2025/01/01 by Suzanne Rutland · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #German legal, social, and political studies #Jewish Identity and Society #Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.55803/j185w
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/11/06 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/07
For Jewish students and staff on Australian campuses, the almost immediate upsurge of antisemitism and anti-Jewish attacks in the response to the 7 October Hamas massacre in southern Israel was highly distressing. The attack stands as one of the most traumatic events in modern Jewish history since the Holocaust. Over 1,193 were murdered on that day, with 251 being taken as hostage. As Bar-Halpern and Wolfman stress, the trauma created within the Jewish community was triggered not only by ‘the events themselves, but also from the response of others in the aftermath’. Despite the brutality and atrocities of this pogrom, for Jewish people worldwide, the response of glorifying Hamas and blaming Israel for the attack lifted a veil on age-old antisemitism, also known as Jew-hatred, breaking inhibitions and allowing this oldest hatred to resurface in stark and unsettling ways.