Today I recorded an interview with the UK-based group Feminists Against Antisemitism. The interviewer, Susan McDonnell, a retired lawyer, was both warm and welcoming and asked all the right questions. I am honored to be of service to this mostly Christian group. I am thrilled that they exist.
Here, below, is what they published earlier today about a Literary Festival (really, yet another anti-Israel hate fest) in Adelaide, Australia:
The hypocrites of Adelaide Writers' Week
Inside the Australian writers’ festival meltdown: a tale of rape denial, Jewish betrayal, and defence of a writer who celebrated October 7 as ‘a glimmer of hope… palpable, real and exhilarating’.
Feminists Against Antisemitism
Jan 22, 2026
The on-again, off-again literary festival is the latest iteration of the creative sector’s abiding narrative of nefarious Zionist repression, writes Julie Szego, an Australian journalist and author. She writes regularly for The Australian and publishes a Substack newsletter.
If Jewish-Australians, still reeling from the Bondi Hanukkah massacre, were hoping the long antipodean summer would bring some relief from the unrelenting Jew-baiting and harassment of the past two years, reality, yet again, slapped us in the face.
In the post-October 7 era, Jews invariably dominate the news, no matter the season. First, we had the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese fiercely resisting calls for a Royal Commission into anti-Semitism, only to cave in response to public pressure - his dithering and indecision lending fuel to those ready to accuse the “Zionist lobby" of exerting undue influence over Australian politics to stifle “criticism" of Israel.
“Zionists have no right to cultural safety"
This narrative of nefarious Zionist repression finds especially fertile ground in the creative sector, which brings us to the Adelaide Writers Week fiasco: a summertime thriller, replete with twists, turns and intrigue. A saga that ended on a depressing note for Australian Jews and especially for Jewish women who once felt they belonged to the intellectual left, after big-name local and global authors, including Zadie Smith, Masha Gessen and former New Zealand prime minister, and feminist icon, Jacinta Ardern, effectively rallied in solidarity around Sydney-born, Palestinian-Australian Randa Abdel-Fattah, a writer and academic who insists “Zionists" - who might they be? - have no right to “cultural safety."
"If you are a Zionist, you have no claim or right to cultural safety. It is the duty of those who oppose racism to ensure that every space Zionists enter is culturally unsafe for them"
Randa Abdel-Fattah
She also openly celebrated October 7, while simultaneously dismissing and minimising, if not outright denying, the systematic sexual violence perpetrated that day. Israel, she claimed, was “weaponising rape atrocity propaganda."
Australia’s longest-running and most prestigious literary fixture, the Adelaide Writers' Week (AWW) is part of the flagship Adelaide Festival of Arts. Its director, Louise Adler, is an antizionist Jew known for courting controversy.
In early 2023, Adler was sharply criticised by the South Australian Premier, Peter Malinauskas, for inviting Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer - Adler devoted a whole day’s programme to hardline Palestinian Arabs - who had described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “a depraved Zionist" trying to ignite World War III.
Undeterred, Adler scheduled the incendiary Abdel-Fattah to appear at this year’s AWW. An author of 14 books for children and young adults, and the recipient of a public funding grant to the tune of 870,000 Australian dollars to research “Arab and Muslim-Australian social movements," Abdel-Fattah’s reputation precedes her.
She led a children’s excursion to the Gaza protest encampment at Sydney University, where she encouraged her charges to chant for “intifada." She changed her Facebook cover photo on 8 October 2023, to an image of a Hamas paraglider in the colours of the Palestinian flag; when pressed on the subject this week, she told Australia’s public broadcaster, ABC, that when she chose the image, she had “no idea" about the civilian death toll. The assertion is laughable. In an essay published in Mondoweiss a year after the atrocities, she praised the October 7 attack as a “glimmer of hope... palpable, real and exhilarating."
Me Too Unless You Are a Jew
On the day itself, for crying out loud, she reshared a post featuring an image of a terrified young woman running from terrorists at the Nova festival that mocked “the indigenous settlers" fleeing their “ancestral land." She added the dehumanising comment, “What passport should I use today?" It was beyond her to express even fleeting sympathy for the young people butchered in the desert.
Of the women and teenage girls gang-raped and mutilated, she wrote:
“It was always about using the mass rapes claims to whip up genocide fervour... Nobody wishes the mass rape claims were true more than Zionists."
Randa Abdel-Fattah
I hardly need to labour, for this audience, the level of malevolence involved in casting doubt on the rape atrocities. Casting doubt in the face of evidence so crushing that even the systemically anti-Israel UN was forced to the belated finding there were “reasonable grounds" to believe that “conflict-related sexual violence - including rape and gang-rape - occurred across multiple locations of Israel and the Gaza periphery." Casting doubt in the face of what we all saw in Hamas’s own livestream, starting with the gunmen in the back of the pickup truck spitting on Shani Louk’s near-naked, lifeless body.
