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
Unsilenced: Lee Kofman's Fight Against Doxxing and Antisemitism in Australia's Arts and Creative Industry
Lee Kofman and her family survived Soviet persecution as refuseniks in the 1970s, but nothing could prepare her for what happened when she tried to support fellow Jewish creatives in Australia after October 7th. The acclaimed author and writing teacher created a WhatsApp group (later vilified as 'Zio600') for Jewish artists and academics, only to see the private conversations leaked and members' personal details publicly doxxed. She lost most of her teaching work overnight, but she won't be silenced. Lee caught up with Tami and Dash to discuss the chilling parallels between her childhood in the USSR and today's literary gatekeeping, and why she's channelling her energy into "Ruptured" - a powerful new collection of essays from Australian Jewish women.
Article related to this conversation:
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/reassembling-the-jewish-matryoshka-dolls-in-my-family
https://thejewishindependent.com.au/hate-on-becoming-a-bad-jew
More information about Lee and Ruptured:
https://leekofman.com.au/ruptured/
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Are you curious to know how the lives of Australian Jewish women were irrevocably changed by the events of October 7?
Speaker 2:And are you interested in how the creative landscape has changed for Jewish artists in Australia since October 8?
Speaker 1:In this week's episode of Ashamed to Admit, you'll be hearing from Lee Kaufman, writing teacher, mentor, author and editor of nine books in Hebrew and English.
Speaker 2:Lee Kaufman is a long-time contributor to the Jewish Independent and, together with Tamar Paluch, she's also the co-editor of a series of essays called Ruptured, which is being released this week.
Speaker 1:Who knows if she'll be ashamed to admit anything. It's season three of this Jewish Independent podcast and we seem to be dropping our shame Some of us more than others. Tammy, come along for the ride, as we have a go at cutting through some seriously chewy and dewy topics.
Speaker 2:Welcome to this week's episode of A Shame to Admit. Welcome back everyone. I'm Dash Lawrence, executive Director here at the Jewish Independent.
Speaker 1:And I'm your third cousin, which is not the same thing as a second cousin once removed, Tammy Sussman. It's also quite possible that I'm 8% to 10% genetically similar to you. Dash, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm good. I'm good. I'm suffering through a Melbourne winter, ready for a bit of a break from these cold, dark days. Actually going to take a brief overseas holiday in a couple of weeks, tammy, are you?
Speaker 1:Yes, where are you going?
Speaker 2:Nowhere special.
Speaker 1:Oh, he doesn't want to say.
Speaker 2:No, I'm going to Bali.
Speaker 1:Are you?
Speaker 2:Yeah for a wedding.
Speaker 1:Whose wedding?
Speaker 2:Not telling you.
Speaker 1:No, I don't need names and addresses, I'm just saying genre, family member, friend.
Speaker 2:Old school friend.
Speaker 1:Old school friend. Yeah, do you keep in touch with your old school friends.
Speaker 2:Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Still very close.
Speaker 1:Okay, so you're going to be catching up with a few of your school friends, correct? Yeah, so you've got your school friends. Do you also have uni friends?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've got uni friends. I've got work friends. I have other random people that I've picked up along the way Marathon friends, Marathon friends, running friends. I've got quite a disparate friendship group Like. A lot of them don't know each other and are not connected at all, so it always makes for an interesting birthday party for me when I bring them all together.
Speaker 1:Okay. Do you have a group of Jewish friends that you keep separate to your non-Jewish friends?
Speaker 2:I don't keep them separate, they just happen to be separate. But then, to be fair, some of them are separate to each other. So I have obviously so many Jewish friends that plenty of them are not known to each other.
Speaker 1:Oh, he has so many Jewish friends. Are you quite popular?
Speaker 2:Sorry, let me rephrase that I have a number of Jewish friends. I have so many. That was a bit of an exaggeration. I have many Jewish friends. I have a number.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how many.
Speaker 2:As you'd expect, given that I've spent a large chunk of my working life working in and around Jewish communities, I'm like I'm not going to count. What is this Like? Some sort of inquisition?
Speaker 1:KGB inquisition. I thought you were going to say I have so many Jewish friends because I'm just a pretty fun, interesting guy and I always come to social events with a bit of triv.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, that's true. I don't think there's any connection between that and my Jewish friends. They like me for different reasons.
