The changing sources of antisemitism in Australia

FROM THE 1950S TO THE PRESENT: THE DIVERSE AND CHANGING SOURCES OF ANTISEMITISM IN AUSTRALIA by Professor Philip Mendes, Presentation to Australian Jewish Historical Society Forum on ‘Antisemitism in Australia between 1788 and the present’, 23 June 2026

This paper has four parts. Firstly, drawing on the archives of the former Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, I’m going to identify some of the key manifestations of Antisemitism in the 1950s and 1960s. Secondly, I will present case studies of the 1958 Jim Killen affair and the 1960 Swastika epidemic which briefly introduced Antisemitism into the wider Australian political debate. Thirdly, I will provide an audit of some of the principal incidences of progressive Antisemitism in the 1970s and 80s. And finally, I will jump forward to the Antisemitism crisis that has confronted Australian Jewry since October 2023.

My key findings will be twofold: Firstly, from about 1950 until October 2023, there was arguably no serious politically motivated Antisemitic political movement in Australia. In contrast, the so-called pro-Palestinian movement of the past three years has deliberately used Antisemitism as a key political strategy to intimidate, abuse and ideally exclude Jews from political and public life. Secondly, whereas during the 1950s and 60s, the political Left could usually be relied on to provide anti-racist solidarity to Jewish Australians confronting Antisemitism, the opposite is now almost true. Some progressive groups and institutions have actively enabled Antisemitism, and most have at best acted as bystanders.

Part One: What forms did Antisemitism take in the 1950s and 1960s?

As noted by tonight’s preceding speaker, there was significant politically organized Antisemitism in the 1940s attacking the entry of Jewish refugees, alleging Jewish support for terrorists in Palestine, and demonizing Jews more generally. That racism was advanced by far Right groups such as the League of Rights; some mostly conservative members of Parliament such as Henry Gullett, Sir Frank Clarke and the Deputy leader of the Country Party, John McEwen; sections of the RSL’ and mainstream publications such as Smith’s Weekly and The Bulletin (Mendes 2022).

Mainstream Australian conservatism seems to have largely rejected Antisemitism by the 1950s. Nevertheless, the left-wing Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism remained busy in its anti-defamation activities. One ongoing activity undertaken by the Council was responding to specific incidents of anti-Jewish discrimination in business, employment, factories and other workplaces, schools, housing, health services, public transport, and immigration centres. The Council would typically target not only the specific sources of discrimination, but also the broader government authorities or bodies responsible for policy and legislation. Other concerns included anti-Semitic statements in the media and literature, anti-Jewish slogans in public places including vandalism of Jewish graves, fire attacks on a number of Jewish organisational buildings and private homes in 1960, and anti-Jewish assaults. Another activity was action against sporting (e.g. golf) and corporate clubs and bodies which discriminated against Jews. For example, the Council mounted an extensive campaign against the alleged exclusion of Jews from the Stock Exchange, and the imposition of a quota on Jews joining the RACV Country Club (Mendes 2022).

A strong positive for Australian Jews in these decades was that they could usually rely on the broad spectrum of the Left to actively oppose any domestic political manifestations of Antisemitism. The Council actively drew on support from Labor Party branches, trade unions, intellectuals and academics, journalists, and progressive clergymen and churches (Mendes 2022).

Part Two: Exceptions to the rule: Antisemitism impacts on mainstream society

As noted above, Antisemitism was largely relegated to the political fringes during this period. However, there were two significant exceptions to this rule: the Jim Killen affair and the Swastika epidemic.

2a: The 1958 Jim Killen Affair

In 1958, the conservative Queensland Liberal Party MP for Moreton, Jim Killen, who was reportedly aligned with the AntiSemitic far Right League of Rights, presented a parliamentary speech blaming Israel and Zionism for the Middle East conflict. According to Killen, the creation of Israel was a fundamental error, and the cause of one million Arabs becoming refugees. Although he urged the Arab states to recognize the reality of Israel’s existence, he highlighted the legitimacy of Arab fears of Zionist expansion, and its enabling of growing Soviet Communist influence in the Middle East. He urged that Israel be forced to return to the original boundaries of the 1947 Partition Plan (Killen 1958; see also Anon 1958). The left-wing Jewish Council had no hesitation in identifying Killen’s anti-Zionism as a form of Antisemitism. They attacked what they termed the ‘vicious anti-Israel speech’ for its ‘anti-Semitic’ implications’, and alleged Killen’s arguments had been actively assisted by the LOR.

