Ashamed to Admit
Are you ashamed to admit you're not across the big issues and events affecting Jews in Australia, Israel and around the Jewish world?
In this new podcast from online publication The Jewish Independent, Your Third Cousin Tami Sussman and TJI's Dashiel Lawrence tackle the week's 'Chewiest and Jewiest' topics.
Ashamed to Admit
Episode #32 A feminist, a Zionist, an optimist and a realist, with Lynda Ben-Menashe
Powerhouse Lynda Ben-Menashe is the current president of the NCJWA (National Council Jewish Women Australia) and she joins Dash and Tami in the ATA studio to chat about her origin story, how she combated imposter syndrome and sexism in Jewish organisations, and the painful end to years of interfaith friendships because of October 7th. It’s our International Women’s Day special, and you’ll love it.
Articles aligned with this episode:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/the-sisterhoods-sickening-silence-over-hamass-sexual-atrocities
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/no-longer-cursed-but-not-quite-the-revolution-we-planned
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/shared-table-cooking-for-peace
Email your feedback and voice memos here: ashamed@thejewishindependent.com.au
Subscribe to The Jewish Independent's bi-weekly newsletter: jewishindependent.com.au
Tami and Dash on Instagram: tami_sussman_writer_celebrant and dashiel_and_pascoe
X: TJI_au
YouTube: thejewishindependentAU
Facebook: TheJewishIndependentAU
Instagram: thejewishindependent
LinkedIn: the-jewish-independent
Are you interested in issues affecting Jews in Australia, the Middle East and the world at large? But a little bit ashamed that you're barely keeping up to date.
Speaker 2:Well, you've come to the right place. I'm Dash Lawrence and, in this podcast series, your favourite third cousin, tammy Sussman, and I call on experts and each other to address all the ignorant questions that you might be too ashamed to ask.
Speaker 1:Join us as we have a good go at cutting through some seriously chewy and dewy topics.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Jewish Independent Podcast. Ashamed to Admit, Shame to admit. Hello everyone, I'm Dash Lawrence, Executive Director here at the Jewish Independent.
Speaker 1:And I'm Tammy XX, chromosome Sussman. I am woman, hear me roar, or whatever.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, go on, give me your best roar, then Deep breath out, go on.
Speaker 1:I know I'm supposed to be keeping things upbeat here, and this is our International Women's Day special.
Speaker 2:The mental load's getting you down.
Speaker 1:I don't know if I'm really feeling it this year. I'm going to start with a bit of a kvetch.
Speaker 2:Okay, go on.
Speaker 1:International Women's Day. It's commercial and tokenistic. I'm seeing brands. I'm seeing companies and organisations using the day for marketing purposes, for superficial gestures like cupcakes. I'm seeing discount codes without any real meaningful commitment to gender equality. It's like one big PR stunt. It's disingenuous. I'm all for celebrating women's achievements and discussing gender equality, but to do it for just one day feels a little bit performative, like where's the ongoing action? I want to see systematic change dash. And then there's that over-emphasis on celebrating women's achievements. Sometimes I can feel a little patronizing, especially when people aren't adequately addressing ongoing issues like wage gaps, the domestic load, mental load, gendered violence and discrimination, which just sucks, quite frankly. But I know that my role here is to keep things upbeat and I don't want listeners to switch off. So as well as providing the kvetch of the week, I'm also going to be a shame to admit. Hype or ruach girl. Do you know what a ruach girl is? Dash.
Speaker 2:Yes, I do.
Speaker 1:What is it?
Speaker 2:It's like an endorser or someone that praises others.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's also like a job. You can get paid to go to a bar about mitzvah. You get paid to go and like get everyone dancing and get the spirits up. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ruach girl, that could be a good job for you.
Speaker 1:There he goes again, trying to suggest another job for me instead of making a full-time role at Jewish Independent.
Speaker 2:You're great with the vibes, you're positive, you're funny. I would hire you to be a Ruach girl at my son's bar mitzvah.
