The newly minted Jewish Council of Australia may be a product of the Israel-Gaza war but the group of progressive Jewish academics, teachers, writers and lawyers is continuing a long tradition.
“There have always been progressive threads in the Jewish community in Australia,” says the historian Max Kaiser, an executive officer of the council, which he co-founded in February. His grandfather was a member of the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Antisemitism, established in 1942. Before that, from 1928, there was the Jewish Labor Bund in Melbourne, born as an outpost of the largely Yiddish-speaking socialist movement in eastern Europe (and still active).
