My Life as a Jew

By Michael Gawenda

A multi-award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of a major Australian newspaper searingly explores his Jewish identity at a time when a substantial — and growing — part of the left is opposed to the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became — a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.

Gawenda went on to become a public figure during his 40 years as a journalist, including his role as editor-in-chief of The Age — the only Jewish editor-in-chief in the newspaper’s history. Throughout this time, and since, he became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. This has also forced him to examine his own Jewish identity and his relationships with his Jewish friends, and to forensically examine the basis of the critiques of Israel.

At a time of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, My Life as a Jew is a controversial book. It is also a vital book. It should be read by activists for Israel and Zionism, as well as for the Palestinians. It should be read by readers of all political stripes. It should be read by journalists, as it is in part about journalism and its failings. And it should also be read by people interested in the remarkable life and career of its author, Michael Gawenda.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: Oct 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781761385322

Michael Gawenda

Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning four decades, he was a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, and a senior editor at Time Magazine. He was editor and editor-in-chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004. Michael Gawenda has won numerous journalism awards, including three Walkley awards. He was the inaugural director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is the author of four books.

Book preview

My Life as a Jew

Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning four decades, he was a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, and a senior editor at Time magazine. He was editor and editor-in-chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004.

Michael Gawenda has won numerous journalism awards, including three Walkley Awards. He was the inaugural director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne and is the author of four books.

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Published by Scribe 2023

Copyright © Michael Gawenda 2023

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Scribe acknowledges Australia’s First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 761380 47 1 (Australian edition)

978 1 957363 70 7 (US edition)

978 1 761385 32 2 (ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

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For my sisters, Hinda, Cesia, and Rita.

I hope I have honoured them.

CONTENTS

One: The end of a friendship

Two: My Zionist sisters

Three: An unorthodox Jew

Four: Falling for Israel

Five: The Jewish writers’ revolt

Six: Good Jews

Seven: Hannah Arendt, and loving the Jews. Or not.

Eight: Universalist Jews

Nine: Bad Jews

Ten: Powerful Jews

Eleven: The Jewish editor

Twelve: Where I stand

Thirteen: Coming home

Fourteen: The long road to coming out

Fifteen: A Jew in full

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER ONE

The end of a friendship

Over the years, some of my friendships have withered and died, natural deaths caused by change and a narrowing of time, but I am thankful for those that have survived my growing old. These friendships — childhood ones that are still alive, friendships with fellow journalists, and some more recent ones, miraculously recent because I thought new friendships would no longer happen to me, given my age — are no less a part of me than is my family. Not like family, because family is unchosen and the connections are unbreakable, whatever happens. But my friends, as much as family, are central to who I am, how I see myself.

My friendship with Louise Adler did not wither with time. It ended suddenly and fiercely. Until now, I have been unable to write about this ending. I was afraid, and fear is a cancer for writers. I was afraid of publicly revealing a part of me that I have not revealed before, and I feared that perhaps I would be betraying Louise, or rather betraying things between us that were and should remain private. But here I am, finally writing about it, the end of our friendship. I feel the fear, but I am sure that if I were writing about someone else, and Louise and I were still friends, she would urge me to write it, and she would find a way to get it published. And she would cry, ‘Damn the consequences!’

Our friendship was decades long, and it ended abruptly, but, looking back, I see that it had been unravelling for years. I remember the date it ended. It was Saturday 9 October 2021, when I wrote to Louise and said I felt betrayed by her. It was Shabbes, the Sabbath, meant to be a day of rest, but we secular Jews do not follow every divine rule of Shabbes observance.

From the start of our friendship, the fact that we were Jews was important to both of us. Ours was a friendship that had started more than 30 years before, slowly at first, both of us taking small steps at a time, when Louise was arts editor of The Age and I was deputy editor. I think it was a difficult time for Louise, and I hope I was there for her, and not just because that was my role on the paper. Part of my job was to listen, and try to smooth over — never fix, because fixing was impossible — the internecine conflicts between journalists and editors, and journalists and journalists, that are part of the fabric of most newsrooms.

Louise had a particularly hard time because she was not a journalist, and the editor, Alan Kohler, who loved left-field appointments, had brought her in as arts editor. She was not made welcome, to say the least. Some of the hostility towards her was because she was regarded as a pushy, loud woman. This was and remains a common anti-Semitic stereotype, and is also a way of characterising a woman’s behaviour in terms that are never used to describe men.