Speaker 1:I guess you could say they're using you for the spare room in your new home that's currently being built. Everyone wants a go of the bidet hose, which I have not spoken about this season.
Speaker 2:No, you haven't. I won't say. I was wondering when you were going to weave it back into the show, tammy. But well done for doing that.
Speaker 1:The reason why I'm talking about friends and I was curious to know about your different friendship groups is, as I've mentioned on this show a few weeks ago I have a girlfriend now. It's a relatively new relationship and usually what happens at the start of a relationship is, once things are going well, you start introducing that partner to friends.
Speaker 2:Well, it was very early on that I met your girlfriend. You took that relationship from nought to ten very quickly by introducing her to your co-host.
Speaker 1:I did. So she hasn't met all of my friends yet. At some point I took her to meet a group of friends at the same time. You know, get it out of the way, because I'm quite popular, I have a lot of friends.
Speaker 1:So I thought if we have to get through each one individually and I've got the kids every second weekend, like it's going to take a whole year. So I thought, you know, we'll have a gathering of friends. You can meet a few at once. And at the end of the meeting she said to me were all of them Jewish? And I found myself getting like self-conscious about the fact that most of them were like 99%, and I don't know why. It's something that I'm ashamed to admit. That most of my close friends now are Jewish. I feel like says something about me that I'm not so open-minded or that I don't connect with diverse people, because I do. I definitely do. I just feel like my social group has gotten smaller, Like it's not that there's been a loss of trust with my non-Jewish friends. There's just been an ease since October 7 to not have this elephant in the room.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. Well, also, as you age, there's a retraction of friendships and sometimes a returning back to the friendships that are most established, most comfortable, where you really feel that people see you really deeply for who you are because they've always known you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I do have a few non-Jewish friends who I feel really close to and I feel like I can be my complete self. Thanks, tammy.
Speaker 2:I've always said you can be yourself around me.
Speaker 1:Well, my girlfriend, like most people, assumed you were Jewish. So I think what it comes down to is the fact that if I'm in a room full of friends, if they're Jewish, I don't have to be on guard or feel like I'm walking on eggshells or kind of have this high level of vigilance that they might say something about the Middle East that might upset me.
Speaker 2:You mean, like Israel is a settler, colonial state and all Zionists are genocidal crazed ethno-nationalists?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my non-Jewish friends wouldn't say that, but they might say so. What are your thoughts on? I know that after October 7, a lot of people were quite offended that their non-Jewish friends didn't reach out and check in and see how they were. For some reason that didn't offend me as much because I am well aware of how the algorithm works and I just assumed that those friends wouldn't have seen what was going on as much or they have their own stuff going on, so their silence didn't hurt me. But I know that for a lot of people in the Jewish community that was a huge factor in losing connections and losing sense of belonging in certain groups.
Speaker 2:And that's really at the heart of this new book that the Australian, jewish, israeli, russian she's got such a big and a rich identity and story. Lee Kaufman. She's one of the extraordinary women behind this new book called Ruptured.
Speaker 1:And we had the privilege of chatting with Lee today. So pour that shot of vodka into your cup of tea, sit back, relax or pull over if you're driving and enjoy this chat with Lee Kaufman. Lee Kaufman, welcome to the Ashamed to Admit studio.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2:You are our first Siberian-born Jewish guest on Ashamed to Admit, I am fascinated to learn more about the Jewish community of Siberia, but let's first get a bit of a sense of what your upbringing was like in the former Soviet Union.
Speaker 3:Oh goodness, this is such a big question. Up until I was six years old, I was raised by parents who were pretty standard, sort of Jewish, soviet parents, you know. They were kind of communists, quite idealists in terms of the principles. We feasted on pork at home. I was born in Siberia, as you said, delicacies was I'm sorry, this is going to be gross uh, uncooked slabs of pork, fat with raw garlic in them and so I loved it it was supposed to warm us, because the winters in siberia could get to minus 40.
