There are about three people I’m prepared to listen to on Australian radio, to the extent that I might plan my day to coincide with their programs. Here is one of them – with whom I disagree on many things.

Rowland.

~~~

“I Am Proud That.”

By Phillip Adams ao

The suspicions and hostilities of bigotry may have their roots in some ancient survival mechanism ordained by evolution. When I think of prejudice in the playground, of the bigotries in which I energetically participated at East Kew State, it’s hard to separate nature from nurture.

I can’t remember anyone, certainly not my parents or grandparents, encouraging me to abuse the kids from Europe who were turning up in Australian schools in 1946 and 1947. The chants of “Go back to your own country” seemed to spontaneously combust. On the other hand, the pejorative “reffos” certainly wasn’t an invention of kids in bubs’ grade.

At playtime we’d yell “Catholic dogs stink like frogs jumping off hollow logs” at the kids in the adjacent playground. This invariably elicited the response “State, State, fulla hate”. This behaviour was clearly a consequence of decades of sectarianism in the suburbs. Proddies versus Micks – that represented a major fault line running through Australian society.

Anti-Semitism? It was hardly a consideration in East Kew. It was, and would remain, the principal bigotry of the affluent, of the Toorak elite.

This is not to say it didn’t exist in our neighbourhood. It was just that hostilities to Jews were eclipsed by concerns about wogs, eye-ties and chinks

Abos? Few of us had ever laid eyes on an Aborigine. And Jews were a bit like that. They were thin on the ground at East Kew. In any case, if they weren’t orthodox, Jews were hard to identify.

I became aware of Jews in my early teens, as I started to pick up the signals from the Christian church. Not that I was Christian – I’d been an atheist since I was five. But my father, a Congregational minister, had some sympathy with the idea that the Jews had killed Christ. But any indoctrination was offset by my discovery of the concentration camps, of the Final Solution. Whilst the term “Holocaust” had yet to enter the vocabulary I was overwhelmed by my realisation of what Germany had perpetrated on Jews. It became a major factor in my movement towards the political left. I’d already read “The Grapes of Wrath” by John Steinbeck, the Penguin paperback that would change my life. The story of the gas chambers completed the process of radicalisation and would, just three years later, lead me to join the Communist Party.

I wouldn’t be there long. I’d be out of the CP after Hungary. Having joined up at 16 I was expelled at 19, along with my political mentors, the late Stephen Murray Smith, editor of Overland, and the late Ian Turner, the radical historian.

During that time I fell hopelessly in love with Jews. No, not with Judaism. With Jews. It was a consequence of realising that a remarkable number of the people I most liked and admired were secular Jews. And I met a great many in the Communist Party.

I was forced to leave school before completing my secondary education and the only job I could get was working in advertising. So by day I toiled in the furnace hold of capitalism whilst, at night, I divided my time between what passed for Bohemia and the comrades.

(It’s odd that many of the most successful advertising agencies were, at that time, run by men with long Communist Party associations, but that’s another story).

My principal party duties were to write for The Guardian, now deceased, and to work at the Realist Film Association which had its screenings at Flinders Street’s New Theatre, just a few doors from the Herald. I’d sell the tickets, light the pot-bellied stove and project the films. If we were screening Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”, one of the few battered prints in our repertoire, I would also attempt to synchronise Shostakovich and Prokofiev 78s, reaching a frenzy of disc-jockeying during the Odessa Steps sequence.

This led to the night when my love affair with Jews intensified dramatically. Realist Film had imported an East German documentary called “Behind the German Wars” which described the rise of anti-Semitism and Speer’s use of slave labour. In German, it was un-subtitled, so I used to read a translation through a microphone plugged into the projector.

We used to hire films out and, one night, I was told to take the projector, the screen and their respective stands to a private screening – in a small lounge-room above a shop in Brunswick. The screening was organised by the local Communist Party and the room soon filled with people, none of whom I knew. Out went the lights and I began my voice-over narration, “Behind the German Wars”. But within moments I knew that my efforts were unnecessary, redundant, and gratuitous. Because everyone in the room was weeping. As was often the case with left-wing gatherings, the audience was overwhelmingly Jewish – and many were German-speaking survivors.

There’s another memory of that night that’s burned into my memory. On the mantelpiece of that shabby, overcrowded little room was a lovingly framed photograph. A portrait of Dad or Grandpa. It had been enlarged from a damaged negative and was little more than a pale blur. A pale blur in glasses. Or rather, there was a glint suggesting that the blur had been wearing them. It was all the family had, the only physical evidence of a victim of the Holocaust.

Looking at the photograph I felt what I’d later feel when visiting the death camps. A mixture of guilt (I was after all blonde and blue-eyed) and terror.

By now I was writing reviews for The Bulletin – at a time when the magazine had “Australia for the white man” blazed across the masthead. And I began to realise that without the Jews the Victorian Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne Theatre Company would have found it hard to survive. For the Jews were central to Melbourne’s culture – to its music, its literature, its theatre. The tiny community of Jews made a disproportionate contribution to the best in Melbourne life – political and cultural – just as the Jews, representing less than one per cent of human population, made a disproportionate contribution to the arts, literature, science, philanthropy and the nascent civil rights movement everywhere I looked. At the age of 16 I found myself wishing I’d been born Jewish.

Years later, a Jewish taxi driver would be astonished to discover that I had a mezuzah on the front door. “I didn’t know you were Jewish,”he said. “I’m not.” “Then why the mezuzah?” It was hard to answer. But it was the same reason that I called my first child Rebecca.

