Why Jewish women should submit*

Thought that headline would get you in.

It’s fair to say that in today’s public conversation, female voices carry greater weight than they ever have before. The focus on “lived experience” is a prime example, and the voices of women’s lived experiences are often assigned the highest value.

In 2022, one J. Stone (a pseudonym) published a book called The Great Feminisation, which posited that one of the greatest civilisational upheavals in human history was underway.

His(?) assertion was that in the past 60-odd years, women have moved en masse into public life alongside men, ultimately achieving parity and even supremacy in many culturally influential institutions and professions. This degree of female cultural ascendancy has never been seen before. Women have brought with them into public life their distinctive ways of thinking: greater emotional sensitivity and alertness to harm, strong capacity for compassion, lesser affinity for free speech, and superior sociality – and susceptibility to social contagions. Women’s new power has thus brought dramatic social change – change that has not been all good.

Sure enough, when it comes to the public conversation about Jews, antisemitism, Zionism and Israel, things have not been all good. Notably, many of the most hostile and hateful voices to Jewish ears have been female.

The first world conference on the Status of Women was convened in Mexico City in 1975 to coincide with International Women’s Year. At that conference the infamous UN Resolution that Zionism was Racism first appeared, driven by the Soviet antisemitism which rebranded “Jews” as “Zionists”.

Infecting the women’s movement and other progressive spaces, this new strain of the old virus then animated the 1980 UN Conference. Jewish women’s experiences there were called “nothing short of a psychological pogrom”.

It bloomed into the hate-fest of the UN’s 2001 Durban Conference (ostensibly “Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance”), presided over by the first female president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. Then metastasised through the Women’s March under its leadership by Palestinian-American Linda Sarsour and Louis Farrakhan-fangirl Tamika Mallory.

In Australia since October 7, 2023, we have seen a coven of female “influencers” daily excoriate Zionists, demonise Jews, spew antisemitic hate and deny the lived experiences of Jewish and Israeli women.

In such a climate, elevating the voices of Jewish Australian women is massively important to counter the lies and libels, and assert what some refer to as “our narrative” but most of us recognise as “truth”.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion gives us a platform to do so.

National Council of Jewish Women Australia (NCJWA), as the oldest Jewish community organisation in this country and the peak national representative body for Jewish women, encourages Jewish Australian women to step up onto that platform.

NCJWA has run two surveys since July last year to hear about women’s lived experiences of antisemitism. We did this in order to understand the contemporary context of our work, help us discern the needs of the women we serve, and guide us as to how we might begin to address them.

But because we asked permission to share those stories with decision makers and media and anyone who might be able to act on the issues that were raised, what almost 700 women told us now forms the centrepiece of the NCJWA submission to the Royal Commission.

Commissioner Virginia Bell, an Australian woman of great valour, has called for accounts of the lived experience of Jewish Australians as her starting point. We urge all Jewish women to answer her call.

This week NCJWA launched our latest social media campaign, “Be an Esther.” Our newsletter is called Esther Speaks, which has the tagline, “For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?” (Book of Esther 4:14 – likely written between 460 and 331 BCE, so copyright no longer necessary.)

Now really is the time for every Jewish Australian woman to be an Esther. By raising your voice to the Royal Commission, you could not only help bring relief and deliverance for our people, but also for all the people of this land.

*to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion

Lynda Ben-Menashe is president of National Council of Jewish Women Australia.

Visit NCJWA’s Royal Commission website at ncjwa.org.au/rc and contact NCJWA at projects@ncjwa.org.au if you’d like support making a submission.