LIFE AFTER BOOK OF LIFE – DEBORAH CONWAY

Deborah Conway is one of Australia’s most iconic singers. In her recently released Book of Life, she exposes the world of 1980s post-punk. Her career took off from Melbourne to national and international fame. She has had spectacular highs and even some lows and today enjoys the fruits of the successful singing and personal partnership with husband Willy Zygier.  She has been called an obstreperous women in Australia’s music industry, but a woman who has straddled the high arts and the low without losing her footing or her mind. On Monday 23 September 2024, Deborah Conway addressed The Sydney Institute to talk of reactions to her book and how the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2024 changed everything for Jewish Australians.

LIFE AFTER BOOK OF LIFE 

DEBORAH CONWAY

There are so many ways I could begin this speech it’s difficult to know where to start. “It was a rainy August night when the 1959 world tour of the Bolshoi Ballet performed at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre but despite having bought their tickets months in advance, only my father was in attendance. My mother was busy producing my first appearance at the Jesse MacPherson maternity hospital.” Hmmm, rainy night…perhaps a bit old school…

I could begin with my family, or when I first become a musician or becoming an author .. maybe it doesn’t matter… after all…it’s only the beginning….boom tish.

I grew up in Melbourne, in the bosom of my Jewish family. My Jewish education was patchy, Jewish kindergarten but not Jewish day school, Jewish Sunday School, Jewish Summer camp & Jewish Dancing Class in the local Anglican Church. Shabbat dinner every Friday night with my grandma, two nights of seder/the family meal that celebrates Passover, where my dad would try and get through the service as quickly as he could, eat, and then lay on the couch snoozing. Fasting on Yom Kippur and the regular shul hop on all the high holy days, we’d start in Kew, head to Temple Beth, a quick stop at Toorak Shul to see my Nanna (who hosted a Jewish version of Christmas lunch on December 25), then over to Charnwood Grove to hear the Shofar being blown by Rabbi Lubofsky. We never had pork products in the house though there weren’t too many questions asked about what was in the fried rice when we got takeaway Chinese from our local on a Sunday night. While my parents were observant, they were not particularly religious, G-d wasn’t a feature of my Jewish education; I believed in Jews and I didn’t need to believe in G-d to do that.

At 18 I bought myself a guitar and started teaching myself to play, farmer’s chords, as we call them, C G, F. (There’s barely a Bob Dylan song you can’t play with C G F.) I joined my first band at 20, it was thrilling to play rock ‘n roll loudly to a room full of music lovers hanging off my every note, all of us working on our future tinnitus together.

We played hard for eight months and then I ran away to Sydney with the drummer (in a purely professional sense) to form a new band. We released our debut album, Domestic Harmony, in 1985. The debut single from that album became a surprise top 5 Australian hit that kicked a gender equality conversation up the pop charts. The band was Do Re Mi and the song is Man Overboard. I still perform it because it still means something.

Most of DRM’s songs were inspired by the heightened political times. In the early 1980s the Cold War dominated foreign policy, the nuclear clock was perilously close to midnight, the arms race was in a final sprint (not that we knew that then) and the mutually assured destruction strategy of brinkmanship that proffered if one superpower were to use their nuclear capability then they would be signing their own death warrant was, as its acronym advertised, completely MAD. We were a product of our environment.

My leftist socialist tendencies were part of how I thought of myself growing up. My brushes with socialism had been brief but had made an impression, good and bad. As a teenager, I had first encountered voluntary socialism, visiting a Kibbutz in Israel. The setup looked rosy, though I remember thinking it seemed a bit rough not to be able to sleep in the same house as your parents.