Unsurprisingly, some on the Adelaide Festival Board, which has oversight of AWW, were nervous about Abdel-Fattah’s inclusion; one member, we’ve since learned, even resigned in protest. Her presence had already made a casualty of last year’s Bendigo Writers’ Festival in regional Victoria, after a university sponsor issued a heavy-handed Code of Conduct in an attempt to muzzle discussion on Gaza - clearly an attempt to muzzle Abdel-Fattah - leading 50 writers to boycott in protest at the “censorship."
With that walkout, I could sympathise; I’d never sign a Code of Conduct warning me off “divisive and inflammatory" topics. Frankly, it would leave me precious little to talk about. Still-who knew the woke brigade had metamorphosed into free-speech fundamentalists seemingly overnight? I’ll expect an uproar the next time a gender-critical feminist is cancelled.
Then Bondi happened, bringing a vibe shift of sorts. After 15 people were gunned down at a Jewish celebration at one of Australia’s most iconic locations, the Adelaide board, with the strong backing of Malinauskas, rescinded Abdel-Fattah’s invitation from AWW, due to start in February. Given her past statements, the board said, “it would not be culturally sensitive" to platform Abdel-Fattah “so soon after Bondi."
It was a pathetic, cowardly statement that invoked the fragile feelings of Jews rather than the hard facts about the writer’s pattern of extremist agitation. It also made it easy for Abdel-Fattah to repeat her persistent claim that she was a victim of “anti-Palestinian racism."
Within days, more than 180 writers had pulled out of AWW, leading the board to implode and Adler to resign as director. She railed on the ABC against what she described as the repressive efforts of the pro-Israel lobby to police debate on Israel, warning that people with “fat chequebooks" were censoring free expression in the arts.
AWW was scrapped in its entirety.
Free Speech as Cover for Hate
Then a new board was appointed and, in an astonishing backflip-presumably executed in the hope of stemming the bleeding-the festival’s new chair, Judy Potter, issued Abdel-Fattah a grovelling “unreserved" apology and invited her to take part in next year’s AWW. She is yet to accept. Meanwhile, she is threatening defamation proceedings against Malinauskas for allegedly implying, by way of analogy, that she was “an extremist terrorist sympathiser." Whatever gave him that idea?
Where to start with the Orwellian inversions in this caper? For we have also since learned that both Abdel-Fattah and Adler herself successfully prevailed upon the board to cancel a Zoom appearance by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (who is also a fierce critic of Israel, ed.) because of one allegedly off-colour column, in which he compared geopolitics in the Middle East to the animal kingdom.
As I wrote in The Australian, “with the stroke of an unctuous press release we’re supposed to believe the suppressors of free speech have turned into its champions."
And in a perverse reversal of cause-and-effect, we’re supposed to believe that a cheerleader for a racist terror organisation and advocate for the exclusion of “Zionists" from Australia’s cultural and intellectual scene, is a victim of racism rather than a disseminator of it.
Where are the Feminists?
The decision to bar Abdel-Fattah from AWW, explained Kathy Lette, one of the 180 boycotting authors, “sends a divisive and plainly discriminatory message that platforming Australian Palestinians is ‘culturally insensitive.’" As co-author of the 1979 classic, Puberty Blues, Lette’s frank description of male sexual violence in the “surfie" subculture changed Australian literature forever. Now here she is pandering to the “resistance by any means necessary" mob.
To be fair, I’m sure - or, at least, I hope - that many of the boycotting writers don’t share Abdel-Fattah’s wish to cancel Israel, however much the Gaza war might have soured sentiment towards the Jewish state. No doubt many pulled out simply because others had pulled out; others might have felt bullied into doing so.
When writer Shokoofeh Azar told The Guardian she had refused to join the boycotters because writers’ festivals were one of the few platforms through which Iranian dissidents like her could make their voices heard, she reportedly copped a torrent of online abuse. One commentator said: “You should be killed like the Israelis."
Again, what to make of a world in which feminists choose to stand with a terror apologist and rape denier, and not with those resisting a regime where women can be killed for showing hair?
“I didn’t want to undermine the festival, that’s not my point," author Jane Caro, a prominent #MeToo campaigner, told the ABC about her decision to pull out, “my point is trying to live up to my values and my belief about the right of people to express opinions."
Except “living by one’s values" would surely oblige freedom-loving writers such as Caro to explicitly disavow Abdel-Fattah’s ideas; to make it clear that their decision to withdraw should not be read as endorsing her views. If only for the sake of the Jews grieving their dead - not in a conflict on the other side of the world, but here, on Bondi Beach.
But as far as I know, none of the boycotting writers have made such a statement. Not even after weeks of media reporting on all the hateful things Abdel-Fattah has said and done.
And in their silence, I can’t help but glimpse a rigid worldview in which Jews simply can’t be victims, only oppressors. Because we’ve heard this silence from the political left before. It’s the same silence we heard after October 7, and it’s deafening still.
Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D., is an Emerita Professor of Psychology at City University of New York. She is a best-selling author of over 20 books, a legendary feminist leader, and a retired academic and psychotherapist. She has lectured and organized political, legal, religious, and human rights campaigns in the United States, Canada, Europe, Israel, Central Asia, and the Far East. In addition to her books, Chesler currently writes for her Substack newsletter.