STEVE'S POLITICS
Steve Brook and AJDS
Steve Brook was already an established Jewish left-wing activist when 30 years ago the call
came out for the formation of the Australian Jewish Democratic Society. He had been a
mainstayer of a previous Jewish formation Path to Peace. As such he ran the group's radio
program on Community Radio 3CR.
But as much as Steve have the gift of the gab on radio, it was writing which was his stock in
trade. Fortunately the AJDS recognised his talent and always let it flourish. He was a
member of the earlier AJDS Newsletter Editorial Committee in 1991-95. And later on in the
21st century version of the same thing, Steve was a lynchpin of the board in its various
compositions from Hinde Ena Burstin first Newsletter in 2001 till the Newsletter's
metamorphosis in early 2011.
Steve was there not merely as someone who could write, but someone with great political
experience and knowledge. That was independently recognised when he served on the
unelected committee of activists that ran the organisation for some time and later on the
executive. People always listened to Steve, he was never dogmatic, more of a consensus
builder and who always knew that appropriate political/Polish joke to break the ice (or icy
atmosphere, as the case may be.)
Steve was prolific member of the AJDS committee coming up with enough ideas to fill not
one newsletter each month but two or three. Often these ideas related to his own
experiences. He hated anything that reminded him of the subtle and not-so-subtle
antisemitism he experienced in Poland.
As a contributor he took on all of his nemeses and more. Rapture Christianity, the Hamas
charter, bad political films, Obama's opponents from the Right and the ultra-left, the
Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council intellectual dishonesty and many others all got
decent serves.
Steve hated wars. He wasn't happy with the AJDS's decision to support the first Gulf war
after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Alongside Philip Mendes and June factor he wrote a
letter to the paper offering an alternative point of view.
Steve fingerprints were all over the newsletter. He read it all, offered editorial suggestions
corrected grammar and bad usage, and proofread the final product again. One time Steve
was in Bali on holidays and it took three people to carry on his workload. He knew how to
explain things how to improve a rough translation, although more than once he tired to
improve on translation of the Bible.
Steve will be remembered for a long time to come.
...Sol Salbe
The 3CR days of Steve Brook by Steve’s old friend, Les Rosenblatt.
I enjoyed my first meeting with Steve Brook at the very new community radio station 3CR in 1976
-38 years ago now. He was presenting the regular weekly Polish program, and I was presenting the
Friends of the Earth weekly program ‘Non-nuclear Futures’. Both of us also did stints as 3CR
evening news readers once a week as well.
I could never have imagined that this first meeting would be the commencement of a friendship that
saw us both engaging with Paths to Peace, the Communist Party of Australia, and the Australian
Jewish Democratic Society in succession over the years to come. But others will tell of Steve’s
contributions to those organisations.
I want to restrict myself to the 3CR chapter of our lives when Steve so impressed me with his
transcultural sophistication, his linguistic verve, his acute political judgement and dislike of cant,
his exuberant energy and quick-wittedness, and his sharp humour and intelligence. I had not met
anyone like him before. He introduced me to the Polish writers Leszek Kolakowski and Czeslaw
Milosz, who, like Koestler and Hannah Arendt, were both fierce critics of totalitarian politics of
both the left and the right.
Steve detested the Maoist crudities of several of 3CR’s more influential administrative, managerial,
program-making and presenting personnel. He was offended by their formulaic and ill-informed
ideological severity, particularly when it was employed with censorious narrowness against Paths to
Peace having any airtime.
He did his best to assist with the broadening of the scope of 3CR and became stressfully and
intensely concerned to organize transformative decision-making forums within the station’s
organizational structure. During this drawn-out conflicted period in the early history of the station,
Steve continued to smoothly and professionally present his Polish program and the news, but the
conflict did take its toll on him. It would not be exaggerating to say that Steve became partially
embittered by this experience, and it was not until much later when he’d commenced publishing
comic novels that he was able to satirize the events that had so upset him at the time.
When I visited Poland for the first and only time in my life in 1981, by which time both Steve and I
were members of the Communist Party of Australia, Steve briefed me on the highly volatile Polish
political scene at the time. Solidarnoscz under the leadership of Lech Walensa was growing in
strength and a Polish pope was in the Vatican. Steve gave me many contacts amongst Polish
journalists, political activists and musicians. Some of them were extraordinarily hospitable to me
during that very tense period a few months before martial law was declared by Poland’s worn-out
and intensely unpopular proxy soviet regime.
Steve and I continued to remain friends from then until now. Having just read his last dystopian
satire, ‘Smash the White Eagle’ by his nom de guerre Pawel Kotarbinski, who in the last pages of
the book say he’s ‘not a sceptic at all. Just undecided, with a bias against extremism’ . Steve must
have enjoyed translating it. I’ll miss him.
Les Rosenblatt 18th, August 2014.
- GENTLE ACTIVIST STOOD FOR PRINCIPLES -