The New War against the Jews
Dr Dvir Abramovich is the Israel Kipen Director of the Program in Jewish Culture and Society at the University of Melbourne and Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission. He is regarded as the countrys leading anti-hate campaigner and one of the most respected commentators on Israel and the Jewish world. Dr Abramovich has been interviewed on radio and TV, and has contributed numerous opinion pieces to local and international publications. He was President of the Australian Association of Jewish Studies and editor of the Australian Journal of Jewish Studies for eight years. Dr Abramovich is the author and editor of seven books.
The greatest gift any man can have is his children. And I have been blessed with the best kids in the world.
Published by Hybrid Publishers
Melbourne Victoria Australia
Dvir Abramovich 2021
This publication is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction should be addressed to the Publisher, Hybrid Publishers, PO Box 52, Ormond, Victoria, Australia 3204.
www.hybridpublishers.com.au
First published 2021
9781925736816 (p)
9781925736823 (e)
Cover design: Milkman Agency
Introduction
This volume is a summa of my writings, collected over the last seven years, penned for a range of local and international publications. In a way, its bravura opinionating, a series of interior monologues that have gratefully found a public platform. Each piece included here is a springboard for reflection and represents a critical and scholarly engagement with the messy complexity of a phalanx of political, social and cultural issues, specifically antisemitism, the Holocaust, Israel and the Jewish world. Indeed, most of the impressionistic threads in this book pivot towards those ideas and events, though not exclusively. And although these are the subjects I am most at home with, I have taken the licence of digressiveness afforded to an essayist to stray into the unforeseen hinterland, and at times, trespass the usual band of thematic spaces I engage with. This cathedral of forays records the breadth of the large interests that have exercised my mind for decades and chronicles the epochal developments that have suffused the Jewish and Israeli universe during this century.
This work of erudition and passion is my attempt to come to grips with the elephantine rollcall of issues that have kept me up at night and have compelled me to put pen to paper. Writing, the sport of the cerebral, is my game. As Buffon remarked in 1753, Le style cest lhomme mme (The style is the man himself ), pointing to the truism that you may learn a lot about a person through their letters. To wit, the cogitations contained in this book open a window into the themes that have fired me up to spend countless hours trying to understand the timber and wood of the ever-evolving political and cultural landscape that undergirds Jewish life. These are the epochal stars that, for me, glimmer most brightly.
I am a voracious reader, and I usually have something to say. I often disagree with the prevailing orthodoxy. This yearning for pluralism, this appetite for going against the grain, has allowed me to foster a profoundly complex relationship with a loyal cadre of readers who never fail to respond to my regular bursts of moral reckonings and flashes of musings. I treasure dearly their equal intelligence and potent criticisms.
Writing for the masses is a Herculean labour, a hard caper that takes guts. I am always looking to nail down an argument without oversimplification and win the critics who can cut you down to size. Penning essays is an audacious task, akin to climbing a summit. It is an idealistic art form in which one needs to be at once truthful and zippy, playful and serious, so as to hold the jadeds attention. As Shakespeare noted, Brevity is the soul of wit.
Moreover, it defines your public persona, tastes and ideologies, though it never entirely captures what you most love. It also means that you have a fight on your hands since roaming across a constellation of controversies invites splenetic censure, and, not infrequently, ruthless attacks that in the age of the information superhighway appear within lightning speed and are shared infinitely.
I try to season and leaven each meditation with authentic energy, keen judgement and probing insights. There is no cutting corners. Compression does not mean a lack of substance, and you will also be hard-pressed to find a trace of jargon. The persistent hope is that the general audience not only accepts my in-depth observations but appreciates the passion that crackles within the page. Putting false modesty aside for a moment, the ambition here is that these essays will have the capacity to surprise and delight, that they will not wane in value and will be granted a modicum of posterity. And if I have done my job properly, once you have tucked into the book, the entries will touch a raw nerve and provoke irresistibly heated conversations in cafs or on a long plane ride. At heart, I pray that they will serve as a source of enjoyment, as a good read, and that you come back to it again and again.
Contents
ANTISEMITISM
The ADLs Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism Insights from Australia
May 23, 2014
There is a lot to digest and some real insights in the monumental and landmark Anti-Defamation Leagues Global 100: An Index of Antisemitism.
You have to hand it to the ADL. There are very few groups that could manage the largest ever global canvass, polling 53,100 people in 102 countries. A bumper sticker conclusion would be that many folks out there in the world hold antisemitic views. More than a billion, in fact.
What the ADL did was to ask whether respondents agreed with an Antisemitism index, consisting of eleven classic statements that it believes suggest antisemitic bias. And while you could point to methodological problems with the survey, it does tell us, plainly, that we still have a lot of work to do here.
As an organisation whose core mission is to fight antisemitism, the figures relating to Australian attitudes and feelings towards Jews and the Holocaust are of great significance. On the whole, we were not surprised. For us, antisemitism never takes a holiday. And while the unprecedented survey confirms the persistence of Jewish hatred, the good news is that, generally speaking, antisemitism in Australia is one of the lowest in the world.
But lets not break out the champagne just yet. The poll reveals that 14 per cent of Australians answered probably true to most of the questions. And thats based on those willing to admit that they held such views.
This translates to about 2.4 million Australians expressing some hostility towards Jews. Thats too many people harbouring such negative sentiments, and we should not feel comfortable about such numbers.
Particularly worrying is that 41 per cent of those Australians surveyed believed that Jews are more loyal to Israel than Australia. Notice, they believed it was Jews, not Zionists or pro-Israel advocates. Thats a disturbing and staggering figure and shows the pervasiveness of the dual-loyalty libel.