In this powerful address and Q&A, historian and The Australian columnist Henry Ergas reaches back through his own Sephardic family history, the Holocaust and Hannah Arendt to ask two urgent questions: how did Australia get here, and how do we get out of it? His central warning is unsettling: the eruption of antisemitism after October 7 was not an aberration but the culmination of a longer trajectory, and today's relative quiet risks producing a dangerous complacency. Ergas challenges the comforting idea of Jews as merely the “canary in the coal mine”: history, he argues, shows that hatred can remain concentrated on a small minority while everyone else's life continues normally. His memorable formulation—“they came for the Jews, and then they came for the Jews again”—leads to an even harder question: whether Australian Jews can continue relying on governments and institutions to protect them, or whether a fundamentally different strategy is now required.