Nevertheless, Killen continued to engage with the LOR, and in 1962, he joined LOR boss Eric Butler in a joint visit to England to campaign against the UK’s participation in the European Common Market. Killen’s engagement with Butler was furiously condemned by VJBD Public Relations Director, Isi Leibler, who acknowledged that whilst Killen might not share Butler’s antisemitism, any association ‘with racial bigots such as Butler is to be deplored’. However, many years later, Killen changed his views. Interviewed in 1975 as the Shadow Minister for Defence, he strongly defended the existence of Israel, and called on the Arabs to recognize the Jewish state.

Part 2B: The 1960 Swastika epidemic

In the early months of 1960, Australian Jewry experienced a sudden outbreak of Anti-Jewish graffiti and vandalism. What has been called the ‘Swastika epidemic’ began with the desecration of a synagogue in Cologne, West Germany on 26 December 1959, and then spread globally across the western world until it hit Australia.

During January and February 1960, there were approximately 20-30 anti-Jewish incidents in both cities and rural areas including a smashing of the windows of the Temple Beth Israel synagogue, swastikas and threatening slogans painted on the Zionist Federation building in Melbourne, and bomb threats targeting the Great Synagogue in Sydney. Anti-Jewish graffiti also appeared in small towns with few if any Jewish residents such as Whyalla in South Australia and Maryborough in Queensland (Seldowitz 2024).

These incidents were actively opposed by a united front against antisemitism that included political groups and parties across the spectrum including the Liberal-National Party coalition, the Labor Party and the Communist Party, and numerous civil society bodies including trade unions, churches, business and women’s groups, returned soldiers, and the print and broadcast media

Australian governments of varied party persuasion at local, state and federal levels, and civil society organisations responded to these events with statements of support for the Jewish community. For example, in Victoria, the State Liberal Party Premier Henry Bolte, the Attorney General Arthur Gordon Rylah and the Acting Police Commissioner Superintendent Rupert Arnold assured the Jewish community of their support. In NSW, the Deputy Commissioner of Police, Norman Allan, announced nightly patrols of Jewish community institutions to prevent anti-Jewish actions. Additionally, the Labor-affiliated Lord Mayor of Sydney, Alderman Henry Frederick Jensen, organized a large protest forum attended by 3,500 people at the Town Hall to condemn the racist attacks. Speakers included representatives of the Returned Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia (the RSL), churches, the Country Women’s Association, the Chambers of Commerce and Manufacturers, the Labor State Government, and the opposition Liberal and Country Parties.

Representatives of the four major churches – Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican – issued robust public statements supporting the Jewish community. The media was also overwhelmingly sympathetic as reflected in numerous editorials condemning Anti-Semitism. The Liberal Party Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, also strongly condemned AntiSemitism, although his initial statement on 27 January seemed to trivialize the impact of these racist actions by equating them with partisan political attacks on himself as Prime Minister. Nevertheless, Menzies emphasized that ‘there is absolutely no room for AntiSemitism in Australia’, and highlighted ‘the long history of distinguished service to our country by Jewish citizens’. In a second statement on 7 February, Menzies dismissed Anti-Semites as a ‘ratbag group’. He added that 99 per cent of the Australian population ‘regarded Anti-Semitic activities with contempt’.

Australian progressives unconditionally condemned the perpetrators of Anti-Semitic actions, and offered strong solidarity to the Jewish community. The President of the ACTU, Albert Monk, vigorously condemned the anti-Jewish outbreak, and warned that those who attacked Jews also posed a threat to trade unions and democratic rights. Other peak union bodies and individual unions including the Melbourne Trades Hall Council, the Queensland Trades and Labour Council, the Seamen’s Union, the South Australian Branch of the Australian Railways Union, the South Australian Boilermakers Society, and the Waterside Workers Federation passed resolutions condemning Anti-Semitism.

The Labor Party strongly sided with the Jewish community. The NSW state Labor Premier Bob Heffron assured the Jewish community that his government would not tolerate Anti-Semitic incidents. The Deputy Leader of the Federal Opposition, Arthur Calwell, issued a strong statement offering support for all actions taken to ‘combat the evil of Anti-Semitism’. Other Labor Party figures such as Leslie Haylen, Federal MHR for Parkes, William Matthew Rigby, the NSW state Member for Hurstville, the Victorian ALP President Albert McNolty, and John Tripovich, the Victorian ALP Secretary, addressed protest forums.

The Left’s anti-racist approach was typified by the reporting of Tribune, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), which published no fewer than 18 articles condemning Anti-Semitism over seven editions. Tribune displayed a sincere anti-racist solidarity with Australian Jews, describing Anti-Semitism as ‘a barbarous weapon used by demagogues to divide people for reactionary purposes’ (27 January 1960). Their numerous reports attacked the Anti-Semitic outbreak which was equated with right-wing attempts to attack democracy and trade unions, and provoke international conflict. They insisted that a specific contributing factor to the local outbreak was government migration policies which allowed previous members of the Nazi Party to freely enter Australia. A typical CPA statement published in Tribune on 20 January urged government action ‘to eliminate Nazism and Anti-Semitism from Australia’. Members of the CPA were also active in local resident campaigns against Anti-Semitism (Mendes 2025).

