On September 30 I spoke to the Australian Jewish Association about campus antisemitism (and how to fix it).
After the October 7 attacks in Israel, Australian universities saw US-style encampments in support of Hamas. Our campus at the University of Sydney hosted one of them. Two years later there was a mass shooting targeting a Hanukkah picnic on Bondi Beach. Jewish businesses have been defaced, Jewish academics have had their names and addresses published online, Jewish organizations have been prevented from speaking in public, and a synagogue has been firebombed.
With these events as background, all four candidates for president of our undergraduate student council saw fit to campaign this year on “free Palestine” tickets, with one actually campaigning under the banner “Globalise the Intifada”.
You can watch my address on this controversy on the YouTube channel of the Australian Jewish Association at:
A day before the address, I had published an abridged version of my remarks in an op-ed for The Australian newspaper at:
The Australian | Basic Civility the lesson We Need to Teach Ignorant Students
(Note that authors do not choose their titles; the title I submitted it under was “Bans Are Not the Way to End Campus Antisemitism”.)
The newspaper op-ed is paywalled, but the full text of my remarks to the Australian Jewish Association is reproduced below.
Antisemitism, Academia and University Politics
Speech to the Australian Jewish Association
October 30, 2026
Let me start by wishing you Moadim L’Simcha—and a happy Sukkot.
Let me also acknowledge that I don’t know what would happen if you actually built a sukkah on the front lawn of the University of Sydney and occupied it for a week. My hope is that God would shelter you. My fear is that the university would not.
I should make clear at the outset that I do not speak for the university. But I do speak as a sociologist who is credentialed by the university, secure in the knowledge that I can speak to you without having to fear for my job.
Believe it or not, at the University of Sydney we have best-practice protections for academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and freedom of speech. These protections allow me to speak in my professional capacity as an associate professor at the University of Sydney, and not merely in a private capacity. Our university was the first in the country to embrace the principles put forward by the 2019 review into freedom of speech at Australian universities, and we enacted the country’s most wide-ranging protections for academic freedom.
As a result, I enjoy freedom of speech regarding university matters, subject only to restraints or burdens imposed by
· law, and
· the reasonable and proportionate regulation of conduct to enable the University to fulfil its duty to foster the wellbeing of students and staff
But those very freedoms give rise to challenging conflicts.
Many of you will be aware that last week the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council held elections for student offices.
“Freedom for Palestine” was the #1 issue in those elections. Not that there was any debate over the issue; all four candidates for SRC president voiced support for Palestine and condemned Israel. The only question was how extreme each candidate felt she could afford to be in her rhetoric—without threatening her future career prospects.
The mainstream Labor candidate declared herself a “socialist” whose hero was Gough Whitlam. The Left Action candidate described herself as a “revolutionary socialist” whose hero was Rosa Luxembourg. The Globalise the Intifada candidate (a socialist) named Vladimir Lenin and Karl Marx as “their” particular heroes.
The ultimately re-elected incumbent (who described herself as a “left-wing socialist, anti-colonial feminist”), campaigned using posters had her wearing a keffiyeh under a banner that read “Free Palestine” in Chinese, Arabic, and English. She hedged her bets on the heroes question, saying that there was “not a single person I find most inspirational because I believe in community”.
Most of the press coverage focused on the outrageous stunt of the party that registered its official name as the “Globalise the Intifada” ticket. I am happy to report that even at the University of Sydney, “Globalise the Intifada” received only 3% of student votes. And this was 3% of an electorate that voted overwhelmingly (92% in favor) for a boycott of “Israeli institutions complicit in apartheid and genocide”.
That “Globalise the Intifada” won only 3% of the vote may not be manna from Heaven, but it perhaps says something.
The university’s vice chancellor Mark Scott was criticised for not banning the party’s use of “Globalise the Intifada” as its actual name on the election ballots. After all, in historical essence (if not necessarily in the minds of the students chanting it), “Globalise the Intifada” is a call to murder Jews. It is the rhetorical equivalent of printing ballots bearing party names like “Kill All Hindus” or “Nuke the Japs”. Even done as a prank it would be unacceptable. And there is no evidence that the students intended it as a mere prank.
Chanted at rallies in the wake of the 2023 attacks in Israel and the 2025 shootings in Bondi, the slogan was in particularly poor taste. The fact that the SRC elections were held during the High Holy Days didn’t make the situation any better.
Anthony Albanese, Chris Minns, Jason Clare, and the archbishops Kanishka Raffel and Anthony Fisher all rightly condemned the students’ use of the slogan. I condemn it. We should all condemn it.
But Mark Scott was equally right not to ban it.
