The Jew of Melbourne
On the 6-month anniversary of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, I review an important book on the meaning of Israel
On October 3, 2023, Michael Gawenda published a charmingly personal memoir called My Life as a Jew. Little did he know that his life as a Jew — like all Jewish lives, everywhere — was about to change. The Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7 were of course horrific. One might have hoped that the civilized world would close ranks behind Israel, as it had closed ranks behind the United States twenty-two years earlier. Whatever one might think of Israeli “colonialism” or American “empire,” terrorism is terrorism.
Of course, the world did not close ranks behind Israel. Celebrations of Hamas terrorism began the next day in Sydney, and have continued ever since. These celebrations are now held under the cover of “protesting” Israeli military action in Gaza. Interpret that how you will.
I wrote a major review of Gawenda’s My Life as a Jew for Quadrant magazine, submitting it on January 4 under the suggested title “The Jew of Melbourne.” I understood that it was to appear in the March issue. It did not appear. The new editor, Rebecca Weisser, did not approve of my characterization of Gawenda’s approach to Zionism, calling it “a categorical error [that] undermines your authority as a critic.”
Once again, you be the judge … because lacking an alternative venue for a 3000-word review of an Australian book on Jewish life in Australia, I have decided to publish it here via my newsletter. I hope you find it interesting and useful. If you’d like to buy Gawenda’s book (and I recommend that you do), you can find it online at:
My review is below.
My Life as a Jew
by Michael Gawenda
Scribe, 2023, 288 pages, $35.00
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum dedicates an entire wall to Martin Niemöller's moving confessional, "First They Came". Niemöller was a Lutheran minister and self-professed prewar antisemite who was ultimately imprisoned in Dachau for opposing the Nazi takeover of Protestant churches. In his postwar lectures on the evils of Nazism and the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Holocaust, Niemöller famously reiterated (in many different versions) that:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Niemöller's claims are not exactly false. But they are less than true. The Nazis did come for a small number of socialists and union leaders, and killed some of them. They also came for Polish conservatives, homosexuals, and Roma, among others. But primarily they came for the Jews. Of the roughly 8 million people killed in the Holocaust, roughly 6 million were Jews. Nearly two-thirds of all European Jews were killed in the Holocaust, accounting for 40 percent of the world's Jewish population at the time. The Holocaust truly was the Shoah, the 'catastrophe' of the Jews.
Millions more Jews became refugees after the war, including the parents of Michael Gawenda, editor of the Melbourne Age from 1997-2004 and author of My Life as a Jew. Gawenda was born in 1947 in a displaced persons camp in Austria. His parents had fled Poland for the Soviet Union just before the German invasion. Gawenda claims that his father was "always a fierce anti-communist", but it is not clear that Gawenda would have known what his father thought before the war (i.e., before he himself was born). What is certain is that Gawenda's family was deeply involved in the 'Bund', a Jewish lay organisation that Gawenda alternately characterises as "working class", "militantly secular", "committed to Yiddish and Yiddish culture", "socialist", "internationalist", and "anti-Zionist" but nonetheless believing in "Jewish peoplehood"—the final damning characteristic that led to the gulag.
It was thus, perhaps, the uncompromising Jewishness of his parents that ultimately led to Gawenda, a self-described "secular left-wing Jew", becoming editor of The Age instead of editor of Pravda (and no: to anticipate the joke, they are not the same thing). Gawenda's own uncompromising Jewishness has in recent years alienated him from elite Australian intellectual life, much of the organised political left, and many of his personal friends. Not his non-Jewish friends; outside of the world of left-wing activist intellectuals, it is a rare Australian gentile who has any problem with overt Jewishness. It was not the intolerance of gentiles, but Gawenda's estrangement from fellow secular Jews, and in particular from his once-close friend Louise Adler, that motivated him to write My Life as a Jew.
Gawenda's friend Adler is best-known as the long-time head of Melbourne University Publishing (2003-2019). She was later the editor of a book series for Monash University Publishing (2019-2023) called 'In the National Interest', and is currently the director of Adelaide Writers' Week. The connection between Gawenda and Adler dates back to the early 1990s when both held editorial positions at The Age. Over the course of three decades, Gawenda and Adler shared the experiences of left-wing Melbourne Jewish intellectual life, fantasising over the book he might have written (and she might have published) under the prospective title Jews and the Left. For Gawenda, this book was "going to be about whether I had changed, drifted right, or whether the left had changed so that I no longer could easily say that I remained, without qualification, a Jew of the left". How Adler felt about that unwritten book remains a mystery.
