By Nomi Kaltmann as seen in the Jewish Review of Books

April 24, 2025

Maroubra is a quiet coastal suburb in Sydney, Australia. This January an area preschool called Only Children was deliberately set on fire. When police arrived to investigate, they found “Fuck the Jews” scrawled on the preschool’s wall. Only Children isn’t actually a Jewish school, but it is less than a thousand feet from Maroubra Synagogue and the suburb’s only Jewish school. The arsonists had targeted the wrong building. A month earlier the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne was firebombed. One of Australia’s largest synagogues, Adass remains closed, with the congregants praying in a makeshift building down the road.

Since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents in Australia have quadrupled, including bomb threats, beatings, boycotts, graffiti, and verbal abuse. As has been the case elsewhere in the world, Australia’s small and historically comfortable Jewish community has been unnerved by the wave of hate—and underwhelmed by some of the official responses to it.

Just two days after October 7, protestors gathered outside the Sydney Opera House, upset that it was lit up in blue and white in support of Israel, and chanted “Fuck the Jews” and “Where are the Jews?” while burning an Israeli flag. The only person arrested during the protest was a man with an Israeli flag, who the police apparently detained “for his own safety.”

This dramatic rise in antisemitism in Australia is unprecedented. Jews first arrived here in 1788 on the First Fleet and have had a long and largely untroubled history here. They have occupied senior roles of government including governor general, attorney general, treasurer and military general. Although numbering only 120,000, the Australian Jewish community has the highest number of Holocaust survivors per capita outside of Israel. Many of them chose Australia precisely for its distance from Europe. The recent rise in antisemitism to levels never before seen in Australia has prompted many to reconsider their political loyalties, and caused others to contemplate, for the first time, the possibility of leaving.

Against this backdrop, Australia is preparing for parliamentary elections this coming Saturday. Two main political parties dominate Aussie politics, the center-left Labor Party, which currently holds power, and the more conservative Liberal Party. There’s also a smaller progressive party, the Greens, who were the only ones to refuse to support a federal parliamentary motion condemning the Hamas massacre on October 7. Nonetheless, the Labor Party has not ruled them out as possible coalition partners in the next government, an equivocation that the Liberal Party has seized upon in appealing to worried Jewish voters.

Many within Australia’s Jewish community, even those that have historically voted for the Labor Party, are expected to vote against the current Labor government. Although Australian Jews make up a tiny part of the electorate, a significant swing in a district with a large Jewish population could potentially unseat the government.

In a Melbourne-based district called Macnamara, currently held by Labor and home to one of the largest Jewish populations in the country, many Jewish voters feel torn. Another critical race is in Sydney, in a district called Wentworth, where a centrist independent lawmaker, Allegra Spender, is trying to hold on to her seat. She’s being challenged by a conservative candidate, and Jewish voters are split on whether she’s been supportive enough of their concerns. Many Jews on both sides feel their genuine concerns have been reduced to political talking points.

While Jews in Australia are not a monolith, many are furious that the Australian government has taken too long to react to what they see as an unprecedented sixteen months of intolerable abuse. While the Labor government has announced funding for Australia’s federal police to investigate antisemitic crimes, and Australia’s parliament has passed new hate speech laws, many deem these actions as too little and too late. At community forums with candidates, of all parties, questions around Israel and antisemitism feature heavily. Both major parties have promised to fund the rebuilding of the Adass Israel Synagogue.

With current polling indicating that neither of Australia’s major parties will receive an outright majority to form government, a rare minority government in Australia is expected to be the most likely outcome of the upcoming elections. If Labor forms government, with the Greens support, many Jews fear a further marginalization. If the Liberals win, especially in Jewish districts that have traditionally voted for Labor, it will signal a rupture between Australia’s Jews and the Labor Party.

Either way, many Australian Jews have become disillusioned and uncertain about their future here. For the first time, discussions about making aliyah or taking citizenship elsewhere have taken root in Australian Jewish communities. Many now wonder if the golden age for Australian Jewry has come to an end.