Speaker 1:Cool. So Dash, here is me being Ruach girl.
Speaker 2:Got work to do.
Speaker 1:For International Women's Day. Okay, this is what I love about it. It serves as a platform for advocacy. It influences policy changes. It inspires collective action towards gender equality. It brings global attention to issues affecting women, such as gender inequality, violence and health disparities. Let's keep the Ruach going while we introduce our special guest for today's episode. Take it away, dash. I'm giving you the mic, it's your turn to speak and I'm not going to speak over you.
Speaker 2:Linda Ben-Menashe is the current president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia. She's worked in both Australia and Israel in education, publishing and public diplomacy. Linda served the Jewish community for 12 years, mostly through the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies.
Speaker 1:To build social cohesion in the Jewish and wider communities. Linda developed programs including the we Are All Sydney Community Leadership Program, the Shared Table Project, the Women of Diversity Dinner and study tours of Israel and Palestine for mixed groups of NGOs to examine grassroots peace building. Linda is a feminist, a Zionist, an optimist and a realist. Gentlemen, I really hope you enjoy listening to this podcast while you clean the kitchen tonight.
Speaker 2:Linda Ben-Menashe. Welcome to the Ashamed to Admit studio.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, linda. Are you able to describe for our listeners a little bit about your early life, growing up Jewish and as a woman, I'm really curious to know what unique challenges your gender or your Jewishness presented while you were growing up.
Speaker 3:Well, I had a very lucky Australian childhood. I grew up on the North Shore of Sydney. I was actually born in the inner West, so that gives me a little bit of street cred. I was born in Dulwich Hill but when I was two, my family, like many Jewish families, moved from the west and the inner west to the North Shore and I grew up in East Linfield, which was a beautiful waspy area. I went to public schools only because my parents and grandparents were very keen on the notion of public schooling and grandparents were very keen on the notion of public schooling, on Australian identity, on being part of the mainstream and contributing to the society which had hosted our community. So I was this little woggy girl in East Linfield Public School and then Kalara High School and I didn't look like the other girls. So I felt very different and certainly as a woman, absolutely outside the you know the standards of beauty. My best friend in primary school was an Armenian girl, sort of similarly Waghi, and her dad was born in Jerusalem. My dad was born in Tel Aviv and so it was. You know, it was a sort of a shared experience of being outside the cultural norm, was a sort of a shared experience of being outside the cultural norm.
Speaker 3:Yes, I experienced anti-Semitism right through school, everything from primary school can't have you over to my house because my mum says you've got a black heart and you killed Jesus through to high school where, you know, by high school time Jews were about 10%, 15 percent of the population of the school. I was head girl of my school and at the same time Bernard Cohen, who was my classmate the writer, was the head boy and that was kind of extraordinary that these two non-sporty Jewish kids became head girl and head boy of the school. But every week we had hate mail in the prefect box. Hitler didn't kill enough of you. Basically, the day we started our HSC exams, the whole school was covered in that kind of graffiti. So you know, what we're seeing today is what we had there.
Speaker 3:And you know I got beaten up in my first year of high school. I was 11, I was the youngest in the year and this Dutch boy whose parents had, I assume, some sort of Nazi sympathies, he literally beat me up in the playground and back in those days, you know, there was no sort of reporting it to the school. I didn't report it to my parents, god forbid. So I just told the Jewish boys in my year and they took him down the back of the toilets and beat him up and he never did it again.
Speaker 3:But I felt that that level of antisemitism was kind of par for the course in Australia. Australia is a good country, not a racist country per se, but there's always pockets and it was character building and I felt very comfortable as an Australian Jewish person. I didn't have a decent Jewish education. As a result, I wasn't at a day school, I went to Haida, you know, did a bat mitzvah in a soulless synagogue and spent the rest of my young adult life redressing that lack of Jewish education and the understanding of what my place was in Jewish history and stuff. But as a woman, yeah, I sort of felt very much outside the mainstream. You know, blonde, preppy etc.