The book that Gawenda actually did write, My Life as a Jew, opens with an account of the day his friendship with Adler ended, at least for him. On October 9, 2021 Gawenda wrote Adler a letter expressing his sense of betrayal over her commissioning a book by John Lyons for her Monash book series, Dateline Jerusalem: Journalism's Toughest Assignment. Lyons is currently the Global Affairs Editor at the ABC and the book was apparently typical ABC fare: sloppy first-person reportage spiced with allegations about a shadowy 'Israel Lobby' that supposedly exercises veto power over all Western reporting on the country. Both Adler and Lyons had signed one of the many petitions calling on journalists to report the Arab-Israeli conflict from the Palestinian (i.e., the 'victim's') perspective. Gawenda saw Adler's signature of the letter and commissioning of Lyons's book as a betrayal, not so much of their friendship (or even perhaps of their shared Jewishness), as of journalistic integrity.
Since October 7 we have all seen that journalistic integrity is in short supply when it comes to reporting on Israel. For one particularly relevant example, consider the review of Gawenda's My Life as a Jew published by the self-described "progressive, secular" Jew Dennis Altman in The Conversation. Altman, who as a professor at La Trobe University should know something about proper citation, wrote that "Ours is an age of tribalism and Gawenda is honest when he writes: 'I know and have heard Israeli voices in a way I never have the voices of the Palestinians'." That passage is indeed accurately quoted—accurately, and mendaciously. For as Gawenda explains:
Without a fixer to organise interviews and translate ... Western journalists like me could not go to the West Bank or Gaza and confront PA or Hamas politicians. We could not just approach Palestinians on the street and talk to them, certainly not in Gaza, and mostly not in the West Bank. Interviews with Palestinians were organised by the fixer, and those 'ordinary' Palestinians were chosen by Hamas officials.
Or as the New York Times infamously reported on October 17, "Israeli Airstrike Hits Gaza Hospital, Killing 500, Palestinian Health Ministry Says."
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My Life as a Jew is obviously both a memoir and a rumination on Jewishness. Most reviewers have favored it as the former: as an openhearted reflection on the challenges of maintaining a Jewish identity in secular, postmodern Australia. Then again, most reviewers have been Jewish. To the gentile reviewer, this is a book about antisemitism, pure and simple. Yes, the bits of poetry are a cute touch, and it's very nice to hear that Gawenda's children have formed a Yiddish folk music troupe. But most readers who do not happen to be Gawenda's close family friends are unlikely to care about his amateur poetry or his children's singing. The reason non-Jews should read this book is to learn how Jews deal with antisemitism.
Before the Holocaust, there was a simple answer to this challenge: be less Jewish. We all know how that turned out. Before the war, Gawenda's parents were Bundist anti-Zionists who opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Israel while advocating the maintenance of Jewish peoplehood in the diaspora. Gawenda grew up in a Bundist exile milieu in Melbourne. His older sisters, born before the war and educated in the actual, living Bund ultimately embraced the idea of Israel: the only place in the world where Jews "are not anxious about being Jewish". Gawenda, educated in a transplanted Australian Bund, stayed in Australia, wondering what it meant to be a 'Jew' when he was neither observant nor religious. In the inevitable logic of memoirs, he never finds out.
But he does relate his experiences of what his Jewishness has meant to others. At the most anodyne level, it meant that as recently as 2006 his editor at The Age (presumably the controversial Andrew Jaspan, though Gawenda doesn't name him) could question whether, as a Jew, Gawenda would be able to cover an Israeli election in an objective manner. Gawenda is too polite to call this antisemitism, but he does admit that he was "furious". Reading between the lines, Gawenda gives the impression that it was not exactly his Jewishness that was the problem, but the fact that he was not a publicly anti-Zionist Jew.
As with most things antisemitic, that must remain a speculation. But the one consistent theme of My Life as a Jew is that a Jew must be militantly anti-Zionist to be accepted in progressive intellectual circles—so militantly anti-Zionist as to be anti-Jewish, or nearly so. It's not enough to support Palestinian statehood, condemn Benjamin Netanyahu, and refer to elements of Israeli administration as "apartheid", "racist", and "authoritarian"—"if not fascist", all of which Gawenda does. To be a "good Jew", in Gawenda's telling, a Jew must in effect disavow Jewish peoplehood, and loudly condemn Israel at every opportunity as a matter of course. Gawenda, who seems to be more a non-Zionist than either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist, clearly doesn't make the cut. He vehemently condemns the current Israeli government, but staunchly defends Israel's right to exist.
