‘Write for our time and raise your voice’

While other peoples educated their priests and monks, Israel spread the word to as many of its people as possible, since, as our tradition has it, all Israel was there at Mount Sinai. That included women, who were required to uphold the law, and recite the Psalms daily. Although not considered scholars, there were rare exceptions, such as the famed Beruryah, Rabbi Meir’s wife, whom the Talmud acknowledges delivered halachic and homiletical statements.

Why mention our ancient literary heritage in this tribute to Esther Kister, who founded the Jewish Writers Festival (now Melbourne Jewish Book Week) here in Melbourne 20 years ago? Not only because the imperative to read and write has been integral to Jewish life for ever; and that our scriptures inspired, framed and inhabited so much of the Western literary canon, but like Beruryah of the Talmud, Esther Kister took a risk and broke the mould, and started something we never thought would be as necessary as it is today when writers festivals are havens for antisemites.

Professor Emerita Phyllis Chesler had warned us that many on the left had turned against “Jews as a people” and as a consequence they were obliged to betray the Jewish cause. In fact, over 10 years before Chesler wrote The New Antisemitism, Ruth Wisse, the Canadian Jewish literary scholar, commentator and foremost Yiddishist, had sounded the warning in her 1992 masterful, study, If I am Not for Myself: the Liberal Betrayal of the Jews.

What is the Jewish cause? Jewish diversity notwithstanding, the itinerant Israeli speaker Eitan Chitayat (I am That Jew) like the late chief rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sacks, emphasises that the cause which unites most of us is: being free to be Jewish which extends to the existence of Israel. Regardless of whether you are on the right or the left or somewhere in the middle, the existence of Israel as a Jewish state, a safe home for Jews, in their ancient homeland, free from the constant assault of terrorism and war, and the diktats of the UN, is the sine qua non of modern Jewish existence, just as it is for Jews to be able to live freely anywhere without the violence of antisemitism. The Jew who is free and the free Jewish state are mirror images of each other.

If you look up Jewish writing in Australia, the theme that most often appears is the Holocaust. Given the number of survivors who came to Australia, that’s understandable, and just today Maria and Lola: Stories of Survival was launched with the 99-year-old Lola in attendance. Kol hakavod! But the Holocaust as “literature” now numbers in the thousands worldwide, increasingly by writers who are now two and even three generations removed.

I would say there is a three-fold danger of focusing on the Holocaust as a literary genre.

First, any genre easily becomes a string of “sellable clichés”. Right now, in fact, AI-generated Holocaust stories are being created for Facebook by people in Pakistan, who never heard of the Holocaust, but are paid to generate so-called “Holocaust memoirs”. Maybe you’ve seen them pop up on your Facebook page.

Second, and related to the Holocaust as “a sellable theme”, is using it as a prop for telling another story, in order to lend it gravitas – tales of family relationships, lesbian daughters, cross-racial marriages, and remote fathers, as in Eleanor the Great, a quintessential “tick the woke box” Hollywood film by Scarlett Johansson.

Third, and most important of all is that the Holocaust does not tell us all there is to know about Jews and Jewish Australians. Jewish history in Australia long predates the Holocaust, and we have not lived in the constant shadow of trauma and victimhood. Many parents and grandparents who were survivors made sure of that. Their focus was future-oriented, determined to make a new life here. Just like the large number of chalutzim in Israel, who “chose life”, forged new histories, new psyches, new triumphs, and also fought new battles.

Now two years after October 7, 2023, we in Australia also need to fight, in Melanie Phillips’ words, “fight like Hell” on many fronts. How will this be reflected in Jewish writing?

What I think needs to happen now is bold writing. But it may mean getting out of your ideological corner. We have an obligation to counter false charges wherever they come from, in our writing and in our speaking, and to remain resolute in the truth. Not “our truth”, the truth. Make no mistake: the first is a fiction, the second is a fact.

Let us not use our writing to retreat from the present. The task of our time is too urgent. Let us write for our time. In historical studies, in political analysis, in well-crafted Australian Jewish stories and even in poetry that speaks to the whole nation. To do any less would be an abandonment of our sacred and our secular responsibility to Jews and to Australia. In the words of Emma Lazarus, an American, a Zionist, a Sephardic Jew, in the poem which she wrote for Rosh Hashanah 5643: [1883], called The New Year.

“…never was the year Greater with portent and with promise seen, Than this eve now and here.”

Dr Rachael Kohn AO, FRNS is a broadcaster and author.

This is an edited extract from the Esther Kister Oration, held at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club on November 30.