ABSTRACT
Jews are the oldest non-indigenous ethnic group in Australia, with over a dozen Jews arriving on the First Fleet in 1788 and Jewish institutions being well established by the mid-nineteenth century. The largest wave of Jewish migration to Australia occurred in 1938–1939 and again from 1946 to 1954, mostly Holocaust survivors arriving from Europe and Shanghai. The majority of these survivors and their descendants quickly became well integrated into Australian society. Over the subsequent decades, antisemitism occasionally manifested itself in Australia. In the 1950s and 1960s it was mainly driven by two groups on the radical right. Current research into antisemitism has demonstrated that it has taken three principal forms, beginning with religious anti-Judaism, then racial antisemitism and, most recently, political antisemitism associated with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where ostensible criticisms of Israel morph into an irrational hatred of Jews. Muslim antisemitism has become a decisive factor in the rise of antisemitism in the world today.