In my mid-twenties, I encountered the Musician’s Union. We’d heard about this organisation that ensured that the second violin player was getting their requisite tea-break and the bassoon player would be clocking off at exactly the end of her call and not one note more but it was laughable in our sector, a kind of anti-rock ‘n roll collective that had nothing to say for us or to us. However, if you were booked to play Countdown, the Musician’s Union were there, men in bowties hanging around the ABC studios in Ripponlea to ensure that only fully paid up members would be allowed to ply their wares on the biggest national “live” music television program on air. If you wanted your new single seen and heard by a large proportion of the demographically interested music buying audience, you paid those union dues. The Musicians Union wasn’t arguing that the ABC should pay for our appearances, or warning young bands to be wary of signing deals to record companies that used terms in their contracts like “in perpetuity”, the territory being “the known and unknown universe” and mentioned “formats existing and yet to be invented”. They’d just collect their dues and you’d never hear from them again. This didn’t strike me as a fair system.

In 1986 Do.Ré.Mi were on tour through Britain, The Netherlands, Austria and Germany. I wrote about it :-

West Berlin was like nowhere I had ever been. It was the living, breathing manifestation of capitalism, propped up by the Allied Powers—the US, the French and the British, all pumping rivers of gold into this shining example of the other side of the ideological coin: capitalism on steroids, a punch in the nose for the other team.

I spent hours wandering around this extraordinary city with its countless fountains in beautiful public squares, whose boulevards were lined with department stores full of luxury items. The effect was dazzling, as if the very streets were diamond- studded. And then, abruptly, we were all operating inside an absurdly clumsy metaphor—there was the Wall. Cutting a brutalist concrete slash topped with barbed wire across the once grand city of Berlin that had fallen so utterly, so abominably to the unspeakable atrocities wrought by Hitler and his many, many willing accomplices, here was the unintended consequence of the National Socialists’ enduring legacy—the rise and rise of the other kind of socialism.

The following day, the four of us applied for a visa, which cost us DM5, and entered East Berlin via the heavily guarded Checkpoint Charlie. We had had to exchange DM25 into East German currency at the exchange rate of 1:1, outrageous because the East German currency was worth a fraction of that; we were warned that we were forbidden to leave East Berlin with any East German marks in our possession. We walked through Checkpoint Charlie and travelled back in time to 1946. The walls were covered in pock marks from World War II bullets; we wandered around decrepit streetscapes of ruined, collapsing buildings, waiting for an earthmover to put them out of their misery, everyone walking past us grimly wrapped in a grey overcoat, no billposters, no advertising of any sort. Apart from the red insignia on the many uniformed guards we saw on the streets, we had entered a world drained of colour. We had a map and tried to work out where we might eat lunch, or look at a shop, and eventually found a cafeteria, expansive but empty. The food we ordered from the uninterested waitress was as colourless as everything we had seen, there were no pictures on the walls, but the windows onto the street were large and we could see the grey clouds darkening the skies, draining the light to complete the perfect greyness.
The DM25 we had exchanged put a lot of East German marks in our pockets but aside from lunch we could find nowhere to spend them. There were no museums or galleries. We looked for a shop, but aside from a single display window that appeared to be selling recorders, but with no visible entrance, we eventually gave up.

And so, with our allotted few hours spent, the four intrepid band members, who all identified so strongly with the Left and its promises of the good and the kind, headed back to Checkpoint Charlie to cross freely with our Australian passports back into the West. But we had a problem—our wallets were stuffed with East German marks which we’d been cautioned we had to spend before we attempted to leave, and failure to do so would result in unpleasant consequences, the details of which we had no desire to flesh out.

I tried to give mine to a man passing by but he looked at me in horror and walked rapidly away. I thought about giving them to the border guard but sensed this would have been deeply frowned on, as a bribe implying guilt of some kind. I opted to discreetly deposit the notes into a bin, the first and last time I have literally thrown my money away. There was distrust from everyone we encountered. I felt no romance, no sense of justice, no intrigue, just a blunt feeling of threat. I would like to say that 1986 was the beginning of the end of my unquestioning (if less than full- throated) allegiance to the ideology I’d signed onto. As a band we thought of ourselves as a collective, as anti-capitalist, but our visit to East Berlin didn’t instigate a conversation about whether what we’d decided we were against was so very bad, and what we imagined we were for was so very good. We were deeply invested in our worldview, in which the far Right produced egregious evil—and fair enough, it did. But why did we stop there? Why didn’t we interrogate the far Left’s responsibility for unimaginable horrors? It took me way too long to work out that the apparent polar opposites are close cousins.

