But there’s always been anti-Semitism in Australia. Sometimes it bubbles below the surface, invisible. Other times, it shoots out like a geyser.

I remember the bomb scares back in the early ’90s, when I was in elementary school. The teachers would rush us out of the classroom and onto a grassy knoll across the street, where we sat in the sun while police sappers searched the school building.

Every time we drove past the green hills of the Woolhara golf course, described as “the bluest of blue-blood clubs in Australia,” my father pointed out that until the late ’80s, Jews weren’t allowed to be members.

A video of two Australian nurses threatening to murder their Israeli patients went viral recently, the story covered by every news outlet from the BBC to the Jerusalem Post to Al Jazeera. The coverage of it in Israel reverberated with the unspoken words: They even hate us in Australia?

But when I was in high school doing the Australian equivalent of the SATs, our non-Jewish school principal, Mr. Nicholls, told us we shouldn’t write G-d with a dash instead of an “o” on our exam papers, we should just try to make it look like an accidental scribble, because that would make it obvious we were Jewish. What if some of the anonymous people grading our papers were anti-Semites who would deliberately give us a low grade?

Since October 7, the anti-Semitic rumbles have gotten louder in every country in the world, no matter how beautiful, how far-flung, how cultured.

I read an interview recently with Avida Bachar, a survivor of Kibbutz Be’eri, who lost his wife and teenage daughter, as well as his leg, on October 7.  He said that on a visit to Europe, he sat at a café by a lake with a friend, eating apple strudel and watching people feed the ducks. He said to his friend, “I want to move here. I want to live a peaceful life feeding ducks and eating apple strudel lakeside like the people here.”

And his friend said, “We’re in Nuremberg. The Holocaust… this is where it all began.”

The idyllic scenery obscures the past, blurs the present.

Spain, with its stone citadels and cobblestone alleyways and Mediterranean coast line, is beautiful.

So is Venice.

Almost every corner of the globe was, at some point in the history of the Jewish people, a place of refuge.

Our grandparents thought they were moving far away from the epicenter of Jew hate.

But always, the epicenter eventually shifted and followed them. From Eretz Yisrael to Bavel. From Eretz Yisrael to Rome. From Italy to Ashkenaz. From Ashkenaz to Russia. From Russia to the United States. From Spain to Morocco, Syria, Iraq.

It even made it to Australia, the land of white sandy beaches to surf at, koalas to cuddle, and kangaroos to bounce alongside.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 941)