This book offers a timely insight into ideas of 'belonging' in multicultural society from a Jewish perspective, one which is largely missing from the discourse on multiculturalism. There is a current climate in Australia, as there is in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, of rising tensions around migration, religious freedom, and far right extremism. These tensions have been fanned the Israeli-Palestine conflict coming under increased international scrutiny in recent months. Understanding how Jewish communities attempt to build and guide an understanding of what Jewishness means in contemporary multicultural societies is crucial for supporting the right to safety in diversity, not only for Jews but for multiple minority groups. In delivering such understanding, this book has insights not only in an Australian, but a broader international, context. This book explores how various facets of Jewish life are experienced and expressed in Australia, drawing on rich ethnographic and archival research conducted within the mid-sized Jewish community in South-East Queensland, Australia, which has never before been examined. Jewish Identity in Multicultural Australia explores how Jewish identity is manifested and experienced across a wide range of facets: religion and religiosity, ethnicity and ethnonational identity, history and memory, antisemitism and racism, Zionism and diasporic identity, and family and kinship. Across these key themes, the book builds on a core argument: that contemporary Jewish communities work in certain, set ways and promote certain, set norms within a framework of state multiculturalism to forge a safe, supported place for Jewish life, practice and identity of all shapes and sizes. Jennifer Creese is a lecturer in the SAPPHIRE Group at the Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, UK, where she is an expert in ethnographic research, immigration and emigration, and institutional culture. She is the author of a number of works on Jewish religion, culture, and history in Australia, including Jewish life in Queensland: celebrating 150 years since 1865 (2016). She received her PhD from The University of Queensland, Australia in 2020, and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Brisbane and the Gold Coast, in South-East Queensland. She is active on Twitter at @jennifer_creese.

Explains the contemporary politics of Australian Jewry. This book situates the politics of Australian Jews through comparisons with general patterns in Australian politics, the politics of other minorities in Australia, and the politics of other Western Jewish communities. It contains an appendix of Jewish Parliamentarians.

Like many Jews of our generation, Jon Stratton grew up in a family more concerned about assimilation than about preserving Jewish tradition. While he could easily 'pass' among non-Jews, he found himself increasingly torn between his fear of not belonging and a deeply-felt commitment to his family's past. Coming Out Jewish examines the unique challenge of constructing an identity amid the clash between ethnicity and conformity. For many Jews, the idea of full assimilation ended with the Holocaust. But the pressure to adapt to the mainstream, Stratton eloquently argues, remains powerful, especially for those with anglicized names, assimilationist parents, a history of recent immigration, or ambivalent experiences of themselves as Jews. With reference to the work of Daniel Boyarin, Ien Ang, and Homi Bhabha, among others, Stratton offers fresh analysis on a wide range of topics, including the Jewish origins of pluralism in the US, anti-Semitism in Germany, the Jewishness of sitcoms like Seinfeld, and the Yiddishization of American culture since World War II. More than a book about Jews and Jewishness, Coming Out Jewish smartly and accurately mines the Jewish experience in the West to give voice to the issues of migration, Diaspora, assimilation and identity that affect those, displaced and 'othered', around the world.

Today, Australia's response to asylum-seeking 'boat people' is a hot-button issue that feeds the political news cycle. But the daily reports and political promises lack the historical context that would allow for informed debate. Have we ever taken our fair share of refugees? Have our past responses been motivated by humanitarian concerns or economic self-interest? Is the influx of 'boat people' over the last fifteen years really unprecedented? In this eloquent and informative book, historian Klaus Neumann examines both government policy and public attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers since Federation. He places the Australian story in the context of global refugee movements, and international responses to them. Neumann examines many case studies, including the resettlement of displaced persons from European refugee camps in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the panic generated by the arrival of Vietnamese asylum seekers during the 1977 federal election campaign. By exploring the ways in which politicians have approached asylum-seeker issues in the past, Neumann aims to inspire more creative thinking about current refugee and asylum-seeker policy. 'Klaus Neumann has written a humane, engrossing book imbued with the awareness that in telling the history of Australia, one tells the story of immigration. Immigrants — always resisted, always blasted by invective and ever essential to our society and polity — show us ourselves through the heroic journeys of ancestors, the recurrent frenzies of resistance, right up to our present parlous state as the most supposedly tolerant intolerant society on earth. But if you think you've read all this before, you should know Neumann has brought to this book a novelty of approach, a freshness of perception, that means all the others have been mere preparation.' Tom Keneally 'A riveting book, vast in scope and timely.' Arnold Zable 'Across the Seas is a call to remember, to rethink, and regenerate. And to overcome our culture of forgetting … it's a fine and vital book – a work of highly accessible and gripping historical scholarship, which must be read by as many people in this country, and abroad, as possible.' David Manne 'Across the Seas' strongest point is a lack of dudgeon. Rather than condemn or mock historical players with thunderous prose and stylistic eye-rolling, Neumann plays it cool … Neumann gives us a mature and measured consideration of an issue that will never cease to be complex.' Saturday Paper

