NZ Friends of Israel Association Inc
Fighting racial intolerance in New Zealand and beyond
President Joe Biden filled the months before Inauguration Day lining up a slate of Cabinet secretaries, assistants and advisors, many of them Jewish.
Biden’s choices reflect a diverse cross-section of American Jewry and possess expertise gleaned from decades of experience in government, science and medicine and law.
Here’s a rundown of the Jewish names you should know as the Biden administration begins.
President Joe Biden spoke Wednesday with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, ending what had been a lengthy stretch without a call after Biden took office.
The period without communication had raised questions about what was behind the delay, though the White House insisted the two men had a strong relationship and that Biden was simply calling leaders in other regions before arriving at the Middle East.”
It was a good conversation,” Biden told reporters in the Oval Office shortly after the call ended, without elaborating.
In a post on Twitter, Netanyahu said he had spoken with Biden for roughly an hour in “friendly and warm” terms, affirming the US-Israel alliance and discussing issues related to Iran, regional diplomacy and the coronavirus pandemic.
In matters of culture my late mother, Claire, took her lead from the great Times columnist Bernard Levin and described herself as a “pantry Jew”. She understood herself not through religious faith because, like me, she had none, but through the crumbly chopped liver she sometimes made. She liked to cook gefilte fish, both boiled and fried, following her grandmother’s recipe. The boiled, I hated. Once cooled, the fishy jelly had the texture of phlegm and the mixture of white fish, matzo meal and a little sugar tasted of carelessness.
But the deep-fried, an idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Jewish community, was entirely different. I loved the outer crunch and the fluffy interior, and knew that it would be even more delicious if I were allowed to eat it hot, straight from the bubbling oil, but I was not. Claire insisted it had to be eaten cold and could not explain why, other than to say it was “better that way”.
I did not get an answer until 1997 when Claudia Roden’s Book of Jewish Food was first published in the UK. In the introduction to the fish section, Roden explains that “because it was always cooked in advance for the Sabbath, fish was usually eaten cold”. I read this to my godless mother. I pointed out that her insistence I should eat it cold was therefore a vestigial stump of childhood religious observance. She was delightfully livid.
It’s fitting that my first interaction with Roden’s masterpiece should not have been to consult a recipe, or check a cooking technique, but to nail a point of cultural practice. Although it sits on my cookbook shelf, and includes many recipes, The Book of Jewish Food is not really a cookbook at all. “In many ways it was the first great encyclopedia of Jewish life,” says the historian and keen cook Simon Schama. “I love it for the narrative embroidery around the recipes. That had been done before, but Claudia did it in more detail and with more sophistication than anyone else.” The chef, writer and restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi agrees. “It’s timeless but also academic. It has a thoroughness that you don’t really see any more.”
Leaflets likening Jews to the devil resulted in New Zealand’s only prosecution for hate speech – but it’s a story most are unaware of. Torika Tokalau reports.
Expensive homes and quiet tree-lined streets – Auckland’s Remuera is a picture-perfect slice of suburbia, but it was also the location of New Zealand’s first and only prosecuted incident of hate speech.
In the late 1970s, members of the Jewish community were targeted in a leaflet drop, condemning their faith and likening them to the devil.
Sociologist and professor, Dr Paul Spoonley, who researches racism in New Zealand, believes it was the moment Kiwis first realised neo-Nazi groups existed in this country.
Holocaust survivor Bob Narev, 84, remembers it quite clearly.
In 1977, 30 years after he moved to New Zealand from Switzerland, Narev was living on the fringes of Remuera with his wife, Freida, also a Holocaust survivor.
Bob Narev, a German-born Holocaust survivor, was living on the edge of Remuera in 1977 when the pamphlets were distributed.
The National Socialist White People’s Party of New Zealand, founded by Durward Colin King-Ansell, printed and distributed 9000 pamphlets to Remuera postboxes, some time in the first four months of the year.
Health maintenance organization (HMO) Clalit, the largest healthcare provider in Israel, has reported a drop of 94 per cent of symptomatic Covid-19 infections from a group of 600,000 people who have gotten both of the necessary doses of the Pfizer vaccine, according to Reuters.
HMO Clalit covers more than half of Israel’s population, and also reported that the same 600,000 people were 92 per cent less likely to come down with a serious illness as a result of contracting the virus if they had taken the vaccine.
This study, the biggest one to date in the country, represents a continuation of promising news for the Pfizer inoculation(s), as just last month (along with Moderna) Pfizer got credit for a similar effectiveness rate of 95 per cent in a New York Times report.
If you’re wondering what the measuring stick Clalit was comparing against to come up with those percentages was, Reuters reports that the group of 600,000 was set side-by-side with a similarly-sized amount of people that had matching medical histories. Also, as you can probably guess, that second group was not given the vaccine.
Recommended by one of our supporters. Thought provoking…
[NZFOI: Really?!]
Suggesting Palestinians use their children as human shields and that Arabs hate Jews more than they love their own children is appalling and deplorable racism. Dr Cumin’s remarks are a particularly vile statement of anti-Palestinian racism and a repugnant slur on all Arabs.
Torah Club is a bible study programme for people interested in understanding the bible from a historically Jewish perspective.
It has a focus on meeting physically for study, discussion and debate.
A club has formed in Christchurch and meets weekly on Wednesday mornings.
For more details, click here.
A few of our members are not members of Facebook and so haven’t been able to see Ambassador Yaakoby’s well-made video introduction, so here it is!
At an event to mark International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian people three New Zealand MPs took a pledge to form a new parliamentary Palestine friendship group and to “…raise the voices of Palestinian people in New Zealand’s parliament”.
The event, organised by Wellington Palestine, was attended by over 100 New Zealanders including Golriz Ghahraman, MP (Green Party), Teanau Tuiono, MP (Green Party) and Ibrahim Omer, MP (Labour Party). In a speech to open the event Ghahraman – an Iranian born refugee and former human rights lawyer – insisted that New Zealand must divest from companies that were complicit in crimes against international law.
