Two new post-Gaza works on Judaism show radically different ways of responding to the transformation and ambitions of Zionism in our time, and the claims it makes on Jewish identity.
Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch (eds), Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7 (Lamm Jewish Library, 2025).
Marilyn Garson, Jewish Not Zionist (Interventions, 2025).
Speaking and writing as a Jew has become a dangerous act.
Lee Kofmann and Tamar Paluch, Ruptured
The Jewish community has been captured and ruptured by Zionism.
Marilyn Garson, Jewish Not Zionist
How is a non-Jewish reader to fairly read accounts of what it means to be Jewish and what Judaism means after 7 October and the Gaza genocide? Lacking cultural memory of the Nazi holocaust and lived experience of anti-Semitism, as well as indoctrination by one of the most sophisticated propaganda apparatuses ever assembled, one will inevitably wince at the centring of individual feelings in the face of unspeakable evil. However, recalling one’s own grief and rage—the insignificance of one’s own individual feelings—should remind one of the humility that in turn should be afforded those seeking to come to terms with what one’s Jewishness is when Judaism has been weaponised to justify mass slaughter. It is also fair, however, for a reader to note whether Palestinians are present not only as victims of Zionism but as fully human subjects whose material culture extends before and beyond the Zionist project. A straightforward recognition of common humanity, grounded in accounts of Marilyn Garson’s time in Gaza between 2011 and 2015, runs like a clear crystal stream through Jewish Not Zionist.The same cannot be said of Ruptured, a collection of thirty-six essays by Australian Jewish women about Jewish identity post-October 7.
Ruptured offers thirty-seven variations on a theme. Anticipating the variations to follow, its introduction details an archetypal example of the dangerous act of speaking and writing as a Jew:
‘When I spoke up online, I faced abuse, daily,’ writes one of our contributors, the actress, singer and dancer Dena Amy Kaplan. ‘I lost half of my following on Instagram. I lost friends—many of them. I lost work opportunities, and my career stalled.’ As a result, she ‘stopped speaking out publicly about Israel and being Jewish because I couldn’t handle the emotional toll… It was no longer safe for me to be Jewish in the public eye…’
Online abuse can be debilitating, and speaking up for Israel doubtless took a toll on Kaplan. Even so, her career is progressing smoothly: she was recently welcomed onto Channel 7’s Morning Show to promote her Life Academy podcast, and maintains a large social media following and public profile. If speaking up online and identifying as Jewish in public, or rather to a particular public, is dangerous, it is certainly safer to speak from the pages of a best-selling book.
‘I have no words,’ says a well-known novelist when we invite her to write an essay about how her life has changed since the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, the subsequent Israel-Hamas war and the explosion of anti-Semitism globally. ‘I’ve not written a thing since October 7.’ She, the wordsmith, has had no words for over a year now.
A well-known novelist has no words, and a collection of essays begins with an absence that is also a miniature ekphrasis, effectively a description by absence. There is a literal and immediate correspondence between Ruptured’s front cover and its very first paragraph. The one-dimensional plane of inscription, where written words attain intelligibility, has been violently and permanently torn. The ‘I’ cannot write; the wordsmith has no words because the page is gone. With it goes the possibility of cultural legitimacy, both historical and quotidian.
Immediately, though, the ‘I’ is mediated by a collective ‘we’, and words pour out into the ruptured space.
There is a feeling among contributors that even the language itself has been ruptured. ‘The meaning of words I thought I understood is gutted,’ writes psychiatrist Lynette Chazan. ‘Multiple dizzying inversions are on repeat. Islamist terrorists are freedom fighters. Jewish refugees from Europe and the Middle East returning to their ancestral homeland are colonisers.’ We hope that this anthology can become one step towards our reclaiming of the words and concepts currently used against our community.
Mere paragraphs into Ruptured’s Introduction, it’s clear that Sutured would be just as apt a title, with ekphrasis describing presence rather than absence. Behind the violated page is another page, and the book is a testament to the cultural power and institutional legitimacy of Zionism, the political ideology upheld by all of Ruptured’s contributors. The adjective ‘powerful’ inevitably features in promotions or online summaries of Ruptured, and praise from the crème de la crème of Australian centrist progressivism—Van Badham, Nova Peris AM, Julie McCrossin AM—adorns its cover and inner sleeves.
