Louise Adler’s War on Jews and Jewish Grief

Louise Adler’s latest piece in The Guardian (12/7) accusing the Jewish community of “weaponising Antisemitism” and “over-reach” is not merely wrong. It is corrosively dishonest, intellectually lazy, and morally incoherent. And at this time in this place, where Synagogues are burning, her piece is shameful as it is disgusting.

Cloaked in the high-minded rhetoric of pluralism and free expression, it performs a sleight of hand familiar to anyone who has studied the rhetorical architecture of gaslighting: accuse the accused, invert power dynamics, and weaponise progressive language to delegitimise legitimate pain.
To accuse Jewish communities—just months after the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust—of weaponising antisemitism is not just insensitive. It is an act of ideological vandalism. It reduces real trauma to strategic theatre and implies that Jews, uniquely among the world’s minorities, must ask permission to define their own oppression. Adler, who feels she is the victim, once again is turning the Jewish community into her need for a scapegoat.

Would Adler dare tell First Nations groups that complaints of racism are “relentless campaigns”? Would she accuse Muslim Australians of “lobbying too effectively” against Islamophobia? Only with Jews is the assertion of communal safety reframed as coercion.

Let us be clear: Adler’s critique is not new. It is the latest iteration of an old, toxic pattern—accusing Jews of too much power, too much influence, too much voice. It recasts collective defence against a rising tide of global antisemitism as some sinister, manipulative project. It takes the IHRA definition, adopted by 1,200 institutions worldwide—including dozens of democracies—and presents it not as a consensus safeguard, but as a censorship tool. Why? Because it dares to name the thing Adler refuses to confront: that the overlap between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is no longer theoretical. It is empirical, bloody, and undeniable.

What is Adler to make of the little Jewish girl walking near her father’s Shule, who is accused by a passer-by of being “a genocidal killer”? By Adler’s warped logic, it must be the girl’s fault for provoking the stranger because she was wearing that most ‘Zionistic’ of emblems, a Magen David.
What draws Adler so instinctively to the pro-Palestinian cause is not simply politics — it is the seductive mirror of shared victimhood. The Palestinians, in her telling, are not agents but permanent casualties, as if history happened to them, not through them. But victimhood, untethered from responsibility, becomes a trap. The Palestinians are victims, yes — but of their own decisions. Decisions to reject peace offers that would have delivered them a state, not once, but repeatedly. Not everything they demanded — which has always, in part, included the eradication of Israel — but the realistic possibility of statehood alongside it. That rejection was not imposed upon them; it was chosen.

And Adler, in her own way, shares that posture. She wears her outsider status from the Jewish community as a badge — as if exclusion were forced upon her, not shaped by a lifetime of deliberate detachment. She is a victim, too — but of her choices. To live at the margins is a valid position; to turn one’s back on the Jewish people and then parade one’s moral superiority while disdaining those who remain committed — that is not principled distance. That is betrayal masquerading as enlightenment. In framing the Jewish community as tribal, overreactive, and reductive, Adler doesn’t just critique. She diminishes. She erases its multiplicity, its vulnerability, its right to speak in its own name. And in doing so, she mirrors the very flattening she accuses others of.

Adler’s rhetorical trick is to position herself as the reasonable centrist, caught between two extremes: a zealous Jewish lobby and apparently silenced Palestinians. But this is a false symmetry. What she describes is not an honest contest of ideas—it is a political fantasy, in which Jewish grief is performative, and Jewish advocacy, intolerable.
In this warped narrative, Jews are not allowed to be frightened nor are they allowed to advocate. They must endure desecrated synagogues, assaulted students, and social exclusion in silence—lest they be accused of silencing others.

Her article is a masterclass in projection. She accuses others of weaponising identity while weaponising her own status as a cultural insider. She laments the shrinking of space for dissent while shrinking the legitimacy of Jewish fear. She warns of a “relentless campaign” when it is she  who is waging one—against the right of a people she loudly claims to define herself as, to articulate and defend themselves from an ancient hatred.
There is also a staggering intellectual incoherence. Adler claims to cherish debate—yet attacks Jewish groups for participating robustly in it. She champions nuance—yet offers none herself. She demands that the Jewish community recognise complexity—while flattening its diversity into a monolithic “lobby.” This is not criticism. It is caricature masking dehumanisation.

And the timing is contemptible. In the wake of October 7, when Jews across the diaspora have faced an unprecedented eruption of hostility, Adler chooses this moment to lecture us on their tone. To accuse victims of brutality—of “playing the victim.” It is as if she watched a house on fire and scolded the occupants for calling the fire brigade too loudly. I bet Adler would have hated the sight of the hostage families advocating freedom for their children’s release – including and most especially at Netanyahu himself. ‘

Let’s be even bolder. Louise Adler is not marginalised for her views—she is published in The Guardian and The Age. Whenever she wants. She is a fixture of Australia’s cultural elite as CEO of the Adelaide Writers festival. What she resents is not exclusion from the conversation—it’s that she no longer monopolises it. The rise of Jewish voices who speak clearly about antisemitism, who demand institutional responsibility, and who do not apologise for supporting Israel’s right to exist—this, apparently, is what Adler finds intolerable. Adler is just a Stalinist in modern garb.

But what Adler fails to understand is that Jewish people do not need her permission to speak. We do not need to modulate our grief, dilute our fear, or soften our resistance to hatred for the comfort of her aesthetic of ‘balance’. And we certainly do not need to apologise for standing up—loudly, assertively, and yes, sometimes angrily—against those who would once again make us invisible in the name of someone else’s moral purity.
Louise Adler’s article will age poorly. Because history is not kind to those who scold victims while elevating narratives that diminish their pain. She may claim to defend open discourse, but what she is really defending is a hierarchy in which Jews must whisper when others she deems worthy get to shout.

No.

We will not whisper.

END

Adam Slonim is the director of the Middle East Policy Forum.