When did we become friends? In my memory, it was some time in 1993, when Helen Demidenko won the Miles Franklin Award for The Hand That Signed the Paper. Demidenko presented herself as a child of Ukrainian parents, and the main character in her book, she suggested at various times, was based on her grandfather, who was accused of being a Nazi during the war, a murderer of Jews. The book tried to explain — if not quite justify — why this man had become a Nazi murderer. When it turned out that Demidenko was really Helen Darville, the daughter of English migrants, Louise was outraged; indeed, beside herself with rage. We spent hours and hours talking about this hoax, about its meaning — not just, or even primarily, for Australian literature, but for Holocaust memory and the distortion of Holocaust history, even for Holocaust denial. How could a hoax like this be perpetrated, and how could a book like this win the Miles Franklin, our major literary prize?

We were furious together, over many cups of coffee. We were two outraged Jews — secular left-wing Jews, for whom the Holocaust and its remembrance and its lessons for humanity were to a large extent what being Jewish meant for us. Louise is ten years younger than me, but our parents were Holocaust survivors — not of the camps, but survivors nevertheless, who had managed to flee or hide when the Nazis came after the Jews. Our parents, the sort of parents they were to us, were shaped by the Holocaust. It sat there, this dark thing, in our families, among the survivors and us children.

This is when our friendship started, when we read that phony novel about the Holocaust. We were passionately angry about this book, and that’s how our friendship continued for the next 30 years, two Jews in often wildly animated conversation. It continued after Louise left The Age and became a publisher, and I was appointed The Age’s editor. It went into hibernation after I stepped down as editor and went to Washington, although we were in contact occasionally during those Washington years. Our friendship needed physical presence, eye contact, and talk, talk, talk. When I returned to Melbourne, we took up where we left off.

Louise did a lot for me. She encouraged me to write my first book and, what’s more, she published it. She encouraged me to write other books, some of which I did write and she published. But there was one book that she constantly urged me to write and that I did not write. It was a book about us, really, about our pasts. We called it Jews and the Left — although, really, it was never going to be a dispassionate historical survey and contemporary analysis of the Jews and the left. For me, it was going to be about whether I had changed, drifted right, or whether the left had changed so that I no longer could easily say that I remained, without qualification, a Jew of the left. Did we ever talk about my conception of this book? I think we did not. I do not think that is the book she had in mind.

We never talked about what our Jewish lives had become, even though that question sat there, like a serving of cholent on the table as we talked about our mothers and fathers and our children, and Holocaust literature, and films and Jewish food, and all the other easy stuff about being Jewish. We did talk about harder things, too, personal things that I raise with some trepidation and will explore later. Both of us have close family members — Louise’s husband and my daughter’s partner — who are not Jewish. According to the Orthodox religious definition of who is a Jew, both her husband and my son-in-law are fathers of Jewish children because the children’s mothers are Jewish. But if her son and my son married non-Jews, their children would not be considered Jews, no matter how Jewish their upbringing and no matter whether they identified as Jews. What does this mean for secular Jews like us? What does it mean if, like me, Louise believes in Jewish peoplehood and in Jewish continuity?

We did talk about this from time to time, but with Jewish jokes about our non-Jewish loved ones, warm and loving jokes, but jokes that circled around this question: if we reject — as we both do — the religious definition of Jewishness, based as it is on blood and matrilineal blood specifically, what then? Do we even need a definition of Jewishness to believe in Jewish peoplehood and Jewish continuity? I cannot answer these questions for Louise, and I am not sure I can answer them for myself, but I will have to try.

Occasionally we did talk about Israel, and I told her that the increasing anti-Zionism in parts of the left made me feel that Jews like me were being cast out of our political home. I had not changed. I was — and remain — a social democrat, a person of the left. But more and more of the left would banish me from the ranks of the comrades, because, in their view, anyone who does not support the dismantling of Israel, either by force or by international pressure, is a Zionist. This is a wildly ahistorical, and destructive, definition of Zionism, because it reduces complex issues of Jewish identity to ‘You’re either a Zionist Jew or an anti-Zionist Jew.’ That is the book I would have written — and perhaps I am writing it now.

We enjoyed ourselves when we were together. Although ours was not a transactional friendship, Louise did good things for me, and I hope I did good things for her, too. I hope my support mattered to her when she was angry and sometimes despairing when she felt that some senior university bureaucrats, who had an oversight role of Melbourne University Publishing when she was its publisher, were treating her — as happened at The Age — like a pushy Jewish woman. I defended her when other publishers said they would never deal with her again after some controversy or other, and when some writers said they would not publish with her because they found her difficult. I thought they were wrong at the time, and I still do. When she left Melbourne University Publishing in very trying circumstances, I abandoned a contract I had for a book with MUP because of the way she had been treated.