The argument for a ban is that a university campus should be a welcoming place for all students. The university can, by its own rules, regulate conduct (in a reasonable and proportionate way) in order to enable it to fulfil its duty to foster the wellbeing of students and staff. Mark Scott didn’t have to wait for a court order to implement a ban. I’m no lawyer, and I understand that the SRC is governed independently from the university, but at a minimum the vice chancellor could have torn down election posters and seized all ballots distributed at election booths, forcing the SRC to move its election off-campus. And I understand that he is now in fact seeking legal advice on exactly what actions he should take after the fact, and in the future.
I sincerely hope that he will not give in to the pressure to take a hard line. It is inherently risky to ban speech or behavior. We know where bans start; it is difficult to predict where they will end, and it is not clear that they have any effect beyond satisfying the demand for action. If I were in charge, I would not penalise the students, or the SRC. I would not threaten them with investigations, or refer them to law enforcement. I would not seek to punish them.
I would give a speech. It’s long past time for the vice chancellor, and for people like him, and for people like me, to speak up.
The vice chancellor issued a strongly-worded statement; that is not enough. He commissioned a review; actually, three reviews, though the number hardly matters. They will not be not enough.
The vice chancellor may have called the students into his office for a private chat (we don’t know), and if he didn’t, he should have. Even better, he should have arranged for them to meet the chancellor, who is in spirit (if not in law) the moral guardian of the university. The students should have been made to understand the gravity of their decisions. If these things were done, they would (appropriately) have be done in private.
What the vice chancellor has not done is give a major public speech. He has not invited the great and the good among the alumni to the university to witness a fire-and-brimstone condemnation of antisemitism—and to hear his not-merely-pragmatic reasons for showing forbearance.
Condemning antisemitism is the easy part; even Claudine Gay, the erstwhile president of Harvard University, condemned antisemitism. Punishing antisemitism is harder, but not politically costly. The real challenge is convincing students (and, I might add, colleagues) that antisemitism is wrong—or, failing in that, to teach them that they should keep their antisemitism to themselves.
Over the last three years, we have seen blatant outbreaks of public antisemitism in the streets, on university campuses, and in the arts. We must assume that the private antisemitism was already there, just waiting for a signal that it was somehow suddenly socially acceptable to abuse Jews in public. Ideally, we educators should teach students to overcome their private antisemitisms. Failing that, we should at least teach them that antisemitism is not socially acceptable, and that although it may occasionally be tolerated, it will not pass unnoticed.
The philosopher John Stewart Mill famously feared this tyranny of the public over the private psyche. In his book On Liberty, he complained about the censorship, not of the official censor, but of his neighbors. Most people believe that On Liberty is a book about the threat posed to democracy by the tyranny of the majority. It is not. It is a book about the threat posed to free-thinkers like John Stuart Mill by the small-mindedness of their neighbors—a tyranny that (in his view) operated most strongly in democratic countries.
He specifically cited the United States of America.
With apologies for the lengthy quote, I am going to read out loud the pivotal passage on censorship from On Liberty. I assure you that this is not a cherry-picked paragraph. It represents the very spirit of the book. At the beginning of his chapter on “Individuality”, almost exactly in the middle of the text, Mill complained that:
In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair-play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary.
Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke.
Mill went on to ask: “Now is this, or is it not, the desirable condition of human nature?” Obviously, he felt that it was not.
I submit to you that it is.
I submit to you that each of the four candidates for election to the presidency of the University of Sydney’s Students’ Representative Council should have been asking herself:
· what is suitable to my position?
· what is usually done by persons of my station?
· what is usually done by persons of a station superior to mine?
She (or in the case of the “Globalise the Intifada” candidate, “they”) should have been asking herself:
· is it suitable for a student politician to focus her campaign primarily on supporting the political demands of a terrorist group in a country nearly nine thousand miles away?
· how do other people who aspire to professional careers in my society behave with regard to support for terrorism?
· do respected adults in my society publicly embrace terrorism and associate with advocates of antisemitism?
And I say “all four candidates,” because in practical policy terms it doesn’t really matter whether a student uttered the talismanic, legally prosecutable words “Globalise the Intifada”, or instead used a more carefully phrased formulation like “Free Palestine”—written in Chinese, Arabic, and English, over a picture of the candidate wearing a (specifically Palestinian) keffiyeh. Would a Jewish student confronted by a ballot bearing the names of four pro-Palestinian candidates over a referendum question condemning Israel really be comforted by having the party name “Globalise the Intifada” crossed out and replaced with a slogan like “End the Genocide”?
I note that “End the Genocide” is a ticket name that would have been clearly unobjectionable under university policy and Australian law.
There is no sukkah to be found on a campus where antisemitism runs riot, but the antisemites strategically avoid using a small number of specifically proscribed words and phrases.
