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When ‘Context’ Becomes Complicity — The Language That Incited the Bondi Beach Massacre
People walk at the scene of a shooting incident at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, December 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham
On Sunday, a Chabad Hanukkah candle-lighting at Bondi Beach was turned into a massacre. At least 16 people are dead. Witnesses report that the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” between bursts of gunfire. What should have been a moment of communal joy became a scene of mass murder, carried out in full view of a society that has spent years purposefully ignoring antisemitic incitement and terror attacks that led to this moment.
Around the same time, elsewhere in Australia, the same moral failure surfaced again. On a Melbourne tram, an Australian woman verbally accosted a rabbi and his two children, aged eight and 14, telling them to “go to the gas chambers.” She was carrying a bag bearing the PLO flag. A Jewish father and his children were told, in public, to imagine their extermination.
And that was after “protesters” in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews” — with absolutely no consequences.
“Go to the gas chambers.” There is no metaphor here. No policy critique. No political argument hiding behind rhetoric. There is only genocidal hatred, delivered calmly and directly.
And yet anyone familiar with the pattern already knows what comes next. Not moral clarity, but “context.” Not unambiguous condemnation, but explanation.
We will be told about anger, about trauma, about spillover from Israel’s war with Hamas. We are reminded that emotions are high, tensions are inflamed, and nothing can be viewed in isolation.
This is not analysis. It is evasion.
This is the anti-Zionism exception.
In any other context, this kind of mass murder would end the conversation. No editor would ask what provoked it. No official would suggest it must be understood through global politics. No journalist would hesitate to call the racism exactly what it is. And don’t forget that before the State of Israel was created, one third of the entire global Jewish population was murdered for their religion. But now we’re going to be told that this is only happening because of Israel.
When the targets are Jews, and when the hatred can be draped in the language or symbols of the Palestinian cause, the rules change. Antisemitism becomes negotiable. Murderous language becomes expressive speech. The victims become abstractions.
This is why anti-Zionism has become the dominant framework through which antisemitism is excused in the modern West. Zionism is the belief that Jews, like any other people, have the right to collective self-determination and national survival through sovereignty in part of their indigenous and historical homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews — while granting it to every other people — is not a policy disagreement. It is a moral inversion that recasts Jewish survival itself as illegitimate.
For years, Australia, like much of the democratic West, has tolerated rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at any other group.
Crowds have chanted “gas the Jews” and many other murderous slogans with no consequence. Universities have hosted speakers who portray Jewish sovereignty as a unique moral crime. Media outlets have repeatedly softened or obscured antisemitic incidents — like burning synagogues — treating them as political reactions rather than as hatred with a long and documented history.
Law enforcement responses have been hesitant and inconsistent, often focused on crowd control instead of stopping incitement.
In England, Jews wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David have been arrested for “provocation,” while standing before crowds chanting “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas,” and “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” — an explicit invocation of the massacre of Jews in seventh-century Arabia.
This matters because antisemitism does not operate like other hatreds. It has always depended on permission structures. It advances not only through violence, but through ideas that render violence against Jews intelligible, justifiable, and even necessary to those inclined to act.
When genocidal slogans are tolerated in public space, when Jewish identity is reframed as provocation, when Jewish self-determination is condemned as uniquely evil, and when hatred is endlessly contextualized rather than condemned, the distance between speech and action collapses.
What happened at Bondi Beach was 100% predictable. A slogan shouted yesterday becomes gunfire today. The targets were not symbols or states or abstractions. They were Jews lighting candles.
The media plays a central role in this process, whether it admits it or not. Language is softened. Headlines are hedged. Victims are pushed to the margins of their own stories. A massacre becomes an “incident.” A threat of extermination becomes “heated rhetoric.” Jewish presence itself is recast as a political act that invites response.
This is how a Hanukkah celebration becomes a “flashpoint.” This is how a rabbi and his children become “part of a broader conflict.” This is how Jews going about their lives in Sydney, London, or New York are quietly reassigned responsibility for the hatred directed at them.