Our kids grew up in a house where Jews and Jewishness were respected. But I was by no means a wholehearted supporter of Zionism, let alone of Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians. To this day I remain a critic of many aspects of Israel’s conduct and frequently interview the likes of Hanan Ashrawi, Edward Said or Robert Fisk on my wireless program. And when I do, invariably getting me letters from Jews accusing me of anti-Semitism.

(Over the years the same accusation has been made of me in the Jewish media. But you get used to such intemperate reactions when you’re vociferously attacked by angry Irish or Croatians or Serbs. There are some areas where walking on eggshells just isn’t enough.)

When my daughter with the Jewish name graduated from Melbourne University she set aside her medical career to spend a year working in San Francisco at the Jewish journal, Tikkun. I hadn’t realised how deeply she’d become attached to Judaism. Whist I admired the magazine I was thoroughly alarmed when Rebecca told me that its publisher, Michael Lerner, had proposed to her. Lerner had been a Berkeley radical in the sixties so was only a couple of years my junior.

Not content with her father’s enthusiasm for secular Jewry, Rebecca was determined to become a religious Jew. So the process of conversion that began in a liberal Synagogue in San Francisco was concluded long after she decided not to marry Lerner, in New York. When she phoned me from New York to tell me she’d signed up, she asked if her Dad, the notorious atheist, was upset. “Not as upset as if you’d become a Methodist.”

In between, my daughter the doctor, went off to Israel and got deported when she and Lerner attempted to establish dialogue with members of the PLO. Fearful for her safety I wished we’d named her something safer. Like Lucy.

Recently her sister, my second daughter, Meaghan, came up with a fragment of family history that seems to have been suppressed. My great-grandmother, on my mother’s side, may have been Jewish – an unfortunate fact that had been hushed up, demonstrating that anti-Semitism wasn’t entirely unfamiliar in the Australian working class.

Thus, according to orthodox tradition, I’ve been Jewish all along.

And Rebecca’s conversion was a redundancy.

Over the years, I’d made my pilgrimages to the concentration camps and had written, or tried to write, about places like Auschwitz. I’d had alarming experiences of anti-Semitism in Poland and the Soviet Union and had squeezed amongst the headstones in the old Jewish cemetery in Prague. I’d railed and ranted against anti-Semitism in the Melbourne Club and at the Australian Stock Exchange and paid my dues by attending dozens of Jewish fundraisers. And I received more than my share of hate mail, of accusations from the loony right that I was an apologist for the Yids, a Jewish arse-licker, and worse. And there were threats that when concentration camps were up and running in Australia, my daughter would be one of the first up the chimneys.

Yet I was destined to fall out with my Jewish friends over the anti-vilification legislation – to be greeted with a chilly response by the Jewish audience that had, in the past, always made me welcome. Thus Isi Leibler was underwhelmed by the line I took at a conference on anti-Semitism. I said that I regarded the attempts to legislate against bigotry, and to turbo-charge the legislation with criminal sanctions, was wholly inappropriate and counter-productive. How could I be a member of Amnesty International, arguing for the release of “prisoners of conscience” when Australia, too, would be putting people in prison for things they’d said rather than for things they’d done? I warned that there were plenty of bigots in the country – amongst the League of Rights and the shock-jocks – who’d welcome the opportunity to be charged and convicted – who’d love being media martyrs, knowing full well that it would significantly increase the size and enthusiasm of their following.

Most of all I said that bottling up bigotries and hatreds wouldn’t help – it would simply intensify them. Wasn’t it better to have bigotry out in the open, where it could be identified? Where an attempt could be made to deal with it?

And I warned that Australia’s most influential bigots, the powerful anti-Semites in the upper echelons of the business community, were far too clever to use the word “Jew” as a pejorative. (Three years later Gutnick’s experiences would prove me wrong.) Generally their bigotry was encoded and all the more dangerous for it.

But I found myself being applauded by my enemies in the League of Rights and vilified by my friends in ethnic organisations and, worst of all, in the Jewish community. For example, I was invited to deliver a keynote address at a major conference on multiculturalism – months before the anti-vilification controversy had broken out. As I walked to the lectern, even before I had a chance to speak, I was being booed.

But I was right. The rise of One Nation demonstrates that attempting to bottle things up is nonsensical. You can’t legislate tolerance into existence and you certainly can’t legislate the death of bigotry. Can you image what would have happened, in the run-up to the federal election, had Hanson or any of her rabid acolytes been charged under such an act? The vote for One Nation was bad enough. Given a few martyrs, the party would have gone on an even more alarming rampage.

Here I am, still besotted with Jews. Whilst I’m not mad about the food, I am lost in admiration for Jewish courage, Jewish creativity, Jewish philanthropy, Jewish idealism and Jewish humour. And, yes, some of my best friends are Jews.

There are aspects of Jewish culture that make me uneasy – principally the “If you’ve got it, flaunt it” style of Double Bay. But if that sort of profligacy helps dull the pain of the Jewish experience, so be it.

Arthur Koestler once wrote: “The Jew is the exposed nerve end of mankind”. I think that’s right. Finally Jews are the essence of humanity, the quintessence of our species’ curiosity, energy and yearning. And you don’t need to believe in any putative Messiah to see in the Jews a redemptive quality – a tragic destiny to express, to embody, the human tragedy.

So I’m proud my daughter converted to Judaism. And I hope that Meaghan’s research shows that great-grandma was Jewish.

Phillip Adams ao, October 1998

http://www.melbournesynagogue.org.au/news/haatid/q4_1998/q4_98_02.html