Jewish artists tell royal commission how boycott campaigns and doxxing stunted careers

By James Dowling
Read the article online at The Australian

Most Australians don’t recognise antisemitic tropes despite years of escalating violence against the Jewish community, the royal commission has been told, as Jewish artists detailed boycott campaigns that stunted their careers.

Dor Foundation chief executive Tahli Blicblau on Monday outlined how the “permissive environment” for violence formed after October 7, 2023, as the Antisemitism and Social Cohesion Royal Commission said it would use its second week of hearings to detail the frequency and shifting shape of antisemitism.

This was bolstered by the stories of musicians Deborah Conway and Joshua Moshe, who were members of a WhatsApp group doxxed in February 2024 by anti-Zionist activists and said it hampered their careers in ways they still had not recovered from.

Ms Blicblau said the Dor Foundation – a non-profit established in 2024 – had found a poor public understanding of antisemitism, and showed a declining number of Australians were willing to be friends with Jews.

She argued for a focus on education about racist tropes to “inoculate” against the development of antisemitic attitudes and made reference to an alleged antisemitic incident on Saturday when a parent allegedly shouted slurs at Jewish community leader Alex Ryvchin during a children’s netball game in Sydney.

Dor Foundation chief executive Tahli Blicblau, right. Picture: NewsWire / Damian Shaw

“By the time someone is drawing a swastika on a school or setting fire to a synagogue, it’s too late to reach them and to intervene,” she said. “We need to understand what people are saying before they act and what people are thinking before they speak, and we need to intervene early.”

Ms Blicblau, a former intelligence and NSW Crime Commission official, argued antisemitism was driven by overlapping ideologies: “radical Islam, the extreme far right, racial movements, conspiratorial ideologies and activist elements of the contemporary far left”. Protests after October 7 “set the tone for a permissive environment in which glorifying violence was accepted and permissible”, she said.

“Evidence suggests it had been rising for at least a decade, along with the rise of political and conspiratorial movements and social media,” she said.

“But what changed on the 7th of October was the speed and scale at which it took hold.”

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s research director Julie Nathan said her organisation had recorded a fivefold rise in antisemitism over the same period. She believed it was likely an underestimation and said catching the full scope of online antisemitic remarks from Australian users would be equivalent to “trying to count the stars”.

Moshe, a saxophonist once belonging to a Melburnian hip-hop/R&B group, said the impact of the 2024 doxxing was instant. He was kicked from his band and his wife’s business was targeted.

Moshe joined the WhatsApp group in November 2023. It was set up to support Jewish artists facing “hostility” and his remarks in it became part of leaked chat logs.

Moshe said his career had not rebounded since.

“I’ve lost countless performance opportunities,” he said. “I feel like I’m being held to a very different standard and I’m no longer celebrated in the way that I was prior to the doxxing.”

Moshe said his wife’s store received a threatening voicemail.

“The caller said: ‘You racist MFs better keep watching your MFing back, all us know where you are now’ basically. That message was accompanied with a photo of our son that was taken somewhere on social media,” he said.

The front of the store was covered in boycott stickers and it was vandalised on “numerous occasions”. “I was feeling extremely anxious, devastated, feeling like my life was starting to unravel,” he said. “I was fearing for my safety, I struggled to sleep.”

Conway said she had effectively “doxxed myself”, but it was magnified inadvertently, she said, by Anthony Albanese invoking her by name. “I was an out there Zionist and an out there Jew. I hadn’t hidden anything,” she said.

“The Prime Minister mentioned my name several times, perhaps because he was so shocked that someone within the coterie of the arts world that he was aware of, that he knew, maybe he’d grown up with my music or whatever, was being subjected to this kind of behaviour.

“But that was kind of like a doxxing in itself because he mentioned my name so many times in so many various interviews.”

One venue, she said, was targeted from the moment it advertised her show. “People had actually turned up to the venue and had protested, not at our show but someone else’s show. They then threatened to turn up more often if they weren’t going to pull the show,” Conway said.

“So they pulled it. I don’t blame them. I would too.”

An anonymous witness, identified as ABD, said Australia had failed to “prevent the importing of the war”, after her 15 -year-old son told the commission he had been called a “filthy penny sniffer” and a “rabid, filthy, rotten, gut-wrenching, grotesque Rabbi, yarmulke-wearing, bank-owning, iron-doming, Hashem-following Jew” by schoolmates.

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