My life as a Jew

Memoirs of Gawenda, a journalist and former editor-in-chief of 'The Age' a major Australian newspaper, explores his Jewish identity. Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust he spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became — a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and culture. Throughout this time, and since, he became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. This has also forced him to examine his own Jewish identity and his relationships with his Jewish friends, and to forensically examine the basis of the critiques of Israel.

on loan