If one does a brief sweep of the Internet in 2026 looking for up to fifteen million men, women and children who acknowledge in one form or another a connection each with the other, some can be found. The connection apparently coalescing from shared or similar creation stories, claimed ancestry, oral histories, family trauma or migration stories covering generations.
What one is likely to find is a complex and layered diversity within that est. fifteen million as is mirrored by other large groups broadly sharing any cultural identity down through the 18th to 21st centuries.
In such groups there appears to be no evidence of an overarching group hive mind at work. No obvious synchronisation of thought, opinion or intent within loosely aligned large clusters splintered and spread across continents.
One group of fifteen million people is as resistant of organised analysis as any other fifteen million-strong cluster might be.
However, when the geopolitical world tilts on its axis as it has been doing these last four decades, nations and peoples strain to adjust when faced with powerful individuals, authoritarian states or so-called 'great powers' intent on redefining the concepts of sovereignty and belonging. All the while laying waste to international law and human rights hard won from the ashes of two catastrophic world wars only twenty years apart and barely one generation removed from many of those living today.
Sitting in our living rooms watching the growing conflict and chaos from afar brings into sharp relief uncomfortable questions concerning individual and collective responsibility.
In times of conflict and uncertainty bad actors begin to appear whose motives are unclear or deliberately hidden and, social or political division frequently follows in their wake. Sometimes state-sanction measures to silence manifestations of non-violent open debate are briefly reported by mainstream media.
So it was something of a relief to see the Jewish Council of Australia bearing witness to the fact that a diversity of world views, political opinions, personal beliefs and cultural practices exist within one particular loosely-aligned group of more than fifteen million men, women and children spread across all seven of the Earth's continents.
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MEDIA ALERT, 13 October 2026, excerpts,
Bestselling author Molly Crabapple comes to Australia with lessons from Jewish history for an age of rising authoritarianism
As the far right grows in influence across the world, the Jewish Council of Australia is bringing New York Times bestselling author, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple to Australia this November.
Crabapple's latest book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, tells the extraordinary and largely forgotten history of the Jewish Labour Bund, a revolutionary Jewish socialist movement founded in 1897 that became the largest revolutionary organisation in Tsarist Russia, and later the largest Jewish political organisation in pre-war Poland, fighting antisemitism, nationalism, Zionism and fascism.
Published in April, the book defied expectations, immediately debuting at #4 on the New York Times Bestseller List. Its remarkable popularity speaks to a renewed appetite for histories of resistance and what they can teach us about confronting authoritarianism today....
Why now
As Trump's America embraces increasingly authoritarian politics, and Australia heads towards the Victorian election amid growing anti-migrant rhetoric and far-right organising, the Bund's history has striking contemporary relevance.
At a time when Jewish identity is so often presented as synonymous with Israel and Zionism, the story of the Bund offers another Jewish political inheritance: one of resistance to nationalism and racism, collective struggle, and an understanding that Jewish freedom is bound up with the freedom of others.....
The Jewish Council of Australia is Australia’s largest progressive Jewish organisation, representing over 3,000 Jewish supporters across all States and Territories. Founded in February 2024, it works towards ending antisemitism and all forms of racism and supports Palestinian freedom and justice.
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