For Mark Dreyfus, antisemitism is very personal

The attack on the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne and another car torching in Sydney have dramatically heightened political tensions over antisemitism.

Amid criticism the government has been too slow to act in the past year, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this week announced an Australian Federal Police taskforce to combat antisemitism, visited the Melbourne synagogue (though his critics said this was belated), and on Wednesday was at Sydney’s Jewish Museum.

For Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, a member of Melbourne’s Jewish community, antisemitism is personal. Dreyfus joins the podcast to talk about his family’s story of fleeing Nazi Germany, his own and his community’s experience with antisemitism, and his reaction to criticism of the government’s performance.

My grandmother, like many. Holocaust survivors, didn’t like to talk about what had happened. She didn’t like to talk about the loss of her parents, who were murdered in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. But I have talked to my father, who we are blessed is still with us at the age of 96 and living alone, still in good form. He was sent by his parents, my grandparents, with his older brother, alone to Australia, while my grandparents remained in Germany until four months after the Second World War had started, to try to persuade their parents, my great grandparents, to leave.

Asked his father’s reactions to recent events, Dreyfus says,

It reminded him of Kristallnacht [the 1938 attack on Jews]. He said Kristallnacht was the prompt for his assimilated German parents […] to make preparations to leave and try to persuade their parents to leave and make preparations to send their children away.

Of the antisemitism recently directed at him personally,

Directed at me, I’ve seen directly antisemitic abuse in a form and with a frequency that I have certainly not experienced since I was elected to the Federal Parliament in 2007.

Asked if further federal laws are required to combat antisemitism Dreyfus sugggests the states could do more,

Street conduct, street behaviour is very much a state matter. I’ve seen that some state governments, particularly in New South Wales and in Victoria, have started to talk about the possibility of creating some regulation of demonstration-type behaviour [outside places of worship] similar to what’s been done to protect reproductive health clinics, where there’s a distance that’s been created by law within which people wishing to demonstrate against abortion are not permitted to do so.

I’d be encouraging state governments if they think that it’s appropriate to put that sort of control on demonstrations […] to do so.

On the accusations by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others that the government’s stance on Israel in the United Nations has led indirectly to the local attacks, Dreyfus says,

With the greatest of respect to Mr Netanyahu, he is wrong on two counts there. He’s wrong to say that our government is anything other than a close friend of Israel. And he’s wrong just to connect votes on resolutions at the United Nations with the occurrence of violent antisemitic attacks here in Australia.

Dreyfus criticises the politicisation of the antisemitism issue,

I am very sad to have seen the way in which Peter Dutton and senior Liberals have chosen to politicise and seek party political advantage from the atrocious event of the burning of a synagogue. But sadly, that is what they have done.

We heard [Liberal] senator Jane Hume offering up just this morning on radio that, somehow, our government had enabled terrorist acts. Now, that’s not acceptable. It’s not acceptable that Peter Dutton should seek to politicise the appalling event of the burning of the synagogue. And it’s not acceptable that any of his colleagues should seek to do the same thing.