By contrast, Jewish Not Zionist is partly an account of Garson’s exclusion from mainstream Jewish institutions in Aotearoa/New Zealand. As in Ruptured, there are multiple accounts of hate speech and threats of violence, yet despite ‘an embodied emotional distress’ Garson terms ‘shul-shock’, exile strengthens her faith. Garson’s insight that ‘being hated is still a way of being in relation’ echoes Jacqueline Rose’s analysis of Zionism as ‘a child of the psyche, a dream…You cannot have an argument with a dream.’ The insight also highlights two distinct cultural tendencies amongst a broadly progressive Jewish public post-October 7, from veteran anti-Zionists to those who have repudiated Zionism during the genocide to ‘liberal Zionists’ who feel, as Ruptured contributor Sharonne Blum puts it, ‘detached from the progressive universe I once called home’. Both confront a dialectic between their faith and/or culture and the Israeli state—officially synonymous with Judaism via Zionism—which has realised its incipient genocidal potential.
Garson belongs to the group whose struggle is to redeem and reform their religion after a majority of its institutions have either supported or been complicit by silence in genocide. Her writing is unadorned and down-to-earth; despite some repetitions and stylistic awkwardness, she expresses her intertwined spiritual and political positions with conviction and courage. Occasionally, more clarity would have been ideal: ‘community’, for example, is employed throughout but never defined. Yet Garson doesn’t claim to be an academic, or even an activist: like Peter Beinart in his recent Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, Garson humbly and thoroughly addresses the dialectical complexity of a Judaism that furnishes essential needs—spirituality, belonging, tradition—and the necessity of Judaism’s separation from Zionism and accountability for the Gaza genocide as well as 75 years of oppression in Palestine. Jewish Not Zionist is a compelling contribution to a growing literature about what Judaism might be and what Jews might do—’neither replicate Jewish exceptionalism nor abandon Judaism’—after a genocide committed by a Jewish state.
The cultural tendency represented by Ruptured seeks to reconcile Zionism and the Israeli state with a broadly progressive politics. Needless to say, it fails—it has been decades since Zionism could be considered ‘progressive’ in a meaningful way. One could generously argue that the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 was also the death of liberal Zionism as a set of political ‘facts on the ground’. Yet it is not only Jews who contribute to this tendency; indeed, Jews are a minority. Most Australian media, cultural and academic institutions remain committed to ‘liberal Zionism’, an ideological fiction Ruptured exemplifies. Palestinians and Gaza appear only as ciphers; contributors resolutely centre their own suffering. While one would expect a reasonably thorough liberal feminism to underpin the collection, it also fails to coherently articulate this politics, instead defaulting to an identitarian individualism that allows contributors to assemble ‘Zionism’, ‘feminism’, ‘anti-Semitism’, etc. as befits their unique subjectivity.
Ruptured features contributions from psychologists/psychoanalysts, journalists, writers, artists and teachers. Common to all is the conflation of antisemitism with anti-Zionism, solidarity with Palestinians and moral repugnance at genocide. This is a shame, to say the least, although unsurprising; it also renders the collection dull and monotonous, hollowing out the potential for insight by turning the gaze resolutely inward. More interesting is the martial language that occurs throughout. Blum’s alienation from her progressive universe coincides with ‘becoming more myself every day and finding a new community of fellow warriors’. Further, Blum is ‘also training them—arming them with the tools they need to find their voice and defend their people’. Author Joanne Fedler tempers martiality with spirituality, praying for ‘protection for the young men fighting on all fronts’. She finds it ‘tough to look at social media feeds showing the ruined lives of the civilians in Gaza’; her ‘heart aches for all the human suffering unleashed by war’. Here, Fedler speaks clearly to the impossibility of retaining a common humanity and a commitment to Zionism: ‘I used to be the first to call out injustice and bear the brunt of speaking the truth. But I don’t know any more what is true and so I am mute.’
