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By Josh Feldman
Australian writer Michael Gawenda, author of "My Life as a Jew."
For Michael Gawenda, one of Australia's best-known journalists and a former self-proclaimed 'anti-Zionist Bundist,' October 7 was a wake-up call. With the spike in antisemitism in his homeland, particularly among groups he used to see as allies, he is concerned for Australia's Jews
As the first Jewish editor-in-chief of The Age, one of Australia's leading newspapers, Michael Gawenda was a trailblazer in his time. Today, though, he suspects his candidacy would raise concerns if he was vying for a top job in Australian journalism.
"Most newspapers have enough issues with their journalists without having to deal with the perception that a Zionist Jew is running them", says the retired journalist in an interview. "They wouldn't want the hassle."
Calling himself a Zionist was not always an obvious choice, as Gawenda writes in his memoir "My Life as a Jew," published just four days before the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
In fact, growing up he identified as an "anti-Zionist Bundist" and was active in the youth movement affiliated with this secular Yiddishist ideology. For him and his fellow Bundists, creating a Jewish state was not the answer to antisemitism. Rather, they believed the only solution to antisemitism "was a coming brotherhood of man where all people were treated equally," Gawenda says.
"We thought once there was a socialist paradise, antisemitism would disappear," adds the 77-year-old, who was born in a displaced persons camp in Austria.
Throughout his illustrious career – which included stints as a political reporter, foreign correspondent in London and Washington, senior editor at Time Magazine and editor-in-chief of The Age – Gawenda was "determined not to be a Jewish journalist," he writes in his memoir. Although his ethnicity was widely known, he never wore it on his sleeve.
That Gawenda no longer exists. Over the years, he has grown increasingly attached to Israel, which he now views as central to both Jewish identity and the Jewish story of the past century. He credits the beginning of his turnaround to his discovery of Israeli literature, which gave him a window into a society whose language he doesn't speak – to his great regret.
Gawenda visited Israel for the first time in his 30s as a young reporter, in what would become a transformative experience. "I came to see Israel as the center of the Jewish world," he recalls.
He says he was "already a lover of Israel" when he led The Age from 1997 to 2004, but in recent years has found himself increasingly alienated from the significant sections of the left who are hostile to the Jewish state – a feeling that has only been reinforced since October 7.
"Jews like me, who all their lives have been part of the left, no longer feel welcome on the left," Gawenda notes. In some ways, this was true for him even before October 7.
Indeed, his memoir is in large part a chronicle of how he came to fall out of love with the political movement that raised him – large parts of which, he wrote a few weeks after the Gaza war started, "have come to regard Jews as white supremacists, supporters of colonialism and racism – that is apart from good Jews who are declared anti-Zionists."
"I think my book was sort of prophetic about the left," he reflects today.
But it's not just the non-Jewish left with which Gawenda takes issue. He has found himself similarly frustrated by the inability of many left-wing Jews, including many of his childhood friends, to unequivocally condemn the horrors of October 7 – in what he calls "a sort of anxious silence."
As a young activist in the Bund movement, he recounts, his opposition to the Jewish state "was not an anti-Zionism that threatened the existence of Israel." By contrast, he believes today's anti-Zionists are "fundamentally in favor of the elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish state – whether that is by force or by some pie in the sky idea that, in the end, Israelis will be convinced that their future is in some sort of Palestinian state where Jews are a minority."
The Australian media, Gawenda charges, has also been impacted by a creeping ideological opposition to Zionism. Last November, he resigned from Australia's Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance after its national media section endorsed a letter, which, among other demands, called on Australian newsrooms to "give adequate coverage to credible allegations of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid," and "provide historical context when referencing the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel."
For him, this is part of a broader, deeply disturbing explosion of anti-Jewish sentiment in Australian public life over the past 10 months. From chants of "Fuck the Jews" at the Sydney Opera House on October 9 to, more recently, an employee at a major Australian stationery store refusing to laminate a page of The Australian Jewish News because she is pro-Palestinian, Gawenda has been shocked by the public explosion of antisemitism.
A placard calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "the butcher of Gaza," during a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney last October.
"If you told me these things were going to happen 10 years ago, I would have said no, that's not possible, that's unimaginable," he says. "The world has changed."
Gawenda's family history may explain his concerns about this moment in Jewish history. In August 1939, his parents fled the Polish city of Lodz with their two daughters, spending the next six years in Siberia. Many of his parents' loved ones, Gawenda recalls, perished in the Lodz ghetto and Chelmno extermination camp. After the war, his family ended up in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria – where he was born – before moving to Melbourne some three years later. He still lives in the southeast Australian city, which is home to over 40,000 Jews.
During his years at the helm of The Age, which coincided with the breakdown of the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, Gawenda says he did not feel compromised as a Jew harboring a special attachment to Israel.