Jewish students are not unsafe on our campus because the university has not adopted the correct legal definition of antisemitism or properly banned hate speech. They are unsafe because of the widespread social acceptance of antisemitism at our university. That acceptance does not emanate from the university administration, which has been unequivocal in its condemnation of antisemitism.
It emanates from us. It emanates from the campus community.
Mill framed his fear of the tyranny of the majority in terms of the harm principle. In Mill’s view, the antisemite should be free to be antisemitic as long as no harm—literal, physical, or financial harm—was done to the victim.
And when Mill said that people should be “free” to hold unpopular views, he didn’t just mean free from law enforcement. He meant free from the oppression of public opinion; free from the disapprobation of one’s neighbors.
Mill despised the judgment of his peers, and despaired of its power to bow the mind to its yoke.
Mill failed to recognize that the judgment of our peers is exactly what makes society possible. Society only “works” because we so highly value (and so strongly fear) the judgment of our peers. Social norms are incredibly powerful. Those who fall afoul of them are unable to live except on the margins of society.
For example, it is a norm in Australia to drive in one’s lane. That norm is so powerful that new immigrant drivers from South Asia—where people do not ordinarily drive within the lanes—instantly learn to conform to it. The norm of driving in lanes exerts an extraordinary, almost magical power on the newly arrived immigrant despite the fact that its enforcement is almost entirely impersonal. Drivers rarely meet the other drivers with whom they interact. Their passengers are unlikely to speak up or complain. Under most conditions, they can transgress driving norms with impunity. Nonetheless, newly arrived drivers routinely fall into line—and into lane.
Our young university politicians have not fallen into line, and no amount of disciplinary action will make them do so. If we want to ensure that the next generation of talented young leaders stay in their lanes, we must teach them to do so. If we want them to develop a healthy sense of morality, we have to teach them the morals that guide us. At times, we will have to shame them. Their minds must be bowed to the yoke of public opinion.
The responsibility for maintaining and enforcing social norms against antisemitism absolutely should not rest on the shoulders of Jews. Jewish people and Jewish organizations should not even be expected to take leading roles in preventing antisemitism. For how can Jews exercise (to borrow Mill’s words) a “hostile and dreaded censorship” over the children of gentiles?
When it comes to suppressing the scourge of antisemitism, they can not. Only the force of public opinion, broad public opinion, can exercise the tyranny of the majority. The maintenance, and (yes) the policing, of social norms against antisemitism is the responsibility of all of society—and of gentiles most of all.
So when the actors of the Sydney Theatre Company donned keffiyehs for their curtain call just weeks after the October 7 attacks, why was it only Jewish directors who resigned from the board? When antisemitic groups staged an occupation of the University of Sydney’s front lawn in 2024, why was it only Jewish groups that objected? When the 2025 Sydney Festival featured an acknowledgment of country for a Palestine running “from the River to the Sea,” why was it only Jewish theatregoers who walked out? When the 2026 Sydney Festival sponsored a performer who likened the Gaza war to a new Holocaust, why was it only a Jewish donor who pulled her funding?
We—we gentiles—what my Jewish friends in America lovingly call the goyim—we are the ones who should be resigning, objecting, walking out, and pulling our funding. Jews should do so too; of course they should. But they should do so as part of the tyranny of the majority. They should not have to protest alone.
Obviously, calls to “globalise the Intifada” are distressing for Jewish students and staff. Even without the slogan, it can hardly be comfortable to be Jewish on a campus that is plastered with placards supporting Hamas terrorism. Jewish students and staff must be made to feel safe on campus, on every campus. They should not have to seek shelter in the sukkahs of locked offices and online lectures. They should be made to feel free hand out honey cakes on every corner of every campus. Free, and appreciated.
But bans and disciplinary actions can never accomplish those goals. The onus is on us—the all too often silent majority—to shame and isolate the antisemites, Jew-baiters, and fashionable provocateurs among us. We must exercise the tyranny of the majority, full in the confidence that we are in the majority.
My call is thus not directed to you who are here listening to me tonight. It is directed to my friends, my colleagues, my students, and my neighbors. It is directed to everyone.
To those of you who are Jewish, I encourage you to talk less to the antisemites you encounter, and more to everyone else. It is not within your power to bow the mind of the antisemite to the yoke of society. It is, however, perhaps within your power to awaken society to its responsibilities, and to encourage society to protect itself.
Believe it or not, universities like the University of Sydney are (for the most part) doing this the right way. It may be a slow process of moral education to teach students (and colleagues) that antisemitism is unacceptable and will not be tolerated in polite society. But it is the only route to genuine, lasting change.
I hope the vice chancellor is listening, and I hope he will make that speech.
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