Limmud: Play the Ball, Not the Man
A response to Nomi Kaltmann's, “Against purity tests for Zionists and anti-Zionists alike" published in TJI 1 June 2026.
This is not the first time I’ve responded to Nomi Kaltmann’s work. My position on Kaltmann’s contributions on the whole remain unchanged. This is an accomplished, talented, and highly intelligent writer—among other things. I write with earnestness, and with faith that my thoughts will be received sportingly. I will not be arguing against Kaltmann’s position, but against her rationale.
I have no interest in passing judgment on any individuals involved, beyond that which I have already passed above.
People are complex, rarely ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and all of us almost entirely misunderstood. Talking about systems is not only more practical, but more honest and less cruel.
Play the Ball, Not the Man
I began playing soccer when I was four years old for the Five Dock Dockers. Coach Charlie, Michael’s dad, was a Freemantle Dockers fan. Michael was our goalie. Charlie died of leukaemia a couple of seasons in, leaving us with a rotating roster of other people’s dads to fill the space between half-time oranges and re-explaining what it means to be ‘off-side’ to children.
When Charlie died, my mum dropped me at Michael’s house. Neither of us knew what to say, so we played Sega and pretended that we couldn’t hear his mother crying in the kitchen. None of this is relevant to what I’m writing, except for the only memory I have left of Coach Charlie:
“Play the ball, not the man”, he’d said. “Play the ball.”
It was good advice.
Today, that advice will guide both the basis for my criticism, and manner in which I go about it.
The Ball
“Against purity tests for Zionists and anti-Zionists alike”, written by Nomi Kaltmann and published by The Jewish Independent 1 June 2026, is a response to controversy surrounding the looming Limmud festival.
The festival was to be a joint enterprise between Limmud and two other Jewish community enterprises—Adamama and Shalom, the latter two having now backed out over a ‘scheduling’ disagreement. This was a disagreement over one speaker’s ties to a fringe antizionist group that popped up immediately after October 7.
On principle, I don’t like it when these conversations focus on individuals. Sometimes it is through the exposure of individuals that a systemic problem is best highlighted—for example, when we talk about Randa Abdel-Fattah and Grace Tame. This is not one of those occasions—far from it.
Before opining about the controversy, we need to understand the context.
Six months since the Bondi Massacre, Jewish Australia is knee deep in a Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion—an endeavour mired by further controversies. During the course of the Commission, The ABC and the SBS have rejected the IHRA definition, October 7 celebrators and rape deniers have been platformed at writers festivals and handed podcasts by our public broadcaster, and witnesses have been hounded after giving testimony.
Nomi Kaltmann enters the Limmud controversy “appalled”, stating that she does “not believe in cancelling people because of their political views.”
She has taken issue with Adamama and Shalom’s decision to exit the event, along with the JNF’s Sarah Vanunu. I support Adamama, Shalom, and Vanunu’s decisions to step away no less than I support my own decision to proudly join the likes of some of Sydney’s most incredible Jewish minds, like Shoshanna Gottleib and Gregory Uzelac.
Kaltmann frames what has transpired as a form of cancelation mirroring the antizionist ostracism and silencing of Jews since October 7. To Kaltmann, this is merely a matter of “Zionists” applying the same “purity tests” that antizionists have applied.
“For years, Aussie Zionists have argued that excluding people because of their views on Israel is discriminatory,” writes Kaltmann.
Rather, I do not believe in cancelling people because of their political views. Ideological litmus tests are a dangerous slippery slope. Our community has complained relentlessly about cancel culture when it is directed at Jews who hold Zionist political views, yet now seem perfectly comfortable using the same tactics against Jews whose views on Israel they dislike.
If a speaker were invited to present on Israel, Zionism, October 7 or Jewish communal politics, then their views on Israel would obviously be relevant. Participants would have every right to scrutinise them and audiences would be entitled to challenge them.
But instead, the logic being applied in this case seems to be that once a person adopts a controversial political position on Israel, they become unsuitable to speak about almost anything else. They become, in effect, treif.
To me, that is a dangerous road for our community to travel down.
The central problems with Kaltmann’s piece are categorical. Kaltmann uses the word “anti-Zionism” to describe antizionism, positioning today’s discriminatory movement as an extension of late 19th and early 20th Century Jewish anti-Zionism.
Kaltmann may genuinely believe that there should not be a separation of these two concepts.
The piece presents antizionism as a form of discourse of the same mettle as “Zionism”, and inverts Jewish aversions to antizionism as a “purity test”.