Speaker 2:Linda, we're talking to you today because International Women's Day is coming up and you are the president of the National Council of Jewish Women Australia and you're also a feminist and you're someone who's been working very hard within the Jewish community for a long time to see equality for women in all kinds of Jewish spaces and places. When was your awakening as a feminist?
Speaker 3:It's kind of an interesting question because I was born a feminist. I was born into a feminist family. My father was born in Israel. As I said, no family here except for his mother, but my mother's family. I'm fifth generation Australian on that side and the grandparent generation was a generation of giants. They were people who changed the face of this country. My grandmother's brother was the Supreme Court judge who introduced abortion law into this country. You know, my first cousin, once removed, was, you know, his son, also a Supreme Court judge. My grandfather was Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University, introduced the tutorial system to this country.
Speaker 3:Before that it was all top-down. It was all about democracy, equity, access. They were Labour voters, they were focused on liberal values and feminism was just part of the water we drank. There was no question about feminism.
Speaker 3:You know, I grew up in a family where Shabbat and Chagim and everything there was all this political discussion and yelling around the table and it was just half of the course and I grew up really with sort of no awareness that there was a struggle to be had, like I was a woman. I could do whatever I wanted to do. Education was the pathway to any kind of achievement. I could go into any field I wanted.
Speaker 3:And it's kind of like when did I become a feminist? Well, I don't know when I became a feminist. I literally feel like I was born one. And you know, I mean, I read the women's room and the older I got, the more I read about, you know, feminist history and ideology and so on, and I just idolized, you know, gloria Steinemans and the people like that who today people sort of think they're the old icons. But they were. They were so powerful and I sort of really only felt a challenge to my feminism much, much later in my life when, you know, I experienced for the first time some of the inequities and some of the misogyny that feminism had been developed to counter.
Speaker 2:So you mentioned that you attended an Orthodox shul. Didn't sound like it was a huge part of your early life?
Speaker 3:You know, as I said, I did a bat mitzvah. Well, the bat mitzvah was such a superficial and meaningless experience and the boys got to do a bat mitzvah and all of us girls were equally capable intellectually and in every other way, of probably doing something like that, and in orthodoxy today, of course that's what girls do. But in those days, you know, there were sort of 12 of us wearing a blue dress, made of the same material but a different style, standing on the stage, the bimmer stage, reciting stuff we didn't understand the meaning of, and so it was. It was. That was kind of sad but I think wasn't a challenge, but it was an awakening. There were two sort of periods at university when I was involved with orgers again, you know I was a girl on the national executive and I felt imposter syndrome at that time, and for those people who don't know, linda, can you tell us what AUGUS is?
Speaker 3:AUGUS is the Australasian Union of Jewish Students. Augus, Okay, and most of the countries in the world have such a body, and those people are very often like me, people who come from the public school system, who have spent their whole lives engaging with the wider world and who are perhaps a little better equipped to do so from a relationship perspective. But we have a deficit often and I certainly did in content and knowledge, which we have to address.
Speaker 1:Okay, and they're usually like. Their HQs are on campuses, university, tertiary campuses.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it wasn't until much later in my life I realised. I remember sitting in a talk with David Harris, retiring from the American Jewish Committee, and him talking about his career right, and what he had set out to do and wanted to do, and I thought to myself, if I had had more confidence in myself starting from that time, I could have done so much more. And why didn't I put myself forward more? You know, men put themselves forward whether they're competent or they're not competent. No shame, no hesitation, right, despite my family upbringing, when I got into quote unquote Jewish communal life, the men dominated and so you sort of felt you didn't have the right to challenge.
Speaker 3:I'll also say that another influence on my development as a woman and my conception of what a woman is when I moved to Israel at 21, I'd gone when I was 14, to visit my father's family for the first time.
Speaker 3:We'd gone and I was like, oh my goodness, I grew up among all these blonde-haired, waspy people and I got off a plane and I actually looked like the people walking in the streets and I looked like my aunties and I decided then I would go back to live there one day and see how that was to be in the mainstream rather than a minority.
