Sydney attack forces Jewish parents to ask how long innocence can survive
As a parent, I can accept grief, randomness and pain. What I cannot accept is a world in which children are taught to fear who they are, or worse, taught to hate who others are
Any parent wants to protect their children’s innocence for as long as the world allows. There’s a particular kind of shattering when life shows its harshness before you’re ready for them to see it. Some children are cushioned from that reality longer than others. Mine were not.
My own approach to parenting has always been shaped by the way I was raised — lovingly, gently, but pragmatic and honest about the unfair parts of life. By the ages of four and three my children had already experienced some of its deepest cruelties. They were beside my mum, whom we cared for at home, as she died. Their age protected them from the full weight of it, but not entirely. They sat at the end of her bed, small and innocent, comforting her in her final days.
This time of year, grief seems to sit heavily in the background. My daughter, now three, cries for her granny when she falls over. It is not something she has picked up from either me or my husband. It’s muscle memory: love and loss entwined together. Watching that is both heart-warming and devastating. It shows my mum’s impact at such a fundamental time in my daughter’s development, but it also shows the loss.
My parents always taught me that life is not fair, that terrible things happen to good people, and that resilience is not optional. But they also insisted that life can still be full of goodness and that the world doesn’t stop turning for sorrow. I try to pass that on.
It is an indescribable pain, the idea that we will one day have to explain to our children that some people hate them simply for existing
And yet the recent terrorist attack against Jews in Sydney during Chanukah has forced something into sharp focus for me as a parent. In this case, my children unlike many Jewish children their age are still blissfully unaware of the hatred that exists around them.
They don’t attend a Jewish school. My three-year-old hasn’t been taught what to do if a terrorist storms her classroom. My five-year-old runs through the school gates without being flanked by security guards. For now, they enjoy a childhood that resembles my own, open, unguarded, and free from the sense that danger is stitched into the background of everyday life.
But for how long?
I know other Jewish parents whose children are already absorbing a harsher truth: that they are targets. It is an indescribable pain, the idea that we will one day have to explain to our children that some people hate them simply for existing. It’s a conversation no parent wants to have, and yet it is one that more and more of us are being pushed toward. Hatred of Jews is no longer a lesson from the past; it is alive in the present and party of our everyday life.
What I cannot reconcile about the Sydney attack beyond the brutality itself is that it was carried out by a father and son. That detail has shaken something fundamental in me about what it means to be a parent.
In what kind of society does a father guide his child into acts of violent, racist murder? Parenting is supposed to be the purest form of protection, nurture and moral guidance. To see a father instructing, collaborating with his son into hatred instead of shielding him from it is almost too much to fathom and yet here we are.
It is another glaring example of a sickness spreading unchecked through society, accompanied by a remarkable silence from the very people who like to tell themselves they care about justice, equality, and human dignity. Jewish communities have been sounding the alarm for years and too often it feels like we’re calling into the void.
Attacks like Sydney do not happen in vacuum. It results from radicalisation online, in person, in community and in the home. It is evidence of a society unwilling to deal with the virulent spread of antisemitism.
It also signals the only growing generational transmission of hate. It is not just that hatred is now alive, it is that it is being taught and handed down.
You only have to spend a short amount of time online to see that peddlers of today’s hate on social media are the parents of tomorrow, if they are not already.
What hope have children got if adults online can’t distinguish criticism of a government versus blanket discrimination of a people because of their identity.
As parents if we don’t confront the culture that allows hatred to take root in families we face a future where children are taught hatred and destruction instead of to love and protect.
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