Waking up this morning to a late-in-life realisation about how antisemitism has affected my life made my cheeks sink.
Waking up this morning to a late-in-life realisation about how antisemitism has affected my life made my cheeks sink.
Opinion
January 30, 2025 — 3.24pm
Walking to work this morning, I felt as so many of us do during those early hours: hopeful that today might be better than yesterday, and relieved that my three children had finally returned to school after weeks of hearing intermittent bickering ricochet off the kitchen walls.
But then I sat down at my desk and read the news. Someone had spray-painted the words “You f—ing Jews” in massive black letters across a home in my neighbourhood. On a wall of the Jewish school around the corner, more scrawled, angry letters: “Jew Dogs”. And “F— The Jews.”
This happened just nine days after a daycare centre near the Jewish school in my suburb was set alight and scrawled with the words “F— the Jews”. All this after a spate of antisemitic attacks across the eastern suburbs of Sydney and elsewhere in Australia.
I’m Jewish. I’ve seen countless antisemitic attacks – graffitied buildings, slurs shouted at rallies and buildings firebombed – occur in cities across the globe over the past four decades. They tend to occur every time the Israeli government or army is involved in any war or attack.
But I felt no personal threat. I didn’t yet understand the price I would end up paying for the toughness I projected to myself over all those years and all those attacks. They simply became a fact of life.
I have always known that people hate Jews. When I was a kid, my father used to tell me about the signs that were posted near the main beach in my hometown, Toronto, in the 1950s that read: “No Dogs or Jews Allowed”.
My grandmother fled to Canada from Poland in 1929. Relatives of mine were murdered in the Holocaust. Their loved ones who were left behind had to withstand the bomb blast of trauma that came after.
So what right did I have to feel bad? For myself? Especially now, 15 months since October 7, when Israelis were raped and butchered in their homes, and the war that followed in which tens of thousands of Palestinians were killed?
But when I read the news this morning, I could feel my temples throbbing. And my tear ducts begin to swell.
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This was my body finally registering what I’ve pushed down all my life: that knowing how people feel about Jews has affected my behaviour – and what I think about myself – for as long as I can remember.
I have always, under the surface, felt the pressure to be inarguably good. To be tolerable and appealing in every way. I had to be a good Jew. Because God forbid I give anyone extra ammunition to use against Jewish people that makes them think, “See! It’s true! They’re greedy, cheap, money-hungry …”
If I was super tolerant, even in the face of slurs against Jews, people might think “oh, they’re not all bad!”
To wake up this morning and realise that I’ve spent a lifetime feeling this way made my cheeks sink. What an impoverished way to live.
I would give anything for my children never to feel this way. I don’t think they do, but I’ve never shared these feelings with them until now.
A month ago, my youngest son, who is 11, turned to me at the dinner table and asked “why does everyone hate us?” I spoke honestly about how I then felt. “Not everyone hates us,” I said, with a reassuring smile. “It only feels that way now, because of October 7. This often happens. Things flare up, and then they die down.”
A beat. “Not everyone hates us,” I repeated. “Yes, they do,” he said, with a tone of childish defiance.
Do I still feel that way now?
I do. I know not everyone hates us. I know that most people are good. That, in my own life, my friends and loved ones judge me for who I am rather than the religion I happened to be born into.
But this late-in-life realisation about how antisemitism has affected my life, and those of many Jewish people I know, has made me want to share it.
“I have a sick feeling like something really bad is going to happen and lives are going to be lost,” one friend of mine, who is Jewish and lives in Sydney, texted in a group chat this morning. “This is a hugely significant trans-generational trauma trigger for us all.”
She was referring to the latest graffiti attacks but also to the revelation by NSW police yesterday that a caravan that contained enough explosives to create a 40-metre blast wave – and the address of a Sydney synagogue – was recently seized near Dural, in Sydney’s north-west. It’s being investigated by police as something that might have been intended to create a mass casualty event.
“Agreed – why are we waiting for a ‘mass casualty event’?” wrote another friend, who is also Jewish, in the chat.
She was referring to comments by NSW Deputy Commissioner of Police, David Hudson, that the caravan “was not going to be used in the normal antisemitic attack that we have seen occur in Sydney, such as graffiti and arson attacks”.
“What is a normal antisemitic attack?” wrote my friend. “For the first time, I felt sick sending the kids to school. And I haven’t felt that really in the past.”
Tomorrow, I know I’ll wake up feeling differently. My kids will know, for the first time, how I feel about this. I have hope that maybe if I’m honest, others will have more compassion towards anyone who’s different from themselves. Who, perhaps, they just don’t know, or understand.
Samantha Selinger-Morris is the host of The Morning Edition for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via Twitter.
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