"Ruptured" Explores Australian-Jewish Experience As Antisemitism Grows

The 36 essays that are featured in Ruptured, published in August 2025, tell the stories before the bullets at Bondi Beach. Anti-Jewish hatred kept growing while we were working on selecting and editing the essays for this collection. By mid-2024, the frontline had shifted from social media, and weekly anti-Israel protests and university encampments were becoming increasingly brazen and inflammatory. Words escalated to menacing graffiti, fire bombings, and arson, and this pattern of violence culminated in the December 2025 massacre of fifteen people at a communal Chanukkah celebration.

And so Ruptured captures the chilling trajectory of how words—and normalized hate across public and personal spheres—became tinder for violence. The stories capture the immense sense of dislocation experienced by Australian Jews, and the unravelling of our sense of security and communal safety. Some refer to incidents that made headlines, like the infamous doxxing episode, while others share accounts of bullying and harassment in creative spaces. But many of the essays reflect on the quiet struggles of everyday life, where the mundane acts of going to work, sending kids to school, or attending university have become weighted with fear and grief. 

While the source of these stories is in darkness, they strive for light. Alongside themes of angst and heartbreak emerge themes of hope, resilience, and creativity. As editors, we asked our contributors to show up fully on the page rather than seek redemptive arcs. Instead, we compiled the essays in such a way that would optimize the reading experience—ensuring moments of light and uplift among the more difficult stories.

In our introduction, we write that speaking and writing as a Jew has become a dangerous act. Indeed, our considerations around creating and promoting the book reflected that reality. Several high-profile women who were approached to contribute essays declined, citing professional concerns, and there were women who chose to withdraw their essays for fear of recriminations, where the circles they operate in were too small to afford them safety. 

Other editorial considerations included using a multi-layered editorial approach to ensure that the pieces were sound from a literary perspective, as well as ensuring that the language could not be easily taken out of context or misrepresented. These considerations were directly tied to the volatile environment we were operating in at the time. It should be noted that the horror at Bondi has, to some extent, forced the Australian government and the broader community to reckon with the reality that was stewing for such a long time, and the feelings of silence and abandonment that are key themes in the book. To this end, we will be submitting Ruptured to the unfolding Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, which was formed in the wake of Bondi. In this sense, Ruptured has also become a timely piece of evidence—capturing our stories, and also the spirit of the women-led activism that emerged among Jewish Australian women these past two and a half years.

Creating Ruptured was also a way to seek repair. Jewish women have shared how they felt seen and heard when reading Ruptured, and that it has helped them open conversations with friends and peers from beyond our community. Readers beyond our community have reached out to share how the book has helped them understand Jewish lived experience and even identify their own blind spots and knowledge gaps. While we have received some contempt, as to be expected, this has not characterised the book’s reception, affirming to us that many Australians do want to listen, learn, and seek nuance. Feeling less alone in a scary reality, as individuals and as a community, is restorative, and so this act of repair and dialogue is an important outcome for us. We hope that Ruptured can enable conversations that don't require political agreement but make room for empathy and humanization.

Ruptured is more than a tapestry of Jewish women's voices, woven together to pierce the silence that we have experienced as individuals and as a collective. It is an act of resistance and reclamation. While it tells the Australian story, global readers will see themselves on these pages—and we hope it will inspire them to write and share their own stories too.