Speaker 3:So and then, when I was six, so maybe closer to seven my parents went through complete transformation. We moved to Odessa, which is the city of birth of my father my mother is a Siberian Jew, my father is Ukrainian Jew and first of all it was warm, and secondly, my parents became religious, so they not only stopped eating pork, but also they wouldn't even say the word pork. You know, we stopped eating pork, but also they wouldn't even say the word pork, you know. Then, of course, we started living in hiding in some ways, like our home life became very secretive because, as you probably know well too, in the Soviet Union the god was exiled or outlawed, you know. So you were not supposed to practice any form of religion. So I spent 12 years in Russia, my first six years in Siberia, this next six years in Odessa.
Speaker 2:And how was it that they came to being more religious and more observant? Because it's not like there would have been lots of outlets or places for them to adopt a more from lifestyle in Soviet Russia.
Speaker 3:You're absolutely right. I was a very sickly child. I was born as a joke, but it's kind of not a joke. I was born with a broken heart. I had a hole in my heart and one of the arteries was too narrow, and so it wasn't like a serious condition. So if I was born in the West with this condition, there would be just like a fairly simple open-heart surgery, as far as they can be simple, and I will be fine.
Speaker 3:But you know, the Soviet Union did not put enough money into medicine. They put all their money into space science, because that sort of gave them, and into weapons and things like this, because that sort of fed their ego. But hospitals were very underfunded, understaffed. There were hardly any sort of sober surgeons there or nurses. This sounds again like like I'm joking, but it's actually not. It's actually really how it was, so late 1970s, early 1980s, but the state of the medicine was like 1950s in the west. So my parents actually didn't know if I'll live or die.
Speaker 3:For a long time I couldn't be even operated upon because they very soon in such bad state that they sort of the doctors wanted to wait until I grow to be a bit stronger in order to to do the surgery.
Speaker 3:So, as you can imagine, having the first child so sickly, with kind of unclear prospects of surviving, have really affected my idealist communist parents, and when they sort of really confronted this system, the medical system in the Soviet Union started raising questions for them. Are we really living in the best country in the world? Are we really living in a country where everybody is equal when we need to bribe the system? Eventually I was deemed to be well enough to be to have a surgery, and so we flew to moscow and I was about to be operated by a surgeon whose nickname was the butcher, which is was because most of his patients died, but his brother was a very big shot in the party, in the communist party, so nobody would fire him. This is when my parents transformation began. This is when they met god. So I say met god, but they really met godly people. They met those few, very religious jewish refuseniks who lived in the soviet union.
Speaker 3:They were based in moscow. It was group of them. One of them was an anesthetist. I can never pronounce the word Anesthetist.
Speaker 2:Ah, an anesthetist.
Speaker 3:Thank you. This doctor who I will not repeat his name because I can't helped my parents to bribe the butcher not to operate on me, and in the process he of course course got them sort of into the godly matters as well. So my parents sort of really felt very grateful to that group of people. They also prayed for me. You know, I survived the surgery and that was a very transformative thing for my parents. So the next thing they did they went to the same doctor whose name I cannot pronounce and he, while I was still in Moscow, he did a home surgery on my father. So give him, breathe me love when my father was in his 30s with his anesthetic, and then my parents, also in the same Moscow apartment some of these apartments, some Jewish person apartment also got married the Jewish way, and that then it went on.
Speaker 2:But this was all done behind closed doors. There was no public expression of your Judaism, no possibility of being outwardly religious. It all had to be done in the privacy of homes.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so. My father would wear, like you know, he would wear kippah, but when he would go outside of the house he would always put, like you, a cap, like a kind of hat, some kind of hat on his head and tragically you know these days, with the antisemitism, what is happening he's back to putting a hat every time he goes out of the house in New York where he lives. We just never know what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:How and why did the family end up in Israel?
Speaker 3:So we actually refused NICs. We submitted papers to leave the country even before my parents became religious, about a year before, because already then my parents felt really deeply disillusioned with the medical system, but we were refused.
Speaker 1:I am ashamed to admit I don't know what a refuse nick is. I'm assuming it's someone who refuses to abide by the rules of the Communist Party in former USSR, but I'm not quite sure.
