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Antisemitism is on the Rise Down Under
By HENRY SREBRNIK As in other western countries, Australian Jews have been targeted by boycotts, harassment, and intimidation since the Gaza war began last October.
Throughout its history, Australia has been good to its Jewish community, which numbers more than 100,000 people today, with most living in Melbourne and Sydney.
From around 1947 to 1952, Australia took in more Holocaust survivors as a proportion of its population than any other country. Their children and grandchildren form more than half the community in Australia.
Being Jewish in Australia has never been seen as a bar to success. Yet since the Gaza war started, reports of antisemitism have spiked 700 per cent, including violent attacks.
Responding to pressure, on July 9 Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed Jillian Segal, the president of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, to be “special envoy to combat antisemitism in Australia” for three years.
There is an urgent necessity to overhaul laws about doxing, the intentional online exposure of an individual’s identity, private information, or personal details, which has had a disproportionate impact on Jewish individuals. Pro-Palestinian activists distributed a nearly 900-page transcript that they leaked from a private WhatsApp formed last year by Jewish writers, artists, musicians and academics.
For example, Josh Moshe, a 33-year-old grandson of Holocaust survivors, moved to Melbourne in 2010. He and his wife operated a well-known gift shop in Thornbury. He had never experienced problems before.
However, all of this rapidly changed after the WhatsApp group was doxed. “We were sworn at, the shop was graffitied with ‘Glory to Hamas,’ and ‘we don’t want Zionists in Thornbury,’” he said. As a result of such stories, the government plans to make the practice illegal.
Many politicians espouse openly anti-Israeli views. A video of Jenny Leong, an Australia Green Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, discussing how “the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby” are using their “tentacles” to “influence power” went viral in early February.
Pro-Palestine encampments have come under increased scrutiny. A joint statement by protest organizers at 10 universities claims their movement has been peaceful and opposition to the state of Israel and Zionism as an ideology was not antisemitism.
“There needs to be more nuance around the conversation,” remarked David Slucki, associate professor at the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization at Monash University in Melbourne. “Our governments at the local, state, and federal level come out regularly in support of Jews and against antisemitism, which is something we have rarely seen throughout history. And yet I routinely hear people talk how similar the current situation is to 1930s Germany.”
On the other hand, a Monash colleague of his, Philip Mendes, Director of the Social Inclusion and Social Policy Research Unit, disagrees. “Australia has experienced an unprecedented outbreak of anti-Semitism,” he maintains. (Full disclosure: he and I have collaborated on a number of scholarly articles and books.)
Jewish university students and academics have been subjected to various forms of defamation, threats and hate speech by university-based encampments and associated forums, flyers and graffiti, which are intended to exclude them from academic and public discourse, he maintains. Many Jewish students and staff assembled in early May at Melbourne University Square, well away from the encampment, where some told stories about feeling intimidated on campus.
On May 9 the federal opposition Liberal Party’s education spokesperson, Sarah Henderson, claimed campuses had become “hotbeds of antisemitic activism” in “flagrant breach” of university policies. Mendes sees this as a new form of McCarthyism, like that experienced by Communists and other leftists during the Cold War.
Michael Gawenda, a well-known Australian journalist, was editor of the centre-left Melbourne Age for seven years from 1997-2004, and a foreign correspondent in both London and Washington. In an article published in the British periodical Fathom in February, he describes his anxiety over current events.
“The Labor Government in Australia has been all over the place on Israel and the Palestinians and on the Hamas-Israel war,” he explained. “There are vital Labor-held seats in Sydney and Melbourne that have significant numbers of Muslim Australians, enough to swing election results.” It has meant that from Albanese on down, “there has been a failure to properly, unequivocally, call out what has clearly been an explosion of Jew hatred in Australia.”
Western Australian senator Fatima Payman, a devout Muslim born in Afghanistan, quit the Labor party recently in a major rupture with the Albanese government over Palestine. She used the politically charged phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which, she said, asserted “a desire for Palestinians to live in their homeland as free and equal citizens, neither dominating others nor being dominated.”
A close friend of mine, Michael Birkner, professor of history at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, has spent many sabbaticals in Melbourne over the past two decades. He agrees that the Labor Party in Australia is walking on eggshells about the war in Gaza.
“The intellectual community is pro-Palestinian, and there are thousands more voting Muslims in Australia’s cities than Jews.” A small community perhaps a fifth the size of the Muslim community, the Jewish community’s “political influence is scant, even as there are notable Jewish writers and elected officials.” Indeed, in so many ways, it resembles its sister community in Canada.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown.
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Forverts podcast, episode 8: Subway stories
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם אַכטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „די אונטערבאַן“.
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען: משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָס פּערזענלעכן עסיי „און אַלץ צוליב אַ יאַרמלקע!“ וואָס איר קענט אַליין לייענען דאָ, און אַ צווייטן אַרטיקל פֿון שׂרה־רחל שעכטער, „זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשיר“, וואָס איר קענט לייענען דאָ.
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
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