SMH: American writer says he was uninvited from Adelaide Festival over timing
We are now in the part of this saga where everyone is quoting everyone else, and the Herald is content to leave one group in the background. The article outlines a new account from Thomas Friedman and the board’s 2024 wording, but it avoids the obvious question: why is Jewish discomfort always a footnote, while everyone else’s feelings become the moral center of the story?
See: the original article
Sins
Context-Free Concern
We are told there was a petition and outrage, but not what we were meant to be outraged about, and certainly not why Jewish readers found the uproar so familiar.
At the time, pro-Palestine activists, including Abdel-Fattah, were petitioning the festival to remove Friedman from the program over his animal kingdom column.
It’s instructive what the Herald chooses to spell out and what it omits. In this case, we’re told precisely what prompted outrage at Friedman, down to the “animal kingdom” reference. But when it was Abdel-Fattah’s turn to be removed, the Herald couldn’t bring itself to mention her history of antisemitic statements—let alone elaborate on them for the public to judge. If the serious objections to Friedman warrant close, explicit reporting, why doesn’t that standard apply when the subject is someone platforming open hostility to Jews? Once again, Jewish concerns are carefully skirted while others’ sensitivities are laid out in full.
The “Silencing Writers” Sleight of Hand
Adler’s framing is reported without interrogation, even though this very saga is about a writer who was silenced first.
Adler resigned as director of Adelaide Writers’ Week amid the saga over Abdel-Fattah being uninvited from this year’s program by the board, saying that she “cannot be party to silencing writers”.
There is no attempt to reconcile that line with a board allegedly pressured to uninvite Friedman. If “silencing writers” is a principle, it should not depend on whether the writer is Jewish or whether their views on Israel are currently fashionable. The absence of this obvious inconsistency reads less like balance and more like avoidance.
Who Gets Sympathy
We are told whose feelings matter, and whose do not, without any direct engagement with our community.
On Sunday in an interview with Guardian Australia, Abdel-Fattah rejected allegations of hypocrisy, saying she and the petition writers were concerned about the impact of Friedman’s writing on socially and historically marginalised people.
The Herald repeats this concern without noting that Jews are not some theoretical community, but a real one in Australia that has been targeted, grieving, and repeatedly sidelined in cultural spaces. If the question is harm, then the harm to Australian Jews deserves more than a drive-by mention. It deserves actual reporting.
Overall Review
There is real news here, and the article outlines it competently, but it still dodges the moral reality of who gets the benefit of editorial empathy. The Herald can quote every player in the Adelaide Festival boardroom drama, yet it will not ask how it feels to watch Jewish participation treated as optional while Jewish discomfort is treated as embarrassing.
This is interesting enough to be in the series because it adds a new factual wrinkle to the Friedman episode, but it continues the same pattern: reporting around our community instead of reporting for it.
Overall rating: 5/10 (a stale poppy seed bagel, recognisable but not fresh).