Speaker 3:I had a boyfriend there for the first two years that I lived there and he was from an Iraqi Jewish background and the gender constructs in that. You know, I'm Ashkenazi, I was very white. You know, my mother had lived in England for part of her childhood. I thought we were white people right, I thought we were English actually and understanding different roles of women, different conceptions of womanhood, the power of women through a different lens not the feminist lens, but a feminine lens, and I've always felt very organically both feminine and a feminist and I don't see any contradiction between them. And that period of my life really consolidated my sense that all of that is possible and that there are certain powers women have. I mean, lots of people talk about this, but I really strongly believe that there are certain powers women have that are feminine powers that allow us to do a lot more than we could as men.
Speaker 1:That's so interesting because when you said that you had this Iraqi boyfriend and you were exposed to his family, my impulse was to assume that, because the gender roles were perhaps more defined, that the women had less rights or power. But what you've just told me contradicts that.
Speaker 3:Tremendous power, actually, and in fact so you know he was Iraqi and then later I married a Yemenite, israeli. But the Yemenite women in my family that I married into and who I'm still very, very close to, they were unbelievably powerful, strong matriarchs and very much challenged the stereotype we might have in a country like Australia.
Speaker 2:Talk to us more about the point, point when the male dominance, the patriarchy, really became restrictive and really started to challenge you.
Speaker 3:So after I got married, my husband he was a feminist as well and I always worked and we had three children and I worked through those as well. I didn't work in the Jewish community until much later in my career and I was very happy to do so and I came in in a really good position, in a good way. But I think what I saw was, over time, that I went in literally saying I don't care if I get the credit or not, I just want to do the work, I want to see the work done, and I think that's a very female and stupid approach that we take. And so I did the work and I didn't get the credit, and all the women did the work, and sometimes I felt, you know, I had this image of us that we were like the people behind the scenes who were doing the feed into the earpiece of the man sitting at the news desk, like that was how I felt. Anyway, over time I got more resentful actually, which I suppose is natural, which I suppose is natural.
Speaker 3:But I felt that our community is led by many people, many men, who are feminist in their conceptions of themselves and who really do share those values, and I don't know where it comes from, like the air of the world that we breathe. But the ideology and the practical application don't necessarily merge, and so you'll have even young men in communal leadership who absolutely are and would call themselves feminists, whose actions really are throwbacks to an earlier time, back to an earlier time. And there are many things which are unspoken and unseen impediments to women taking on those leadership roles. It's not like women can't get to those top leadership positions, but somehow they don't in numbers.
Speaker 3:First of all, I wouldn't say that our community is a misogynist community. I'm saying that there are pockets, there are individuals, it is not systemic in our community and you know, I hope that's what this reflects. I have never felt that it is particularly useful to be a whiner in any context, whether it's Jews whining about, you know, jew hatred in Australia or women whining about misogyny, in any context. I think it's much more powerful to work from within a system, to change it, to subvert the system, and I think that relationship building I don't even use the word advocacy at all anymore If you want to change hearts and minds, you need to engage with people in order to create relationships in which you are a trusted purveyor of ideas, information etc. And so that's kind of how I've tried to work.
Speaker 1:Linda, it's funny you use the word wine, which some feminists of my generation would say well, that's subconscious misogyny right there, because we wouldn't say that men wine, oh I would.
Speaker 3:I absolutely would. A whiny baby plenty of whiny babies out there who are not female. No, and I use it about our community as well we shouldn't be out there whining. And I'll tell you an example once from a time when I was an education manager for the Jewish community and we went to the board of the Department of Education about some quote unquote anti-Semitism in schools back in the day, and I remember them saying to us they used that word. They said what's amazing about your community is that you come to us with a problem, you don't just whine about it. You come to us and you bring us a solution, which is what we've done. We've said here are all these harmony programs that we're developing. Would you like to be part of them? So I would challenge that. It's not just women who are described as whiners at all.
