Australia’s most populous state on Wednesday passed sweeping new gun and anti-terror rules following the mass shooting on Bondi Beach, tightening firearm ownership, banning public display of terror symbols, and strengthening police power to curb protests.

The New South Wales state parliament passed the Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Bill early morning after the upper house approved the bill by 18 votes to eight during an emergency sitting.

Premier Chris Minns said not all residents of New South Wales would support the tough reforms but his government was doing everything possible to keep people safe, in the wake of the Dec. 14 shooting at a Jewish Hannukah celebration, where 15 people were killed and dozens wounded.

“Sydney and New South Wales has changed forever as a result of that terrorist activity,” Minns told reporters.

The bill passed the lower house on Tuesday with support from the governing center-left Labor and the opposition Liberal party. The rural-focused National Party, the Liberal’s junior coalition partner, opposed the gun reforms arguing the ownership caps would unfairly disadvantage farmers.

The Bondi Beach gun attack, Australia’s deadliest in almost three decades, prompted calls for stricter gun laws and tougher action against antisemitism.

Under the new gun laws, which Minns described as the toughest in Australia, individual licenses will be capped at four, while farmers will be permitted to own up to 10 guns.

Gun club membership will be mandatory for all firearms license holders.

Police will be granted more powers to impose restrictions on protests for up to three months after a declared terror attack.

Public display of flags and symbols of prohibited terrorist organizations such as Islamic State, Hamas, or Hezbollah has been outlawed and offenders will be jailed for up to two years or fined A$22,000 ($14,742).

Minns said concerns had been raised over chants like “globalize the intifada,” usually heard during anti-Israel protests, adding that hateful statements used to vilify and intimidate people must be banned.

Police believe the two alleged gunmen were inspired by the militant Sunni Muslim group Islamic State. Sajid Akram, 50, was shot dead by police, while his 24-year-old son Naveed has been charged with 59 offenses, including murder and terrorism.

LEGAL CHALLENGE

Activist groups have condemned the law and signaled plans for a constitutional challenge.

In a statement, the Palestine Action Group, Jews Against the Occupation, and the First Nations-led Blak Caucus said it would file a legal challenge against what they described as “draconian anti-protest laws” rushed through the state parliament.

“It is clear that the [state] government is exploiting the horrific Bondi attack to advance a political agenda that suppresses political dissent and criticism of Israel, and curtails democratic freedoms,” the groups said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has also vowed a crackdown on hate speech, with his center-left federal government planning to introduce legislation to make it easier to prosecute those promoting hatred and violence, and to cancel or deny visas to people involved in hate speech. Albanese has proposed a gun buyback plan as well.

Facing criticism that his government has not done enough to curb antisemitism, Albanese said he spoke with Israeli President Isaac Herzog on Tuesday and invited him to make an official visit to Australia as soon as possible.

($1 = 1.4923 Australian dollars)

A private jet that crashed overnight, killing Libya’s army chief of staff and seven others on board, had reported an electrical fault and requested an emergency landing shortly before contact was lost, a Turkish official said on Wednesday.

The Dassault Falcon 50 jet, which took off from Ankara Esenboga Airport at 1717 GMT on Tuesday for Tripoli, informed air traffic control at 1733 GMT of an emergency caused by an electrical malfunction, said communications directorate head Burhanettin Duran.

Search teams found the black box of the plane early on Wednesday, Turkey’s interior minister said.

‘A GREAT LOSS FOR THE NATION,’ PRIME MINISTER SAYS

Libya’s internationally recognized government said the dead included army chief of staff, Mohammed Ali Ahmed Al-Haddad, and four members of his entourage. Libyan Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah called it a “great loss for the nation.”

Three crew members were also killed, Turkish officials said.

In Libya, divided between administrations in the west and east, authorities on both sides announced a three-day period of mourning and lowered flags to half-mast.

Mohammed Al-Menfi, head of the Tripoli-based Presidential Council, said the deputy chief of staff would assume Haddad’s duties until a new chief is appointed.

“We want to emphasize the continuity of operations as a military institution,” Menfi told Istanbul-based TV channel Libya Alahrar.

Haddad, from the coastal city of Misrata some 200 km (124 miles) east of Tripoli, was appointed chief of staff in 2020.

