Antisemitism is growing like a virus worldwide 

It has been, to put it mildly, a very “interesting” summer for me. Everywhere I went — in Europe and now even in my own home in the New York/New Jersey area — I was confronted with a rising tide of hostility, intimidation, and outright violence directed against me for one reason: I am a visible Jew in the public eye who fights for his people.

Since I lived in Western Europe as rabbi at Oxford University for 11 years, I speak every summer in communities all over that continent, which is filled with millennia of Jewish pain.

In Vienna, I was physically assaulted in the very heart of St. Stephen’s Square by an Islamist mob that recognized me as I walked near a “Free Palestine” rally, something we saw in virtually every European city we visited. The assault became international news when I was surrounded by 10 Austrian police who treated me as an instigator rather than a victim. I instigated the assault by wearing a yarmulke in a European capital, something that few Jews dare today, especially in the city where Hitler learned his antisemitism. The assault was brutal and humiliating, and the police, who forced my wife and me to go give a statement for two hours on Shabbat, only climbed down once they began to understand that this would become an international incident, heavily covered by global media. The story hit the front page of Euro News, with the headline, “Prominent U.S. rabbi assaulted at rally in Vienna questions police actions,”

I received a letter of apology from a senior government minister. But Austria still hasn’t arrested my assailants. The case is ongoing.

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On a European river cruise where I was doing research on the First and Second Crusades for my new book about the origins of annihilator antisemitism, my family and I were subject to a torrent of complaints from a group of Australians who raged about our alleged “Jewish special treatment” because we were the lucky ones who were served congealed tofu glue while they feasted nightly on sirloin steak. Yes, even that got their backs up. Imagine it — on a ship meant to bring people together, the old poison of antisemitism reared its head, dressed up in the language of grievance.

Everywhere I traveled, I saw the same sight: “Free Palestine” marches choking the streets of European capitals. From Paris to Frankfurt, from Basel to Toledo, masses of people waved Hamas flags and shouted slogans that demonized Israel while ignoring the October 7 massacre. What shocked me most was not just the scale of the protests, but the way in which they normalized hatred of Jews in broad daylight, with police and politicians usually turning a blind eye.

Meanwhile, my inbox, my phone, and my social media feeds filled with death threats. Threats against me. Threats against my family. Threats that spilled over from the anonymity of the internet into the reality of my life. Being outspoken against Hamas and antisemitism has made me a target many times before, but this summer the intensity was different. The hate was more brazen, more unrestrained, more determined to silence me.

Then there’s Australia.

It is not often that an Israeli prime minister directly rebukes the leader of a democratic ally. Israel does not lightly take to chastising its friends. Yet such is the depth of Australia’s crisis of antisemitism that Benjamin Netanyahu himself has now spoken in words that history will record as both searing and unprecedented.

In a blistering letter dated August 17, 2025, Netanyahu admonished Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese for failing to confront the “epidemic” of antisemitism that has, in his words, “intensified under your watch.” He accused Albanese of “pouring fuel on the antisemitic fire” by promising to recognize a Palestinian state — rewarding Hamas terror, emboldening Israel’s enemies, and encouraging Jew-hatred to stalk Australia’s streets.

“It is not diplomacy,” Netanyahu declared. “It is appeasement.”

Netanyahu’s words came not in isolation but against the backdrop of escalating hatred in Australia: synagogues firebombed, Jewish preschools vandalized, Israeli restaurants ransacked, Jewish schoolchildren menaced on public transport, Jews assaulted on beaches, Jewish lecturers shouted down in their own halls, as I personally experienced in my last visit.

And the crisis has metastasized at the very top of Australian government. Last month Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke banned Israeli MK Simcha Rothman from entering the country. His crime? Not terrorism. Not extremism. Not incitement to violence. His crime was being an unapologetic Zionist member of Israel’s parliament, democratically elected, in the only free assembly in the entire Middle East.

