This is Hal Levine’s interesting analysis. A worthwhile read on the ethics of the ban and how it leaves the tolerance of other Jewish customs and traditions with respect to NZ society and law in question.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hal Levine received his Ph.D from S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook in 1976 while a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington. He did his initial fieldwork on urban ethnicity in Papua New Guinea. His PhD and the monograph Urbanisation in Papua New Guinea: A Study of Ambivalent Townsmen (co-authored with M. Levine), published by Cambridge University Press in 1979, was based on this research.
In 1981 he did a study of the fishing community of Stewart Island, New Zealand. A number of papers published in widely scattered journals were put together by the Anthropology Department and issued as Stewart Island: Anthropological Perspectives on a New Zealand Fishing Community . Hal’s next two research projects centred on Maori claims to fishing resources before the Waitangi Tribunal, and Jewish identity in New Zealand.
Being Jewish in New Zealand with Ann Beaglehole was published by Pacific Press in 1995 . It was followed by a monograph on the three ethnic identity projects entitled Constructing Collective Identity . The latter book was published by Peter Lang in 1997 with a grant from Victoria University’s Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Hal has more recently published papers dealing with debates about the meaning of iwi, Samoan chiefly practices in Wellington, and the implications of surrogate motherhood for the anthropological study of kinship. He has taught a wide variety of introductory and advanced papers in anthropology and is currently putting together a course about the interrelationships between society, culture and internal experience.
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