SYDNEY — “Cancelled,” a powerful documentary about the sharp escalation of Jew-hatred in Australia since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas pogrom in Israel, premiered to a full house here Sept. 16. The turnout of 650 also registered a protest over the film being “cancelled,” as television producers and film festivals alike refused to show it.
In introducing the documentary, director Danny Ben-Moshe told the audience he sent a rough cut to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Dec. 14, 2025, just hours before two Islamist gunmen shot 55 people at a Jewish event on Bondi Beach, killing 15. “The blood had not run dry from Bondi,” he said, but they didn’t deem the movie “fit to screen.”
Neither the ABC nor SBS, another public broadcaster, nor the organizers of the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, were interested in showing it. “Our existence, our story, gets in the way of the [anti-Israel] narrative” so prevalent today. “We are living in a cultural ghetto.”
“Cancelled” features musician Deborah Conway, artist Nina Sanadze, writer Joshua Dabelstein and circus performer Talia Sofizade, each of whom stood up and spoke out after they were targeted during the wave of Jew-hatred following the Hamas pogrom.
Since then, the number of antisemitic incidents in Australia has more than doubled, one of the sharpest increases in the world. Anti-Israel protests spread on campuses and in the streets along with violent attacks on Jews and their houses, cars and synagogues. They’ve faced harassment in classrooms, sports matches and in many workplaces.
The biggest change since the Hamas attack, Dabelstein said in a panel discussion after the film, is “the Jewish community coming together” to speak out. After screenings scheduled for the Jewish International Film Festival in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, the producers hope to make the film available online.
Ben-Moshe and Sanadze visited the Nova festival site and nearby Kibbutz Nir Oz, both devastated on Oct. 7. “That reality is being denied, distorted, obfuscated and defended in Australia,” he told the Australian Jewish News before the premiere.
Sanadze was one of a group of 600 Jewish artists and academics whose posts and contact details were “doxxed” — made public without their consent — in early 2024. This was intended to provide Jew-haters with a hit list to attack.
After being forced out of the studio where she worked for speaking out against the Hamas attack, Sanadze opened the Goldstone Gallery in Melbourne, which is featured in the documentary. The burnt-out doors from the Adass Israel Synagogue, which had been attacked in December 2024, were exhibited there.
Sofizade was ostracized by fellow students at the circus school she attended for defending Israel. Then, as she was having dinner with a friend at Miznon, an Israeli restaurant in Melbourne, it was attacked by Jew-hating protesters.
Conway, a well-known singer, also spoke out in defense of Israel’s right to exist. She faced cancellations and protests at her concerts and at events to promote her recently published memoirs. She said that when she spoke at a small bookshop in Brisbane there were a dozen people outside wearing masks. “They literally screamed for the next 45 minutes and pounded on the glass.” At another event, “70 people turned up wearing balaclavas beating pots and pans.” The police were there at both events, she said, but did nothing.
The debate continues
The film screening came as the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, established by the federal Labor government in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, wrapped up its proceedings. Its report is due Dec. 18. The overwhelming majority of the 20,000 submissions made to the commission came from members of the Jewish community who seized the opportunity to speak out about what they face.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to establish the commission following the Bondi shootings only after widespread anger erupted, led by Jewish organizations, over the fact the growing acts of antisemitism were being normalized by government inaction.
The commission heard 340 witnesses over several months. But hearing about a problem “is not the same as investigating it,” wrote doctor Jacqueline Rakov. She had sent a letter to the government just weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, co-signed by 235 other doctors. It protested the eruption of antisemitism in the healthcare industry, but was ignored.
Albanese and other federal government leaders continue to attack Israel’s defensive war against Hamas, Hezbollah and Tehran. At the Labor Party national conference in June, a resolution was adopted that dropped a demand for Hamas to disarm. Jewish delegates and some others who abhorred the pogrom agreed to a “compromise” as an even more vitriolic anti-Israel motion was being posed.
The Communist League in Australia campaigns to defend Israel’s right to exist as a refuge for Jews, explaining the role that Jew-hatred plays in the imperialist epoch, as the capitalist rulers seek to place the blame for their deepening crises and wars onto the Jews. The CL points to the need for the union movement to take on responsibility for both physically defending Jews and for building actions that protest Jew-hatred.
Robert Aiken is the Communist League candidate in the New South Wales state elections.