My aunt was buried last Friday, the last of her generation in my family. We were not close but out of respect for her son, my cousin, I went along to the service.
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Jewish services for the dead are Spartan yet comforting. There are no endless eulogies, just a brief summary of the facts as we know them.
My aunt and her sister were marched to Ravensbruck sometime in 1943. I never knew much of the detail nor did we get them last Friday. My own parents, like so many Holocaust survivors, did not wish to remember. Another aunt had tattooed numbers on her forearm but we didn't speak about that either. Still, that detail and the effect of the Holocaust, were embedded in my life. As a young girl, I was rarely out of my mother's sight. Then, when my own eldest daughter was 10, she had to write a history of an elderly relative. I left the two of them to it. And two hours later, I returned to a 10-year-old daughter changed forever.
All these memories came flooding back as I sat through the service.
Just two minutes from the end, the kindly rabbi asked us not to congregate on the footpath while my aunt's coffin was delivered to the hearse. He said something like, the council thinks it's a security risk. That morning, I'd read a news report that said the same local council had banned construction of a synagogue in Sydney's Bondi because it could be a terrorist target. This week, I'm reading insane commentary about that decision.
We are security risks. When I told both Muslim and Jewish friends I was writing this, they all had their stories. Stopped incessantly at airports. Frisked. Stopped again. A friend who is Jewish but doesn't "look" Jewish is constantly being asked to show identification at her child's school.
Over centuries, Jews have been marginalised. Our Muslim siblings experience the same. We are being made different and even our places of worship aren't safe. Instead of banding together, there's a continued attempt to set us against each other; assisted by people who would never consider themselves racist. They don't know history or politics but they are deadset allies of brown people. At least the ones they can tell are brown. Sounds more like Andrew Bolt than I care to imagine.
Here are three actual events in my life. One young woman telling me Asian Australians never experienced the level of racism that Muslim Australians currently experience (but of course she mustn't have studied the White Australia policy). Another young woman assures me "non white" people are more aware of microracisms but refuses to acknowledge anyone else's experience. And a third "ally" suggests that "people of colour" are the only ones who experience what culture studies theorists call Othering. These are people in their 20s and 30s who say these things.
But this is not about my right to say I experience racism – it's about what we need to do to fight it. And fight it we must if Australia is to make itself whole again, to atone for the bitter lives of Indigenous Australians, to stop the murder on Manus, to ensure we have an Australia where Jews and Muslims and whoever else wants to, can farewell their relatives in peace.
Sociologist James Arvanitakis says we must stop looking for ways to be divided. He wrote a brilliant but quite academic article eight years ago about alleged hierarchies of hurt – but I spoke to him this week to see if anything had changed in all that time.
Only that the need to be united is greater.
"We all carry prejudices but it's how we react to those prejudices which is important. Do we give in to them or do we fight them?"
And if we fight those prejudices, how do we do that best? He says we need to have conversations about our institutions and how those institutions prepare us for living together. He's talking schools and churches, synagogues and mosques.
"And let's not pitch one group against another. We are in this together, we need to find a way to negotiate."
But of course, the first response I see to the banned synagogue is from the Zionist Federation of Australia, imploring others to stop the hate of Jews. And this will only ever work if we stop the hate of everyone.
I was introduced to the work of American anthropologist Karen Brodkin, author of How Jews Became White Folks, earlier this year. Now, 20 years since she wrote the book on erasing difference, she's rethinking her groundbreaking work because she has seen such dramatic divisive tactics used in the United States.
"Many have pointed out the chilling parallels between the values and world views of the old eugenicists and those of Trump and his supporters. Not least is Trump's belief that his success comes from good genetics. So, too, are the overt welcomes and dog whistles to racists, xenophobes, misogynists and homophobes expressed by many of his followers, key advisers and Cabinet picks. To many, Trump's plan to impose a compulsory registry for all Muslims echoes Hitler and yellow stars."
But she concludes by saying this:
"Twenty years later, in North Carolina, a friend told me that many white Southerners still didn't see Jews as white. Again, this didn't really bother me. These folks, I thought, just didn't know any better.
"Today, I'd think differently. We need to challenge all bigotry, not least by building inclusiveness and democracy every chance we get."
Yep. I'm not more hurt than you. I'm just hurt. As we all are when racism explodes.
Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a Fairfax Media columnist.