At the beginning of the 1990s I put out my first solo album, String Of Pearls with a single that was played on every radio station, sometimes simultaneously, despite the film clip shot on an autumnal golf course where I performed in red plaid plus 4’s; It’s Only The Beginning… and in a way it was. Shortly afterwards I met Willy Zygier, a guitarist, a Jewish guitarist, whom I employed for the next nine months of touring. The spark we both felt when I opened my front door to Willy that day has fuelled 33 years of our collaboration on every possible thing there is to collaborate on including three daughters, 10 albums and two Jewish Music Festivals.

I called my second solo album Bitch Epic  and totally owned it. I performed through all my pregnancies, for one tour wearing red sequins with a gold mesh cutout bordered with rhinestones over my belly. I played Patsy Cline in the early 2000s loving every minute of that glorious singer’s incredible legacy. In 2003, we became an independent music entity, called our new label Intercorps (silent s). Our first release in 2004 was accompanied by a brand new, never before tried, marketing approach. Using the genius of the internet we promoted the Summerware Party, buy 25 copies of our CD & we would turn up to your place to deliver & sign them & play a 4-song acoustic set. We had broken the old marketing mould. It gave us new ideas of relating to audiences. In the mid naughties, Willy and I produced a series of concerts called Broad, a direct response to my frustration that “female singer/songwriters” were lumped in together as a monolithic genre ignoring the extraordinary variety of women’s contributions across multitudes of styles.

In 2008, Willy & I released an album called Half Man Half Woman. The last song we wrote for this was Take Pity On The Beast, played over jagged guitars and drum loops forming the solid, hypnotic bed of irresistible force that would half carry, half push the listener across an eight minute pilgrimage. Willy had the title and the first chorus. It was enough, I ran hard and fast and came up with a full cast of characters, friends, our fathers. It is not so often you can point to something and say, “Before this we were this and after this, we were something else.” For my climactic penultimate verse, I sought inspiration from the Haggadah:

When Israel went forth from Egypt, Jacob’s household from a people of alien tongue, Judah became his sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The Sea saw and fled; the Jordan turned backward. The mountains skipped like rams and the hills like young lambs. What ails you, O Sea, that you flee? O Jordan that you turn backward? O mountains that you skip like rams? O hills, like young lambs?

Is this the description of an earthquake? A mystical vision? The ecstatic response of the Jewish diaspora returning? A natural phenomenon only able to be understood through transcendent rhapsodising?

Questions don’t always need answers to make sense of something. This was sense making in the metaphysical realm. The lines came to me unbidden, after so many Seders, I knew them backwards (which is how they came out) and there we were, in a place I hadn’t glimpsed before. I had written a song with the fullest sense of my being as a Jew. I had finally placed side by side what I did with who I was. It was like a light went on. Before this we were this and after this we were something else.

In 2010, Jewish copyright lawyer & music fan, Gary Holzman, decided to mount the Shir Madness Sydney Jewish Music Festival. He asked us to perform at it and we got invited back in 2012. By the time we played Shir Madness again in 2013 we had released Stories of Ghosts, an album of songs based on a loose dialogue around Torah themes and how they apply in a 21st century context; how these millennium old stories can still speak to us through the poetry of the words and, beyond that, what it means to be Jewish, a meditation on the complexity of what holds us to the earth in an age of atheism and rising antisemitism.

