We want ballet

A friend and mentor, Nathan, sent me an old interview from 1964 - Leonard Cohen, still young, speaking with a clarity that I can only describe as rabbinic. The poet as prophet and the prophet as reluctant comedian. I listened to it twice. Then I listened again.

I’m too young to be nostalgic for 1964, but I know I’ve heard this before, and I couldn’t explain it. He was speaking from the middle of then and now. The arguments and dilemmas haven’t aged or evolved, but it’s so clear the world has changed.

Few artists speak of their blood the way Cohen did. In a time when Jewish identity is either relegated to museum vitrines or weaponised for advocacy, hearing someone speak of Jewishness as destiny felt like air. It reminded me that to be Jewish and audible in the modern arts is to be a problem. How ironic that the misfit is the Jew.

So I began writing as a kind of reply. Like a reflection from 2026.

I am not an educated Jew. My Hebrew is weak. My Yiddish is worse. My Jewish texts have entered mostly through osmosis and biography. I am, at best, a thief of ideas and spirituality, an untrained observer with too many notebooks. But I am atomically Jewish. Jewish in the way Chagall meant when he said he thought of himself as international until the rise of antisemitism made him paint his Jewish memory.

The Jews have always been accused of being too particular and maybe obsessed with their own history…for sure, too tribal. But Cohen’s interview reminded me that our particularism is metaphysical.

He says: “The world is hostile to the writer. The world is hostile to the poet. The world is hostile to any man who will hold up a mirror to the particular kind of mindless chaos in which we endure. That is the glory of the Jew: that he is despised. His destiny is exile. His vocation is to be despised.”

In that one move, for me, he collapsed the distinction between the poet and the Jew. Exile as the shared condition. The writer who insists on reality must be ostracised; the Jew who insists on God must be detested. The world can tolerate almost anything except the refusal to flatter it.

But the most devastating and prophetic idea he has, is where he diagnoses Canada - though I would argue he was diagnosing the West at large:

“We do not wish to own ourselves… We want ballet, poetry, forests, money… but we do not want to pay the existential price of having a soul… So instead we debate language, funding models, identity. It’s all easier than confronting the thing that actually hurts.”

When I heard that, something clicked. This - THIS is what has hollowed the arts in our time. It’s not what people think- like, some censorship issue. It’s cowardice and I think truly, the refusal to pay the existential price of having a soul. Cultural institutions now produce ethics, not. Art. I’d be fucking shocked if they understood the value in what it is to transcend. It explains why so much art (and activism) now feels like a weak robot.

This is my problem with the culture of the arts today. Art has always been political, but where is the danger? Where is God? Advocacy has taken the place of the raw impulse to make and tell the story and people treat political figures like gods, in this godforsaken godless world. “All hail demigod Mamdani, for his mother was a pauper and his father was Zeus!”…etc.

The blind and absolutely clownish pursuit of perfect equality between ideas and cultures, is not liberation. It’s killing our souls. It’s the death of distinction, and therefore the death of art. This has been at the core of my growing malaise with the arts for years. Not politics, the sudden contempt for skill in fields of tall poppies. Not the hyper-moral puritanism of the progressive class. It’s not letting difference exist, offend, stretch, disturb, fail, transcend, descend, light up the light between your thighs. We’re all dry…everywhere. Everything now lives in the flat beige middle, under the supervision of committees.

Which brings me to today’s dystopian comedy of errors- the Adelaide Writers’ Festival ‘scandal’.

If we had a culture that could still tolerate danger and distinguish between vulnerability and victimhood, Randa Abdel-Fattah would not need to be cancelled, nor defended or turned into a martyr of free speech. She would simply be what she is: a writer who supports a terrorist organisation, denies the rape of Jewish women, and endorses various forms of legitimised dehumanisation.

But sadly, we have a culture that can’t seem to tolerate contradiction. So Randa becomes either a saint or a fascist (though I think she’s someone who sees her people in pain, and has revenge venom running through her veins). There’s no middle. Those who withdrew were not defending principle., but a ranking of pain in which Palestinian identity eclipses the Jewish body. To speak of Israeli women raped would pollute the myth, so they kept their mouths shut- they didn’t name it but instead, for whatever reason, lined up with the rest of the herd, knowing full-well, their leader is actually a wolf.

