Lynda Ben-Menashe, b. 1964, Sydney, Australia.

"I was born in Australia in 1964 and have lived here almost all of my life. I think my experiences are quite typical of those of many Australian Jews of my generation. I would never call Australia an antisemitic country; far from it, I feel that it is one of the most peaceful and ethnically tolerant societies in the world. But that is not to say that antisemitism does not exist here.

I grew up in what is usually described as a very affluent suburb on Sydney's North Shore and attended only public schools. The ethnic mix of these schools was mainly white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, but there were some Southern Europeans, Hong Kong Chinese and Jews; Jews made up about 20% of the school population.

The first experience of antisemitism I had was in Year 1 (1970), when at Christmas time I asked the teacher if our class might learn some Chanukah songs in addition to the obligatory Christmas carols. (Chanukah is a Jewish festival of freedom which occurs around Christmas time most years.) The teacher agreed, but apparently some of the parents did not and there was a huge outcry that their Christian children should not be exposed to any 'foreign' culture.

When I was about 8 I stopped going to the local Brownie Guides. It had been Mothers' Day and we were making presents for our mothers which were a bar of soap with pins stuck in it in the shape of a cross. I had asked if I could stick my pins in the shape of a Star of David and a deathly silence had fallen. 'No,' I was told, 'You can only make a cross.' After this incident, a classmate informed me that she was no longer allowed to be my friend. Her parents had told her that 'all Jews have black hearts.' If you wonder how I can remember the words so clearly, just imagine the impression they would have made on a child of that age.

In my first term at High School, Year 7, 1976 one day a boy just attacked me, physically, with an umbrella, screaming that I was a Jew. I was the youngest and smallest student in the year; I'd never seen this boy before, a big fat boy who had swastikas painted on his bags and books. There was some response from the school, I don't remember what, but I do remember that all the Jewish boys in our year beat him up and that shut him up for a few years.

I was elected School Captain in Year 12, and coincidentally the boy captain was Jewish too. So surely that was a sign that there was no antisemitism. But the entire year, I don't think one week went by when the box for letters to the prefects from other students didn't contain one or more antisemitic letters. 'Kill the Jews' 'We hate you all' Scrawled drawings of the boy captain and I with nooses around our necks. And on the day our HSC (matriculation exams) began, we arrived at school to find it covered with horrible graffiti, swastikas, 'Hitler didn't kill enough'.

It must sound strange, but what I recall is a really wonderful school life with lots of friends, only two or three of them Jewish. But I heard the message loud and clear and it was: 'You are not one of us, no matter how much a part of this society you think you are.' I think I just accepted that that was how things were, and it only made my resolve in my own identity stronger.

At university I joined and became active in the Union of Jewish Students. In 1982 I was part of a group who toured our state, debating 'anti-Zionist' groups about Israel's invasion of Lebanon. Many of us Jewish students were either opposed to or very ambivalent about that war, but the antisemitism of the campus presses had prompted us to defend Israel in principle. Seeing the image of then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin depicted in SS uniform leaning over a globe, with blood dripping from his hands was something we just could not ignore. We felt we couldn't let plain, simple, ugly antisemitism be disguised as 'anti-Zionism'; especially not in such vicious terms, with that blatant depiction of Begin, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, as a Nazi.

I knew I could only marry someone Jewish, not only because I wanted to, but also because I felt sure no non-Jewish man would be interested in me. When non-Jewish boys from Uni asked me out I was always shocked. I would go, but feeling a fraud, as if they didn't realise that they had made a terrible mistake; they couldn't possibly have known I was Jewish or they wouldn't have asked me.

Anyway, I married: an Israeli Jew, and we have lived both in Israel and here in Australia. And there I feel at home but alien in some ways, and here I do as well. In Israel I am referred to as an 'Anglo-Saxon'! How bizarre. And our children speak Hebrew and are getting a far better formal Jewish education than I had. But I wonder, will their Jewish identities be as strong as mine is if they don't experience the antisemitism I did? There's the real irony."