We remained two Jews drinking coffee and talking, talking, talking. I never talked as much as I talked when I was with her. How is it, then, that we did not talk about those things that would end our friendship? About the sort of Jews we had become, she and I, how each of us had changed, and what the changes might do to our friendship? About Israel — yes, it was about the way each of us thought and felt and worried about Israel, but it was about much more than that, because our feelings about Israel were, and remain, a sort of metaphor for the sort of Jew each of us had become.

Our friendship ended on Shabbes, on Saturday 9 October 2021, when I wrote to tell her that it was over.

Several months earlier, in the middle of 2021, Louise had commissioned and published a booklet by the then ABC senior news executive John Lyons. Dateline Jerusalem: journalism’s toughest assignment was the title. At first, I thought it was meant to be a slightly humorous, wildly exaggerated title. It was not. Lyons meant it literally. His thesis was simple: the Israel Lobby in Australia had succeeded, through threats and accusations of anti-Semitism, in making cowards of Australian journalists and editors, who regularly self-censored their coverage of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Journalists and editors were too afraid, too cowed by threats, to reveal the true horrors of Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel.

The Lyons booklet was part of a public-policy series that Louise commissioned for Monash University Publishing. Just how the media coverage of the Israel–Palestinian conflict was a public-policy issue is hard to fathom. The rest of the series were written by former politicians, or public-policy wonks. Good and worthy — and, it must be said, coming from the left — but these mostly sank without trace. Not so the Lyons booklet, which had nothing to do with public policy, but which Louise knew would get decent coverage — a journalist writing about the failings of fellow journalists and editors.

Although I was not named, and Lyons had not spoken to me, I felt counted among those cowardly, intimidated editors. How could I not? I had been editor of The Age for seven years. I was editor when Bill Clinton’s failed peace initiative signalled the end of the Oslo process, which had provided a road map to a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I had been editor during the Second Intifada that followed Clinton’s failed peace initiative, when many hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children died in suicide bombings of buses and restaurants and community centres. Many hundreds of Palestinians also died in the Israeli Defense Force’s miliary response in the West Bank to the suicide bombings. What’s more, I was the only Jewish editor, back then and subsequently, of a major metropolitan paper in Australia. Why would Lyons not have spoken to me? Perhaps he thought he might have discovered that I was not a fellow traveller of the Israel Lobby.

Louise knew all this, because we talked about it after she had commissioned the booklet but before it was published. She and I both knew what Lyons was going to argue. I was not named in the booklet and nor were the majority of the twenty-three editors and senior journalists that Lyons said he had interviewed on the record. They were anonymous. I do not know how many of the anonymous editors that Lyons said he had spoken to confirm his thesis. In his booklet, he asks that he be taken at his word. Frankly, I am not prepared to do that. And nor should any journalist. This is what happens when your work is full of anonymous sources. Anonymous editors — how would any journalist agree to write a story like that? How many editors would publish such a story?

Oddly, the four editors he does name and quote in the booklet do not support his thesis. Two reject it outright, and one neither confirms nor denies it. Lyons quotes him as saying only that the Israel Lobby can be very aggressive and hard to deal with. The editor refers to a particular meeting with a delegation from the lobby. The lobbyists had been rude and aggressive, and he had come close to throwing them out. Poor bloke. An editor being subjected to rude and aggressive behaviour! By a bunch of middle-aged Jews! The fourth editor is Chris Mitchell, who was editor-in-chief of The Australian when Lyons was based in Jerusalem. Lyons does not ask Mitchell whether he was cowed by the Israel Lobby. He clearly felt no need to. After all, Lyons was one of the few Australian journalists, it seems, who resisted the brutal pressure of the lobby.

Lyons does name one journalist who was a correspondent based in Jerusalem, who, he wrote, confirmed that the pro-Israel Lobby was abusive and threatening. This journalist was the only one he interviewed, it seems, who had reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The named journalist, Jodi Rudoren, was not just Jewish, but religiously observant. She is now editor-in-chief of the Forward, a left-leaning and storied New York–based Jewish newspaper. Rudoren was Jerusalem correspondent for The New York Times back when Lyons was The Australian’s correspondent. This is what he writes about her:

Most journalists based in Jerusalem who report exactly what they see in front of them are trolled and abused. As an indication of how far right much of the pro-Israel lobby has leant, correspondents of the New York Times … have been systematically targeted. Jodi Rudoren, who was from an observant American Jewish family, was attacked even before she landed in Israel. Her crime? After she was announced as the new NYT correspondent, an Arab-American sent her a note of congratulations. She replied with a thank you in Arabic: Shukran. For that, she became a target. Later, a prominent US-based pro-Israel lobby group branded her a ‘Nazi bitch’.

