DANNY BERKOVIC: Why the ‘Jewish Council of Australia’ is anything but

Over recent months I have been sent statements and opinion pieces from the Jewish Council of Australia, often forwarded by third parties and circulated more broadly in political and media circles. They arrive framed as authoritative, as though this body speaks for Australian Jews, or at least for a substantial portion of them. It does not.

The Jewish Council of Australia is a recently formed advocacy group, established in 2024 by individuals who openly reject the positions taken by mainstream Jewish communal organisations, particularly on Zionism, Israel and anti-Semitism.

They are entitled to hold those views and to argue for them publicly. What is misleading is the way the organisation’s name creates the impression that it represents a community it plainly does not.

Australia’s Jewish population numbers about 120,000 people. It is politically and religiously diverse, but one point is not in dispute: a strong majority of Australian Jews identify as Zionists in the most basic sense, meaning they support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state alongside equal civil rights for all citizens. That position spans generations, denominations and political affiliations.

The Jewish Council of Australia, by contrast, represents a fringe within that community. Its own published material lists 1407 signatories to its core principles, gathered since its founding in 2024. Of those, 322 are anonymous.

Even taking those figures at face value, the scale is unmistakable. This is not a peak body. It does not function as one. It does not command anything approaching communal consent.

For comparison, the recent bondiresponse.com campaign called for a royal commission into anti-Semitism and social cohesion. It attracted approximately 3500 signatures in just 67 hours from launch, with no budget and little more than ad-hoc organisation. That does not make it representative of all Australians, but it does demonstrate how easily claims of “voice” and “authority” can be tested when numbers are put on the table.

And yet statements from the Jewish Council of Australia continue to be circulated as though they carry communal weight. The effect of the organisation’s name is to blur the line between advocacy and representation, obscuring who is actually speaking — and how few they are speaking for.

Louise Adler is a member of the Jewish Council of Australia’s advisory committee and a former director of the Adelaide Writers’ Festival. Writers’ Week was cancelled in 2026 under her stewardship.

In defending the decision to include Randa Abdel-Fattah in the program, Adler claimed that opposition to Dr Abdel-Fattah’s appearance was based on the idea that “the mere Palestinian-ness of an author” constituted a threat to the Australian Jewish community.

That claim does not withstand scrutiny.

Dr Abdel-Fattah’s ethnicity is irrelevant. No serious objection has been raised to her being Palestinian, and to suggest otherwise is not only wrong but deliberately inflammatory. The concern relates to what she has written and advocated.

Among those views is her statement that Zionists have “no claim or right to cultural safety”, as well as her support for excluding other speakers from public platforms on ideological grounds.

It was precisely that position that NSW Premier Chris Minns addressed when he said it was “intolerable for anyone to suggest that another Australian doesn’t deserve a safe space, cultural or any other kind”. That was not a generic remark. It was a direct repudiation of the idea that cultural safety can be selectively withdrawn based on politics.

Pretending that the debate around Dr Abdel-Fattah is about her “mere Palestinian-ness” is therefore not an innocent misunderstanding. It is a reframing that has the effect of shifting scrutiny away from her views and on to a caricature of Australian Jews as fearful and censorious.

That framing only works if two things are accepted as true when they are not: first, that criticism of what someone says or writes is the same as hostility toward who they are; and second, that those raising concerns are part of some unified, powerful bloc.

Neither claim withstands scrutiny.

If Adler or the Jewish Council of Australia wishes to argue that Dr Abdel-Fattah’s views should be welcomed and debated, they are free to do so. What they are not entitled to do is misrepresent the objection, invent motives, or pretend that a small ideological faction speaks for a community of 120,000 Australians.

Louise Adler was entrusted with one of Australia’s most respected cultural institutions. When she was unable to bend it to her ideological position, she instead blew it up. At a moment when Australians are looking for restraint, accuracy and good faith in public debate, Adler and her supporters are delivering the opposite.

Danny Berkovic is a Sydney businessman and an organiser of the bondiresponse.com petition