The way I see it, the ball in play is not Limmud, Adamama, Shalom, or those billed to speak. The ball in play is antizionism.
I will do two talks at Limmud. No purity tests will be administered.
Book here: Sunday 7 June (12pm), Monday 8 June (11am).
1. Anti-Zionism Is Not Antizionism
Historical anti-Zionism was a Jewish conversation about the future of Jewish life. Zionists wanted a Jewish state. Anti-Zionists offered alternative conceptions of Jewish continuity. It was not a united position. Anti-Zionism dissipated in the 1930s-40s. Many of the few surviving anti-Zionists emigrated to Israel.
Antizionism was popularised through Soviet, Pan-Arab and Islamist propaganda in the post-Holocaust era. It inverted the Holocaust against its victims and recast the birth of the Jewish state as a re-imagining of the Nazi genocide. It is a position on Israel’s innate illegtimacy, bolstered with decades of libels and conspiracies no different to the mechanism bolstering antisemitism and antijudaism.
Antisemitism is spelled as one word today because it describes a distinct conspiratorial obsession with Jews. It was never a critique of “Semitism.” It is not a “response” to “Semitism”. It is not the “opposite” of “Semitism”. It is not anti- “semitism”.
Antizionism is spelled as one word because it describes a distinct conspiratorial obsession with Jewish self-determination. It is not a “critique” of “Zionism”. It is not a “response” to “Zionism”. It is not the “opposite” of “Zionism”. It is not anti- “Zionism”.
In short, historical anti-Zionism was a conversation between Jews. Antizionism is a conversation about Jews.
Antisemitism was a response to the dominant anxieties of the time: who is German, and who isn’t? Who is with us, and who is against us? Whose presence may be used to explain the loss of World War One, financial havoc, political and social unrest, and the failure of the Weimar Republic?
The structuring of a pariah Jew today may yield the same violent results, but it occurs in response to different anxieties. As a result, the permissibility of antizionism is contingent on an entirely distinct justificatory framework. Race-based hate is out. State-based hate is in—because it can more easily be structured as ‘political criticism’.
Antizionists stigmatise Jews worldwide when we fail, or are merely assumed to fail, a test that insists we all position the Jewish state as uniquely malevolent and illegitimate.
No other state has been marked for elimination on ‘moral’ grounds, nor those considered proximal to it marked for abuse and violence worldwide.
To refer to the antizionism of today as the anti-Zionism of the past is to destroy a Jewish historical artefact and replace it with a hate movement. Anti-Zionists did not proscribe “purity tests”—to use Kaltmann’s language.
2. The Purity Test
Antizionist purity tests have made Jews incredibly unsafe. The purity tests are rarely even administered outwardly, instead functioning as an internal logic system for antizionists to assume Jews guilty until proven innocent. We must bend over backwards and bow with noses to the dirt, defiling ourselves for the luxury of equal status.
These purity tests ask Jews not to renounce really-existing-Israel, or really-existing-Zionism, but to renounce an antizionist invention.
This purity test saw my Rabbi’s 8 year old daughter spat on in Newtown.
This purity test has seen me doxxed and told to “get back in the oven.”
This purity test saw 13,000 Jews exiled from Poland in 1968 for being “Zionists”. The government at the time had criminalised antisemitism. How did they find out who was a “Zionist”? They went after people with Jewish names.
Kaltmann frames those who chose to exit the festival as purveyors of the very kind of purity test that has resulted in global violence against Jews.
This inversion is obscene.
Nazis stigmatise Jews by subjecting us to a purity test no less vile than the purity tests imposed by antizionists. Ask Jews in the creative industries where their lives and livelihoods have gone since October 7. Ask Jews in academia, working for NGOs, and involved in activism how silently—how swiftly—their Jewishness became a source of suspicion.
We, as a nation, apply a purity test in return, removing Nazis from our streets. If a Nazi wanted to teach at a high school, should we hesitate before applying a “purity test”?
We have a society-wide stigmatisation of antisemitism—which, in turn, is only made possible by our capacity to have identified antisemitism as bad, using only a description of the effects it has produced. Antizionism is no less an assault on Jews than antisemitism. We will remain defenceless only as long as we mistake these purity tests for some form of legitimate excercise in “harm reduction” or “discourse”.
I am taken aback by the inversion of antizionism’s purity tests against those of us who are sick of being stigmatised by it.
3. The False Equivalence
Kaltmann’s accusation of “hypocrisy” rests on a false equivalence.
Anti-Jewish hate flourishes today because we misunderstand antzionism. We paint a swastika on the antizionist elephant in the room after damage is done, unable to see antizionism as the post-Holocaust era’s new permission structure for stigmatising Jews.