Gawenda expresses his concern (by explicitly expressing his lack of concern) with "what non-Jewish people will think" of his proclamations of Jewishness and love for Israel. If he sat down and re-read his own book from beginning to end, he might come to the realisation that he is much more concerned with what Jewish people will think about him. With the exception of a small troupe of antisemitic intellectuals (who, admittedly, seem to be thick on the ground in Gawenda's circles), the main antagonists in Gawenda's story are Jewish. By contrast, most non-Jews genuinely admire the accomplishments of Jews and the Jewish people, and if there is a touch of political incorrectness about admiring Jews for being Jews, it certainly does not amount to antisemitism.
Outside academia and the press, most gentiles who give Jewishness any thought at all are respectfully mournful about the Holocaust, acutely sensitive to contemporary antisemitism, and thoroughly horrified by anti-Israel terrorism. To ordinary gentiles who are not deeply enmeshed in left-wing activism, it is crazy that Gawenda's former friend Louise Adler would have invited "eight Palestinian writers" to participate in a "truth telling" exercise at Adelaide Writers' Week, spending taxpayer money to spread the message that (in Gawenda's words) "Israel is a brutal occupier and oppressor of the Palestinians, an apartheid state, a colonialist enterprise from its birth". That's to say nothing (and Gawenda says nothing) of the liberal sprinkling of left-wing Arab-Australian truth-tellers also included on the program.
Adler is not the only Jewish antagonist in My Life as a Jew. Ostentatious Jewish unconcern with antisemitism is a theme that runs throughout the book. The two most provocative chapters of the book focus on Hannah Arendt's 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, which she famously subtitled A Report on the Banality of Evil. Gawenda draws a parallel between his disappointment with Adler and the Jewish esotericist Gershom Scholem's disappointment with Arendt. Scholem was a early Zionist who, in Gawenda's words, "left Germany for Palestine in 1923, never to return". Gawenda is clearly sympathetic to Scholem and his message of "Ahavath Israel: 'Love of the Jewish people'". Once "a universalist Jew", Gawenda has aged into a Jewish particularist like Scholem. Arendt took the opposite Jewish journey, from youthful Zionism to adult universalism.
In his letters to Arendt, Scholem objected to her portrayal of Adolf Eichmann (one of the chief architects and executors of the Holocaust) as a mere bureaucrat, and even more passionately resented her implication that the Holocaust was facilitated by the cooperation of Jewish community leaders. The publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem ended the friendship between Scholem and Arendt; according to Gawenda, "for Scholem, the book is a betrayal of Arendt's people". Gawenda goes even further in his condemnation of Arendt. He calls her a "German Jewish snob", condemning her "class and ethnic snobbery, this disparagement of Jews from Eastern Europe, where the Holocaust was centrally located and where Jews had been murdered in the greatest numbers".
The reader is left to wonder whether a similar snobbery lies behind the differing Jewishness of the descendants of Western European Jews like Louise Adler and those of Eastern European Jews like Gawenda himself.
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My Life as a Jew was published on October 3, 2023—just four days before the most horrific antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. In the same Conversation review of the book in which he misrepresented Gawenda's one-sidedness, Dennis Altman observed that:
The book was written before the current war, but the horrors unleashed by the Hamas attacks of October 7 only underline the reality that without recognition of Palestinian claims Israel cannot be simultaneously Jewish and democratic.
Note the careful turn of phrase: not "the horrors of the Hamas attacks" but "the horrors unleashed by the Hamas attacks"—i.e., the horrors perpetrated by Israel. In another Conversation book review (of Left is Not Woke by Susan Neiman), Altman took a jab at Gawenda for criticising "Hannah Arendt's use of the term 'crimes against humanity' to describe the Holocaust, an expression journalist Michael Gawenda has found objectionable because it elides the particular experience of Jews". Once again, this is pure mendacity: Gawenda actually wrote that the Holocaust was both a crime against humanity and a crime against Jews, and that one does not diminish the other.
