I Tried to Outrun My Jewishness
An Australian writing teacher's interaction with a student shines a light on antisemitism, history, and identity
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
Two weeks after October 7, wrecked with insomnia and barely-contained dread, I am trying to run a writing workshop on voice.
One of the writers asks to read her piece. She ends with, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Allahu Akbar.”
My throat closes. The sound of spoken German used to chill me, until a German lover in my mid-twenties talked dirty to me in his tongue. I’m over the flinch provoked by that language, but now it has been replaced by this new shudder.
I swallow, nod, and move on to the next person.
Does it show? My gathered brokenness? How raw and bruised I am from the relentless strikes of social media, which Zed, my husband, keeps reminding me is in my power to avert.
“Just don’t look.”
Right.
Until October 7, I knew shamefully little about the history of Israel even though I’d visited a few times, most recently when I was pregnant with my 27-year-old daughter. Close friends and family live there. Their sons and daughters serve in the IDF.
I grew up hearing about antisemitism from old Jews of my grandfather’s generation who fled Eastern Europe in the 1920s, but as a leftie, gender and racial equality struggles seized whatever fight I had in me. I declined an identity built on victimhood and left parts of my history, including my grandmother’s family, in the ovens of Auschwitz. I learned to chant the cry: “Never again.”
But since October 7, I’ve been beset with the same nausea I carried for the nine months my mother was battling ovarian cancer. The Holocaust, which I’ve always assumed was an aberration of history, a particularly German virus, is beginning to make a whole lot of terrifying sense. It’s like a very slow Polaroid is developing. Cue my sleeplessness and panic attacks.
I have unfriended and unfollowed dozens of people on Facebook and Instagram. I am as undefended as I was right after my mother died. A lost child.
After the workshop, my belly clenches as the River to the Sea poet approaches and asks me where I’m from.
“South Africa, originally,” I say in a tone pitched to disengage.
She dated a South African man once, she tells me.
“He lived in the ‘colored area,’ because of apartheid, you know, like there is in Israel… those animals, look how they’re carpet bombing —.”
I interrupt.
“I’m so sorry, but I can’t talk about this right now,” I say. “I am feeling quite traumatized. I am Jewish.”
I have only recently been able to voice this word. Jew. In my German lover’s mouth, Joanne sounded like Jew-anne. Soft, sexy.
“I can tell.”
Her words hang in the air between us.
I barely resist asking if it is my horns that give it away. Something ugly is bubbling inside me.
I am not wearing a Star of David. I haven’t since I was a child.
A week ago, the German—now middle-aged with a receding hairline—sent me a message. “I pray for both — the victims in Gaza and for the Jewish victims — but I will always be on the Jewish side. One Holocaust is enough. At the end of the day, we are forced to take a position and sides. You can’t be silent on this one!”
In my suburb of Sydney, Australia, posters of the kidnapped have been torn down, eyes gouged out. Antisemitic chants reverberated from the Sydney Opera House steps just a week ago. I am developing an addiction to Diazepam so I can subdue the images flashing in my mind.
It goes against every instinct in my body, but I make eye contact with the woman standing in front of me.
“I’m also traumatized,” she says.
***
“What is going to happen to all the people in Gaza now that Israel has cut off the water?” I’d asked Zed, hoping he might understand it better than me.
“There must be a logical reason.”
“Well, what is it? People will die of thirst. The hostages are in Gaza too.”
“Yeah, I dunno. I’m not a military strategist.”
***
As a child, I used to have nightmares of hiding under the dirt in the flowerbeds in the garden of my family home, terrified I would be found and killed. Despite my Semitic appearance (I have been mistaken for Greek, Lebanese, Spanish, and Italian) I have resisted “being a Jew” my whole life. When I walk into a room of strangers, I could be anyone from anywhere. Now it is clear there is nowhere to hide. It makes no difference whether I have devoted my life to fighting for others, or am a right-wing Netanyahu fan. Being Jewish finally means something I have tried to outrun my whole life, this polluted treasure of an identity.
I widen my gaze to take in the whole of this woman.
She has a tough history I don’t care about. All I perceive and feel is my own pain.
Even without a Star of David around my neck, she sees me more clearly than I do myself. She sees through my internalized antisemitism, past my “passing” as a non-Jew, to this part of myself I can no longer outrun.
“I can tell.”
Finally, I manage, “I’m sorry you’re feeling traumatized. We’re all feeling raw and vulnerable. I hope you can find support to help you.”
She eyes me uncertainly.
And in that luminous pause, I open my arms.
She hesitates, but she enters the hug.
I feel her tremble against my chest.
When I get home, I go online to Etsy to purchase a small blue opal pendant in the shape of a Star of David which I have worn every day since then.
Lest there ever be any doubt.
Joanne Fedler is the internationally bestselling author of fifteen books, including The Whale’s Last Song (4th Estate, 2024). She has an LLM from Yale and set up and ran a legal advocacy to end violence against women in South Africa. Based in Sydney, she is now a writing mentor and runs writing retreats and workshops. Her book Things Without A Name (Allen & Unwin, 2008) has been optioned for the screen.
This essay is part of a new collection of work inspired by the anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates. Want to contribute? Instructions here. Subscribe here.
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Am Israel Chai