“Antisemitism” monopolises our understanding of anti-Jewish hostility, forcing antizionism to conform to a separate, distinct, “antisemitic” rationale to be taken seriously. This is a category error. We may as well insist homophobia to look like sexism before calling it out.
Anti-Jewish conspiracies no longer present themselves as a response to the political, national problem of “Semitism.” They present themselves as a response to the political, national problem of “Zionism.”
The men who shot Jews on Bondi Beach did not name “Semites” as their target. They named “Zionists,” then shot indiscriminately at Jews celebrating Hanukkah.
Antizionism provides a third lane on the highway to Jew-hate; antijudaism and antisemitism have been blocked, rendered socially and legally impermissible.
Treating anti-Zionism and antizionism as interchangeable makes objections to antizionism look like censorship, despite antizionism being no less more legitimate than antisemitism.
Antizionism’s power to harm Jews rests in its capacity to presents itself as “political criticism”. The false equivalence is easy to make on such a categorically spurious defence of antizionism, but impossible to make when antizionism is not being entertained as reasonable.
4. Inversion
A Jewish community can reject ideological purity tests while recognising the difference between dissent and delegitimisation.
Jewish life has always contained argument about power, ethics, land, sovereignty, religion, nationalism, diaspora, occupation, borders, war and peace. Jews can oppose Israeli governments, condemn Israeli policies, grieve Palestinian suffering, support Palestinian rights, reject messianic nationalism, criticise settlements, oppose annexation and argue fiercely about the moral responsibilities of Jewish sovereignty.
These arguments operate within the shared assumption that Jewish collective life has legitimacy—an assumption incongruent with antizionism.
Antizionism treats Jewish sovereignty as an intrinsic crime. It presents the Jewish state as uniquely born in sin, uniquely disfigured by its existence and uniquely deserving of dismantling.
It relies on a small set of libels that now circulate with extraordinary force: Israel as genocidal by nature, apartheid by design and colonial in essence. Those libels then attach themselves to Jews who refuse to renounce Israel. Zionists become genocide supporters, baby killers, fascists, white colonisers, supremacists and racists. The public hatred of the Jewish state becomes the social marking of Jews.
The charge of hypocrisy depends on treating Zionism and antizionism as equivalent identity positions inside Jewish pluralism. This framing is at least 80 years out of date.
A Jewish community that objects to antizionism inside its own institutions is making a claim about boundaries. We should be able to debate how these boundaries are be erected without inverting a hate movement against its victims.
5. Limmud
Limmud should be a place where Jews gather to ask the most important questions of our time.
Jewish events are the only events in which we don’t have to worry about antizionist purity tests and ostracism. They should also be spaces where difficult conversations are allowed to breathe.
Instead of analysing real fears about antizionism, Kaltmann is “appalled” by the very fear antizionism instills.
Institutions should platform whoever they like, provided they’re prepared to defend themselves against scrutiny, and provided that their freedom to do so does not impinge on the freedoms of others.
Other institutions should have every right to want nothing to do with anyone considered proximal to antizionism.
As for me?
Well, I’d rather play the ball, not the man.
As I’ll be speaking at Limmud about antizionism, all of this chatter suits me just fine.
The contentious character is scheduled to talk about comedy. I believe he represents a threat to many that he doesn’t actually pose as an individual; that his presence is of more symbolic than material weight.
I am not as “appalled” as Kaltmann, but I am troubled by her derision of those who have so strongly condemned the lineup. I denounce all personal attacks levelled in this controversy.
I am more interested in criticising systems than people. I find individuals fascinating, and to some extent sacred.
We are all just people trying to make sense of a world that rarely makes sense. Nobody is ‘good’ or ‘bad’. We operate in fluctuating shades of grey. A pariah may surprise you with their humility, or their sincerity. A criminal may be a great father. Your hero may have just thrown a cigarette butt onto the pavement or yelled at their partner. A Jewish Council affiliated comedian may inspire you, charm you, or make you laugh.
We must focus our attention where it matters.
Not on the man. Not on the institution. Not on boundaries, kneejerk comments sections, rumours, fear, cowardice, principles, or pragmatism. Not commentators like Nomi or myself. And not on you, and what your decision to attend Limmud or not might say about you.
Let’s play the ball.
The ball is antizionism.
I urge you to come along to what will be a truly fascinating weekend.
We can all play ball together.
Book here: Sunday 7 June (12pm), Monday 8 June (11am).
If you’re in Melbourne - I’ll be doing talks June 18, 19, 22, 23.
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