Speaker 3:So, tammy, I thank you for saying that. Not only you shouldn't be ashamed to admit, I'm ashamed. I didn't explain because I'm writing a book about it now and my whole thesis is that we forgot a very important part of Jewish history, which is refuseniks. The refuseniks were Jewish people in the Soviet Union who submitted papers to apply to go to Israel and were refused because it was a whole category of people. So as soon as you would submit papers to request the state to allow you permission to live to Israel, if you were refused, your life would be completely changed. You will become a second.
Speaker 3:Well, jews were already second-rate citizens in the Soviet Union You'll become third-rate citizen. The consequences would be horrendous. Usually you would lose your job or you would be demoted and very much underpaid. People would not want to be associated with you, not to be tainted by associations. So your friends, a lot of your friendships, would be lost. You know it's a bit like today saying I'm a Zionist, I'm a proud Zionist Very similar actually. So refuseniks were those Jews who were just basically living in the limbo in the Soviet Union. You know, you would kind of resubmit your application every few months or years or whenever you could. So we were refuseniks for six years. We submitted papers asking to move to Israel in late 1970s. But there was a big wave of Jewish-Russian immigration to Israel because there was some deal cut between America, jamie Carter and Brezhnev at the time. But we were unlucky because we submitted just as the wave ended. But we didn't know when that immigration wave ended. When my parents submitted their first application.
Speaker 1:So how did you finally get to Israel?
Speaker 3:So this is again a very long story which I'll summarize. Once my parents became religious as well. That made them like not just refusing, but like serious dissidents because they were practicing, you know, things that you were not supposed to be practicing. When we came back to Odessa after my surgery, some of the other refuseniks my parents knew started kind of to come to religion as well, and others outed themselves as being religious, which before they didn't to my parents and so somehow, without meaning to my parents, ended up being leaders of religious Jewish underground in Odessa and our house became a hub of terribly illegal, horrible activities like horrible crimes, like learning Hebrew in groups together or celebrating Shabbat. You know we've done all those terrible, terrible things. So very boring. But the KGB was very interesting.
Speaker 3:So my parents became like a nuisance for the KGB. They became dangerous agitators in their eyes, came agitate, dangerous agitators in the eyes, and so six years later the KGB just had enough of us, especially that at the end of those six years my mother, who was heavily pregnant with her fourth child, turned up at the local KGB office and said if you're not going to finally give us the permit to go, I'm going to burn myself pregnant in the public space. She didn't mean it, but they sort of believed her. But at that time we've already well known my family, was well known in the west as well, especially among jewish communities. So I don't think they wanted to risk such bad press. You know pregnant, you know doing something to herself. So they let us go in 1985, which was literally two months after Gorbachev came into power, so just before, just a few years before, again, another mass Jewish-Russian migration. But at the time when we left there was literally like maybe 10 people on that plane and five out of them was my family.
Speaker 1:So, le, you touched on the kind of eerie symmetry between having to hide one's Judaism in former USSR and how many Australian Jews are feeling today in contemporary Australia, and you've written for the Jewish Independent before. One of the pieces that resonated with me the most was a piece you wrote about your father and his experience as a quote Zionist traitor and your own experience being doxed in Australia in 2024, what was it like to realise that you were now that bad Jew in quotation marks and did that realisation shift your sense of belonging or stability in Australia?
Speaker 3:Yes, yeah, it sort of enhanced it. I mean, being an Israeli Jew as well in Australia, I've been sensing the antagonism towards Jewish people, and especially in terms of their connection to Israel, for a very long time, because since I came to Australia my main circles of professional circles and circles of friendships were non-Jewish artistic and academic circles, and so I already knew very well from different microaggressions that I've experienced over my 25 years here, from different blunders of my friends who always mean well but don't always know what they're saying. I kind of felt it for a very long time that a bit like in the soviet union I mean, I'm a bit of a I was always sort of second rate citizens in the arts and academic circles in australia. I was sort of circles in australia. I was sort of accepted on the condition of my russianness. Interestingly so I've never ever had anybody say anything negative to me about putin or about the you know, ukrainian russian war, only only lovely things and often people saying things like, oh, you're from russia.