The rich vein of material we started mining in 2008 proved to be an enduring well of inspiration for both of us; the conception, connections and creation, full of discussion, dissent, disagreement that included inspiring us to mount the Shir Madness Festival in Melbourne, a roller coaster of a learning curve, but a roaring success for lovers of Jewish music.

I have been a performer/musician/songwriter/producer and most recently author for more than 40 years now, which makes me a veteran. I’ve been lucky enough to work at many different aspects of making music and music events. And I’m here to tell you the creative process doesn’t get any easier, the true essence of what I do which is songwriting and recording, the process of finding things to say that haven’t been said in quite the same way before is a lifelong challenge. But then I guess if the exquisite torture of the creative process, the tyranny of the blank page, was not so formidable perhaps I would have lost interest. Human beings need challenges to foster a healthy forward momentum.

Jews have certainly been fortunate in that regard, our challenges are constant, multiple and enduring; we are constantly being challenged, chosen to be challenged. Through five millennium we have been challenged; attacks, sackings, conquests, expulsions, slavery, persecution, pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, forced conversion, the Holocaust, the combined Arab Armies, Hamas & Hezbollah – in every generation they rise against us to annihilate us. There is a strong argument to be made that this animus is the centrifugal force that prevents us fragmenting and dissipating into the larger community.

We are the people of the book, not just a religion, we are a tribe, a nation and for so long a diaspora, suffering untold loss we have continued to gather together, to find common ground with our communities. The Jews survive and the miracle of the State of Israel is the living embodiment of our contract to continue to do so. There’s a push and a pull to this. Our survival is not just our stubborn refusal to succumb to the multiple attempts to eradicate us but also because of our unique relationship to G-d, to our practice, to the value we place on the well mounted challenge to a current orthodoxy, to learning and to our innate ability to adapt. It has exercised in us a limber mind.

When I was growing up and attending my Church of England school in Melbourne, my parents would occasionally ask me if I was experiencing any antisemitism. I always said no, I thought, they were paranoid, I thought it belonged to another time, I was dismissive of their concerns. Antisemitism was something from history, not something I had ever encountered or felt in any way threatened by.

The reason I’m here is because, on 3 October 2023, my autobiography, Book of Life was released by Allen & Unwin. Four days later the world changed. The invasion of more than 4000 Hamas supporting terrorists into Southern Israel, murdering, raping, burning, pillaging, kidnapping, unarmed citizens, children, women, men, the elderly, even babies, was, as we have all read many, many times now, the worst atrocity and highest death count of Jews in a single day, since the Holocaust. We are about to mark a year anniversary and there are still 102 hostages being held. The collective trauma has only intensified.

Last month, I read the suicide note of a young man who had been at the Nova Music Festival marvelling at a beautiful sunrise moments before Hamas perpetrated its murderous onslaught. He hid in a bush. His friend was dragged from where she was also hiding in bushes and he watched her being brutally raped by four men before they put a bullet in her. He couldn’t help her, and he couldn’t live with himself because he couldn’t help her, so he didn’t. His farewell note was devastating. An account of unbearable guilt, the guilt of being helpless, the guilt of surviving.

A few weeks ago, six hostages, four of them in their twenties were murdered in the Rafah tunnels, the response from the world has been a collective yawn with one infamous Australian influencer posting on her Instagram page, “I don’t believe for a second Hamas executed those hostages. Israel’s desperation stinks.”

On the 9 October, as we all know, the celebrations of resistance on the steps of the Sydney Opera House were seen all-around the world, large groups of angry (mainly) men, screaming “fuck the Jews”. The only law enforcement was turned against a couple of Jews who had turned up on the advice that the NSW Government would be projecting the Israeli flag on the Opera House sails in memoriam of the lives lost two days before.