This disgraceful act was nothing less than state-sponsored antisemitism: the selective exclusion of a Jewish legislator of the only democracy in the Middle East, while Australia throws open its doors to Hamas apologists and radical preachers who call for the annihilation of Jews.

In his letter, Netanyahu set a deadline for Albanese: the Jewish New Year, September 23, 2025. By then, Netanyahu demanded, the Australian prime minister must “replace weakness with action, appeasement with resolve.” He warned: “Antisemitism is a cancer. It spreads when leaders stay silent. It retreats when leaders act.”

History, Netanyahu said, “will not forgive hesitation. It will honor action.”

It was a remarkable moment: Israel’s leader compelled to lecture Australia’s prime minister on the elementary responsibility of government — to protect its Jews.

Interestingly, Australia fired back initially at Netanyahu’s letter, claiming, disgustingly, that Israel uses bombs as policy rather than in self-defense. And yet, two days later, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was forced to evict the Iranian ambassador to Canberra as Australia acknowledged that that vile regime was behind recent antisemitic attacks on Australian soil.

Netanyahu publicly lauded Prime Minister Albanese for finally acting decisively — breaking the Israeli reluctance to point fingers at Iran — and it appears this push helped spur Australia’s intelligence to expose Tehran’s role. ASIO confirmed that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, using intermediaries, orchestrated firebomb attacks on Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue on December 6, 2024) and the Lewis Continental Kitchen, a kosher restaurant in Sydney’s Bondi in October of that year. One worshipper was injured in the Melbourne attack, which caused massive damage, and although Sydney’s incident caused no injuries, both were branded terrorist acts. In response, Australia expelled Iran’s ambassador, began the process to list the IRGC as a terrorist organization, and escalated its security and diplomatic response.

I wish I could say that my own recent encounter with Australians was detached from this wider crisis. First, let me be clear. I am married to an Australian, and I have nine children who are Australian citizens. I spent two of the most formative years of my life as a rabbinical student in Sydney and came to love the country as a second home. Sadly, that is all changing now based on shameful and unprecedented experiences.

On our recent river cruise through Germany where I am researching a new book on the First and Second Crusades — landscapes soaked in Jewish blood, from Würzburg to Rothenburg to Frankfurt — my wife and I should have been absorbed in history and beauty. Instead, we were subjected to petty but poisonous antisemitism from fellow passengers, the vast majority of whom were Australian.

We kept kosher on the cruise, accommodated graciously by the ship with a vegan menu in new pots and pans. This meant a small reserved table tucked in the corner of the dining hall. Two Jews, out of 120 passengers. Yet somehow this became too much for many Australians to bear.

They whispered about “Jewish privilege.” They complained we received “too much attention.” They spoke openly in our presence about how unfair our treatment was. This while they all dined on sirloin steaks and we ate our tofu. They bristled at our tiny reserved corner table, even though it ofen confined us to direct sunlight in 100-degree heat while everyone else rotated freely across the panoramic dining room. They grumbled that we were disrupting the “rhythm of the ship.” It was, transparently, nothing but Jew-hatred dressed up as fairness.

What struck me most was the hypocrisy.

Had my wife and I been Muslims in keffiyehs and hijabs, every Australian passenger would have stopped at our table to express admiration for our faith. They would have gushed at our devotion, praised our cultural pride, congratulated us for upholding tradition abroad. But because we were Jews, their response was contempt, not respect. Resentment, not admiration. Instead of praise, they muttered that Jews were demanding “special privileges.” Sound familiar? In Germany it sure did!

Instead of respect, they cast us as parasites siphoning staff time and energy. Again, pretty familiar slogans in Germany. Had we been Muslims in hijabs, the Australians would have praised our devotion. Because we were Jews, they mocked us.

The double standard was chilling.

On Shabbat, my wife and I walked to a tour site rather than ride a bus, forbidden on the holy Sabbath — a 15-minute trek in blistering heat. No one was delayed. No one inconvenienced. Yet some Australians accused us of “special privilege.”

