By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in The Jewish Independent

4 May 2026

In the past four months I’ve had an interesting insight into our Australian Jewish community, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Jews of Australia are not okay.

I’ve been a writer for several years now, since I landed an internship at the American Tablet magazine in 2020, writing about our community for both local and international media. So in the immediate aftermath of the Bondi attack, it was not completely surprising that my email inbox detonated. Contacts I had built over five years, editors, radio producers, people I had pitched once and never heard from again, all suddenly wanted the same thing: an Australian Jewish voice, and quickly.

The worst terrorist attack our country had ever seen became, for me, the most professionally intense period of my life. In the days following the attack I wrote almost a dozen articles, appeared on major global Jewish podcasts, and gave interviews to radio stations in the United States, London, Canada and locally.

I hardly slept at all, and I kept talking, writing, explaining, trying to give shape to what people were feeling, and to say clearly that the warning signs had been there, that the Australian government’s response to antisemitism had been weak and ineffective, and that massacre had not come out of nowhere.

Afterwards, the response from within our community was overwhelming. Messages poured in from people I loved, from those I barely knew and from others I hadn’t spoken to in decades. In the weeks and months that followed Bondi, people stopped me in the street, in shul, at events, to thank me for using my voice to speak to the world’s media, for articulating what so many were feeling but couldn’t find the words to say. It was bigger than anything I had ever experienced, and even today, people still stop me to say thank you.

However, in the past few months I’ve also experienced the opposite of this outpouring of love. I put my pen to paper a few times for this publication and stirred up fierce community debate. I wrote that President Herzog’s visit was a bad idea that would cause a circus and divert resources from our grieving community at this time.

I wrote that we should not cancel Grace Tame because it would only make her a martyr, and that cancel culture will ultimately be used against us.

I wrote that we should survey how many anti-Zionist Jews there actually are in Australia, because I believe they would constitute a larger portion of our community than our communal leaders would suggest.

I wrote that I resist efforts to cast anti-Zionist Jews as being outside the Jewish people, because I believe we all share a Neshama, a soul from a common essence. I also wrote about my complex feelings regarding Israel since October 7.

For expressing these opinions, I was vilified. I was told to go fuck myself, I was called a stupid bitch, an attention seeker, a whore. I was accused of doing the work of the enemies of the Jewish people and of being a self-hating Jew. The abuse rolled in from strangers, from people I know peripherally, and from plenty of people I see regularly, including some who weeks earlier had stopped me in the street to thank me for my voice.

The shift was immediate and total. I was granted no space for nuance, no allowance for complexity. One moment I was the toast of the town, the next I was persona non grata. If I’m being honest, I don’t even think most of these are opinions are particularly edgy. I wrote them because I wanted people to think about things a little deeper, and to be a little more mindful of our community discourse.

Of course, people are free to disagree with me, but from a sociological perspective I found the whole experience both deeply jarring and extremely fascinating. I knew the Jewish community could close ranks, but I had not expected to feel it directed at me with such intense force.

Being tossed between these two extremes has taught me that our communal discourse has become brittle. You can be held up as a representative voice one week and cast out as a danger the next. There is no middle ground, and in many spaces, there is little opportunity to think critically or engage respectfully with someone you disagree with.

I don’t think the Jews of Australia are okay. Of course, it’s not everyone, and there are still people who can have kind, decent and respectful conversations about difficult topics. But in general, it has become harder to find people who can do this well.

Maybe there is too much intergenerational trauma, given how many Australian Jews are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

Maybe it is a trauma response in a post-October 7 world, where it feels like antisemitism has moved from the margins into the mainstream. Maybe it is the reality of so many people still trying to process what it means to be the victims of Australia’s worst ever terror attack.

No one has to agree with my opinions, but I was raised and educated to believe that respectful disagreement is part of Jewish tradition, and that we argue because we care, because we want to get to the bottom of a matter after interrogating all sides. The erosion of respectful disagreement is what has unsettled me the most. Not the abuse itself, but rather the realisation that the conditions for normal dialogue have disappeared from our communal life.

I don’t have a clean answer to any of this, and I’m not sure one exists. But I do know this: I do not believe the greatest threat to our community is from the outside. I think the threat that is coming from what we are doing to each other, from the speed with which we sort people into allies and enemies, discard those who think differently, and the way we speak to one another without humanity, is an equal if not greater threat. If we keep going this way, the damage we will do to ourselves will far outlast whatever it is we are trying to protect against.

Antisemitism in Australia is real and rising. Our community is facing serious external threats. But having experienced the highs and lows of our internal conversations, I am more concerned than I expected to be about something else: our ability to talk to each other. We have lost the ability to disagree with each other without turning on each other.

I wrote this piece because I think we need to say that out loud. And until we find our way back from it, we will not just be dealing with what is happening around us, we will be dealing with what we are doing to ourselves.