"I did not lie awake at night wondering whether the fact that I was Jewish meant I was pushing the paper's coverage of Israel and Palestine in any particular direction," he writes in his memoir.
Still, there were moments when his Jewishness was forced on him by others – most notably in 2002, when he refused to run a cartoon by the renowned cartoonist Michael Leunig.
Leunig, whom Gawenda describes in his book as a friend, drew a cartoon comparing Auschwitz to Palestinian refugee camps. Along with Gawenda, The Age's Opinion editor and other senior editors agreed that describing Israelis as the new Nazis "was at best based on ignorance and at worst was an act of bad faith," and was not appropriate for a leading Australian paper to publish, he recounted in the memoir.
Gawenda was shocked by the public outcry that followed. "I was not prepared for a debate that was almost wholly about the fact that I was a Jew, based on the assumption that the fact that I was a Jew had caused me to spike the cartoon of one of Australia's living treasures," he writes in his book.
Now he is retired from journalism and has the luxury of being a more outspoken defender of Israel, he is still no fan of what he calls the country's "appalling government" and its "appalling prime minister," Benjamin Netanyahu. Having brought the likes of extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich into power, Gawenda believes that, ultimately, "Netanyahu will go down in Israeli history as probably the worst prime minister the country ever had."
Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, left, and Bezalel Smotrich, who were brought into power by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2022.
He can't say whether he is optimistic about the future of Australian Jewry. While he believes that "most people have either neutral or good feelings towards Jews," the sudden, widespread emergence of antisemitism in Australia – and the lackluster response from the authorities – has left him literally shaken. In July, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said reports of antisemitic incidents are 400 to 500 percent higher than before the conflict began in October.
"I worry that we've crossed some lines that won't be easy to pull back from," Gawenda says.
But while he may not know what the future holds for his fellow Jewish Australians, he is at peace with his own Jewish identity. In his memoir, Gawenda questions what being Jewish means for him, given that for most of his life he was a leftist, secular Jew. Today, he says he finally has an answer.
"What it means for me is that I am committed to Jewish continuity. I want my kids to be Jews [he has a son and a daughter]. I want my grandchildren to be Jews. And that means I want to do whatever I can, which includes educating myself about what it means to be Jewish."
By Josh Feldman
Australian writer Michael Gawenda, author of "My Life as a Jew."
For Michael Gawenda, one of Australia's best-known journalists and a former self-proclaimed 'anti-Zionist Bundist,' October 7 was a wake-up call. With the spike in antisemitism in his homeland, particularly among groups he used to see as allies, he is concerned for Australia's Jews
As the first Jewish editor-in-chief of The Age, one of Australia's leading newspapers, Michael Gawenda was a trailblazer in his time. Today, though, he suspects his candidacy would raise concerns if he was vying for a top job in Australian journalism.
"Most newspapers have enough issues with their journalists without having to deal with the perception that a Zionist Jew is running them", says the retired journalist in an interview. "They wouldn't want the hassle."
Calling himself a Zionist was not always an obvious choice, as Gawenda writes in his memoir "My Life as a Jew," published just four days before the October 7 massacre in southern Israel.
In fact, growing up he identified as an "anti-Zionist Bundist" and was active in the youth movement affiliated with this secular Yiddishist ideology. For him and his fellow Bundists, creating a Jewish state was not the answer to antisemitism. Rather, they believed the only solution to antisemitism "was a coming brotherhood of man where all people were treated equally," Gawenda says.
"We thought once there was a socialist paradise, antisemitism would disappear," adds the 77-year-old, who was born in a displaced persons camp in Austria.
'Prophetic'
Throughout his illustrious career – which included stints as a political reporter, foreign correspondent in London and Washington, senior editor at Time Magazine and editor-in-chief of The Age – Gawenda was "determined not to be a Jewish journalist," he writes in his memoir. Although his ethnicity was widely known, he never wore it on his sleeve.
That Gawenda no longer exists. Over the years, he has grown increasingly attached to Israel, which he now views as central to both Jewish identity and the Jewish story of the past century. He credits the beginning of his turnaround to his discovery of Israeli literature, which gave him a window into a society whose language he doesn't speak – to his great regret.
Gawenda visited Israel for the first time in his 30s as a young reporter, in what would become a transformative experience. "I came to see Israel as the center of the Jewish world," he recalls.
He says he was "already a lover of Israel" when he led The Age from 1997 to 2004, but in recent years has found himself increasingly alienated from the significant sections of the left who are hostile to the Jewish state – a feeling that has only been reinforced since October 7.
"Jews like me, who all their lives have been part of the left, no longer feel welcome on the left," Gawenda notes. In some ways, this was true for him even before October 7.
