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Michael Gawenda
Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and…
DiscoverMichael Gawenda: The Legacy of Holocaust Stories | Sorrento Writers Festival
Join Michael Gawenda (My Life as a Jew) in conversation with Leah Kaminsky, Rachelle Unreich, and Liz Porter to discuss how in fiction and nonfiction, 20th century European Jewish history still resonates.
Michael Gawenda is one of Australia’s best-known journalists and authors. In a career spanning four decades, he was a political reporter, a foreign correspondent based in London and in Washington, a columnist, a feature writer, and a senior editor at Time Magazine. He was editor and editor-in-chief of The Age from 1997 to 2004.Michael Gawenda has won numerous journalism awards, including three Walkley awards. He was the inaugural director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, and is the author of four books.
My Life as a Jew
A multi-award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of a major Australian newspaper searingly explores his Jewish identity at a time when a substantial — and growing — part of the left is opposed to the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became — a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.
Gawenda went on to become a public figure during his…
