I’ve been talking to Hasidic Jews who’ve lived in Australia. One told me that he could never walk home from shul on a Friday night in Sydney’s posh East side without having some white Australian hurling curses at him. It’s also common for Orthodox Jews in their Orthodox outfits in Sydney and Melbourne to get beat up by white Australians. These Jews tell me they feel much safer in Los Angeles and America generally. That they never (or rarely) encounter anti-Semitism here. Nobody hurls curses at them as they walk home from shul.
Australia has one dominant culture for 90% of the country (the white 90%) and if you exclude yourself from that culture by dressing and acting differently, it is not appreciated. Growing up as a Seventh-Day Adventist in Australia, I remember we were not popular because we deliberately excluded ourselves from the dominant culture. There’s a good scene in the movie A Cry in the Dark about the contempt average Aussies feel for Adventists.
The United States does not have one dominant culture. It has Jewish culture (which breaks up into Hasidic culture and regular Orthodox culture and Conservative and Reform culture, and secular Jewish culture), black culture, hispanic culture, asian culture, white culture, Catholic culture, etc. America is much more accepting of difference and it honors Jews more than Australia does. I suspect this is partly a function of numbers. Jews make up about 2% of the American population and less than 1% of the Australian population. Jews have a more dominant position in America (particularly in finance, academia and media) than they do in Australia. With this power comes increased safety.