But let us never forget that the Holocaust was first and foremost a crime against Jews. The fact that the Nazis persecuted many other people alongside the Jews did not make the Holocaust a generically human tragedy. Similarly in the October 7 attacks, Jews were attacked for being Jews, not for being Israelis. They were not killed for geopolitical reasons. Whatever Hamas apologists may claim, the October 7 attacks were not part of a 'liberation struggle' undertaken by the Palestinian people. Hamas could have had no expectation of territorial gain resulting from the attacks, or an improved position in any future peace negotiations. The October 7 attacks, like their less violent support marches in Australia and other English-speaking countries, served only one purpose: to terrorise Jews.
Gawenda is not one to be terrorised, but neither is he one to actively fight back—at least, not yet. To fight back any more aggressively than he already has would run the risk of his being labeled 'right wing' by his former friends 'of the left'—a prospect that he seemingly abhors. He writes approvingly of newly (and often involuntarily) conservative Jewish writers like David Mamet, Howard Jacobson, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Dara Horn, but he is determined to disavow Mamet's embrace of "the populist right-wing radicalism of Donald Trump". Seemingly terrified to be associated in any way with Trumpism, Gawenda emphatically denounces Trump's "racism, misogyny, authoritarianism, and brutality, and his dislike of the Jews". This, perhaps, to excuse his own fears about drifting to 'the right'.
Ritual denunciations of Donald Trump may be par for the course on the 'left' side of politics, but they reflect particularly poorly on such a champion of "the need for journalists to be independent, open, fair, and not agenda-driven in their work" as Gawenda. Gawenda freely ridicules John Lyons and other signatories of anti-Israeli open letters for their presentation of their personal views "as facts, as incontestable truths ... [when] each one of their facts—their 'truths'—is contestable and contested". He maintains that it is absolutely "disgraceful for journalists to state as facts of truths what is open to debate and contradiction. This is the road to fake news." Yet when it comes to Donald Trump, Gawenda does exactly this. Gawenda's extravagant anti-Trumpism is just as much a shibboleth of 'the left' as Lyons' and Adler's anti-Zionism.
And Gawenda knows a thing or two about shibboleths. While apologising for being "so blunt", Gawenda states flatly that "only Jews like Louise [Adler], who sign letters like the one she signed—letters that want to silence the purveyors of 'tired narratives' about Israel and the Palestinians—could be appointed as director of Adelaide Writers' week". He might reflect that only journalists like himself who denounce Donald Trump could be appointed editor of The Age, or invited to found a journalism program at the University of Melbourne. Instead, he frets about remaining "a left-wing Jew when my comrades ... would denounce me and call me a traitor to all the good things the left stands for if they knew how I felt about Israel" while insisting that he will not "join the right-leaning army of formerly leftist Jews".
Gawenda attributes his steadfast attachment to 'the left' to his Bundist family upbringing. He seems not to have considered the possibility that the culturally Yiddish, politically anti-communist Bund, though construing itself as being 'on the left' in the context of prewar Eastern Europe, might be considered 'on the right' in the context of postmodern Australia. Other than wanting to do good in the world, it's not clear what being on 'the left' means to Gawenda. As a seasoned journalist, he should have the political maturity to understand that the leading Australian politicians of all parties have been deeply committed to doing good in the world. Would Gawenda weigh Menzies, Fraser, and Howard any lower on the moral scale than Chifley, Whitlam, and Hawke? One hopes not. But if not, then why his visceral aversion to 'the right'?
In a different era, in the lost world of prewar Polish Jewry, Gawenda's ancestors defined themselves as 'leftist', 'militantly secular', and 'anti-Zionist'. Gawenda has accepted that anti-Zionism came to mean something different after the creation of the modern state of Israel from what it had meant to his Bundist ancestors. He has also accepted that being militantly secular means something different for a Melbourne Jewish journalist than it meant for a Łódź Jewish weaver. Might he come to accept that being on 'the left' means something different when it is opposed to the 'right' of the Liberal Party of Australia than it meant when it was opposed to the 'right' of prewar Poland's authoritarian Marshal Józef Piłsudski? Gawenda claims to believe that "ideology and a commitment to an ideology are blinding"; does that apply to every ideology, or is there an exception for 'the left'?
Gawenda ultimately concludes that he "cannot imagine a Jewish world without Israel". Unless his sense of imagination changes radically in the near future, he will have to imagine a leftist Australia without Gawenda. Ninety years ago, being leftist in Łódź may have meant being anti-Zionist. Today, being leftist in Melbourne means being antisemitic. Gawenda can either accept that antisemitism is a core tenet of the Australian left, or move to what he disparagingly calls 'the right'. If he does make the move, he might discover that 'the right' is more sensible and welcoming than he thinks.
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