Some will insist that Bondi Beach and the Melbourne tram were isolated events. They never are. Antisemitism has never announced itself first with bullets. It begins with the libels societies allow to circulate. It begins when calls for violence against Jews — “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” — are treated as political opinions rather than warnings.
A culture that cannot draw a red line at “go to the gas chambers” has already erased the line entirely.
Bondi Beach was not unforeseeable. It was foretold — in slogans excused, in threats contextualized, in hatred endlessly rebranded as politics. The massacre did not appear without warning. It appeared after years of permission.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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Stories of ghosts, grief and Shabbat gladness win top prizes in Jewish children’s literature
(JTA) — Anna is a misunderstood sixth-grade girl who communicates with the ghosts of her Jewish ancestors. Teased by her classmates and worried-over by her family, she finds comfort and understanding with her Bubbe and her beloved Jewish traditions.
“Neshama,” Marcella Pixley’s lyrically written novel-in-verse, won the gold medal for Jewish children’s literature for middle-grade readers from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Its Sydney Taylor Book Awards were announced today in a virtual livecast from Chicago.
The award committee called Pixley’s “a lyrical, deeply Jewish story about identity, grief, and resilience.”
The annual award, named in memory of Sydney Taylor, the author of the “All-of-a-Kind Family” series, “recognizes books for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience,” according to the award committee’s announcement.
Other winners include “D.J. Rosenblum Becomes the G.O.A.T,” a coming-of-age mystery by Abby White, which won in the young adult category, and “Shabbat Shalom: Let’s Rest and Reset,” a lively board book written and illustrated by Suzy Ultman, which won the picture book award.
The Sydney Taylor committee named Uri Shulevitz, whose 2008 book “How I Learned Geography” drew on his boyhood experiences fleeing Poland after the Nazi invasion in 1939, as the winner of its Body-of-Work award. Shulevitz, a multi-award winning storyteller and illustrator, died last year.
In addition to the top winners, the Sydney Taylor committee named five silver medalists and nine notable titles of Jewish content.
“This year’s winners and honorees exemplify excellence in Jewish children’s literature through vibrant storytelling and rich perspectives that foster empathy, understanding, and a deep appreciation for culture and community,” said Melanie Koss, chair of the award committee.
Winners will receive their awards in June in Evanston, Illinois at the AJL’s annual conference.
In “D. J. Rosenblum Becomes the “G.O.A.T,” an about-to-be bat mitzah-age girl is determined to prove that her beloved cousin did not die by suicide. Abby White lightens the emotional subject with a teen’s authentic, humorous voice.
“She wrestles with her Torah portion and faith, finding strength to face loss and begin moving forward,” the committee noted.
“Shabbat Shalom” may be the first board book to garner the award, Heidi Rabinowitz, a long-time podcaster about Jewish children’s books, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“The sophisticated board book combines succinct text with playful art,” the committee wrote in its release.
In awarding its Body-of-Work award to Shulevitz (1935-2025), who lived with his family in Israel before settling in New York, the committee recognized him as a “foundational voice in Jewish children’s literature.” His books “illuminate Jewish culture and reflect universal experience,” the committee wrote.
Many of Shulevitz’s titles reflect his Jewish roots, including “The Golem,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer and “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela,” an illustrated travelogue for children based on the real-life voyages of the 12th-century Jewish traveler who visited Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad and Jerusalem. Shulevitz garnered the Caldecott medal, children’s literature’s top honor for illustrated books, for “The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship.”
Earlier, the AJL announced that Jessica Russak-Hoffman, a journalist for Jewish media outlets, won the organization’s new manuscript award for “How to Catch a Mermaid (When You’re Scared of the Sea),” a novel set in Israel for ages 8-13.
Last week, the AJL named Jason Diamond as the 2026 winner of its Jewish Fiction award for his novel, “Kaplan’s Plot.”
At Tuesday’s event, the Youth Media Awards hosted by the American Library Association, the winners were also announced for the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newberry and Printz awards, among others. The Asian American Picture Book award went to “Many Things All At Once,” by Veera Hiranandani and illustrated by Nadia Alam, the story of a girl with a Jewish mother and a South Asian father.