And then, with comic inevitability, the phone calls came to people like me - “since you were cancelled,” would you like to comment on her cancellation? As if cancellation is a guild. As if Abdel-Fattah and I are siblings in misfortune. As if my refusal to denounce my own people is symmetrical to her refusal to acknowledge the rape of mine.

I’ve said already - and I will repeat it because it matters - I don’t believe in cancellation. I don’t believe Abdel-Fattah should have been deplatformed. If you choose to curate a writer who openly supports Hamas, denies rape, and advocates a hierarchy of grief in which Jewish bodies count for less, then you should have the courage to sit in that choice. Just own it.

Own it Louise Adler, now ex-chair of the festival- who for years has cultivated the aesthetic of the contrarian Jewish intellectual - allergic to mainstream Jewish life and especially Zionism- almost certainly energized by the role of community pariah. To some, this posture reads as bravery. But come on…it’s a mood… or an outfit choice that says “I’m a sour academic who hasn’t eaten carbs in three years”.

Her position on the Jewish Council of Australia completes the picture, whose name alone is an act of marketing. It suggests consensus where there is none. I’ve written before that the council should call itself the Jewish Council for Palestine or the Anti-Zionist Jewish Council of Australia. The rebrand would cure the distortion overnight. It would also rob its audience of the kosher stamp it so desperately craves. Jewish dissenters are treated like limited edition dolls with pomegranate necklaces. Look- show the world that your hatred of Zionism cannot be antisemitic, because look - here is a Jew who agrees with you. It is theological laundering.

But the hypocrisy peaks, when one remembers that these are the same institutions and individuals who have spent years sidelining, cancelling, uninviting and blacklisting Jewish Zionist artists from festivals, panels, exhibitions, and grants. I have names. I have dates. I have emails. I am not unique. Others have endured the same and worse. And the Australian arts has done nothing. All the more reason to be great, I say.

Yet the moment their own princess, Abdel-Fattah, is removed from the dais for five minutes, the entire progressive ecosystem falls to its knees in grief. Suddenly they remember the danger of censorship and rediscover the value of free expression.

And then it gets surreal - this entire discourse unfolds against a backdrop that should eclipse it entirely: the Iranian revolution. Girls removing their hijabs and lighting up cigarettes on pictures of Ali Khamenei (PUNK)- and in-amongst danger of dangers, is a theocratic regime confronting the possibility of collapse. Women - actual women, not conceptual feminist avatars - risking death for dignity and perhaps even freedom.

And the Western feminist class, who can’t stop speaking about liberation, fell silent.

SILENT.

Because to speak of Iran is to speak of Hezbollah. To speak of Hezbollah is to speak of Hamas. To speak of Hamas is to speak of October 7. And once you arrive at October 7, you are forced to encounter the unbearable truth that the Jewish people - those unfashionable, inconvenient Jews - were not hysterical after all. They were correct. Their fear was empirical, not psychological.

There’s nothing the Western left fears more than being wrong about Jews. Nothing.

To admit wrongness is to admit that Jewish self-defense is not fascism and that Zionism is not colonialism. Worst of all, that terrorism isn’t liberation and that antisemitism did not disappear after 1945. Too real, right?

What we are living through is not a political crisis but a revelatory one. The masks are off. The alliances are exposed. The hierarchies of empathy have been mapped. The artist is no longer permitted prophecy; she is conscripted to advocacy. And the Jew, once again, finds herself in the oldest position in history: unwelcome moral witness.

The West still wants Jewish art I think, so long as it doesn’t defend Jews. It wants our history, so long as it ends in the museum. I’d say it wants our trauma, but I think people seem to have Holocaust fatigue, considering the are either denying it happened or complaining that it’s overly opportunistic as a subject. It likes our inventions. It wants our food, our comedy, our therapy, our neuroses, our writers, our slang, our violinists, our Hollywood, our theories. It doesn’t seem to want our survival. It certainly does not want our sovereignty. And God, it does not want.

Jewish destiny is exile.