London-born Australian documentary maker Danny Ben-Moshe was himself a cancelled Jewish artist before he made his documentary about, well, cancelled Jewish artists.
His acclaimed film of 2023, Revenge: Our Dad the Nazi Killer, which is available on the BBC’s iPlayer as part of the broadcaster’s prestigious Storyville catalogue, was due to receive an Australian cinema release when he received a call from his sales agent to say the cinema chain was reconsidering.
“I was like, ‘why?’”, says Ben-Moshe. “‘They don’t want to do anything provocative’”, my agent said.
This was about seven weeks after October 7 and it was with that call that Ben-Moshe understood that being Jewish had now become an act of provocation. Then another penny soon dropped. It landed just as virulently antisemitic graffiti and protests appeared on Australian streets calling for the death of Jews and Zionists, and praising Hamas.
Crowds gathered on public spaces around Sydney Opera House chanting “F*** the Jews”. Police looked on without intervening. It was around then that Ben-Moshe realised that “even more threatening than the hate mongers was the cowardice in the face of the hate mongers”.
When we meet in London ahead of his film Cancelled being screened at JW3 on November 15 as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, Ben-Moshe is in buoyant mood. He has just arrived from Israel where he is making an immersive VR project about the current, possibly pivotal, moment in Israeli politics.
But over a green tea we are talking about Cancelled, a film that charts the combined effect of that “hate” and “cowardice” on Jewish artists in Ben-Moshe’s home town of Melbourne. It reveals that Jewish artists who were an integral part of Australia’s cultural life were being erased from billings across the art scene. Concerts by the singer songwriter Deborah Conway, a winner of an Aria, one of the most coveted music awards in Australia, were cancelled. So too were exhibitions by the sculptor Nina Sanadze. She was on the verge of a career high with her first exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and another at the independent Gertrude Gallery when she too was told the space at the venues was no longer available to her. She has no doubt that the reason was that she had condemned Hamas for October 7.
“After that, the harassment, bullying and doxxing started,” she tells Ben-Moshe in the film. She was also eventually evicted from her studio space where CCTV filmed a masked man spray painting the words “Zio Dogs” on the glass door. On the streets of Australia, and London too, it seems that “Zio” is the new “Yid”.
The case of London-born circus acrobat Talia Sofizade, a third-year student at Australia’s National Institute of Circus Arts, is also explored in the film. While studying there in Melbourne she a developed a post-October 7 piece to be performed with on an aerial hoop. The project was based on her own experience of being brought up in Israel and a desire for Palestinian and Israeli coexistence. According to Sofizade, she was humiliatingly made to perform the piece in front of a committee to assess it could be part of the students’ third-year showcase, something no one else had to go through. She watched as one by one everyone in her cohort said they did not want to be platformed with her because, being a Jewish Israeli she was complicit in genocide. These were people with whom Talia had studied and performed for three years.
In Ben-Moshe’s film, these and other experiences reveal how Australia’s progressive arts establishment have pushed Jewish artists out of galleries and venues, often denying them a means to make a living. The film also makes a persuasive case that beyond the personal impact on Jewish artists, the cancellations have significantly contributed to what Ben-Moshe calls a zeitgeist that has permitted synagogues to be firebombed and Jews to be harassed, threatened and – as happened on December 14, 2025 at Sydney’s Bondi Beach – massacred. The 16th fatality, 90-year-old Holocaust survivor Eva Geller, died last week.
“I am Australia’s ‘Jew filmmaker’,” says Ben-Moshe with a mixture of pride and rueful reflection. He was therefore well placed to make a film about what many (even non-Jewish) Australian commentators recognise as a “wave of antisemitism sweeping Australia”.
It seemed reasonable therefore to offer the idea to the country’s main public broadcaster ABC. Especially as the broadcaster had co-produced Ben-Moshe’s Revenge film with the BBC. “It’s not like I’m some random person,” he says. ABC said they might come in on the film at the post-production stage. Having raised the funds to shoot the film, Ben-Moshe and his editor compiled an assembly (a raw chronological edit of footage that tells the film’s story) and sent it to the broadcaster. They again said no.
Ben-Moshe is quick to acknowledge that rejection is a broadcaster’s prerogative. Yet his experience tells him that something was not quite right about this and other decisions. The assembly was ready to send to the broadcaster on December 15 2024, “which means they woke up on the morning after the Bondi attack with an email offering a film about Australian antisemitism.”