The protests were not an outlier. Ever since October 7, the cankerous wound of antisemitism, feebly trying to disguise itself as anti-Zionism, has broken out of the compression bandage that was barely containing it and erupted on university campuses, in encampments, in city streets, in hate filled graffiti, – on and on. I am not telling you anything you don’t already know. Truly, it has been sickening. There is barely a peep from our Federal Government, there are few to no consequences for all the vandalising of offices, the intimidation of citizens, the hate preached from certain pulpits, the incitements, a kidnap, the doxxing of 600 Jewish Academics and Creatives aka the Zio600, the protests that call themselves peaceful but don’t feel peaceful in any way. It has all been covered extensively.

A few weeks later Israel began its incursion into Gaza. There were a lot of casualties, there was also a lot of misinformation about the ratio of fighters to civilians in the casualty numbers. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, no combatants were killed, only women and children. If true this was clearly completely tragic, but it wasn’t, the statistics were being cynically massaged and manipulated. Pallywood was in overdrive. The old cliché, truth is the first casualty of war while the blood libel lies kept metastasising, the Jew hate around the world kept intensifying and the Pro Palestinian activists kept glorifying Hamas as the noble resistance fighting the jackbooted, fascists of the IDF.

No one bothered to zoom out for the wider picture, no one bothered to understand any history of the region, the conflict, the multitudes of attempts at peace deals, the ancient connection of Jews to Israel, to Jerusalem. It was all too tempting to simply overlay the coloniser, oppressor, racist canard over the Middle East, point the finger at Israel and say you’re the problem. What a popular game this turned out to be. The UN, the EU, our institutions of education, the sandstone Universities leading the way, journalism, the unions, the medical establishment, the law, the arts, feminists, the literary world, etc, etc, etc. all climbed aboard the antisemitic slash anti-Zionist train of haters. And there were so many of them on board all supporting one another, that the conformity, the rightness, the belonging felt so good. Heavens, we haven’t been allowed to hate anyone for the longest time and now, look, what a gift, we can hate the Jews, sorry only the Jews who support Israel. Like a pressure cooker with the steam valve released, the cries of “fuck the Jews” from everywhere under the stinking breath of those in polite society have become indiscernible from the thugs burning flags.

Since October 7 the world has been plunged into an updated Alice Through the Looking Glass. Genocide, the term first coined by Rafael Lemkin at the Nuremburg Trials, to describe the Nazi’s crimes against the Jews is now the accusation thrown as a weapon at Israel to describe their defensive war in Gaza; ethnic cleansing, what the surrounding Arab countries did to their Jewish populations after the establishment of Israel, is now the term used to describe the actions of the IDF to remove Hamas from power; concentration camp, the stopover between life and death for the Jews of mid-20th century Europe, built in multiples by the Nazis, is now what they call Gaza. And despite the blatant lie inherent in the description, in all the descriptions, the world is eager to buy the lies wholesale and then tut tut at the monstrousness of the Jews who know first-hand what genocide, ethnic cleansing & concentration camps are & yet still inflict them on their neighbours. So much easier to hate the Jews once you have decided they are just Nazis 2.0.

On 4 October, we opened our show at Arts Centre Melbourne; Songs from the Book of Life. Excuse my deviation for a moment but I need to tell you the show, 8 songs around 8 scenes, is a 3-dimensional version of my book, a theatrical, musical distillation of my life with sets, props, interactive footage and choreography. It’s pretty good if I do say so myself. Scene 4 is a discussion of Jewishness, my Jewishness, a discussion that, by its very nature had to include a brief analysis of antisemitism. It was something Willy and I had been witnessing for several decades; hate, moving inexorably with the gathering pace of a stampeding herd. We have written (are still writing) songs addressing these issues. But this excerpt from our show was very direct. And as you might imagine, challenging to perform. After the matinee performance of 7 October, it became an existential howl.

The history of the Jew lurches through chapter and verse of persecution for multitudes of contradictory reasons. We are the wandering Jew, the rootless cosmopolitan, we are the outsider; we are the controllers of finance & industry, of Hollywood and the media, we are the insider; we are insular, infiltrators, untrustworthy, ready to break our vows, we’re arrogant, G-d’s chosen, pushy, weak, loud, stealthy, communist, capitalist, once too oriental, now too white. Antisemitism motivates its adherents to attribute to the Jew whatever their society deems its most detestable qualities. And throughout history Jews pay with blood. Maybe all a Jew can do is pace the stage and pray.

