When I heard on December 14, 2025, that two jihadists had gunned down 15 Jewish Australians at a Hanukkah celebration on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach, my reaction was two-fold.
On the one hand, I was shocked. The Australia in which I grew up was not one in which terrorism was on anyone’s horizon. It was also a country noted for its hospitality to Jews who, by any measure, have played an outsized role in Australian culture, politics, and economic life, despite being less than 0.5 percent of the population.
Jewish Australians are indeed a remarkable people. Australia’s first native-born Governor-General,, for example, was Jewish. In fact, Australia has had two Jewish Governor-Generals. And whenever I am asked who I consider to be the greatest Australian in the country’s history, my answer is always Sir John Monash. That’s not a name many Americans will recognize, but was an extremely successful—perhaps the best—Allied general in World War I. As the general commanding the Australian Corps, Monash played a key role in breaking the German Army’s will to fight on the Western Front in 1918. He was also the son of two Yiddish and German-speaking Jewish migrants to Australia.
My shock, however, at the attack on the Jewish community on December 14 was accompanied by something else: a lack of surprise. The of vocal and violent anti-Semitism in Australia since October 2023 has gone largely unchecked by Australia’s Labor government. Prominent Jewish Australians and others had been warning for months that extreme violence was likely to happen. But the reluctance of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his government to speak plainly about the problem — let alone address it in any meaningful fashion — was palpable.
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