“I get that broadcasters have their programming streams and schedules. But I also understand that we’ve just experienced the worst terror attack in the country’s history. Jews are living in peril. Broadcasters break out of their programming if they deem it important enough. That did not happen.”
It also did not happen with Australia’s other public broadcaster SBS. It is, says Ben-Moshe, not so much the film’s rejections but the manner of them that worries him. The Sydney Film Festival was also initially very positive after receiving a rough cut of the film. “The programmer called me and said ‘This is a really good film. It’s really important,’” says Ben-Moshe.
Yet still, after requesting a final edit to ensure there were no dramatic changes, for the next five days Ben-Moshe received text after text promising a call back with a final answer. It came in the form of the standard rejection email; thanking him for the submission, regretfully informing him – yada yada.
“Here’s my take on it,” says Ben-Moshe. “What happened between the first conversation in which the festival requested a final cut and Friday afternoon when the email came? Either the film was programmed and someone said ‘Hold on, we’re programming a Zio doc?’”, or [they said] “if we programme this we’re going to have protests.” For Ben-Moshe one decision is an example of the aforementioned hatred, the other goes into the cowardice file.
“I can accept that my documentary is not the greatest ever made, though it is perfectly good,” says the film-maker. But it is not as if either of Australia’s public broadcasters have (at least to his knowledge) commissioned or aired a documentary about Australian antisemitism in the country, he says. This despite all the evidence confirming its existence and despite an Australian Royal Commission into the subject which is due to publish its report next month.
“By the way, we also got rejected from every single film festival in the country: Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, you name it,” says Ben-Moshe he says. There is no whiff of sour grapes as he says this. For the writer-director there is something bigger going on than whether one film, even his, is a success or not.
What Ben-Moshe finds so difficult to fathom is how commissioning editors, broadcasters and film festival curators have apparently ignored the biggest story on their doorstep. Could this be because they are in some way part of the story?
A fourth contributor in the film, journalist Joshua Dablestein who writes about Australian culture and has also been the target of attacks, links Australian antisemitism to the country’s past.
“A lot of Australia’s left live out this anti-colonial good guy narrative which can be done through this virtual reality of ‘kill the Zionists,’” he says. It is, says Dablestein, a narrative that liberates Australian activists from the legacy of their own country’s colonialist past and its treatment of the land’s indigenous peoples.
This observation prompts a question about the “European colonialist” label so unhesitatingly slapped on Israel by activists in other Western societies. Aside from it being incomprehensible to those who know that a huge proportion of Israeli society comprises communities whose forebears have only ever lived in the Middle East and Africa, might the accusation be fuelled in part by the imperialist past of the activists’ own societies?
“My film’s really about cultural and intellectual elites,” says Ben-Moshe. “These antizionist – not anti-Israeli-policy, which is a different thing – activists who I deem to be antisemitic because they demonise Jewish life and lived experience, are shaping the direction of the country, and countries globally. That’s what really worries me. The kids who today are in tent encampments at universities are going to be running their countries in 20 years time. In September of this year, less than a year after Bondi, a student election at Sydney University was allowed to run under a ‘Globalise the Intifada’ ticket.”
Ben-Moshe’s film did eventually find a national platform when it was screened on Australia’s News24 channel. It was also the biggest hit at the Australian Jewish Film Festival (AJFF), says Ben-Moshe. But it was progressive audiences who he most wanted to reach, a demographic where, until recently, he and the artists in the film felt they belonged.
“I was kind of disappointed by the AJFF because we all know that antisemitism is occurring and we don’t need to be persuaded that it is a bad thing. I didn’t make this film for Jews,” says Ben-Moshe.
Or so he thought.
“In hindsight I realised I did,” he continues. “We needed to come together and be in a community to affirm our experience, to identify it, to be mobilised and get some resilience and inspiration from the Jews in the film who have stood up to the hate. And then I realised I had made the film for our community after all.”
Perhaps sensing his outlook has thoroughly depressed his interviewer, he adds: “I take solace from the people in my film and from those who helped make it. They are standing up and being counted. And I’ve made a lot of films with Holocaust survivors who have retained their faith in humanity after experiencing much worse than this. We find a way. It’s in our DNA.”
Cancelled will be screened at JW3 as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival on Nov 15
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