Are we Australian Jews or Jewish Australians?

In 2021 I hosted Future Jews 2048, a monthly online series with this paper about where Jewish life here might be heading. In one of them I asked our panel whether, by 2048, we’d be Australian Jews or Jewish Australians.

Rabbi Yaakov Glasman hoped we’d be Australian Jews, with being Jewish our noun and Australian the adjective. I’d have said the same, as a Brunswick boy who went to Scopus and spoke Yiddish at home before English, free to be Jewish in my own way and in my own time.

Five years on I’ve been made to feel a Jewish Australian, as if Jewish is now a label other people pin in front of my Australian.

Some of that shift happened inside me, and plenty of it came from outside: the arson attacks on the Adass Israel and East Melbourne synagogues, the 15 people murdered at Chanukah by the Sea in Bondi last December, and the extra guards and police now at our shule doors.

All of that sits on top of something I’ve carried all my life, though it was never mine. My parents survived the Holocaust, and after the war they walked away from their home in Włocławek, in Poland, one night, my big sister in her pram, and came about as far from Europe as anyone could.