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NJ church deletes video of pageant featuring antisemitic character but says critics took it ‘out of context’
(JTA) — A New Jersey church says it is “committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage” after putting on a Christmas pageant that drew criticism for reflecting antisemitic stereotypes.
St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s pageant, known as a vertep, featured an antagonist named Moshko who danced with the devil while wearing faux Hasidic garb like side locks and a black hat. The character was referred to as “zhyd,” a Ukrainian slur for “Jew.”
“We do not have any intention to promote harm or hatred with this pageant,” the church said in a statement issued on Facebook on Friday night. “However, we recognize some outside of our culture may assign elements of the performance to stereotypes when taken out of context which is inclusive of peoples historically present in eastern Europe.”
The church did not respond to a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment prior to an initial report on the vertep earlier this month. It did not respond to an additional request for comment on Monday, following the statement. The church removed photos and video of the pageant from its Facebook page following the JTA report.
The vertep is a centuries-old Slavic Christmas tradition that emerged from puppet theater. In recent years, many Ukrainian Orthodox churches have removed material criticized as offensive. Since the current war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2022, one popular replacement for the Jewish antagonist has been a Russian character.
In its statement, St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church emphasized that “the event does not target any specific group” but indicated that it could make changes in future pageants.
“The church is reflecting on this matter seriously and is committed to engaging in dialogue, and teaching others about our heritage while ensuring that future events continue to uphold the dignity, respect, and safety of all people,” it said.
The Anti-Defamation League of New Jersey, which said earlier this month that it was reaching out to St. Mary Protectress, told JTA on Monday that it had not been able to communicate with anyone from the church.
The church’s apology rang hollow for Lev Golinkin, a Jewish writer born in Ukraine who has advocated against the antisemitic elements of the traditional vertep.
“It’s not an apology, it’s more of an insult,” Golinkin said. “The problem is not the context. The problem is exactly that. It is in context perfectly.”
He added, “They’re making it seem that the people who are criticizing them … are the ones who have a problem because they don’t understand the culture.”
St. Mary Protectress is not the only Ukrainian church in the United States to import the antisemitic elements of the vertep from the old country. A church in Connecticut erected a backdrop poster for its pageant this year that included a Moshko character standing next to the devil.
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A new exhibit honors writer Lore Segal, a child survivor and lifelong skeptic of easy truths
(JTA) — I’ve never read a Holocaust chronicle quite like Lore Segal’s autobiographical 1964 novel, “Other People’s Houses.” Mordant, unsentimental and sometimes painfully honest, it’s the story of an Austrian girl sent to England on the Kindertransport, as well as a portrait of the artist as a young refugee.
More than one of her legions of admirers have noted that Segal, who died in 2024 at the age of 96, was only one year younger than Anne Frank, and grew up to become the kind of writer Anne too might have become had she not died in Bergen-Belsen.
Segal’s work, which includes decades of stories in The New Yorker as well as a delightful children’s book, “Tell Me a Mitzi,” is also remarkable in its humility. Segal was adamant that memory — especially of traumatic events like the Holocaust — cannot be a perfect repository of truth. It’s not that authors couldn’t be trusted, but that neither the writer nor the reader should take anything for granted.
That challenge is captured in the title of a new exhibit mounted by the Leo Baeck Institute in New York: “And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal.” The title is a quote from “King Lear,” a favorite of Segal’s and a reminder to hold opposing truths in the same sentence, of resisting the false comfort of a single, final version.
“We tried to give you an insight into Laura’s ability to look at the world from many angles,” Karin Hanta, the exhibit’s curator, said at the exhibit’s opening on Thursday, just days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
At the event, actress Toni Kalem, who played Angie Bonpensiero on “The Sopranos,” read an excerpt from “Other People’s Houses.” Kalem, who met Segal years ago and discovered that their mothers shared the experience of the Kindertransport, spoke of Segal’s “unbridled curiosity” — a quality that runs through the display of photographs, manuscripts and family keepsakes.