For anyone to describe a female journalist as a Nazi bitch is shocking, unacceptable, reprehensible. For a pro-Israel lobby to brand (brand!) a Jewish female journalist a Nazi bitch is beyond disgusting, and that was my immediate reaction when I read this in Lyons’ booklet. Then I read it again. Then I went to the endnotes, where Lyons cited his source for the ‘Nazi bitch’ slur: an article in The Jerusalem Post. I read the article. Nowhere in it does Rudoren even hint at her ever being called a Nazi bitch by anyone, let alone by a pro-Israel lobby. In fact, it’s a humdrum piece. She is quoted as saying that she greeted people who spoke Arabic with ‘Shukran’ (‘Thank you’), and that some people had tweeted that this showed she was biased. She pointed out to them that she responded to Hebrew speakers with ‘Todah’, a way of saying ‘Thank you’ in Hebrew. There was nothing in the article about her having been slurred by a pro-Israel lobby.

So where had this ‘Nazi bitch’ abuse come from? Rudoren must have told Lyons about this terrible attack on her by a pro-Israel lobby.

After the Lyons booklet was published, Rudoren was asked about the ‘Nazi bitch’ slur. She said she had no memory of anyone saying that to her. And she implied that this was something she would remember, had it happened. She said she would contact Lyons to ask him whether he had a note of her telling him about this terrible thing that had happened to her that she had somehow forgotten. As far as I know, Lyons did not respond, and Rudoren did not pursue it any further.

What does this mean? It illustrates some of the journalistic flaws in the booklet, and it illustrates the deep personal bias that Lyons brought to this ostensibly thoroughly reported piece that purports to nail the way the Israel Lobby operates to make cowards of editors and journalists.

Let me go back to the first sentence of that paragraph about Rudoren’s experience with the Israel Lobby. ‘Most journalists based in Jerusalem who report exactly what they see in front of them are trolled and abused,’ he writes.

Put aside the self-serving suggestion that journalists like him are abused when all they are doing is accurately reporting what they see; it is nevertheless probably true that many journalists based in Jerusalem are trolled and abused. But this is probably true for journalists covering virtually any conflict in the world, for journalists reporting any issue or event anywhere. It is true for Jewish journalists reporting from Jerusalem. It is also true that Jewish journalists in America and elsewhere are subjected to organised trolling and abuse — whatever issue they are covering — simply because they are Jews. The trollers even have a symbol for this Twitter abuse that identifies the journalist as a Jew.

But Lyons is making a particular case: the trolls and abusers of the Jerusalem-based journalists — like Rudoren and Lyons — are targeted by pro-Israel lobbyists. Lyons employs a journalistic trick that any experienced reporter should immediately recognise. He goes from writing that Jerusalem-based journalists are trolled and abused to writing that Rudoren was singled out by a far-right Israel Lobby, which called her a Nazi bitch. The abusers, it follows, are organised members of the far-right Israel Lobby.

But Lyons does not name the lobby. Why not? Name and shame! I have been a journalist long enough to know that he does not name the lobby because he does not actually know which alleged lobby it was that did this terrible thing, and he didn’t bother to find out. He did not bother to do this fundamental work that journalists are trained to do from when they are cub reporters: check whether what he had been told was true by contacting his source and asking them to confirm the story.

What Lyons does — over and over again in the booklet — is transform every lone Jew who sends nasty messages to editors and journalists, and tweets accusations of anti-Semitism to journalists and editors, and sends messages to editors like me, calling them self-hating Jews. He transforms them into members of this vast pro-Israel lobby. This means he can accuse the lobby of shouting anti-Semitism every time some poor journalist writes something critical, but accurate, about Israel.

It’s bullshit. Lyons cannot point to a single instance where an Israeli lobbyist — Mark Leibler, Colin Rubenstein, anyone — has accused editors or journalists of anti-Semitism in their coverage of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. He can’t, because they don’t. It is a straw man. Every sad and crazy Jew who sees anti-Semitism everywhere and in everything becomes a voice of the lobby. Even an aggressive and stupid sub-editor at The Australian, who was loud and angry with a young Palestinian-Australian journalist for using the term Palestine, is really a secret agent for the Israel Lobby. It’s terrible journalism. And I told Louise it would be.

Did Louise ever wonder why Lyons did not speak to me, why I was not among those 23 editors and senior journalists he said he had spoken to? I have known Lyons for many years. Just before The Australian posted him to Jerusalem, we had a cup of coffee, at his request, and we discussed what might be the challenges of covering the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. I think I told Louise about this, but even if I did not, when she read his manuscript, did she not think it was strange that Lyons had not spoken to me, the only Jewish editor of an Australian metropolitan newspaper, who