Speaker 3:I love russian literature and like everybody was always in those circles who want to talk to me with my russians part of me or ukrainian part of me as well, but nobody ever or maybe maybe some very few exceptions was sort of interested in discussing with me anything about my life in israel, which is where I spent my formative years, from the age of 12 till 26, even though I've written about it and so I kind of already knew that I was always in danger of being a bad jew, but I kind of managed to survive and and become, and you know, and be invited to places and festivals and included pretty nicely on the strengths of being the Russian Jew.
Speaker 3:When October 7 happened and the subsequent doxing of the Jewish creatives happened, it was full on, but I was not shell-shocked by it. I suppose I anticipated that. I just didn't anticipate the extent of it all. Shocked by it. I suppose I anticipated that. I just didn't anticipate the extent of it. I did not anticipate finding myself one day online everywhere my photo with a caption a genocidal Zionist or whatever else was captioned. That made me think of my father and mother.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. For listeners who aren't aware, the doxing was a result of Lee being the founder or co-founder and coordinator of a WhatsApp group for Jewish artists, creatives, academics, others with a loose connection to those sectors, who were brought together in the weeks after October 7th and ultimately the group's messages and communications were leaked and shared openly on social media channels. And then the resulting doxing that came from that, which we can perhaps come back to again in a moment. But, Leigh, just interested to hear the story around why you decided to create the WhatsApp group in the first place.
Speaker 3:Yeah, look, I created it on the 30th of October thinking if I get 50 people, that's great, we can support each other. Within a few days it grew up to 600-something. At the time when I did that group, we were all so shell-shocked and also I think our community was still sort of like really starting to just coming to grips with this immediate horrendous outburst of antisemitism post-october 7, before even, as we all know, before even Israel started retaliating the silence, and then, all you know, all that ensued. So I just felt very helpless. I felt like I lost my tribe, which is my tribe of creative people Academic I wasn't as much in academy by then already anyway, but yeah, the artistic sort of tribe. I just felt I just saw my peers, my sort of all these writers I've admired and liked and friended, signing all these very biased, uninformed letters, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, there was one petition that I seem to recall that was released out of one of the literary journals of which you may even have previously been a contributor to certainly would have had friends and colleagues that would have and I seem to recall this petition again was released well before Israel began its military operation in Gaza. There was almost no acknowledgement of what Israelis experienced on that day, the level of violence the brutality.
Speaker 3:There was no acknowledgement. Sorry to interrupt you, but the initial letter, which already was signed by several hundred people, contained the sentence if crimes were committed on October 7th. It subsequently was changed, but we have the screenshots and we know that sentence was there.
Speaker 2:And then there was an additional line or paragraph that I still recall, which was to the effect of these cannot be taken without the context of Israel's occupation since 1948. So it was essentially as if Israel, what do you expect? You've been occupying these people since 1948. This is all justified. That was the effect, and I think many of the people that were on that group and I'm assuming this is part of the reason why you formed the group were just shocked to see the long list of artists and creatives and entertainers. There were a number of high-profile Australian entertainers that signed that statement. It certainly shocked and struck me as an incredibly dehumanising public statement that so many people in the Australian arts and creative spaces were keen to attach themselves to.
Speaker 3:Daph, thank you because you described it so well and much better than me. That was exactly the letter that prompted my action. In fact, I remember how I found out about it because my friend messaged me who is I'm not going to say the name he's a non-Jewish historian who knew all the fallacies in that letter. You know there was also factual mistakes, like you know, saying that the hospital, that Israel bombed it, that she didn't bomb it, but anyway. So ironically, I actually found it from that particular person and I remember sitting in the car with the spring onions sticking and smelling everywhere and sitting in complete despair, reading that letter and the signatures in my car and going. It just went in my head, like I just said this sentence in my head either I'm going to sink into depression now or I'm going to do something. So I went home, wrote that email to any Jewish writer I knew at the time. Later it expanded to all creatives and academics as well and said well, let's do a letter, let's do something.
