In January my sister and I went to the Sydney Opera House for the first time since we were children. We walked back to the future up the cool, wide steps, past the bars we are now old enough to drink champagne at, and sat in the same seats from which we used to watch the corps de ballet.

But we were there not for the corps but the corpses. Instead of the ballerinas we used to idolise, family members of the 15 people slaughtered at Bondi Beach filed in. For my sister and me it was the very definition of bittersweet.

In the poem she wrote about it, she said: “Last night at the Opera House/I had cultural confusion, crisis, overlap, a mash-up./What a moment, what a night./Meeting all the proud Jewish Australians/and the many, many friends of our community/who care and stand up and fight/for our right to be we, not you.”

A highlight that night was the statement by NSW Premier Chris Minns that “we” – meaning the kind of Australians we were raised to be – had taken back the Opera House. Taken it back from the vile racists who stood on its steps on October 9, 2023, and screamed “F..k the Jews” and “Where’s the Jews”.

Well, here we were, my Jewish sister and I. Back in the Opera House of our childhood with a suddenly renewed hope that it would again be a home for us.

Like the ballet, All About Women used to be one of my favourite Opera House experiences. Every year I’d troop with my feminist sisters to hear the cool girls rage against the patriarchy, imagine a better world and, of course,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)