You can party on a beach in Australia, but you're still a Jew

                     "A people still, whose common ties are gone;
                      Who, mix'd with every race, are lost in none."

                                                          — George Crabbe

     You can shave your beard, move to Australia — or your grandparents could, permitting you to party on a New South Wales beach in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt.
     Even with an Australian accent, putting shrimp on the barbie by the Tasman Sea, you're still a Jew.
     Not held personally responsible for the death of Christ so much anymore. Generally, that particular deathless sin, one horror used to justify a million others, now plays second fiddle to a more recent wrong that can be laid at the feet of any random Jew, anywhere in the world.
     Now, all Jews carry the stain of recent Israeli policy in Gaza, and no joyous gathering anywhere on earth can be free from the risk of blame showing up, uninvited. Punishment delivered by those whose hearts are so big they agonize over the sufferings of a people they may have never met. And so small they can vent the resultant fury on the most marginally-connected victims. 

     No matter that Jews tend to take up the cause of their adversaries with a zeal seldom found elsewhere. They still count as Jews, and die just the same. Also par for the course. In the 1940s, you could convert to Catholicism, but if your grandmother was Jewish, into the pit you go. They call it "blind hatred" for a reason — it neither sees, nor assesses, nor stands on ceremony.
     A thousand people on a beach in Sydney, celebrating the first night of Hanukkah, which arrived in Australia 15 hours ahead of Chicago. Two shooters. At least 15 dead and 42 wounded, including two police officers.
     About 117,000 Jews live in Australia, out of a population of 28 million, most in the cities. The shooting was on Bondi Beach, on the east side of Sydney.
     If that number seems vanishingly small, it is 0.35%, or nearly double the percentage Jews make up of the world population. Our numbers dwindle through assimilation and intermarriage in a way that murder could never contemplate.
     That doesn't mean people don't still try.
     Like most groups, Jews feel a kinship with each other. I've never been to Australia, but if I did, I might slide by a synagogue, the way I did from Bridgetown to London to Taipei. Check out the locals, catch a bagel and a whiff of home.
     So their deaths still hurt. The odd thing about such attacks is, they're really an eloquent argument for the importance of a secure Jewish state. Because if you're Jewish, and feel you're safe where you are and let your vigilance ebb, you might be caught in an enfilade from two gunmen on a pedestrian bridge.
     You either empathize with other people or you don't. And once you view them not as individuals but as faceless members of groups, you're capable of anything.
     We have a president damning Americans for the crime of coming from Somalia. A federal government sweeping people off the street for being brown-skinned. And as if the war in Gaza hasn't been blood-soaked enough over the past two years, we have no shortage of self-appointed avengers keen to mow down a few more innocents. In Australia.
     One horror begets the next, and the rising tide of nationalism reaps the bounty. Along with funeral directors and granite monument salespeople.

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