Speaker 2:So far. In our conversation today, you've touched on the role that you've played for the Jewish community in New South Wales over many years, working with the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies. You were in essentially a community-building role, weren't you working with a variety of interfaith groups and organisations and other ethnic communities? That's right, isn't it?
Speaker 3:It is, and I mean at the Board of Deputies, we sort of had two categories of work. One was you did Jews or you didn't do Jews. I didn't do Jews, I did everything outside the Jewish community. So, yeah, other ethnic groups, other faith groups, NGOs, women's groups, etc. So in a way that imposter syndrome that I first experienced in August, it carried into the work at the board because I got the very strong message that the political work was the big boys' work and what I did was the party planning, and I knew what I was doing was not the party planning.
Speaker 3:I knew what I was doing was building relationships that we then incorporated into our political work. The coalitions that we built very strategically, very carefully, were coalitions of people whose values aligned with ours so that when we each needed to support each other in some field whether it was an anti-racism strategy or anything else that we could draw on those relationships.
Speaker 3:But you can't just have events and there's no connection to the political work and certainly in my work. Now all of that work comes together. It's a holistic package and I really felt for a really long time a lot of frustration that there seemed to be a division of labour that was both artificial and stupid.
Speaker 2:As if, like Linda's, the one that looks after the relationships with the Sikh community and the Muslims and she organises the lunches and the dinners and that's you know, that's a nice to have part of the organisation, but it's actually not fundamental to Jewish community.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and guess what happened? Remember that whole Nazi swastika legislation that the community celebrated? Well, who do you think brought the Hindu community A into relationship with us? B drafted the beginning of all of that work? Right, that's political work. I'd left the board by the time it got the publicity. But you know, jeremy Spinnack, the president, and I we worked together from the very beginning in the community relations space to work out those community relationships and which were important and where we put our focus and all of that stuff. So you didn't get to the point where you can stand, you know, with a certificate in front of the police minister or the premier or whatever, without all of the work having happened beforehand.
Speaker 2:So let's bring the conversation up to the more recent time, if we can, linda. October 7th happened and, as we know from the conversations that we've had with people like Ralph Ganende on the podcast and other people that work in the interfaith area, there has been a huge amount of damage done to interfaith relations, to cross-community dialogue, particularly with Muslim communities. I'm wondering, as someone who's been working in this space for many, many years, what has been your experience?
Speaker 3:My experience has been that in a time of war, it is entirely unrealistic to expect brutes who have a skin in the game not to gravitate back to their respective historical corners and to think that that would not happen is very unrealistic. If you look at the Jewish community and how we moved, really as a bloc, we've always had diversity around our attitudes to Israel and so on, but I think it's fair to say in all the polling shows that our community moved back into a deep position of solidarity with Israel or the people of Israel. You take the government of Israel out of the equation, take the quote-unquote politics out of the equation, and our connection to our tribe is deeper today than it's ever been as a community. To expect that not to happen in the Muslim community is ridiculous. And of course, our community spent years consciously building relationships with what we euphemistically termed groups where tensions exist, and we did a lot of work which was meaningful at the time, which had potential to impact social cohesion more widely. And October 7, or in fact October 9, was the turning point in those relationships, in what should have been our expectations of what would happen as well. I mean, indeed, I had some colleagues who I had, I thought, quite deep and long-term relationships with in the Muslim community, one woman in particular, very high-profile woman, through every single Gaza war. Until that point we had always kept the communication lines open, we had called each other, we had spoken to each other, we had expressed empathy to each other and so on. You know her family's in Gaza, my family's in Israel, and on October 8th I actually wrote to her and I said that I prayed that her family came to no harm in Gaza and she wrote back a message to me, very something anodyne, you know, and we haven't had another conversation since then, unlike in previous years.
Speaker 3:Another male Muslim leader who I trusted implicitly for a number of years. I actually called him on about October 8 and I said, hey, I hear that there's people driving around the Western suburbs of Sydney like celebrating and fireworks and all that stuff. Is that true? And he was like, oh, I don't know, linda, and that was the last time we had a conversation. And you know, I look at both of their socials feeds and they're just full of really, really painful stuff. At the same time, what's so interesting is that my Palestinian friends in the Middle East you know East Jerusalem, not citizens of Israel. They are the people I'm in touch with.
