A new grassroots study of Jewish Australians challenges the government-backed antisemitism report, exposing contradictions in its methodology and conclusions.<\/p>\n
In November 2025, research commissioned by <\/p>\n
Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism<\/a> (ASECA) \u2013 which this author <\/p>\n reviewed in detail<\/a> \u2013 became the basis for a sweeping government response: $159.5 million in security funding, an Antisemitism Education Taskforce, university \u2018report cards\u2019, visa cancellation powers, and the official adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism.<\/p>\n This week, a very different report appeared. <\/p>\n Not in Our Name: Jewish Australians Speak Out<\/a>, by Dr Leia Greenslade and Professor Linda Briskman, presents findings from a survey of 384 Jewish Australians and 30 in-depth interviews with those who oppose Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories.<\/p>\n Read together, the two documents reveal a contest over who gets to define antisemitism, Jewish identity, and the limits of speech in Australia. What they also reveal is that the government\u2019s report does not withstand scrutiny \u2013 including from its own pages.<\/p>\n The ASECA report uses a \u2018Generalised Antisemitism Scale\u2019 that aggregates prejudice against Jewish people and political opposition to the Israeli state into a single metric, treating both as antisemitic per the IHRA definition. The instrument assumes anti-Zionist attitudes are antisemitic before it begins measuring, then discovers widespread antisemitism. The circularity is structural.<\/p>\n But the report\u2019s most damaging flaw is that its own qualitative findings refute its quantitative framework. On page 7, focus group participants \u201cdid not perceive Jewish individuals as collectively responsible for the actions of the Israeli government.\u201d On page 8: \u201cmany participants expressed support for Jewish communities while also criticising the actions of the Israeli state.\u201d On page 10, the conclusions state it plainly: \u201cAustralians consistently draw a distinction between the Australian Jewish community and the actions of the Israeli government.\u201d<\/p>\n The report records this distinction three times and then overrides it with a measurement tool that erases it. It classifies respondents\u2019 ability to separate a people from a state as a \u201cknowledge gap.\u201d The only way this works is if knowledge is defined as agreement with the position that anti-Zionism is antisemitism \u2013 a political stance, not an empirical finding.<\/p>\n The report\u2019s own data table deepens the problem. The gap between its two subscales is largest among students (0.50) and youngest adults (0.49), and smallest among older cohorts \u2013 evidence that education drives political opposition to Israel while leaving prejudice against Jewish people stable. Rather than address this, the report folds both into a single score and concludes that universities incubate antisemitism. This is the evidentiary basis for the recommendation to <\/p>\n defund non-compliant universities<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Not in Our Name respondents are 85 per cent university-educated \u2013 the very population the ASECA report classifies as most antisemitic. Yet here are Jewish Australians, raised in Zionist households, educated in Jewish schools, who have arrived at the same conclusions as the students the ASECA report pathologises.<\/p>\n Their dissent is not born of ignorance. One participant, Dale, describes growing up \u201cas a Zionist\u201d before it \u201cunravelled when I went back to Israel at 19 and joined the army.\u201d Another, Esther, traces a process of learning about \u201cstructural oppression and colonialism.\u201d Lori, in her fifties, describes joining anti-Zionist Jewish groups and \u201cmaking connections with the Jewish community probably for the first time.\u201d These are people who have deepened their Jewishness, not abandoned it. As Leanne puts it: \u201cI\u2019ve never felt so connected to Jewish people in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n On antisemitism, Not in Our Name respondents offer a contextual explanation the ASECA report refuses to provide. They link rising antisemitism to Israel\u2019s military actions rather than treating it as a free-floating pathology. As Lesley observes: \u201cevery time Israel goes to war there\u2019s an increase in antisemitism\u2026and this war has been so extreme that there\u2019s a more extreme reaction.\u201d Several identify a mechanism the ASECA framework cannot see: the institutional insistence on conflating Judaism with the Israeli state itself generates the backlash it claims to measure.<\/p>\n The personal data is telling: 48 per cent of Not in Our Name respondents reported no increase in personal encounters with antisemitism since October 7. Only 14 per cent identified their educational institution as a source. Some reported more abuse from within the Jewish community than from outside it. As Noah observes: \u201cI\u2019ve seen way more anti-Semitic slurs coming from Zionist Jews than I\u2019ve seen from even the neo-Nazis.\u201d<\/p>\n The recommendations from each report make the political stakes explicit. The ASECA apparatus prescribes surveillance and punishment: funding cuts, media monitoring, an Education Taskforce from early childhood to university, and a hate crimes database built on the IHRA definition.<\/p>\n The Not in Our Name report recommends fostering pluralism within Jewish institutions, diversifying curricula to include Palestinian perspectives, and grounding ethical inquiry in Jewish values \u2013 Tikkun Olam (Repair the world), Chesed (Loving kindness), Tzedek (Justice). One sees dissent as a disease. The other sees it as a tradition.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that the <\/p>\n