Australian universities have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, in which students and academics feel compelled to hide their Jewishness for fear of discrimination and hostility.
One University of New South Wales tutor told the Royal Commission on Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion that four students performed nazi salutes towards him on campus, including inside a classroom.
The witness, who gave evidence to the inquiry under the pseudonym ACJ, said he had been teaching a business class — entirely unrelated to nazism — at the time of the incident in April 2024.
ACJ said beyond being “offended and threatened” by the act, he described being disappointed by the university’s “lacklustre” reaction when he later said he wanted to report the incident to police.
“My grandparents had survived the Holocaust. The nazis … murdered a huge proportion of my family,” he said.
“So, when someone does a Nazi salute at me, it feels like they want to kill me.”
He accused the university of discontinuing his employment as a direct reprisal for reporting the issue.
After regulating receiving shifts each term, ACJ said he had been surprised when he found that he “was the only casual PHD student not to receive work” after reporting the incident.
He told the commission he had lost the “will or strength” to keep fighting against the hatred.
“I felt really unsafe. This whole experience was the worst time in my life and it really changed how I felt about being an Australian,” he said.
“Before the protest at the Opera House on October 9 (2023) I was really proud to be an Australian.
“Since then I feel worried that Jews don’t have a future here in Australia.”
The fourth block of the anti-Semitism inquiry, held in Melbourne for the first time, focused on the lived experiences of Jewish students and academics at Australian universities and examined the response of the institutions to the challenge.
Witness Liat — who is Sydney born but moved to Canberra in 2022 to attend Australian National University — described being taunted with slurs, including “baby killer” on campus, leading her and other Jewish students to hide visible signs of their faith such as wearing a Kippah or Star of David.
“I wouldn’t use my name ordering at coffee shops for fear that someone would ask me where it’s from,” she said.
“That series of micro-calculations that you make every single day and at every single instance is exhausting.”
Liat spoke of people on campus making “unsavoury jokes” using classic tropes of anti‑Semitism, such as making reference to money and her nose.
“They carried the implicit implication that I would take them in good faith, that I wouldn’t be the Jew who got offended,” she said.
Liat shared how a tutor responded “well, that’s a shame” after she’d mentioned she was “an Australian-Israeli”.
Liat criticised ANU’s reporting process for anti-Semitism, saying it “retraumatised” Jewish students, and in most cases was only met with “silence or inaction”.
“An institution that doesn’t want to name anti-Semitism in public has already decided not to respond to it in private,” she said.
“The university cared far more about how it was portrayed, that it was tackling racism as best as it could, over actually tackling the racism on campus.”
Academic Andy Smidt told the commission her Jewish son needed an escort between classes at the University of Sydney, so concerned was he about the potential threat from those at on-campus pro-Palestine student encampments.
She said people at the infamous encampment chanted “intifada” as her son passed, and accused him of being a paedophile.
Dr Smidt, who now works at University of Notre Dame Australia but has previously worked at the University of Sydney, also spoke about her concerns over “aggressive” graffiti on campus, such as a tag that “Israel doesn’t have the right to exist” and an inverted red triangle which she interpreted as a symbol “associated with Hamas as a terrorist organisation” to identify targets.
Students for Palestine organiser Yasmine Johnson later defended the encampment and other protests held at 21 campuses across Australia.
Ms Johnson, who is a Jewish woman, denied any knowledge of links to proscribed hate group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
She said the “rapidly escalating” violence in Gaza and lack of acknowledgement by Australian politicians and media to it had prompted her to follow the US encampment movement.
The University of Sydney graduate also defended chants like “globalise the Intifada” and “there’s only one solution, Intifada revolution”, while invoking the slogan “from the river to the sea”.
The phrase, which can be interpreted as advocating for the destruction of Israel, is banned in Queensland.
Ms Johnson told the inquiry that she doesn’t “hold movements for the justice of the oppressed to a standard that says there can never be any violence”.
She also accused the Jewish community of “deliberate misinterpretation” of pro-Palestine movement slogans to turn them into “controversial words and phrases”.
“We had to create a visible and noticeable demonstration of our opposition to these crimes, and we were successful in that in a way. Although not in changing the university’s policies,” she told the inquiry.
StandWithUs Australia executive director Michael Gencher told the Commission it was only after the massacre of 15 people at Bondi Beach in December that the pro-Israel group noticed universities acting on anti-Semitic concerns.
“Really, until this past December, I have not seen urgency. It’s since December, since the massacre in Bondi, that I have seen a change in responsiveness,” he said.
Ahead of the hearing on Monday, Education Minister Jason Clare warned that Australians should expect to hear “pretty horrific evidence” in the block.
He announced universities would be required to adopt definitions of anti-Semitism, racism against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and Islamophobia under new standards.
They will also be required to implement a “transparent complaints processes” and enable representation and participation in decision making.
Australia’s special envoy to combat anti-Semitism Jillian Segal had made recommendations in a dedicated plan last year.
Under the plan there would be a report-card system for the university sector, and staff, students and visitors who promoted hate speech would be held accountable, by withholding or terminating funding.
Ahead of Monday’s session, Royal Commissioner Virginia Bell noted that Jewish witnesses in previous sessions have been subject to “ugly anti-Semitic attacks” after providing testimonies.
She used her platform to warn that such attacks carried an indictable offence under provisions of the Royal Commissions Act.
She described it as a “sobering reflection” on Australia’s social cohesion that several Jewish witnesses had been targeted after engaging with the inquiry.
The Royal Commission’s full report will be handed down no later than December 14, 2026, which marks the first anniversary of the attack.
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