it has ever been.”

She said she has seen how anti-Zionism is being used as a shield for antisemitism, and the only way to combat this is by education.
“A shield that is hiding the hatred and the bigotry, and putting on a costume, a cosplay of someone who is morally superior, and we cannot let that stand. Every generation, there’s a new way that antisemitism is expressed, and in our generation right now, this is anti-Zionism, and it’s insidious. And I honestly don’t know how we’re going to combat it, other than education.”

On the Bondi attack, Messing said, “I felt like it was October 7 again, on just a smaller scale. And it was so horrifying that it would be on the first night of Chanukah,” she said.

Messing said the diaspora had mourned with the Australian community, and that her hope lay with young Jews.

“They are going to save us. They are leaders that are stronger than any generation before us… they are unstoppable,” she said. “We’re still here after 3000 years, and we are here to bring the light into the dark.”

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The JCA has launched a campaign seeking almost $40 million, more than double the amount it raised last year, at its annual event in Sydney with almost 1600 people in attendance. The annual campaign event was its first major communal gathering since the December 14, 2025 Bondi Beach terror attack on Chanukah by the Sea.

To open the event, Rabbi Yaacov Chaiton, principal of Kesser Torah College, read aloud the names of the 15 people killed at Bondi Beach. Two videos were also screened about the terror attack, one on the immediate aftermath and JCA’s role in the community’s response, and a second on the relief effort ahead.

JCA chief executive Alain Hasson said the funds were needed to support bereaved and injured families, the organisations that JCA funds, and the community’s engagement with the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

Hasson said the attack had been “designed to drive a wedge between us, to break us, and to instil fear in us”, but had failed.

He said young people in particular were grappling with their identity.

“Some of our community, and particularly our young people, are asking hard questions,” Hasson said. “Who am I? What does it mean to be Jewish today? Can I wear my school uniform in public? Should I take my mezuzah down? Is it safe to be visibly Jewish?

“Now more than ever, we must invest more, not less, in Jewish identity. This is not a luxury in this climate. This is our truest form of security.”

Hasson said giving was a personal declaration, saying, “You are declaring that our Jewish community will not be defined by the violence done to us, but by the love and the strength with which we respond to it”.

He closed his address with the words of the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. “You can suffer and yet sing, walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and emerge limping but undefeated into the light of new life. Limping but undefeated. That is us, that is Sydney, that is today,” he said.

The Hebrew phrase “Kol Yisrael Arevim Zeh Bazeh”, all Jews are responsible for one another, recurred throughout the afternoon.

JCA president Ian Sandler, who is stepping down after a six-year term and will be succeeded by Myra Salkinder, said the surge in antisemitism that followed the October 7, 2023 attacks had reached Australia, appearing on the steps of the Opera House, on streets and campuses, and outside schools and synagogues.

“We had told ourselves that in the sunlit corner of the world, the oldest hatred could never take root. We were wrong, very wrong,” Sandler said.

He said the Bondi attack had nonetheless united a community known for its internal debate. “We are a community that loves to debate politics, religion, Israel, education. Nothing is off limits,” Sandler said. “It’s who we are, and on most days we’re proud of it. But on December 14, none of that mattered. Every divide fell away. Orthodox and progressive, left and right, the big institutions, the small chesed groups working out of someone’s lounge room. Everyone moved as one.

“I thought about naming every organisation that stepped up, and then I realised I couldn’t. Not because anyone was missing, but because everyone was there.”

Sandler said the first JCA campaign, in 1967, had raised $340,000 for 10 founding organisations, and the body now supported 24.

In his final address as president, he said the community’s best days lay ahead. “The best chapters of our story are still to be written.”

Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh president and CEO Jeff Finkelstein, whose community lost 11 people in the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue attack, said he had travelled to Sydney to stand in solidarity, with both communities having experienced “the worst of antisemitism”. He described the day of the Tree of Life shooting, recalling the attack itself as well as the way the community galvanised afterwards to care for one another.

“The grief, the anger, the disbelief. It was overwhelming. It is something I will never forget,” he shared, explaining that every year, as the leaves begin to change colour in October, the trauma begins to resurface.

“Remember it does become easier to carry, but trauma does not disappear. What changes is our ability to cope, to support one another and to build resilience. I see that same strength in this community.”