Part three: Political Antisemitism in the 70s and 80s

As we move into the 1970s, the earlier systemic discrimination against Jews discussed above – for example the formal exclusion of Jews from some business associations, law firms, and clubs (Gawenda 2020: 45, 63) – seemed to decline. Additionally, politically motivated Antisemitism remained on the margins, both the traditional far Right, and also the relatively new phenomenon (at least in Australia) of anti-Jewish racism on the far Left.

In 1991, I was invited by the Australian Institute of Jewish Affairs to contribute to a Symposium on ‘The Australian Left and the Jews’. In that paper, I carefully distinguished between legitimate criticism of Israeli government policies, and forms of anti-Zionism that actively employed Antisemitic tropes. On the basis of that distinction, I identified five case studies of Left Antisemitism during the 1970s and 80s: the Australian Union of Students campaign against Israel which lapsed into manifestations of overt Antisemitism including violence against Jewish students; Community radio station 3CR’s formal exclusion of Jewish community groups and programs; blaming the victim allegations that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis to perpetrate the Holocaust; the Robert Pash affair whereby some leading Labor Socialist Left figures had collaborated with a Libyan-government funded promoter of anti-Jewish racism; and fringe Labor Party leftist Bill Hartley’s open alignment of anti-Zionism and Antisemitism (Mendes 1991).

At the time, I highlighted that ‘the mainstream Left has neither espoused anti-Semitism nor tolerated anything remotely smacking of anti-Semitism’ (p.33). A detailed article in the same edition of the journal by Professor Bill Rubinstein on Holocaust denier John Bennett highlighted the continuing threat to Jews from the Antisemitic far Right (Rubinstein 1991), as did a later article by Dr Hilary Rubinstein documenting the League of Right’s long history of Holocaust denial (Rubinstein 1997). So did the notorious Demidenko affair five years later whereby a novel by Helen Darville alleging that Jewish Bolsheviks were responsible for the 1930s famine in Ukraine (i.e. a form of the Judeo-Communist conspiracy theory) received uncritical acclaim from prominent literary sources including receipt of the Miles Franklin Award (Mendes 2024).

The relative marginalization of anti-Jewish racism in progressive Australian groups continued well into the 2000s. But the establishment of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement locally and globally in 2002 gradually facilitated a movement of Left Antisemitism from the fringes to the mainstream. The BDS movement essentialized and targeted not only all Israeli Jews, but also the great majority of Jews internationally who support the well-being State of Israel and its population, as the political enemy. In Australia, that movement gradually seized control of key progressive organisations and institutions.

Part Four: Post October 2023: the Australian Left fails to provide anti-racist solidarity to Australian Jews

Today, there are arguably six principal manifestations of contemporary antisemitism in Australia as follows:

• The December 14, 2025, terrorist hate crime in Bondi that killed 15 people and left dozens injured, and an entire community traumatised;

• Other violent attacks on Jewish community institutions and Jewish businesses including the firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue, attempted attacks on other synagogues in Melbourne and Sydney, aggressive vandalism targeting the parliamentary offices of Jewish MPs and Jewish-owned properties, cars and restaurants, and large numbers of threats against and physical assaults on ordinary Jewish Australians;

• Aggressive and threatening invasions of Jewish-populated suburbs in the cities of Melbourne (e.g., Caulfield) and Sydney (e.g., Coogee and Bondi) by pro-racist mobs incited by activist groups such as Free Palestine Melbourne;

• The doxing (release of highly personal details online) of hundreds of Australian Jews who were participating in a private online group to combat antisemitism resulting in them being subjected to hate mail and death threats; boycott campaigns against Jewish-owned companies such as Schwartz Media, philanthropists such as the Gandel family and prominent artists and performers such as singer Deborah Conway; Jews being forced to close businesses and leave workplaces and even residences due to ongoing threats and harassment; and attempts to exclude Jewish health practitioners from various public festivals;

• Jewish university students and academics being subjected to various forms of defamation, physical threats and attacks and hate speech by university-based encampments and associated forums, student union meetings and newspapers, flyers and graffiti intended to exclude them from academic and public debates. Two-thirds of Jewish university academics and students continued to report in October 2025 that they felt unsafe on campus.