September 11 2001 marked a change inAustralian attitudes towards immigrants. The spotlight was on Muslims. This collection of thought-provoking essays looks at multiculturalism's successes and failures in providing a secure, well-integrated, free and fair Australia. Philosopher and writer Raimond Gaita has gathered some of Australia's leading writers in the field to examine an issue that goes to the heart of Australia's identity. Author and lawyer Waleed Aly examines the role that the media has played in anti-Islamic myth-making in popular Western culture. Writer and researcher Shakira Hussein looks at how Australia's immigration policy has changed the cultural landscape. Geoffrey Brahm Levey writes on multiculturalism and terror and Raimond Gaita on 'the war on terror'.

This is the newest volume of the annual Studies In Contemporary Jewry series. It contains original essays on Jews and crime in fact, fantasy, and fiction; verbal and physical violence in Israeli politics; Jews as revolutionaires; armed resistance by Jews in Nazi Germany; ethical dilemmas within the Israeli Defense Forces; violence in Israeli society and social stress; and other topics. As with other volumes, it also contains review essays and book reviews.

Refugees. Border protection. Ethnic gangs. Terrorism. History wars. Pauline Hanson. Australia's faith in multiculturalism has been shaken by fierce attacks from its enemies and a sense of crisis among its friends. Multiculturalism has become a political tool to win votes and generate community anxiety. What is left of the multicultural ideal? Bob Hodge and John O'Carroll take the pulse of multicultural Australia in the wake of September 11. They investigate the hot spots' of multiculturalism, showing how they cluster around fiercely defended boundaries and borders, both literal and symbolic. They tackle the issues of racism past and present, and show how injustice impacts on many communities in Australia, including Aboriginals as well as more recent migrant groups. The authors argue that despite appearances, multiculturalism is alive and well in Australia, and a commitment to tolerance and diversity characterises daily life. In fact, Australia's multiculture is the best kind of borderwork against terrorism, racism and injustice. A timely, original and optimistic discussion of Australia's multicultural past and our possible futures.' Graeme Turner, Director, Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland This clearly written book shines a welcome light on the fog of critique of Australian multiculturalism from both the Right and the Left.' Jock Collins, Professor of Economics, University of Technology Sydney

Using digital storytelling--a new media genre that began in California in the late 1990s and that proliferated across 'the West' in the 2000s--as a site of analysis, this book asks, 'What is done in the name of the everyday?' Like everyday multiculturalism, digital storytelling is promoted as an accessible, enabling, and ordinary phenomenon that represents cultural experience more accurately than official sites. As such, the genre frequently houses stories of migration, community, and ethnic and racial differences. In turn, digital story collections often act as digital monuments or repositories of multiculturalism, giving a digital life to narratives of migration, cultural difference, and national belonging. This is evidenced in one of the world's largest public collections of digital stories, found in the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and referenced throughout this book. Using examples from this collection and pointing to comparable ones in the UK and North America, this book investigates how notions of the everyday become a channel through which certain long-standing discourses of race get redeployed in multicultural nations. What can digital storytelling teach us about the status and future of multiculturalism in these societies? Can digital storytelling re-mediate multiculturalism in new, progressive ways?