Lore (pronounced “Laura”) Groszmann was born in Vienna in 1928; one month after the Nazi pogrom on Kristallnacht, she was sent to England and raised in a series of foster homes (her refugee parents would eventually arrive and find work as domestics). Later she would join her family in the Dominican Republic, and they eventually found refuge in Washington Heights, the Manhattan redoubt for German-speaking Jews. After she established herself as a writer, she became part of a circle of mostly Jewish writers in New York, including Cynthia Ozick, Vivan Gornick, Grace Paley, Norma Rosen and Gloria Goldreich. Her husband, book editor David Segal, was 40 when he died in 1970.
Hanta had hoped to write a biography of Segal, but when that project stalled, she pivoted. “With all the materials I had gathered,” she recalled at the opening, “why not stage an exhibition?”
The first iteration, mounted in Vienna’s Bezirksmuseum Josefstadt — located in the district where Segal grew up, and, as Hanta later discovered, near the hospital where she was born — drew thousands of visitors. The New York version, expanded and sharpened, shifts the focus westward, tracing Segal’s journey from prewar Vienna to Manhattan, where she lived for decades, taught generations of writers, and, according to the New York Times, came “closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.”
That novel, “Her First American,” appeared in 1985 and explored the uneasy intersection of race and Holocaust history through the relationship of a Jewish refugee and a Black intellectual. (LBI has scheduled an online event about Horace Cayton, Segal’s real-life lover and the inspiration for the novel.) “Other People’s Houses,” her first book, earned Segal a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her short-story collection “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” (2007) became a Pulitzer Prize finalist. All three books will be reissued in the spring of 2026 by the New Press, while Melville House is publishing a posthumous collection, “Still Talking.” Introduced by Gornick, it features the linked “Ladies’ Lunch” stories she wrote late in her career, about elderly Manhattan friends dealing frankly and often hilariously with the daily indignities of growing old.
The exhibit at the Center for Jewish History, where LBI catalogues the history and culture of German-speaking Jews, includes notebooks from Bedford College in London, where Segal studied after the war, filled with short stories entered into competitions. There are manuscripts marked and re-marked in a hand that never stopped revising. There are address books kept by her parents — one from England, one from the Dominican Republic — opened to pages that quietly testify to vanished worlds: cousins who hid behind kitchen curtains in France, friends who assumed false identities, children who never made it onto the trains.
One small object carries particular weight: a childhood friendship book, the sort in which relatives and friends inscribe poems and well-intentioned advice. Segal’s includes an entry from her first English foster mother, urging her to cherish friendship — advice that reads differently if you know, as Segal later wrote, that their relationship was fraught. Her father’s contribution, a drawing of a boy hiking in the mountains, echoes a story Segal drafted as a young woman about a prewar hike in the Alps with him. She revised that story at 90 and retitled it “Dandelion.” The New Yorker published it in 2019, 70 years after its first draft.
The exhibition is accompanied by a season of in-person and virtual programs, and Hanta has her own wish list of commemorative projects: She hopes that a park in Vienna where Segal played as a child might be renamed in her honor; that the exhibition might travel; that “Other People’s Houses” might be distributed free in Austria in 2028, the centenary of Segal’s birth and the 90th anniversary of the Kindertransport.
On opening night, before reading from “Other People’s Houses,” Kalem paused to apologize for the necessary cuts she made. “As you know, all her life, Lore was a master of meticulously crafting and scrupulously revising her work,” said Kalem. “So it feels like literary malfeasance on my part to attempt to edit a word of Lore’s story. It feels akin to cutting Shakespeare by shortening Hamlet’s soliloquy…. So Lore, I hope you understand and I hope you will forgive me.”
The exhibition also includes a video produced by Hanta and Segal’s grandson, Benny, which captures Segal late in life, still circling her subjects, still attentive to the elusiveness of truth. At the opening, Segal’s son Jacob spoke of his mother’s ambition and her modesty, her seriousness about art and her refusal to be undone by success or disappointment.
“She always made the world larger,” he said. “It’s smaller now.”
“And That’s True Too: The Life and Work of Lore Segal” runs through April 15 at the Center for Jewish History, 15 W. 16th St., New York, New York.
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