Bondi and beyond: Lessons from Kochi in a fractured world

From my hotel on Jew Street in Kochi, the morning begins gently – filtered light, the sound of footsteps on old stone roads, the quiet preparations of another day. At breakfast, a familiar melody drifts through the room: Ma’oz Tzur, the thirteenth-century Hebrew hymn sung during Hanukkah. It is a song of survival, of deliverance through successive calamities. Here, it plays without irony or tension, part of the hotel’s regular playlist.

In the antique shops along the street – filled mostly with Hindu and Christian artifacts – I find menorahs for sale. They are made here in Kochi. I buy one to take home, along with an old bronze mezuzah, complete with its rolled parchment prayer, recovered from a Jewish house. I can be visibly, unselfconsciously Jewish in a city that embraces coexistence. That ordinariness – that ease – is increasingly rare.

News alerts puncture the calm. A terror attack in Sydney targeted Jews gathered to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah, killing 16 people. It was Australia’s deadliest mass shooting in decades. The siege of Gaza grinds on. Israel’s brutal assault as a response to Hamas’s diabolical attack on civilians at a music festival has killed tens of thousands, devastating civilian life leaving so little hope for a just future. In the West Bank occupation deepens and settler violence intensifies. It has resulted in waves of antisemitism, both frightening and too familiar.

These events are often discussed separately. They should not be. As Israeli aggression proceeds with impunity, antisemitism is not merely rising alongside it; it is being actively fueled by a dangerous collapse – the refusal or inability to distinguish between Jews and the Israeli state. That collapse serves the Israeli war machine, allowing any criticism of state violence to be dismissed as antisemitic, while simultaneously flattening Jews everywhere into a single caricature, responsible for crimes we neither commit nor condone.

Many Jews, in Israel and across the world, oppose the politics of the Likud government and the devastation being wrought across the Middle East. Yet we find ourselves caught in a vice: instrumentalised by the Right to shield Israel from accountability and targeted by those who conflate Jewish existence with Israeli state power.

I come to Kochi deeply aware of these fractures.

I am here for the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, a festival that asks us to think of culture as being in constant flux. Drawing from the history of Kochi, it seeks seek to build a community of artists and emphasize inclusion.

I also come with my own history. I am from the Baghdadi Jewish community of Kolkata, where Jewish life, much like in Kochi, unfolded in relationship with the city’s plural social fabric. Jews in Calcutta lived and worked alongside Hindus, Muslims and Christians, with particular ties to Muslim communities with whom we share many customs and rituals. These ties endure even as our numbers have dwindled. I was raised in an India where difference was not something to be managed but lived.

The Indian state’s response to Jewish vulnerability remains quietly attentive. I receive periodic calls from the Foreign Office checking on the welfare of our community. The local police remain in touch to ensure the safety of synagogues and other institutions. These gestures are not dramatic, but they do matter. They signal a distinction – between protection and suspicion, between care and surveillance – that is absent in many parts of the world today.

Walking through Kochi, these distinctions feel firmly rooted. The green iron lampposts with gold Stars of David on Jew Street are charming. Old Jewish homes bear signboards naming the families who once lived there, their lineage displayed with pride rather than unease. My hotel, the Postcard, occupies a former Jewish home, as do many of the two-storeyed buildings lining the street.

One of the homes belonged to Sarah Cohen whose embroidery shop remains a local landmark. Childless, Sarah and her husband adopted Taha Ibrahim, a Muslim boy who once sold postcards outside their door. Today, Ibrahim runs the shop, preserving not only the business but the memory of the family who raised him. This is not coexistence as slogan, but as inheritance.

At the end of the street stands the Paradesi Synagogue, built in 1568 – the oldest synagogue in the Commonwealth. Inside, the hand-painted blue-and-white Cantonese tiles cool the floor, while Belgian glass lamps imbue the space with colour. A clock tower, gifted by the Dutch, rises above the complex. The synagogue shares a garden with the adjacent Hindu temple, a spatial intimacy that feels almost unimaginable elsewhere. A short walk away, in the former palace, the Raja’s Jewish subjects are referenced. They were granted privileges and protection, not as outsiders to be tolerated, but as members of the polity.

It is perhaps not incidental that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, now in its sixth edition, chooses to describe itself not as a singular exhibition but as a living ecosystem. Rather than finished spectacle, it privileges process as methodology, friendship as infrastructure, and rootedness as a way of engaging the world. In a historic port city shaped by trade rather than conquest, this curatorial vision feels less like an innovation than a recognition.

Kochi has long understood that cultures survive not by dominating space, but by learning how to share it – across time, across faiths, across difference. In resisting the pressure to present itself as a completed narrative, the Biennale mirrors Kochi’s deeper historical wisdom: that coexistence is not a static achievement, but an ongoing practice. It requires maintenance, humility, and the willingness to remain a work in progress. This sensibility feels urgently absent from a world that increasingly demands total allegiance and singular identities.

This history – and this present – matters because it disrupts a prevailing narrative. Jewish presence in Kochi was not born of conquest or displacement. It was shaped by trade, by invitation, by reciprocal obligation. Jewish histories are not singular. To collapse them into the story of the devastation wrought by the modern Israeli state is not only intellectually dishonest; it is politically dangerous.

Kochi does not offer easy solutions to a fractured world. But it offers something rarer and perhaps more necessary: an ethics of distinction. It shows that it is possible to oppose Israeli state violence without demonising Jews; to honour Jewish history without endorsing occupation; to hold grief, anger and solidarity without surrendering to collapse.

As I prepare to leave, I am struck by how much I did not have to explain here – who I am, where I belong, for what I am not responsible. In a moment when identities are being weaponised and histories flattened; Kochi insists on complexity. It reminds us that the past, when cared for rather than instrumentalised, can still provide important lessons.

In a fractured world, which may be one of the most radical lessons of all.

Jael Silliman is an author, scholar and women’s rights activist.