Speaker 3:And then I did this and I thought, well, if I'm going to organize the letter, you may as well just do a whatsapp group might be. I've never even used whatsapp before. It was the first time I downloaded on my phone. I may as well just like do it through whatsapp. It will be a bit easier to gather signatures and write a letter. And then I thought, well, if you already have a whatsapp group, maybe we can support each other. Because I was in such pain. I was in such pain like, seriously I I've had tough things happening in my life, but that was one of the greatest pains in that car those spring onions seriously it really hurt. So I just thought the group would be a great space for us to process the pain and then to also, if we want to do some collective action, to do some collective action. But of course, if we just do collective action, it's lobbyism. We are lobbyists, we are doing some terrible things, even though there are WhatsApp groups for every cause possible.
Speaker 1:I think what was so heartbreaking for many people was that, as you described, the group's intent was support focused, and yet the transcripts of that group then got downloaded, got leaked and then people combed through 900 pages of WhatsApp transcripts looking for evidence of wrongdoing, and that can really shatter people's sense of self, even people who weren't in the group.
Speaker 2:And I think that perhaps the peak of it, tammy, was the release of a sheet of the names and photos of various members of the group, almost like a kind of a hit list. Yeah, here are the people that have participated in this group. Here are their names, here are their occupations, here are their affiliations. Lee, this must have taken you right back to Soviet-era Russia. It must have felt like that's exactly what I was thinking Some form of.
Speaker 1:KGB shit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, type of operation.
Speaker 3:And even to the extent that the conspiracy theories around us. My friends got phone calls from people saying is Lee working for Mossad? And one of my friends said, well, she's not fit enough. So really, the anti-Zionist rhetoric and activists. They're really rehashing so much of what was going on in the Soviet Union the same language, the same theories. They're drawing all the age-old conspiracies about the powerful Jews as well.
Speaker 2:Lee, I know that the group is still going and I know that you're continuing to be a support and a moderator and a kind of facilitator of Jewish creatives during this time, which remains very volatile and anxiety provoking for a lot of Jewish people here in Australia and around the world. So I guess the bright side on this is that you've been able to forge a community under very difficult circumstances. But what have you lost in the time since October 7th?
Speaker 3:I've been a teacher of writing as well as writer in Australia for a really long time, for probably I don't know almost 20 years now, and I don't want to sort of I don't mean to sound like I'm, you know, blowing my own horn or whatever the expression is in english, but I just want to give you the contrast soon in terms of losing how much for me. So up until october 7, or even the dog thing I've been teaching all around Australia constantly. In fact, I was constantly thinking how can I reduce my teaching so I can write more? My classes are almost always not just book out, but also I have waiting lists. Because I'm passionate about teaching.
Speaker 1:I think I just love it so much you're great, lee, like I, going to give you permission to blow your own horn.
Speaker 3:Sorry about that, I'm only saying no, I'm saying do it because you're amazing.
Speaker 3:That's very beautiful, but the only reason I'm actually mentioning because it's really not in my character to speak like this of myself is only because the contrast of what happened after is so sharp. So I get about maybe 25% of teaching bookings to what I did before October 7. Leacher organizations, whom I'm not going to name, but major leacher organizations with whom I've had very strong, very close association, mutual support, not just them supporting me, Organizations where I served in many different roles, would not book me now. So because I don't know why, maybe because I'm a genocidal Zionist, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Can we talk, maybe, about what you've gained?
Speaker 3:Yes, thank you. Of course I'm no longer prepared to, as I did before, to minimize my Jewishness and my Israelness as a writer, and I know now that my publication prospects are very uncertain because of that. Because up until now, every time I would write a book or even an essay, I would be and I'm ashamed to admit on your podcast, I'm very ashamed to admit I used to calculate how far can I push writing about that side of me before a publisher will say to me, no, I'm not taking that, or a reviewer will say something negative. So I've always used to kind of try and find a balance. I mean, I've always written about my Jewish side, but I kind of kept to the safe Jewish topics, more you know. So it was okay for me always to write about how, I say, rebelled against religion in which I was brought up that you know. But I wouldn't say discuss the ways in which I'm attached to Israel, I wouldn't critique Israel. So I wouldn't be sort of honest about those parts of myself, not in terms of writing something dishonest, but just I wouldn't write, wouldn't fully explore my Jewishness. Whereas now I feel like I have to. I will always write about what's urgent and that's what's urgent for me to write about now. So I definitely feel like I lost a lot of potential publishing prospects. I definitely feel so much more connected to the Jewish community in ways I've never been before.
