Earlier this month, Jewish families across Australia sat down, dipped an apple in honey and wished each other a sweet new year.
This year the honey tasted a little bitter. Jewish Australians go into this new year angry. We go into it after burying our dead at Bondi and wondering who is next. For three years we have been told to stay calm while the hate got louder, got closer and got deadlier. And now we are asking a question no Australian should ever have to ask. Does this country still want us?
That is our sweet new year. That is what happens when a country lets it happen.
I am going to say some things that will make some of you uncomfortable. Good. Discomfort is the least we deserve from you.
Nine months ago, on a warm summer evening at Bondi Beach, Jewish Australians gathered to light Chanukah candles by the sea. Fifteen of them were murdered. The youngest was ten. The oldest was 87 and had already survived Hitler. He came to Australia because it was a safe place. The lucky country. The one corner of the earth where the story was supposed to end differently.
The story ended the same way. On a beach. In Sydney. In December.
And a year before that, masked men poured accelerant through a synagogue in Ripponlea at four in the morning and set it alight, with people inside.
Now let me tell you about the part nobody puts on the news.
This new year, Jewish Australians walked past the guards and the barriers and filled the synagogues anyway. Every one of them knew what happened at Bondi. Every one of them knew what happened in Ripponlea. They went anyway. In their thousands. With their kids.
One week after the Bondi massacre, up to 20,000 people walked back onto that same beach for the last night of Chanukah. The killers wanted that sand to belong to terror. The community took it back in seven days.
Since October 7, more Jews have come back to their community and their identity than at any time I can remember. The Star of David is being worn again and worn on purpose.
That is Jewish Australia. Attacked, burned out, abused in the street, and turning up anyway on the holiest nights of the year with a plate of honey cake.
But I owe you the truth, and the truth is that we are tired.
We are tired of being called resilient. Resilient is the word you use for people you have decided to let cop it. A community is resilient the way a house is resilient when the fire brigade keeps turning up to the same address. We would rather someone stopped lighting the fires.
We are tired of grief with conditions. Every other community in this country is allowed to mourn its dead and be held. When any other Australian says they have been hit with bigotry, we believe them. When a Jew says it, the answer comes back before the sentence is finished. That’s just politics, mate. That’s just free speech. Everyone else gets to name their own pain. Jews get told to prove it first.
And we are tired of the silence. Silence is the wound that the guards at the door cannot bandage.
And we are tired of the deal. The one nobody wrote down, but everyone enforces. You can belong in Australia, so long as you keep the Jewish part quiet. Keep your job, keep your mates, keep your invitation, so long as you pass a test on Israel first. Every other Australian gets to belong for free. We are asked to pay for it.
So here is my challenge, and I mean you. Any decent person knows that antisemitism is evil. Say so. Out loud. At the barbecue, in the tea room, to the Jewish family down the road. All it takes is a spine.
Because I have lost count of the Jewish Australians who tell me the same story. Since October 7, the phone has gone quiet. The co-workers. The neighbours. The people who march down the street for every cause on earth and go mute the second the dead are Jews.
The guards outside the synagogues protect our bodies. Your silence eats everything else.
Let me put it in language every Australian understands. Picture your church. Your mosque. Your footy club. Your kid’s school. Now picture a man with a gun standing at the gate every single week, because somebody out there wants your family dead for what you are. Picture your grandparents fleeing that exact thing across half the world to get here, then watching it turn up on Bondi Beach in the summer holidays.
That is Jewish Australia in 2026. And here is the part that should scare the daylights out of every one of you. Hatred that starts at the synagogue door never stays there.
We are grieving for the Australia we thought we had. Help us get it back.
Every generation of Jew haters wants the same thing. Fewer Jews. Our reply is a full synagogue on the holiest nights of the year and a kitchen table crowded with kids. More Jews. Louder. Prouder. Right here.
The antisemites wanted us smaller. I have never seen my community stand taller.
Shana tova, Australia. A sweet year. Make it one.