Groups urge investment in dialogue
Negative attitudes towards Jewish Australians have risen, experts warn weakening cohesion fuelling division.
Fifteen per cent of Australians reported a negative or very negative attitude towards Jewish people in 2025, up from 13 per cent in 2024 and nine per cent in 2023, the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has heard.
The figures, from the Scanlon Foundation Research Institute’s annual Mapping Social Cohesion study, were given in evidence by chief executive Anthea Hancocks and senior manager of social research John van Kooy.
Van Kooy said the 2023 result was not a starting point but the end of a plateau of between eight and nine per cent running from July 2020, which “began to increase starting in 2024”.
He cautioned against reading the figure as a measure of antisemitism, describing the survey’s single item on attitudes towards people of different faiths as “a necessary but not sufficient” condition for understanding the problem. He also warned against comparing percentages between groups. The overall Scanlon Index of Social Cohesion stood at 78 in 2025, against a base of 100 in 2007.
Asked about the conditions behind the figures, van Kooy pointed to declining perceptions of fairness, declining financial security, and falling levels of belonging, pride and support for diversity.
Over Monday and Tuesday’s hearings on social cohesion initiatives, the commission also heard from organisations working across communities.
AusIran co-founder Rana Dadpour told the commission Iranian Australians had felt a deep solidarity with the Jewish community after October 7.
She said the Islamic Republic systematically promoted anti-Jewish hatred, but that millions of Iranians in the diaspora had fled that ideology, and drew the commission’s attention to more than 2500 years of Jewish life in Iran.
Dadpour also identified a parallel between the two communities.
“Sometimes the policies of the IRGC … or the regime in Iran, would be linked to Iranian people. The same is happening with the Jewish Australian community. Some policies of the Israeli government are being linked to the Jewish community here,” she said.
Together for Humanity founder Rabbi Zalman Kastel described a school where students had been called “gas inhalers” and pushed into narrow spaces and sprayed with deodorant to evoke gas chambers.
“There was a culture of pretending this was okay,” Kastel said.
After a partnership program that trained older students as in-house facilitators, the school recorded no incidents of antisemitism or racism between February and May this year, having recorded many across 2024 and 2025. The partnership cost $10,000 in government funding.
Rabbi Kastel said addressing prejudice should not be confined to schools with affected communities. “Hatred doesn’t just harm the victim. Hatred harms the hater.”
He urged reform of the Australian curriculum and teaching standards, warning that intercultural capabilities sat within general capabilities that “almost nobody teaches”.
Together for Humanity’s Jewish-Muslim student exchanges have not run since October 2023, and Rabbi Kastel said he hoped they would resume in 2027.
Rozana Australia CEO Panos Massouris told the commission a “relational absence” between communities, rather than any failure of goodwill, drove division.
Social cohesion, he said, “is not the absence of difference” but “a presence of relationships strong enough to carry it”.