Speaker 3:I feel as a writer that I kind of write now not just for my life, as I've always done but I hope it doesn't sound pretentious, I don't mean it in this way, but I feel like I'm also writing for other people who kind of relate to what I'm going through in my community and hopefully maybe some other minorities not just Jewish minorities who maybe feel silenced in some ways.
Speaker 3:So when Tamar Paluch and two other wonderful women from our editorial committee, simone Wine and Romy Muszynski invited me to co-editor them, this book Ruptured. It was just so wonderful because I kind of felt really voiceless. I felt like at the time and I still feel like this to quite large extent but everything that I have to say about what it's like to be Jewish now, today, is not going to be published in mainstream left-leaning publications. So it will be hard to reach for me audiences which I want to reach or the kind of audiences who I want to change their, the kind of audiences who I want to change their minds, although I do try to do it through social media. But I just felt like that book was for me a really good way of not succumbing to again depression and anger and, instead of giving voice to other people and to myself, to say what we have to say about how we feel these days lee.
Speaker 2:Why the decision to have the collection be purely the voice of women? I'm interested in that choice and what it was about their experiences that you felt needed to be collated into a single edition so that's a very good question.
Speaker 3:So I was invited into this project when it was already performed as a project of giving voices to women. So I can't take credit for that, but it spoke to me. It's not that I think men's voices are not valid. I think they're just as valid. It's just that there was an aspect to what happened in October 7 and the aftermath that was distinctly female in several ways. First of all, the horrendous, deliberate sexual violence has impacted women so much. I know it impacted me very much in my intimacy. I mean, it's hard not to think, not to have those thoughts, those flashbacks, those things in my own private daily life and I know that I'm not the only one who says that but my sexuality definitely has been impacted by what happened on October 7th and I'm always happy to talk about it because I think we need to talk about it. It wasn't just a far away thing that happened to women, it's also I mean, of course I'm not in any way comparing myself to the real victims, but I think many of us have felt our relationship with sex has been impacted.
Speaker 3:Then the betrayal of feminists. You know the Me Too, the all that you know, I don't need to talk about it a lot. We all know what I mean. So the betrayal of feminism I mean, my writing has always had a very strong feminist angle to it and so for me, to sort of, I just don't feel what I belong in feminist spaces in ways I used to belong in feminist conversations. I feel very betrayed by my so-called sisters.
Speaker 3:And then another aspect of it what happened was that at least I can only speak about australia. I don't know how it's in other countries, but in australia there's so much grassroots, unpaid activism sprung since october 7th in our communities, and it's predominantly, I would say, women who give their unpaid time and and effort. I mean, even in our WhatsApp group there's a group of us who are administrators. We're all women, but there's so many men in the group, so this is not a go at men. It's just to say this is how things are. So these are the kind of distinct dimensions we wanted to explore in this book as well.
Speaker 1:You have some pretty amazing contributors as well. You have some pretty amazing contributors including Deborah Conway, carly Moore, gilbert, jemima Montag. People are going to get angry at me if I leave their names out. Did I say Kerry Sackville, joanne Fedler? Some really big names. Clearly, there are some patterns that emerge from all of these essays shared griefs, feeling of isolation, of disappointment. I'm curious to know if there were any contradictions or general divides between people's experiences that surprised you and the editorial team.
Speaker 3:I was actually surprised in how many similarities there were between the essays. Our biggest challenge, my challenge, was actually, I think, in some ways to make the essays as distinct and possible, and I hope we succeeded. I hope so, even though we strived, and indeed included women from lots of different occupations and age groups and all sorts of you know different identities and demographics and you know experiences. The essence really, to me that it's almost like a conversation. They're always like talking to each other, and one of the biggest echoing themes from through this was silence. There's so much silence in this essay, different types of silences, the silences between friends, the silence of um in war places, that self-silence, silencing of a lot of people. I mean, for example, in her essay, dina kaplan, the actress and the singer. In her and then in her essay she writes that when I first approached her and asked her to contribute an essay, she said no, she was too scared. When the first hostages were released, she decided well, can I swear on the podcast? No, yes, fuck it, I'm going to write the essay, doesn't matter that I was bullied and terribly. You know she was really abused online. She writes about that and she wrote her wonderful essay then for us. So yeah, so silence has been a huge thing between these essays.