Speaker 3:I got a message from my closest Palestinian colleague about two weeks after October 7, expressing her deep shame about what had happened, and I was like it's not your shame. We've met twice in Israel since October 7, I've been twice and met twice in Israel since October 7. I've been twice and she actually gave me a piece of jewellery on our second meeting, like a necklace, this beautiful necklace. I said what are you doing? She was like you are my only remaining Jewish friend outside Israel, in the diasporas. Like your positions get harder, you're further away. It's's more abstract. You can go into polemic on the ground in Israel, israel, palestine. Like you know, you're real people, you know everybody's suffering and you engage as humans, and here everything becomes dehumanized. And so I think certainly I've had so many comments from people since October 7th oh, look at all that work you did.
Speaker 3:It's all wasted work. It's not wasted work. It was the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do. The Jewish community doesn't build relationships with people with whom we have tensions because we're trying to achieve some outcome. You know which. If we don't achieve it, oh, it's failed work. It's right. We are supposed to have our hands out. We have our hands out. We have our hands out. We will always have our hands out. That's what Israel's Declaration of Independence represents as well.
Speaker 3:Does it mean our hands are always going to be met? No, but I will say that since October 7, the work that I've done well, that I did for the Board of Deputies I was no longer working for them but they asked me to come back and consult. I did Jews. I've done Jews since then. That's what I've been doing and I have, like everybody, I have recognised that indeed we're in a new phase of Jewish history and world history and we are a people apart and we try as much as we possibly can to be a people together in the communities where we live. But sometimes we are, through external factors, we are a people apart and that's how it is right now. And as many relationships as we can maintain, we do maintain, and relationships with other groups hindus and christians and just sort of general other people that all those other ethnic groups, like the vast majority of the relationships, still stand.
Speaker 2:What do you think about the prospect of rebuilding those relationships that you mentioned before? And I'm thinking of those two individuals that you said you trusted? Implicitly, I feel a sense of deep, almost betrayal and a break of trust. So, thinking about those individuals, thinking about others, do you hold any prospect of a resumption of relations, or is this, just now, a generation of relations never to be rebuilt?
Speaker 3:I am an optimist, but I do think there's a generational rift and unless there is concerted work done, and not just by us, by the society at large, the rent between the Jewish community and the Muslim community and the Muslim community and the rest of the Australian community is not going to be repaired.
Speaker 3:It's got to be a whole of society effort and I think that the, in particular, the ideological indoctrination of children and generations that we see all over the world, has to be addressed in a very systematic way. I mean, this is not the same thing. But if you have a look at what happened in Saudi Arabia after 9-11, where the government works out that actually this system of education, this ideological indoctrination which led to, you know, the majority of the pilots being people who came from our country and of course, you know us as the monarchy being the number one target, we've got to do something about this and they basically ran a re-education program for a generation and they have changed that society fundamentally. And I mean, as I say, that's not the same paradigm as Australia, but there has to be a top-down and bottom-up, whole-of-society approach to what our relationship with the Muslim community represents as the tip of the iceberg what our relationship with the Muslim community represents as the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1:Linda, you mentioned that during times of war, it's unrealistic or naive to not expect people to side with or have the most empathy for their own people. But what about the people who don't have skin in the game, like? I'm thinking of all the white Anglo feminists who've taken a stance?
