School grounds can feel like unsafe places. It’s something I’m aware of because I am an education reporter – but also because I am Jewish.
At school I had coins tossed at my feet, in the anticipation that as a Jew I’d stingily pick them up and pocket them.
I was careful whom I told about my real identity – to certain people I classed Shabbat as “Friday night dinner”. I’d pretend I had plans on Saturday mornings instead of disclosing the real reason: that I was actually going to synagogue to prepare for my Bat Mitzvah. This as a 12-year-old girl.
As we negotiated the trials of adolescence there lurked the feeling that we needed to hide our identity, knowing our families were murdered because of who they were and the worry that we’d be targeted because of it.
Being Jewish is a spectrum, some have ancestry but don’t identify, some may be atheist but culturally Jewish, or religious and anti-Israel. To bullies, none of that matters.
When he went to school my husband Andrew, who only found out about his Jewish ancestry as a teenager, was called “An-Jew”. Other students told him that they’d kill and rape his Jewish grandmother who narrowly escaped the Holocaust. They were jokes, of course.
It’s worrying that in the almost 20 years since I went to school, things have not changed. In some cases they are worse.
Read the article by Nicole Precel in The Age.