There I was, a Jew pacing the stage for the matinée on 7 October when our youngest daughter who had recently made Aliyah and was living in Tel Aviv, was texting from her apartment’s stairwell to let us know she was sheltering and safe. It was the first we heard of the attacks. My darling youngest daughter is a party animal and if she had not recently split with her Israeli boyfriend they might have both been at the Nova Festival.

On 26 November, Mushroom held a 50th Anniversary Celebration at which we were asked to perform. The audience was a full house at Rod Laver Arena, 12,000 strong, and around two million watching on free to air TV. Willy and I wore white suits, blue shirts, he wore a white yarmulke, I wore my oversized Magen David. I introduced It’s Only the Beginning saying, Michael (Gudinski) hated what I wore in the video clip for this song (you’ll recall it was plus 4’s) but I think he would have loved this outfit. I had marked us as targets.

A few pics were snapped backstage and went up online. Me posing with a couple of Yothu Yindi members and Kate Ceberano. There was an outpouring of support from some in our social media pages, but the post also attracted a lot of ugly, faintly threatening commentary referencing blood on the white suits of genocide supporters. The genocide supporter slur was baffling. Hang on, I don’t support genocide, never have as a matter of fact. Regardless, the calls for hanging our heads in shame, we are disgusting, everything we have ever touched is now tainted and the very personal slur, of being a talentless has-been, made frequent appearances.

A few weeks later, the Sydney Theatre Company opening night of The Seagull, caused uproar when three of the cast members donned keffiyehs for their curtain call. The fallout was intense; board members resigned, subscribers cancelled, donations were withdrawn. In the wake of all this, I was invited to talk to Patricia Karvelas on Radio National. The interview was supposed to be about the equivalence, if there was any, between the STC donning keffiyehs and Willy and I dressing as we did for the Mushroom event. It could have been an interesting discussion, but my interviewer was not to be mollified merely with the sartorial and so within a few minutes the conversation turned to Gaza with Ms Karvelas insisting Israel was solely and only fully responsible for the high death toll of innocent civilians.

The next few moments became ground zero for my total fall from grace. The haters have relished decoupling a very few words (seven to be exact) from the context of their intent and wave them as a flag to proclaim my craven disregard for human suffering. The meaning of my words in context, are when Hamas puts weapons in the hands of underage boys to point at the enemy, they use them as fighters and then use them in the childhood casualty count. To say this is an horrendous, cynical exploitation of young lives is a chronic understatement but the mountain of evidence remains unexamined by the pro-Palestine groups defending Hamas as freedom fighters.

So, there I was, a new book, my first book, and a full dance card of author talks, in-conversations & writer’s festivals. And then things started to fall apart.

It seems that many people who patronise writer’s festivals, people who are so fond of debate, who are such warriors for the exchange of free ideas, who support the social justice campaigns for the great and the good are perfectly happy to kowtow to the loudest most disruptive voices and minimise the ideas that a few disrupters find offensive.

Writing WA and Newcastle Writers festival stood by me. Sadly, they were forced to employ a phalanx of security to protect me and the audiences, from whatever threats were being made. There were others that walked back their invitations. I don’t know if I blame them or not, but the dishonesty is the ultimate gaslighting coming up with elaborate excuses rather than fess up to the fear, intimidation or maybe that they agree that I really am a genocidal blood thirsty maniac who enjoys the suffering of small children.