It is notable that military metaphors abound precisely where the scant references to Gaza or Palestinians are materially present. Former Age journalist Julie Szego wears her Star of David necklace ‘as battle-gear in what will be a long, long war’ after acknowledging her distress at Hind Rajab, ‘found dead in Gaza’. Szego then shifts gears slightly, writing that ‘some women now sense an invisible barrier separating them from most other Australians, those without personal ties to the war’. According to the 2021 census, Palestinian Australians number at least 15,000. Whether of Lebanese, Syrian, Yemeni or Iranian background, at least 218,830 Australians have a personal tie to a country that Israel has bombed since October 7. Although these individuals obviously don’t share a monolithic view of recent or historical events in West Asia, it is reasonable to assume that many have been personally affected by the violence inflicted by Israel since October 7, and in most cases long before. A significant minority of Australians also experience barriers that separate them from others; unlike in Szego’s case, these barriers tend to be visible and impermeable, concretely experienced as well as sensed.
Olympian Jemima Montag contributes a rare piece in a different register. Montag wears ‘Nana’s Bracelet’, a refashioned gold necklace worn by her Holocaust-surviving grandmother, during races. Journalists ask her about it at athletics championships, and she is happy to describe the strength she feels as it moves up and down her arm. After October 7, she is reluctant to speak about the bracelet and her grandmother’s experiences, and decides to conceal her Jewish identity at the 2024 Olympics, where she wins medals in two races. Montag’s existence outside of the narrow, incestuous and typically low-stakes environment of the Australian ‘creative industries’—after all, an Olympic champion is accustomed to operating in high-stakes environments—perhaps helps her piece read as genuine and humble, fulfilling Ruptured’s ostensible aim of preserving a ‘historically significant period’, documenting ‘profound changes in our public and private lives’. ‘Nana’s Bracelet’ is refreshingly guileless: although Gaza isn’t mentioned, Israel features only in a brief reflection on the 1972 Black September attacks at the Munich Olympics. In just 1200 words, Montag weaves together personal and world history to express how October 7 has complicated her Jewish identity, via unresolved confusion and a ‘duality of fear and pride’.
Ruptured’s lowest point is probably psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Lynette Chazan’s claim that ‘many military experts say the Israel-Hamas war has the lowest civilian to combatant ratio ever achieved in urban warfare’—recall that Ruptured was published in August 2025. Chazan complains about the ‘NGOs and progressive journalists’ that defame her as a defender of genocide:
For me, as for many, or perhaps most, Jews, this moral fabric has been ripped apart like the high-tech fence the Israelis also thought was impregnable. I may be easily gaslit, but some things I do know. Australians would demand massive forces to protect us from those determined to destroy us. Progressives would discover the limits of diplomacy when it came to their own safety. Australians would not accept a ceasefire that leaves terror threats on every border. And the world would not try to stop Australia. I am no genocide supporter.
Garson has no need to rely on distortions of reality. Although Jewish Not Zionist is a combination of autobiography, collectively written blog posts, speeches, manifestos and accounts of personal connections to Judaism—not unlike the micro-autobiographies, spiritual and secular testimonials and personal manifestos that comprise Ruptured—there is no obfuscation, nor conflation of October 7 and the Nazi Holocaust. What’s more, Palestinians are present as agentic human beings. Compare one of the few other mentions of Palestinians in Ruptured, from author and playwright Elise Esther Hearst:
I knew deep in my kishkes that the onslaught of horrors in Gaza depicted in the media would impact the Jewish population in Australia, but I was floored by the extent. Were my book sales impacted? It’s hard to say. Did my theatre audiences and actors feel unsafe? Undoubtedly. Had Yentl, a multi-award-winning production, suffered from poor attendances and was it likely boycotted? Yes.
Some blank pages are best left unfilled: to speak and write fairly in a rupture is to resist both reversion to an anti-liberal friend/enemy politics and to remain committed to salvaging a common humanity from the carnage. This must be grounded in something other than liberal ideals: as Garson shows us, spiritual traditions are materially useful here.
For Jacqueline Rose, Zionism always involved a form of ‘insubordination against reality and the demands of reason…For that very reason, it permits and excuses anything.’ In Israel and outside, Zionism relies on myth and metonym to provide ideological ballast for the transfer of structural violence to its victims: Judaism and Israel for Zionism and civilisation; Palestinian for barbarian, even Nazi; and now anti-genocide for anti-Semitism. This transference is evident in the Israel that fortifies Ruptured’s Judaism; the Israel contributors take up arms to defend. Garson could be addressing them directly when she writes, ‘I no longer care what a liberal Zionist imagines that their Israel might have been. They need to reckon with the killer that their Israel is.’
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