I was doxxed for being in a WhatsApp group.
Not a political organisation. Not a protest movement. A private group of Jewish Australians sharing how frightened and grief-stricken we felt after October 7. Someone found it, extracted my personal information, and shared it publicly. The threats followed.
Then came an incident in a public domain in Melbourne. On a school excursion, my daughter was called a "dirty Jew" by another student from another school at the Melbourne Museum. She’s a child.
My kids won’t wear Jewish jewellery or religious symbols in public. They made that decision themselves. They didn’t need to be told. We are proud of our Jewishness, but I respect them.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, the doxxing, the threats, the watching my children edit their visible identity for their own safety, a thought crept in my mind while watching the witnesses this week at the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion that I’m almost ashamed to admit.
Does anyone actually still care about antisemitism anymore? Or the Holocaust?
And then, almost immediately: is the fact that I’m even asking that question the most telling thing of all?
The Numbers First, Because They’re Impossible to Ignore
Those who know me, know I love my numbers, it’s just my thing, being a consumer insights and marketing strategy professional. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s 2023 Report recorded 6,552 antisemitic incidents: the highest in Australian history. A 316% increase on the previous year. Not a spike. A detonation.
Jewish schools needed police escorts. Synagogues hired private security. A Jewish-owned restaurant in Sydney was firebombed. Students at Australian universities described feeling physically unsafe identifying as Jewish on campus - not in 1938, not in 1942 - in 2024, in Melbourne, in Sydney, in Brisbane.
The Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has heard testimony that makes this viscerally real: the Jewish student who stopped wearing her Star of David on campus. The family who removed the mezuzah from their front door. An entire community quietly, systematically making themselves smaller and less visible.
Sound familiar? It should.
We Are a Community of Survivors’ Children. That Is Not a Metaphor.
For a significant portion of Australian Jews, the Holocaust is not distant history. It is one, maybe two generations away. It lives in our grandparents’ silence. In the names that simply stop, mid-family-tree, somewhere in Poland or Hungary or Romania.
Rachel Yehuda’s landmark research demonstrated that trauma is inherited epigenetically - that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors show measurable differences in stress response and anxiety patterns. This is not psychology as metaphor. This is biology. This is what intergenerational trauma actually means, written into the body at a cellular level.
So, when someone calls my daughter a dirty Jew at the Melbourne Museum, the response in our community is not disproportionate. It is the entirely logical activation of a nervous system that has been encoding this specific threat for three generations.
That is not weakness. That is traumatised wisdom.
But Then the Doubt Creeps In
And yet, and this is the part nobody wants to say out loud, I find myself wondering. Are we drawing on the Holocaust too much? Are people tired of hearing about it? Does it make us look like we can’t move forward?
I suspect I’m not alone in this. I suspect this thought visits a lot of Jewish Australians at 2am and gets quickly suppressed out of guilt and loyalty to memory.
But here’s what I’ve come to think: that doubt didn’t come from nowhere. It was cultivated.
Let’s Talk About Gaslighting
One of the most sophisticated tools of modern antisemitism is not Holocaust denial. Denial is crude. Denial is easily refuted. The more elegant weapon is this: making Jewish people feel embarrassed about remembering.
Making us ask, are we too much? Making us internalise the exhaustion of others. Making us wonder if our trauma is legitimate or performed or politically inconvenient. Making a Jewish Australian mother - who was doxxed for grieving privately in a WhatsApp group - wonder fleetingly whether her community’s pain is still worth the world’s attention.
The Holocaust has been filtered through decades of cultural machinery. Hollywood sentimentality. Social media reduction into infographics and Reels. Bad faith reframing by anti-Zionist groups who have worked systematically to recast Holocaust memory as political manipulation rather than historical record. The cumulative effect is that for many non-Jewish Australians, the Holocaust has become cultural wallpaper - background noise from a Year 10 excursion.
Meanwhile the actual ideologies that produced it, the dehumanisation, the conspiracy theories, the scapegoating, are not wallpaper. They are alive in Australian streets, campuses, and comment sections. They are in the DMs I received after I was doxxed. They were in the mouth of the student who spat words to my daughter.
So, when I ask "is my community seen as weak for not moving on?" I have to ask myself: who benefits from me thinking that way?
The answer is not comfortable.
We Have Seen This Film Before
Drawing on Holocaust memory is not nostalgia. It is not an inability to move forward. It is the rational response of a community that has seen this film before and is urgently, desperately trying to tell everyone around them how it ends.
The strength in Holocaust memory isn’t grief. It’s pattern recognition. And right now, in Australia, the pattern is visible to anyone willing to look - in the record-breaking antisemitism statistics, in the Royal Commission testimony, in my daughter’s bare neck where a Star of David used to hang.
We are not weak for remembering. We are not dramatic for drawing connections. We are a community doing what traumatised communities do when the threat that shaped them comes back around: we recognise it. We name it. We refuse to be quiet about it.
Even when, especially when, we’ve been carefully encouraged to wonder if we should be.
So here’s what I want to ask you - Jewish or not, whatever your politics:
If Holocaust remembrance and education were truly working, if the lessons had genuinely landed, would Jewish Australian children currently be taking off their jewellery before they leave the house? And if the answer is no, it clearly isn’t working, then whose interests are really served by telling us we’ve said enough?
Sources: Executive Council of Australian Jewry Antisemitism Report 2023; Rachel Yehuda, Mount Sinai Hospital; Australian Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion 2024-2025