Our country is gone. My family has endured bigotry for decades, but now I’m broken

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

December 21, 2025 — 5.00am

This isn’t the country my parents wanted for me. It isn’t the country I want for myself. On Sunday morning, I took my grandchildren to their swimming lessons and all was sunny peace and lemonade ice blocks. A few hours later, my world, their world, was dark.

Some of us call this time of year Chrismakkah. Families with Jews and Christians, celebrating together, birth and light and love. Now, after the massacre at Bondi, there is no light, no love. Tears and fears. My country is gone.

Hundreds of people listen to speeches before Friday’s paddle-out at Bondi Beach to pay tribute to the victims of the massacre last Sunday.

I message friends from New Zealand. Did it recover from the Christchurch massacre? No, not really. Is it too soon? No, says one old mate. I don’t think we will ever recover, he says. He says local Muslims don’t go in for annual commemorations. I get that. Sure, honour the dead, but could we erase the day this ever happened.

I am broken. The tears are in my eyes when I wake up and when I go to bed. A woman at the kindy Christmas party embraces me and I try not to sob because it’s too embarrassing even for me, even for someone whose feelings are always bubbling at the surface anyway. Plus, do I really want to discuss with anyone what it means to be Jewish in Australia today?

Yes, I appreciate your messages, but do you match your words with action? Do you call out people you know when they are bigots? From today, that counts more than anything while I still have to work out how to exist in a country that saw 15 Australians murdered in the hot blood of rage against people who were just celebrating life. We must stand against bigotry and racism – but we aren’t doing that. Now members of the Liberal Party claim to be experts on antisemitism but it was just five minuets ago they defended the right to be a bigot.

How bad is antisemitism in this country? The Australian Human Rights Commission has received 77 complaints of antisemitism in five years. Obviously, not everyone reported. Of those complaints, there have been 50 since October 7, 2023, when Hamas murdered over 1100 Israelis and Israel responded by murdering thousands and thousands of Gazans.

We are breaking apart. The detail is everywhere. The murders on Sunday are the bold headlines of what’s happening to our lovely home, but there are small subheadings everywhere. A friend tells me that when she told her boss that one of her students had used the Hitler salute as she walked past, the boss said: It was a joke. Apparently, just a joke.

But I am also too old for some of the rubbish I’m hearing about antisemitism. This is most certainly the most immediate, the most instant, the most violent act of antisemitism in this country. But it’s part of a continuum of bigotry and hatred experienced by those of us who are Jews.

The Israel consulate and the Hakoah Club were both bombed in 1982. My mother was so sick with lung cancer then, so sick, so terrified. We were planning my wedding and she soldiered on, just as she did my whole life. My father, who’d been liberated from a forced labour camp, was long dead. They decided when they arrived in this country that they would whitewash us. We wouldn’t go to Jewish schools but to private Christian schools. We would be Jewish but not too Jewish, although too Jewish to let me win the scripture prize the year I beat every other kid in the class. Yes, yes, that happened nearly 60 years ago, but it still prickles.

This country has antisemitism running in its blood. The golf clubs that would never take a Jew as a member. (It got so bad in Melbourne that Victorian Jews started their own golf club, Cranbourne.) The schools that wouldn’t take my brother because they had already filled their Jewish quota for the year. The very Australian Holocaust deniers. The reporters who, for the life of them, cannot distinguish between what it means to be Jewish and what it means to be a Zionist. You can be Jewish in your very marrow and still resent the way Benjamin Netanyahu rules his country. And how dare he criticise Australia when, on his watch, so many were murdered in their homes?

I have done my best to have civil conversations with serious Zionists, trying to bring them more to the middle. I hope my Australian Arabic friends are doing the same with the radicals among them. Can we move each other? I am praying.

Do I blame Anthony Albanese for the attacks on Sunday? Do not be so ridiculous. Australia was antisemitic well before he turned up and it will be long after he goes. I am so desperately sad he singled out Jillian Segal, wife of an Advance donor, to be his antisemitism envoy when he had the right person for the job all along – David Gonski, who will now oversee Holocaust education in this country.

We still have Holocaust deniers here. Did my four grandparents just disappear in a puff of smoke? Sure, because that’s what happens when you shovel the dead into ovens and burn them.

Segal’s overreach on universities is intellectually embarrassing – and the idea that we can’t criticise Israel is offensive. I hope Gonski eventually takes over. He is definitely the best there is.

As for guns, guns kill people. The sooner we ban them, the better. It’s something John Howard knew when he was prime minister, in the shadow of the Port Arthur massacre. He’s conveniently forgotten it, just to give his pals political leverage, to lay blame at the feet of the Labor prime minister. I can’t do that. A reminder: Jewish schools in this country have been using security for well over a decade.

Of course, the deranged father-and-son terrorists are to blame for this atrocity. But the very people charged with protecting us from these killers, ASIO and the police, clearly failed when we needed them most. ASIO knew for years that the shooters had Islamic State affiliations. The excuse is that there are thousands of radical preachers who admire fascism and hate Jews. Don’t have enough resources? Might be a good time to ask now. Never too late to save a few lives.

And as for the NSW Police, how on earth did its leadership allow a blatantly, joyously, Jewish celebration to be attended by two inexperienced police officers? This, just a month after Nazis were allowed to chant antisemitic slogans on the steps of NSW parliament. Was anyone paying attention?

Probably now, we all are. But it’s too late to bring back the Australia we had last Sunday morning.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.