Ep.83 How Did We Get Here? Henry Ergas on Antisemitism, History and Australia After October 7

How did Australia get here? And more importantly, how do we get out of it? In this powerful address and Q&A, historian and The Australian columnist Henry Ergas reaches back through his own Sephardic family history, the Holocaust and the writings of Hannah Arendt to ask the questions that too few Australians in positions of power are willing to confront. Drawing on centuries of Jewish history and his own family's experience, Ergas argues that the eruption of antisemitism after October 7 was not a shock or an aberration. It was the culmination of a longer trajectory that Australia's institutions, media and political class failed to recognise, name or resist. And today's relative quiet, he warns, risks producing exactly the kind of complacency that allowed things to get this bad in the first place. Topics covered in this episode: Why the post-October 7 explosion of antisemitism in Australia was not a surprise but the result of a longer and identifiable trajectory Henry Ergas's own Sephardic Jewish family history and what it reveals about the recurring patterns of Jewish experience Hannah Arendt's analysis of Jewish political strategy and why proving usefulness to governments eventually fails Why the comforting idea of Jews as the canary in the coal mine misreads history — hatred can remain concentrated on a small minority while everyone else's life continues normally The failure of every major Australian institution after October 7 and why the lack of moral courage was as damaging as the antisemitism itself The formulation that stops you in your tracks — "they came for the Jews, and then they came for the Jews again" Whether Australian Jews can continue relying on governments and institutions to protect them, or whether a fundamentally different strategy is now required This is one of the most intellectually serious and historically grounded conversations Behind The Headlines has hosted. Henry Ergas does not offer easy answers. But he asks the right questions. And as he argues, if we do not ask the right questions we will never find the right answers.