Segal launches landmark guide to antisemitism

Too many Jewish Australians have been told that the antisemitism they can see with their own eyes is not really antisemitism at all.

On Thursday, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, launched a handbook designed to make that denial harder to sustain.

Understanding Antisemitism in Australia, launched at the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne, is the first academically rigorous, Australian-focused guide to applying the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism, Australia’s official definition.

Segal said the handbook was designed not only for the Jewish community but as a resource for government and civil society broadly.

“It’s not just a tool for us. It’s a tool for the community, and it’s a tool for government,” she said.

She noted strong international interest in the publication, revealing that the EU’s lead antisemitism envoy had already requested printed copies ahead of a Geneva meeting, and said she had found significant goodwill among the global network of roughly 35 antisemitism envoys.

She urged community members to submit to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism, and called for a whole-of-society response to what she described as an attack on Australian values.

“An attack on us is an attack on Australia. It is undermining our social contract, undermining our democracy,” she said.

Segal pointed to former Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, who wrote the handbook’s foreword, as an example of the non-Jewish allies the community needed to engage.

“There are a lot of people who are looking for this sort of resource. They find themselves friends of the community but unable to articulate the arguments,” she said.

Jewish Museum board member and arts lawyer Alana Kushnir delivered a personal account of antisemitic targeting in the arts sector, describing what she said was an institutional failure to protect a Jewish professional when it mattered most.

In the days after October 7, Kushnir said she raised serious concerns with fellow board members, the CEO and senior staff of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art about social media posts by artists that she considered antisemitic, including posts that minimised Hamas atrocities or, in those first weeks, described events in Gaza as a Holocaust.

When her concerns went nowhere internally, she spoke up on her personal social media account. Shortly afterwards, an artist publicly branded her “a full-blown Zionist,” a “genocide apologist” and “ACCA’s resident Zionist.”

“This was not a good faith disagreement about Israel. This was not criticism of a government policy. This was the public branding of a Jewish woman in the arts as morally corrupt, dangerous and illegitimate,” Kushnir said.

What followed, she said, was a case study in institutional failure.

An emergency board meeting was called, but rather than examining the antisemitic conduct directed at her, it focused on managing what it described as escalating reputational risk, with the burden placed on Kushnir herself to help the institution determine its response.

“When a person reports discrimination, harassment or conduct that is deeply offensive, they shouldn’t be expected to design the institution’s response in real time. The victim should not be required to become the crisis manager, the educator, the policy drafter and the evidence gatherer while at the same time absorbing the harm,” she said.

Kushnir said the antisemitic hostility directed at her had been minimised and reclassified as one side of a politically sensitive debate, with organisational reputation prioritised over Jewish safety.

“This guide provides the practical architecture that has been missing. It gives boards, executives, staff, funders and institutions a way to move beyond panic, avoidance and reputational self-protection,” she said.

Australian Zionist Federation CEO Alon Cassuto illustrated the broader erosion of Jewish confidence in public life with the story of a 13-year-old girl from a Jewish day school.

On a school excursion to the National Gallery of Victoria, accompanied by a plain clothes security guard as is now the norm, she was approached by a student from another school and asked what school she attended. The girl paused, then said nothing.

“What sits behind that hesitation is the gradual erosion of psychological safety for Jews in Australia,” Cassuto said.

“No other minority would be expected to accept that as normal.”

He argued the handbook addressed a critical gap: not a lack of awareness, but a lack of clarity about where legitimate criticism of Israel ended and antisemitism began.

“Without clarity, leaders can’t have conviction, and without conviction, leaders cannot act,” he said.

Understanding Antisemitism in Australia is available online here.