6)A general atmosphere of McCarthyist intolerance towards Jews in key progressive communities which is akin to that experienced by Communists and other leftists in the USA and Australia during the Cold War. The question “Are you or have you ever been a Communist?”, has now been reframed by pro-racist progressives to impose a political test on whether or not a Jewish person is to be defined and excluded as a ‘Zionist’ from public bodies and institutions

In contrast to 1960, contemporary Australian society has failed to display bipartisan opposition to Antisemitism, and is instead divided between three perspectives: anti-racist groups that display public solidarity to the Jewish community; pro-racist groups that actively promote antisemitism; and bystanders whose silence arguably enables the haters.

Pro-racist attacks on Jews incorporate manifestations of both institutional and interpersonal racism including internalised racism. Perpetrators typically present arguments based on:

• blaming-the-victim assumptions that conflate political anti-Zionism and anti-Jewish racial hatred.
• confounding a legitimate right to individual academic freedom in areas of demonstrated knowledge (but usually including nil research output or expertise pertaining to an understanding of antisemitism) with a non-existent collective right to engage in hate speech
• attacking the International Holocaust Remembrance Association definition of Antisemitism (and the different, but in part overlapping, Universities Australia definition adopted in February 2025) in a tactical attempt to prevent the creation of an effective framework and strategies for responding to the antisemitism crisis
• adopting such spurious concepts such as ‘moral panic’ and the alleged ‘weaponising’ of antisemitism in an attempt to reverse the status of perpetrators and victims of racism and silence effective opposition to antisemitism
• opportunistically leveraging the support of tokenistic Jewish groups as alibis, and fail to engage with the genuine lived experience of most Jews.
• actively smearing those Australians from across the spectrum who publicly oppose antisemitism as having ulterior ideological motives, rather than being influenced by a genuine opposition to racism.

Progressive sources of pro-racist views in Australia include political parties such as the Australian Greens and the Socialist Alliance; Overland and Arena academic magazines; the tokenistic Jewish Council of Australia; academic groups such as Sydney University Staff for Palestine; some professional sub-groups such as Teachers and School Staff for Palestine Victoria and Social Workers for Palestine Australia; and branches of multiple trade unions including the Australian Services Union, CFMEU, AWU, the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, and the NTEU.

More common in progressive organisations such as trade unions, social movements, advocacy groups, human rights bodies and media outlets such as the ABC has been adoption of the bystander approach whereby groups sit passively on the fence half way between the perpetrators and victims of antisemitism. The National Tertiary Education Union seems to be an exemplar of this approach.

Bystanders love saying that these debates are complex. Instead of unequivocally calling out anti-Jewish racism and supporting Jewish colleagues presenting their lived experiences of racism to public inquiries such as the Royal Commission, they instead present lame excuses for not taking any action. Their neutralist silence has implicitly caused harm by ceding permission to pro-racist groups to espouse anti-Jewish prejudice without any fear of public disapproval. On an individual level, the failure of many progressives to publicly call out antisemitism has left their Jewish friends feeling abandoned on both a personal and systemic level (Mendes 2026).

References

Anon, ‘Vic Jew-baiter boasts propaganda success’, Australian Jewish Times, 26 December 1958, p.1.

Gawenda, Michael (2020). The Power Broker, Mark Leibler: An Australian Jewish life. Monash University Publishing. Melbourne. https://publishing.monash.edu/product/the-powerbroker/.

Killen, James, Address to House of Representatives, Hansard, 6 August 1958, pp.106-108.

Mendes, Philip (1991) The Australian Left and the Jews. Without Prejudice, 2, 30-35.

Mendes, Philip (2022) Combatting Antisemitism on the far right: An examination of the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism and its anti-defamation activities. Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 26(1), 54-78. https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/54127?fromBrowse=1.

Mendes, Philip (2024) The strange Helen Demidenko (Darville) affair revisited. Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 27(1), 131-150.

https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/514707?fromBrowse=1.

Mendes, Philip (2025) Australia’s last antisemitism crisis was different, The Jewish Independent, 8 April 2025. https://thejewishindependent.com.au/australias-last-antisemitism-crisis-was-different/

Mendes, Philip (2026) Progressive intolerance: The contemporary AntiSemitism landscape in Australia. Centre for Independent Studies. https://apo.org.au/node/333357.

Rubinstein, Hilary (1997) Early manifestations of Holocaust denial in Australia. Australian Jewish Historical Society Journal, 14(1), 93-109.

https://collections.ajhs.com.au/Detail/objects/53466.

Rubinstein, W.D. (1991). Profile: John Bennett. Without Prejudice, 2, 47-51.

Seldowitz, Dovi (2024) Revisiting the 1959-60 Swastika Epidemic: A forgotten chapter in Australia’s history. Sydney Jewish Museum Blog. https://sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au/news/1959-1960-swastika-epidemic/