By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in Crikey

7 May 2026

It’s been a depressing few days to be a Jew in Australia. With the royal commission into antisemitism now underway and public hearings beginning, many in my community have been glued to the TV, watching as Australian Jews try to put words to what the past few years have felt like.

I’ve been watching testimony of Jews abused while wearing their Star of David in public, a Jewish paramedic whose patient did a Nazi salute and was threatened for being Jewish, and a Holocaust survivor who came to Australia seeking safety and now fears being publicly identified as Jewish, all testify before the commission. I also watched the president of a Jewish school in Sydney explain that the primary school she serves now looks more like a prison than a place of learning. I knew exactly what she was talking about. At my children’s Jewish school in Caulfield, you see it the moment you arrive at the gates: the bollards, armed guards, barbed wire and newly updated thick concrete fencing due to the threats facing our community in Australia. Like I said, depressing.

This week the Jewish community also celebrated Lag Ba’Omer, a Jewish festival that has bonfires and parades, and usually plenty of joyful and chaotic kids running around with roasting marshmallows and holding glowsticks. At the Lag Ba’Omer event I took my kids to at a local synagogue in Caulfield, there was a police car parked outside. My eight-year-old looked at the single police car and asked me, “Is it enough security if there’s only one police car?” He didn’t sound scared; rather, he sounded like he was assessing, something that all kids his age do. How that question broke my heart.

I also stopped in at my six-year-old daughter’s Lag Ba’Omer school parade, where the kids walk a few hundred metres from their Jewish school to a nearby park, like they’ve done every year since I was a kid. Yet I felt such a heavy feeling when I realised that this was the first year that this group of primary school girls were accompanied by security guards for the entire short walk. Watching them holding hands, chatting, blissfully unaware that this simple act could be dangerous, I had the jarring thought that this is now what normal looks like for us in Australia as we practice our Judaism.

No-one else lives like this in Australia, and it sucks that Jews are facing real risks that force us to be hypervigilant when doing normal things. With the royal commission in full swing, average Aussies are going to hear what Jewish life has felt like here recently, and I hope it shocks them.

For most of my life, I loved being an Australian Jew. I’ve been writing for local and international media about our small but tight-knit community and how we have managed to build such a vibrant Jewish life in Australia, which is so far away from major Jewish centres in places like New York or Jerusalem. Aussie Jewish communities are small but mighty; we’ve always punched above our weight, and historically most of us have loved living here.

And now I am sitting here, watching the royal commission into antisemitism, and recognising too much of what is being said.

Originally, I wasn’t sure if I was going to make a submission. No-one has been violent to my kids or me, and no-one has threatened us directly, but then I thought a little more and realised what I had to add about my lived experience as a Jew in this country over the past few years.

I think it’s important that the royal commission hears about my anxiety when I take my young sons out, and how I encourage them to wear baseball caps so their skullcaps aren’t immediately visible, in case someone vilifies us or targets us for being obviously Jewish.

Or a disturbing incident in a park in South Caulfield, a few weeks after October 7, when my eight-year-old got into a completely ordinary argument with another kid over a swing, and the other child’s father lifted his jumper to reveal a “Free Palestine” T-shirt and said to my son, “Do you know whose side I’m on? Not yours!” I mean, what the hell was that?

Or how I bumped into a former work colleague who, laughing when he was retelling a story, described someone who was annoying him at his new workplace and then said to me, “You would know what they’re like, they’re one of your mob.”

On their own, each of these small stories is easy to brush off, but they are my lived experience with antisemitism in Australia. In the end, I joined the 5,000+ people who made submissions to the commission.

So where does that leave Australian Jews?

For me, I want to continue to speak out about rising antisemitism and put my experience on the record. It is not about trying to prove who has had it the worst, and of course, other groups have also experienced horrible racism in Australia.

I hope decent Australians hear the testimonies coming out of the royal commission and realise that Australian Jews are not crying wolf, and that this is not simply about people disliking Israel or opposing the war in Gaza — a war that Australian Jews have no control over. What Jewish Australians are trying to explain is that we are dealing with sustained threats, intimidation and hostility that have altered the way our community lives. It has changed how our kids go to school, how we gather in public, and what security we need just to hold communal events. Jews now think twice before doing something as ordinary as wearing a Star of David in public.

If we start to accept that heavy security at all Jewish events, armed guards at Jewish schools, abuse of kids in a park for a conflict thousands of kilometres away as a normal way for Jews in Australia to live, then something in this country has gone seriously off track. If we don’t say this clearly now, we will keep adjusting to this terrible version of the new normal, and who knows if Jews will be able to continue to live here.