The Australian, 11 May 2026
Jewish artists tell royal commission how boycott campaigns and doxxing stunted careers
By James Dowling
From 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.
“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.”