Australia: What is antisemitism?

As an Australian Jew who publicly supports Palestinian freedom, I’m targeted by my own community – and neo-Nazis

Jews should be able to criticise the actions of Israel without risking exclusion from communal life

Sarah Schwartz

The Guardian: 2 Jul 2026

As a teenager, I walked through concentration camps in Poland, where the Nazis industrialised the murder of European Jewry. That history has shaped not only my Jewish identity, but a commitment to political struggle. It taught me that memory carries not only grief, but obligations: to resist racism, dehumanisation and the silence that permits the erasure of a people.

Today, I’m giving evidence to the royal commission on antisemitism and social cohesion, established after the slaughter of 15 people at a Hanukah celebration at Bondi beach. Their murders demand an honest reckoning. The question is whether we can confront antisemitism without weaponising Jewish grief or turning Holocaust memory into a political instrument to silence the very forms of solidarity and dissent it should compel.

Over the past two years, as a Jewish person publicly supporting Palestinian freedom, Israel’s defenders have repeatedly turned symbols of Jewish persecution against me. Online, I am called a “Kapo” and “Judenrat”, invoking the institutions the Nazis created to make Jews complicit in their own persecution. Those who claim to be the inheritors of the Holocaust circulate memes depicting me as a rat, pin yellow stars on my clothing, place me on a train to concentration camps and describe me as “Hitler’s Jew”. During a live ABC interview, another Jewish guest declared that I was “an anti-Jew”.

Afterwards, a publication launched a “debate” about whether that description was justified, as though my Jewishness itself had become a matter for public adjudication.

At the same time, I’m a target of actual neo-Nazis. They traffic in conspiracies such as the “Great Replacement”, portraying Jews as the hidden force behind multiculturalism, migration and anti-racism. They recycle familiar caricatures of Jewish appearance and Jewish power that have animated antisemitism for generations. They are indifferent to my views on Israel. They target me because I am publicly Jewish, and because I stand with those they imagine to be the enemies of a white Christian nation: Muslim people, migrants and anti-racists.