A children’s charity I had been approached to perform a fundraiser for cancelled my appearance, citing they’d received pushback after the save the date notices had been sent out. Stand up to them I said, don’t cave to this appalling bullying. They caved. At a bookshop in Brisbane I did a hastily organised in-conversation to promote my book, and a gathering of furious, unhinged, protesters turned up on a quiet suburban street to harass us and all the people who attended. Wailing accusations of genocide, hiding behind their masks and signs of “Globalise the Intifada” and “Zionist = Nazis”. A dozen police had to attend but did nothing to shut down the protest.

And there’s the silence, the events that simply don’t materialise though you were sure they would.

Our theatre shows have been routinely targeted, causing some promoters to cave and cancel our appearances, others to double down in their determination to stand by us while being forced to hire security for our protection. Most recently, we performed in Hobart. There were people outside protesting and handing out pamphlets of my villainy. Inside, activists disrupted our show numbers of times, yelling, having to be forcibly removed from the theatre and at the last disruption a patron decided to take matters in her own hands, break her wine glass on the edge of the stage before threatening a protester who had just started yelling at me that I should be ashamed. It was mayhem, a small glimpse into societal breakdown. Last month, the glass wielder was sentenced to 49 hours of community service, the protesters are emboldened in their fight for justice. How they think turning two Melbourne musicians’ theatre show staged in Hobart into a screaming melee could possibly change the course of the war in the Middle East is a fascinating proposition. I’ll wait. These are interesting times.

A few weeks ago, the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival cancelled me. This was the second time, they weren’t happy with just once. Let me explain. On the 31 October, I was invited to be part of the..“Byron Writers Festival … renowned for its relaxed atmosphere and diverse program of stimulating and entertaining conversations. We aim to bring writers together in an environment that nurtures and invigorates them as much as it does our audiences.” Great, I accepted their invitation immediately. On 8 March, I received another message from the “very relaxed” BBWF to say they’re very excited to instead offer me an “out of season event”. They would book a theatre and fly us up. I smelt a rat.

I am clearly not as relaxed and laid back as the BBWF. I responded, through my publisher, that I would far prefer to be in the scrum of the festival proper, but I wasn’t given a choice. So, I accepted their changed invitation. And then, as I had suspected all along, the very relaxed BBWF that prides itself on offering a “diverse program of stimulating and entertaining conversation” decided I was a little bit too diverse for their sensitive souls. Oh no, they screamed as they climbed on the chair, skirts and noses held high, “she thinks Israel should be allowed to exist”. They cited the aforementioned incident at The Playhouse Theatre in Hobart as the reason but without context. I was left to wonder, had they received threats? Were they nervous to endanger their audiences? Or are they fully on-board with cancelling someone who believes Israel should be allowed to exist? I hear Michael Gawenda was passed over for John Lyons to moderate an Israel/Palestine discussion, perhaps that is the answer.

I keep being told I’m brave, we’re brave. But I’m not sure we had a choice. I never felt I could do anything other than stand my ground against the unreason. It is self-defence against insanity.

I have not spoken to some close friends for many months. I don’t know why entirely. I’m sure they know I/we are not bloodthirsty, genocide justifying, lunatics, we have known each other for a long time, you’d think something like that would be tricky to keep under your hat. Nevertheless, they are definitely NOT talking to us. But it doesn’t hurt. Because, ultimately, I can’t lie about something so fundamental to my being, to say, “Hey, maybe you’re right, Israel is an apartheid, colonising, racist, genocidal state that should just disappear”. Nah. Better to find new friends. And I have.

I have also done some soul searching. My name is Deborah. The name comes from the Book of Judges. Deborah the Judge who sang her troops into battle. I’m not sure how much of a warrior I can be at age 65, (though I’m still a pretty good singer) but I always knew that if I was going to pick a hill to die on, defending the right of Israel to exist would be it. And the corollary, calling out blatant unexamined antisemitism from all the good, the kind, the righteous, the educated, the clever, the concerned, even amongst people I could never have imagined would fall for it, then here I am. Hineini, hineini. I’m ready.

Antisemitism is a war that has to be fought even if it can never be won.