I’ve just got my internet connection up and running again, and as I suspected, the “maybe” Jewish status of the man sworn in today as Australia’s 29th prime minister, following his successful (many will add “lamentable”) coup last night against the previous incumbent, the more genuinely conservative Tony Abbott, is circulating again.
Thus we learn, from the Times of Israel, citing an interview Turnbull gave to the Australian Jewish News a couple of years ago, that Turnbull’s mother may have been Jewish, and if she was, then so is he (halachically) but she was very vague about the matter, and so therefore is he.
To quote the latter newspaper in 2013:
‘….“My mother always used to say that her mother’s family was Jewish,” the member for Wentworth said….
Asked if his mother’s revelation has shaped his views he said: “Yes, maybe.”
“I grew up in the Eastern Suburbs and as we all observe there were a lot of Jews in the Eastern Suburbs and I have always been very comfortable.
“There is no doubt that the strong traditions of family and the whole heimishe atmosphere of the Jewish community, which I’m sure some people don’t like, for me – as someone who is a good friend, but not part of it – I find very admirable.”
Reflecting on his mother, he noted, “She had a lot of Jewish friends in Sydney and a lot of Jewish friends in Philadelphia, where she was living when she died.”….’
Well, that can’t do Mr Turnbull (who, by the way, is a convert from Presbyterianism to Catholicism yet at odds with Catholicism on several social issues) any harm with Jewish voters, although I’ve always wondered why another Liberal politician, former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, an Abbott loyalist who yesterday denounced Turnbull as the Liberal Party’s Kevin Rudd (a reference to the Rudd-Gillard backstabbing episode in the Labour Party), never big-noted his own undoubted Jewish ancestry. Indeed, he seems to have kept it snugly under wraps.
Then, again, we’re entitled to roll our eyes and say “So what?” when confronted with a politician who just happens to have a Jewish parent or forebear. I mean, look at the British Labour Party’s former leader, “Red Ed” Miliband. His Jewish parentage didn’t make him especially sympathetic to Israel, did it? And David Cameron’s two Jewish great-grandparents, or Jack Straw’s one? True, Malcolm Fraser had a mother with a Jewish father, and Bob Hawke had a (first) wife with a mother of Jewish extraction, and both Fraser and Hawke were friendly to the cause of Soviet Jewry, and to Israel too, though not for the long haul.