After Bondi, Mourning Jews is Easier than Listening to Them

The image was striking: hundreds of surfers paddling out into the water at Bondi Beach, forming a silent heart-shaped tribute after the deadly Hanukkah shooting that claimed Jewish lives. It was peaceful, visually powerful, and clearly meant with care.

And yet, watching it, I felt a discomfort I couldn’t immediately explain, but now understand. It came from a nagging sense that this moment of solidarity arrived only after Jewish warnings had already been ignored.

I have a soft spot for Australia. I lived there for a year and a half, mostly in Melbourne, but also several months on cattle stations in rural Queensland. I loved the country, the culture, the openness, the relaxed pace. I savoured the living, breathing Jewish cultural life in Melbourne, a city with one of the highest populations of Holocaust survivors per-capita outside Israel. I’ve walked Bondi Beach, site of last week’s massacre. I haven’t been in Australia in over a decade, but I still care deeply about the country. Because of that connection, what has been happening in the country since October 2023 has not felt distant or abstract.

In Melbourne especially, antisemitic incidents have surged: vandalism, harassment, threats, intimidation. Not one, but two synagogues were targeted in arson attacks. The Jewish community spoke up early, warning that the atmosphere was spiralling down, that slogans and rhetoric were being normalized in ways that felt dangerous. Those warnings were often met with discomfort, deflection, or outright gaslighting. Jews were told they were exaggerating, conflating “criticism of Israel” with hatred, or acting in bad faith.

Then Bondi happened.

Suddenly, the danger was undeniable. Suddenly, grief was universal. Suddenly, solidarity was visible and uncontroversial.

This sequence of events matters, because it’s a noticeable pattern.

In the days following the attack, the Australian government has taken steps that deserve recognition. A gun buyback initiative is being pursued in response to the attack’s violent nature. There are moves, at least in New South Wales, the state where the attack occurred, to treat “globalize the intifada” as illegal hate speech, a tacit acknowledgment that the phrase does indeed have a violent undertone (as Jews have repeatedly warned). These are not trivial actions, and they should not be dismissed.

But they are also telling in a different way. It is easier to regulate weapons and respond to bloodshed than react to rhetoric and heed warnings. Easier to act once violence has occurred than to confront the cultural and ideological warning signs that precede it, reactively instead of preventatively. There is also an ongoing debate about whether the response should include a national royal commission or remain confined to a state-level inquiry in New South Wales. Without ascribing bad faith, the hesitation to pursue a national reckoning reflects a familiar tendency: to treat antisemitism as episodic rather than systemic, as a local failure rather than a national challenge, desperately trying to dismiss a visible cause-and-effect as “a few isolated incidents”.

This pattern is not uniquely Australian. It is a broader Western one. Dara Horn gave this pattern a name in her book “People Love Dead Jews”. Her argument was not that people literally enjoy Jewish death, but that societies often find it easier to honour Jews once they are safely gone than to engage seriously with Jews while they are alive, vocal, and inconvenient. Dead Jews ask nothing of non-Jewish society. Living Jews ask non-Jewish society to listen, to act, and to accept that antisemitism is no longer limited to the far-right white supremacist fringes of society (which, for the record, it never was).

Bondi fits that pattern uncomfortably well.

Public mourning rituals, however sincere, can ring hollow. They allow societies to express grief, show “how we really are”, and close the emotional loop without fully confronting what came before. Candlelight vigils and symbolic gestures do important emotional work. But they do not substitute for accountability, nor do they answer the harder question of why Jewish warnings were so easy to dismiss when they were still being voiced by the living.

Many of the cultural spaces now outwardly expressing grief were, not long ago, spaces where Jewish concerns about antisemitism were dismissed or even weaponized. Where slogans with violent histories were defended as abstract or metaphorical. Where Jewish fear was something to be managed rather than heeded. That contradiction is what makes moments like the Bondi tribute feel performative. None of this requires questioning the sincerity of individual mourners. Many Australians are acting from genuine compassion. But solidarity that arrives only after tragedy, and only when the victims are beyond speaking for themselves, is not the same as solidarity that prevents tragedy in the first place.

If there is meaning to be drawn from Bondi, it should not end at grief. It should include a commitment to take Jewish voices seriously before the next attack, not after. To challenge incitement before it hardens into action. To recognize that antisemitism today often hides behind political language until it suddenly doesn’t. And it requires a willingness to name not only the victims, but the movements and ideologies that made the violence possible.

People will cry over dead Jews. The harder test is whether they are willing to listen to living ones.