Speaker 3:So I think one of the most important frames for understanding the sort of the ethnic part of it is that we happen to live in this supposedly post-national, post-tribal, post-colonial all the rest of that stuff world, but human beings are tribal and we can't get away from that and the world today actually functions on a tribal model. We just call it identity politics and it's all so much more even than a generation ago, about what group, what identities do you hold, what group do you belong to. And I think that many in the feminist community have bought into a package of tribal beliefs, and one of those tribal beliefs is a fundamentally flawed conception of what Jews are and Israel is, and so there is a massive amount of hostility towards Zionist feminists. That pretty much coincides with the rise of identity politics. You know, if you look at what happened in Women's March, you know that's 10 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe even more the slow but inexorable expulsion of Zionist feminists from the feminist movement which they built right. I mean, you know I was at an exhibition in LA actually a few weeks ago. It was about Diane von Fustenberg Holocaust survivor family. She becomes, you know, this incredible designer in America and there's all these photos of her with the leading feminists of American history. They're all Jews. Every one of them is a Jew His old mate, gloria, gloria Betty Friedan, you know all of those people Bella Abzug, letty, cotton Pogrebin they're all Jews.
Speaker 3:And so I think that there's been an incredible sense of betrayal for Jewish women in the feminist movement. You know, when the leaders of Women's March stood up with Louis Farrakhan, one of the most notorious anti-Semites in America, and refused to disavow, you know his anti-Semitism, like that was the beginning of the end for Jewish women in the feminist movement. And yeah, I think it's all about tribalism. It is deeply, deeply disappointing.
Speaker 3:Again, you know there are individuals who I can't name, but there are individual women in positions of high status in the feminist communities here who will reach out or have reached out or we've reached out to them and had conversations. They're like totally with you, but we just can like totally with you, but we just can't say it publicly. We just can't say it publicly. We're getting our instructions from the top, we get, but it is the lack of moral courage, the absence of guts to take a stand morally, and also I mean look at Senator Payman the other day standing up for the Iranian regime, which stones women to death for being raped, like the cognitive dissonance is so profound. It's like a microcosm of the cognitive dissonance we feel as Jewish people in the wider progressive spaces. It's very disappointing, it's very distressing and it's insane yeah.
Speaker 2:First off, mazel Tov, on your election to the position of President of National Council of Jewish Women Australia. Firstly, help our listeners understand what the organisation is and what it does. And now, having spent so many years looking out to the Jewish community, what is on your agenda for your time as leader of NCJW, which, as far as I understand, has done some work external to the Jewish community but is very much working within the Jewish community?
Speaker 3:So thank you very much. It's a really exciting challenge for me now and it's a beautiful synthesis of work that I've done before and work that I've wanted to do before. National Council of Jewish Women is actually the oldest Jewish roof body in Australia. We're 101 years old. We were founded before the ECHA, before the Zionist Federation, before anybody, because you know, women organise. And it started as a deeply revolutionary feminist organisation which was charged with representing Jewish women in Australia but helping all women, supporting all women in Australia and families. And so this revolutionary woman her name was Dr Fanny Redding. She was an immigrant from Eastern Europe. She studied medicine before there were other women studying medicine.
Speaker 3:It's the 19th century, you know. She never married. She became a doctor in King's Cross. She helped sex workers, she helped migrants. She did all this grassroots, incredible, incredible work and the organisation always responded to the challenges of the time. So when there was a world war on, they were involved in war work, you know, and supporting soldiers and supporting refugees and all that kind of stuff. And that's what National Council has always actually done. Most people confuse the state bodies with the national body. So the state bodies still do all of that grassroots work, that social justice work and reach out to the Jewish community.
Speaker 3:The national body, which now again has all the state presidents on it, the national body is the voice of Jewish women in the country. It is a political lobby group for the rights of women, of Jewish women, and for the issues of the time that are top of mind for Jewish women in Australia, and so it evolves with the times, and so the first thing we did was a listening campaign. We've done two listening campaigns actually with Australian Jewish women, not just our members, but in general, to say what's important to you right now, what do you want us to do and get their input into what it is we're going to do. October 7 galvanised Jewish people and certainly Jewish women across this country, and so there are literally hundreds of women. We've restructured, we've got eight committees around our national board. We've got the most unbelievable array of talented women working together, and I guess my vision is to clearly address the issues that we need to address, and Jew hatred and the soft targets that are Jewish women on the front line of that are, you know, are a top of mind for us. So we're empowering them, of course, advocating on behalf of them, but also to provide a model for Jewish organisations of how things can be done a little bit differently, like even our org chart.