Speaker 3:You asked me about the differences, but it's the similarities that strike me. I mean the specifics always are very different and that's interesting too. It's interesting what everybody chose to focus on. Some essays focus more on resilience. Some essays are darker, and I'm glad they're darker. I don't think we need to resolve everything, because nothing is, sadly, resolved yet. Even the war hasn't ended yet. But another sort of recurring motif across so many races was, as we say in Himu Hinani, here I Am. This sort of refrain of just the fact of our existence at the moment is political and powerful. The fact that we exist. I mean, so many people are out there wanting to kill us or whatever do to us, and we're still here.
Speaker 1:You mentioned before that you were concerned about publishing prospects. The book was published by.
Speaker 3:The Jewish Library of Australia, we were very pleasantly surprised with two major Australian book distributors offered us their services and one of them took us on. So we didn't expect it and we also did not expect to get into any bookshops.
Speaker 1:That was going to be my next question. Is the book available in bookshops?
Speaker 3:This is a very good question, so, as we're sort of discussing it, the book distribution is in a very strong, energetic process. So a lot of bookshops in Australia became gatekeepers for Jewish authors and Jewish themes, and I'm not afraid to say that.
Speaker 1:Neither am I.
Speaker 3:So we have some wonderful, wonderful friends, like, of course, the Avenue Bookshops in Melbourne, one of them.
Speaker 1:Gertrude Nellis in Sydney. Oh my.
Speaker 3:God, yes, the Little Bird in Brazil, but to my great surprise so far. Maybe ask me in a few months I'll say something else, but so far quite a few bookshops are, yeah, ordered copies, and not just the bookshops I expected.
Speaker 2:You have had an extraordinary life, an extraordinary journey from a small town in Siberia, a little Jewish girl with, as you said earlier, a broken heart, an Israeli party girl, Australian Jewish mother, a successful writer and writing teacher, who then encountered a sort of shocking level of intolerance and backlash and professional isolation. I'm wondering what you've learned and how you've grown personally through this time.
Speaker 3:I think I'm still growing through that, but I'm just learning more to be myself in life and on the page, my authentic self. I'm learning to stop pandering to other people's levels of tolerance. I'm also learning slowly that there are lots of great people also in the literary scene. They're just quiet people. Also in the literary scene. They're just quiet. So I've actually been again in the last half a year, probably again asked more and more to teach, but not for those big literature organizations. It's the good people who are quiet and less formal and don't get government funding. Who's been actually quietly supporting people like myself.
Speaker 3:I love Jewish writers, so I'm learning that there are good people there that are just not necessarily in power in the literary circles. But it's also terrifying if my non-Jewish friendships almost completely all of them survived and intact. But there are some things we avoid. So in the essay In Rapture, in my own essay, I really wrote things as they are and I know that a lot of my non-Jewish friends are beautifully going to support me and come to the book launches that we have and get the book. Some already ordered the book, but I don't know what will happen after they read my essay because most of them are writers and of course I don't say anything bad about my friends there because I love my friends and I know the support in every way they were capable of. But I do say quite big things about the literary community in Australia. So I just kind of bracing myself to see will I have some open and difficult conversations with my friends after they get in the book and what will happen next.
Speaker 2:Well, you strike me as an incredibly brave and courageous person, leigh, and someone who's very resilient, even if they read it and they don't like what they read.
Speaker 1:I think Tam and I both know that you'll be okay, thank you and the book again is called Ruptured Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life post-October 7, edited by you, our special guests Lee Kaufman and Tamara Paluch, available online and in any good not just good exceptional bookstore. Thank you so much for joining us today, lee.
Speaker 3:Thank you very much, Vok you very much for such a rich conversation that was lee kaufman, co-editor of ruptured.
Speaker 2:We'll put those details in the show notes for today's episode, but that's it for this week. You've been listening to a shame, to admit with me dash lawrence and me tammy suss. This episode was mixed and edited by Nick King, with theme music by Donovan Jenks.
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Speaker 2:As always, thanks for your support and look out for us next week.