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Recently, I went to a very unusual book launch. The venue was kept secret to all but invited attendees. We were checked off on a list and there was a security guard on the door.
Once inside, everyone was very lively and friendly. We were celebrating Ruptured, a collection of essays edited by Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch, in which Jewish women living in Australia reflect on their lives after October 7, the date when Hamas attacked Israeli civilians.
Lee Kofman has co-edited a collection of essays in which Jewish women living in Australia reflect on their lives after October 7.
These are very varied stories, but if they have one thing in common, it’s fear. Fear of antisemitism in all its guises, from blatant hate and ostracism to insensitive responses from non-Jewish friends. I had no idea what they were all going through until I began to read this book.
One of the contributors is Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was imprisoned for 804 days in Iran. She writes that some friends demanded to know where she stood on “the genocide… Losing my liberty to years of psychological torture and physical abuse no longer cut it. Now it seems I was required to adopt the same ideological positions as my own captors.”
Interestingly, the launcher was not a Jew, but the novelist Christos Tsiolkas, well known for his left-leaning politics and his support of the Palestinian people. These women were writing about a calamitous moment in our culture and our time, he said. He confessed he’d cried as he read the essays.
“I’ve been outraged by what’s happening in Gaza, but equally outraged by antisemitism in this country,” he said. He urged us not to compare suffering: “We will not indulge in that ugly, juvenile competition of horror.” He denounced the “moral idiocy” that had infected progressive politics and added that he thought feminism had failed women. He hoped every feminist would read this book.
A London street art tribute to Palestinian journalist Plestia Alaqad.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
All very well, you might say, but where are the books by Palestinians in Gaza that we can read in Australia? They are there if you look. Juliet Rogers, a professor of criminology at the University of Melbourne, has singled out two books. They are The Eyes of Gaza, by Plestia Alaqad, an on-the-ground account of the first 45 days of the war from a journalist who has since moved to Melbourne with her family; and Letters from Gaza, edited by Mohammed Al-Zaqzooq and Mahmoud Alshaer, a collection of stories, poems and fragments from Palestinian writers recorded over the last 20 months.
In a long and thoughtful article for The Conversation, she also references Gates of Gaza, by Amir Tibon, an Israeli journalist who lived in one of the kibbutzim raided by Hamas on October 7. All these are harrowing first-person testimonies of being under attack. Plestia’s book is a plea to stop what she describes as a genocide, but also a celebration of being Palestinian. Letters from Gaza goes beyond the numbers of dead to help readers understand the incomprehensible. In Gates of Gaza, Tibon narrates the five hours he spent hiding with his family listening to shootings.
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After the debacle that was this year’s Bendigo Writers Festival, with more than 50 writers withdrawing because of a last-minute code of conduct placed on appearances, I urge any future writers’ festivals to think long and hard about the testimonies contained in these books.
Invite those who are willing and available to speak to us. Ask them to be respectful, certainly. But also allow them to be honest and forthright and passionate. It is the only way forward, if we are ever to understand what is going on in the world and in so many of our citizens’ lives.
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