Speaker 3:When I gave it to the designer she said that's not a normal org chart and I said, well, what do you mean? She said, well, there's sort of no hierarchy. I'm like that's right. There are ways of leading as an organisation that are not just nominally consultative and cooperative, but really so. And all the organisations that we are affiliate to, including the ECHA and so on.
Speaker 3:Basically we went to them and we said we are here.
Speaker 3:We are here to amplify your good work, we are here to complement your good work, to here to complement your good work to go places you can't go, don't want to go, do things that you haven't done or don't want to. I mean, for example, yesterday we were giving a platform to diverse jewish women's voices in australia, and that means ethnically diverse, politically diverse, etc. Yesterday we did a socials post which called on australian feminists and other humanitarian organizations to condemn the despicable misogyny and cynical manipulation of sending the body of an unidentified palestinian woman into israel in place of shiri bivas and called on empathy for both of those women's families. Like I don't think there are other Jewish organisations doing that Like. We don't feel that there's any need to advocate on behalf of our Jewish community without also being humanist and inclusive. So I hope that we will not only answer the needs of Jewish women in Australia, complement the work that all the other Jewish organisations are doing, but also provide kind of a new model of organisational work and leadership.
Speaker 1:So sounds like you're not doing a lot of party planning.
Speaker 3:No, there's not an awful lot of party planning, but we do have really amazing events. But we are doing everything from meeting individually with political leaders not just female leaders, obviously political leaders in the portfolios that are important, you know, ministers for women, ministers for education, ministers for multiculturalism in each state, that sort of thing and we invite along to those meetings, obviously, the other organisations, roof bodies, jewish organisations, roof bodies we Jewish organisations, roof Bodies we are having engagements, boardroom engagements, salon engagements, speaking engagements with non-Jewish women of influence from sectors you know all the sectors across the country. We are doing webinars and we are doing events for Jewish women, but not only for Jewish women, and obviously we've got a media presence which hopefully, is growing by the day, and we are providing a voice for Jewish women, but not only for Jewish women. And obviously we've got a media presence which, hopefully, is growing by the day, and we are providing a voice for Jewish women in this country.
Speaker 2:She's a force to be reckoned with. Linda, Great to see that you're bringing so much energy and new life and new ideas to an organisation that has been around for so long and has done really good work. But sometimes it just takes a fresh set of eyes to come in and shake things up a little bit, which sounds like you're very much doing.
Speaker 1:You know there's no shame in this podcast, even though it's called A Shame to Admit so like are you medicating? How are you getting through the day.
Speaker 3:No, I'll tell you the truth. The truth is about 10 years ago I realised that I've actually just got a lot more energy than most people, and while I still do, I might as well use it and then.
Speaker 1:I'll be dead. Okay, Coffee chocolate.
Speaker 3:I don't drink coffee. Chocolate yes, but I don't drink coffee.
Speaker 1:Are you contagious? Because, if so, when can I move in?
Speaker 3:Have. Are you contagious? Because? If so, when can I move?
Speaker 1:in. I have a hard time getting that.
Speaker 3:No, I know it's a bit weird, but I have to use it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I have a few friends like you. I'm like a non-practicing alpha female. Linda, thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of A Shame to Admit.
Speaker 3:Thank you for inviting me. I thought like only really important people got invited on, so I'm kind of shocked and very very honoured.
Speaker 2:That's it for another week, friends.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to. A Shame to Admit with me Tammy Sussman and executive director of TJI, dr Darshal Lawrence.
Speaker 2:This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King, with theme music by Donovan Jenks.
Speaker 1:If you like the podcast, it's time to leave a positive review.
Speaker 2:You can tell us what you're ashamed to admit via the contact form on the Jewish Independent website.
Speaker 1:As always, comrades, thanks for your support. Go smash those International Women's Day cupcakes, all the patriarchy, and look out for us next week.
Speaker 2:Bye for now. Thank you.