Indeed, his memoir is in large part a chronicle of how he came to fall out of love with the political movement that raised him – large parts of which, he wrote a few weeks after the Gaza war started, "have come to regard Jews as white supremacists, supporters of colonialism and racism – that is apart from good Jews who are declared anti-Zionists."
"I think my book was sort of prophetic about the left," he reflects today.
But it's not just the non-Jewish left with which Gawenda takes issue. He has found himself similarly frustrated by the inability of many left-wing Jews, including many of his childhood friends, to unequivocally condemn the horrors of October 7 – in what he calls "a sort of anxious silence."
As a young activist in the Bund movement, he recounts, his opposition to the Jewish state "was not an anti-Zionism that threatened the existence of Israel." By contrast, he believes today's anti-Zionists are "fundamentally in favor of the elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish state – whether that is by force or by some pie in the sky idea that, in the end, Israelis will be convinced that their future is in some sort of Palestinian state where Jews are a minority."
'The world has changed'
The Australian media, Gawenda charges, has also been impacted by a creeping ideological opposition to Zionism. Last November, he resigned from Australia's Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance after its national media section endorsed a letter, which, among other demands, called on Australian newsrooms to "give adequate coverage to credible allegations of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid," and "provide historical context when referencing the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel."
For him, this is part of a broader, deeply disturbing explosion of anti-Jewish sentiment in Australian public life over the past 10 months. From chants of "Fuck the Jews" at the Sydney Opera House on October 9 to, more recently, an employee at a major Australian stationery store refusing to laminate a page of The Australian Jewish News because she is pro-Palestinian, Gawenda has been shocked by the public explosion of antisemitism.
A placard calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "the butcher of Gaza," during a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney last October.
"If you told me these things were going to happen 10 years ago, I would have said no, that's not possible, that's unimaginable," he says. "The world has changed."
Gawenda's family history may explain his concerns about this moment in Jewish history. In August 1939, his parents fled the Polish city of Lodz with their two daughters, spending the next six years in Siberia. Many of his parents' loved ones, Gawenda recalls, perished in the Lodz ghetto and Chelmno extermination camp. After the war, his family ended up in a displaced persons camp in Linz, Austria – where he was born – before moving to Melbourne some three years later. He still lives in the southeast Australian city, which is home to over 40,000 Jews.
During his years at the helm of The Age, which coincided with the breakdown of the Oslo Accords and the second intifada, Gawenda says he did not feel compromised as a Jew harboring a special attachment to Israel.
"I did not lie awake at night wondering whether the fact that I was Jewish meant I was pushing the paper's coverage of Israel and Palestine in any particular direction," he writes in his memoir.
Still, there were moments when his Jewishness was forced on him by others – most notably in 2002, when he refused to run a cartoon by the renowned cartoonist Michael Leunig.
Leunig, whom Gawenda describes in his book as a friend, drew a cartoon comparing Auschwitz to Palestinian refugee camps. Along with Gawenda, The Age's Opinion editor and other senior editors agreed that describing Israelis as the new Nazis "was at best based on ignorance and at worst was an act of bad faith," and was not appropriate for a leading Australian paper to publish, he recounted in the memoir.
Gawenda was shocked by the public outcry that followed. "I was not prepared for a debate that was almost wholly about the fact that I was a Jew, based on the assumption that the fact that I was a Jew had caused me to spike the cartoon of one of Australia's living treasures," he writes in his book.
Crossing the line
Now he is retired from journalism and has the luxury of being a more outspoken defender of Israel, he is still no fan of what he calls the country's "appalling government" and its "appalling prime minister," Benjamin Netanyahu. Having brought the likes of extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich into power, Gawenda believes that, ultimately, "Netanyahu will go down in Israeli history as probably the worst prime minister the country ever had."
Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir, left, and Bezalel Smotrich, who were brought into power by Benjamin Netanyahu in 2022.
He can't say whether he is optimistic about the future of Australian Jewry. While he believes that "most people have either neutral or good feelings towards Jews," the sudden, widespread emergence of antisemitism in Australia – and the lackluster response from the authorities – has left him literally shaken. In July, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said reports of antisemitic incidents are 400 to 500 percent higher than before the conflict began in October.
"I worry that we've crossed some lines that won't be easy to pull back from," Gawenda says.
But while he may not know what the future holds for his fellow Jewish Australians, he is at peace with his own Jewish identity. In his memoir, Gawenda questions what being Jewish means for him, given that for most of his life he was a leftist, secular Jew. Today, he says he finally has an answer.
"What it means for me is that I am committed to Jewish continuity. I want my kids to be Jews [he has a son and a daughter]. I want my grandchildren to be Jews. And that means I want to do whatever I can, which includes educating myself about what it means to be Jewish."