You can’t make this stuff up. We actually had an elderly Australian man who interrupted our Sabbath dinner and came and sat next to us and told us it was unfair that we walked instead of taking the bus. I asked him how that could possibly have bothered him. He answered that we should be joining the group. I answered that he should stop finding fault with Jews and should search his heart to discover if this is the man that he thought he would grow up to be.

Think of the absurdity: Jews walking in the burning sun while Australians rode in air-conditioned buses—and we were the ones supposedly privileged. This was not reason. It was not logic. It was antisemitism pure and simple. They accused us of privilege for walking in 100-degree heat while they sat in air-conditioned buses.

As our ship sailed past towns where Jews had been butchered and annihilated utterly in Crusader pogroms, burned as plague-spreaders, and deported to Nazi gas chambers, I could not escape the historical echo.

Always the same charges: Jews are different. Jews are parasites. Jews are freeloaders.

The Crusaders said it. The medieval mobs said it. The Nazis said it. And in 2025, some some Australian tourists on a German riverboat said it again.

Antisemitism does not always scream in jackboots. Sometimes it mutters across Chardonnay glasses. Antisemitism does not always scream. Sometimes it whispers across a dinner table.

But let no one imagine this riverboat episode was isolated. It was a microcosm of what I have long warned: Australia is drowning in antisemitism.

On October 8, 2023, the day after Hamas’s massacre of 1,200 Jews, thousands gathered on the steps of Sydney’s Opera House—not to mourn Jewish death but to chant “Gas the Jews.” Not one person calling for Australian jury to be gassed was arrested by the police. The sails of that iconic building glowed red in supposed solidarity with Israel even as the mob beneath called for a second Holocaust.

Weeks later, I was attacked at Coogee Beach simply for being visibly Jewish. Videos of the attack went viral. At a lecture I delivered in Dover Heights, a group of Israel haters tried to shut me down. Police removed them, then quickly released them. Three synagogues in Melbourne were burned or firebombed after October 7. The city’s most active synagogue was burned to the ground. Prime Minister Albanese played tennis while it smoldered and refused to visit for four days.

This is not the Australia I knew when I married my wife, Debbie, in Sydney in 1988. This is a sewer of antisemitism, poisoning not only its streets but its halls of power.

The rot begins at the top.

Prime Minister Albanese pushes for recognition of a Palestinian state without any demand for democracy, women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, or minority protections. Foreign Minister Penny Wong obsesses over Israel’s alleged “war crimes” while minimizing Hamas’s atrocities.

When mobs screamed “Gas the Jews,” both were silent. Silence emboldens. Silence spreads the cancer.

Netanyahu was right to call Albanese’s policy appeasement. It is worse: it is complicity. When mobs screamed ‘Gas the Jews,’ Albanese and Wong offered silence, not outrage. That silence was deafening.

Australia once prided itself on being warm, open, egalitarian. Today it is earning notoriety as a country where Jews are unsafe, unwanted, and unprotected.

On a riverboat in Germany, Australians muttered the same slurs hurled for centuries: Jews as parasites, Jews as freeloaders. At the Sydney Opera House, Australians screamed the genocidal cry: “Gas the Jews.” In Albanese’s office, Australian policy rewarded Hamas and punished Israel, silencing Jewish voices while empowering Jew-haters.

History will judge Anthony Albanese and Penny Wong harshly. Netanyahu’s warning will echo long after they are gone.

But what matters now is whether Australians themselves wake up and decide: do you want to be remembered as a nation that let antisemitism flourish, that silenced Jewish voices, that banned Jewish leaders, that looked away as Jews were firebombed and assaulted?

Or will you act—now, not tomorrow—to end this sewer of hate? Because, as Netanyahu warned, “History will not forgive hesitation. It will honor action.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach of Englewood is the author of “Judaism for Everyone” and “The Israel Warrior.” Follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @RabbiShmuley.