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In July last year I learned that Louise Adler, publisher of Melbourne University Press, had commissioned Antony Loewenstein, a little-known online journalist who has his own far-left blog, to write a book about the Australian Jewish community and its attitudes to Israel. Mr Loewenstein sent me a questionnaire asking my views on various subjects. After making some inquiries about him and reading the extreme anti-Israel views at his website, I decided not to participate in this project, knowing that my participation would give it a credibility it didn’t deserve. I wrote to the Jewish News urging readers to have nothing to do with Mr Loewenstein’s book.
Louise Adler:cover for Loewenstein
Ever since, Mr Loewenstein has painted himself as a heroic dissident being persecuted by the “Jewish establishment” for daring to criticise Israel and the Jewish community. It is sometimes perfectly obvious what is going to be in a book before it is published. If a leading publisher commissioned Pauline Hanson to write a book about multiculturalism, or Fred Nile about the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, no doubt all the commentators at the ABC and The Age would have plenty to say, because it would be obvious what such books would be like.
The fact is that I and many other people knew Mr Loewenstein’s views on Israel and on Australian Jews long before his book appeared. This is the point that Mr Rodgers and his ilk persistently fail to acknowledge so they can misrepresent criticism of Mr Loewenstein. After all, he stated them openly at his own website a year ago, where he called Israel “fundamentally undemocratic and colonialist” and “a terror state”, and described the Australian Jewish community as “vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic.” He also said that “so-called Western ‘values’ deserve to be challenged and overthrown.” I give Mr Loewenstein credit for honesty – he stated his views quite openly, so everyone knew what would be in his book long before it appeared.
Of course, when the book appeared, my anticipation about its contents was proved to be correct. The book is shallow, predictable, trite and obvious, as well as riddled with factual errors. This was not my view alone. Dr Philip Mendes of Monash University, author of Jews and Australian Politics (and himself a frequent, but fair, critic of Israeli policies), said: “The majority of the text [of Mr Loewenstein’s book] is overwhelmingly simplistic and one-sided. This could have been a serious and objective examination of the role of local lobby groups in influencing Australia’s Middle East policies. Unfortunately, that book still waits to be written.”
Dr Michael Fagenblat, of Monash University’s Centre for the Study of Jewish Civilisation, says: “There’s nothing new or interesting here and several things that seem patently false. These remarks seem completely one-sided; they overlook the complexity and manifold responsibility that has contributed to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” (both these comments appeared in the Jewish News of 28 July)
Since his book came out, becoming a hero of the anti-Israel commentariat seems to have gone to Mr Loewenstein’s head. Despite being lionised at writers’ festivals around the county, he still complains that the “Zionist lobby” is working to silence him. His attacks on Israel are growing more strident. In Brisbane, debating Phillip Mendes, he said: “Israel’s behaviour in the West Bank and Gaza are the tactics of a rogue, terror state. Enough with the Holocaust, alleged Palestinian ‘terror’ and victimhood. Take some responsibility for the parlous State of Israel in the international community. For all of us who want a safer Middle East, today’s Israel is currently the problem, not the cure.”
In August I was given a chance to confront Mr Loewenstein face-to-face on ABC Radio, and I must thank the Jon Faine program for setting up this debate, which was ably moderated by Gerard Whately and Gideon Haigh. The debate was conducted in a civil manner, but I made a point of taking Mr Loewenstein to task over a comment of his which I considered particularly offensive. Speaking of the comedian Sandy Guttman (Austen Tayshus), he said at his website: “Jews are often their own worst enemies. It might help if Tayshus didn’t look so much like those awful caricatures we know from the 1930s!” So Mr Guttman is to be criticised because he looks too Jewish for Mr Loewenstein’s sensibilities!
Mr Loewenstein is, of course, entitled to his views – ignorant, offensive and superficial though they are – but I don’t apologise for my decision to launch a “pre-emptive strike” against his book last year. Nor do I resile from my view that a person who thinks that a Jewish state is “a fundamentally undemocratic and colonialist idea from a bygone era,” and that the Australian Jewish community is “vitriolic, bigoted, racist and downright pathetic” was not a suitable person to be commissioned by a major publisher to write a book about our community and its attitudes towards Israel.
This is not MUP’s first excursion into anti-Israel polemic under Louise Adler’s direction. In 2005 she published Jacqueline Rose’s The Question of Zion, a tract so blatantly anti-Israel that even a self-professed anti-Zionist reviewer, Simon Louvish in The Independent, called it a work of “overriding shallowness” which showed “a lack of basic understanding” and “over-reliance on certain dissident Israeli historians, and avoidance of others.” Ms Adler is, of course, free to publish as many bad books as she likes, but why do they all have to be anti-Israel bad books? Why does she lend the prestige of the MUP imprint to a one-sided rehashing of all the usual anti-Israel propaganda?
Dame leonie Kramer:cover for Demidenko
Ms Adler is free to publish as many bad books as she likes, but why do they all have to be anti-Israel bad books? Why does she lend the prestige of the MUP imprint to a one-sided rehashing of all the usual anti-Israel propaganda? I am reminded of another literary lioness, Dame Leonie Kramer, a few years ago, lending her authority to the fraudster Helen Darville-Demidenko and her bogus-Ukrainian anti-Semitic novel The Hand that Signed the Paper. At least Dame Leonie can claim she was conned. Ms Adler has no such defence.
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