JET VANISHED FROM RADAR WHILE DESCENDING FOR LANDING

Air traffic control had redirected the aircraft back toward Esenboga Airport and emergency measures were initiated, but the jet disappeared from radar at 1736 GMT while descending for landing and contact was lost, Duran said.

“The aircraft’s voice recorder was found at 0245 and the flight data recorder at 0320. Examination and analysis of these devices have begun,” Interior Minister Ali Yerlikaya told reporters at the crash site near Ankara’s Haymana district.

Yerlikaya earlier said the aircraft had requested an emergency landing while flying over Haymana, adding that its wreckage was found near Kesikkavak village.

Duran said investigations into the cause of the crash were continuing by all relevant authorities.

Libyan officials have said the jet was leased and registered in Malta, and that its ownership and technical history would be examined as part of the investigation.

The Whiskey Bible: A Complete Guide to the World’s Greatest Spirit
By Noah Rothbaum
Workman, 640pp, $40

Ask an American to picture the origin of whisky and they will probably conjure up a bearded man in overalls emerging from the Appalachian woods, clutching a jug of moonshine with three Xs on the side.

Noah Rothbaum, the author of The Whiskey Bible, has a name for that cliché: the “Uncle Jesse theory” of whisky history, after the chaotic moonshiner on The Dukes of Hazzard. It’s also, he argues, almost completely wrong.

“For one thing, moonshine only exists because of tax law,” he told me when we spoke about the book. “You don’t get bootleg without a government to evade.”

Real American whisky — the kind that fills warehouses and balance sheets and, until 1933, doctors’ prescription pads — was an immigrant industry, built in cities and river towns and railroad hubs. It grew when America stopped being a rum-drinking colony and became a rye-drinking republic.

Before 1776, the young colonies distilled molasses from Caribbean sugar into rum. After independence, that molasses was politically tainted — too bound up with the British Empire and its trade routes. American farmers had land and grain, not sugar cane. So they turned to whisky.

Then a tiny insect changed everything. When phylloxera destroyed vineyards across Europe in the 19th century, wine and brandy became scarce. Doctors who’d been happily prescribing cognac as a cure-all suddenly needed alternatives. Medical journals in Britain began recommending whisky as a respectable substitute. Demand soared. As Rothbaum writes in his Bible, phylloxera “transformed whiskey from a farm product to an international best seller.”

“Right at the moment when whisky is taking off, you also have this massive wave of Jewish immigration to America,” Rothbaum told me. “And they bring with them exactly the skill set the new industry needs.”

A Jewish story

What’s a nice Jewish boy doing writing a Bible? Or writing about booze at all? There’s nothing actually sacrilegious about the title of The Whiskey Bible in a series whose expert guides include The Wine Bible and The Beer Bible. More transgressive, perhaps, is how close it hews to a kind of competition — Jim Murray’s best-selling, canonical, annual tasting guide, the Whisky Bible. But having a Jewish critic in the top tier of American whisky coverage is actually deeply appropriate.

Indeed when I asked Rothbaum, the spirits editor at Men’s Journal, about it, he was enthusiastic about a personal historical connection to the industry: “Looking back, part of my family ran a restaurant in Warsaw and others in the Ukraine ran a boardinghouse so my conjecture is, maybe it had a distillery or at least, you know, in my looking back romanticizing the past, perhaps they were making some kind of booze there, too.”

But even if his conjecture has no basis in family reality, his story is no outlier. Rothbaum’s Whiskey Bible is a readable introduction and encyclopedic guide to the “world’s greatest spirit” that has its own tag at the Forward. The “Bible” is also a highly engaging guide to a surprisingly broad swath of history and science from George Washington (“America’s first celebrity distiller”) to bovine digestion – bourbon has to be made in a certain way to ensure that its leftovers can be used in feed lots for cows. As Rothbaum recently told a crowd at the 92Y, “everything through the lens of whisky is more fascinating.”

It’s a coffee table book, definitely released to be part of the holiday gift market. But, unlike much of that tranche, it’s a reference book that you — or your giftee — will actually enjoy referring to for years to come. It doesn’t taste test each distillery’s expressions (for that you need Murray) but it has all the background you could need. Want to know about Japanese whisky, there’s a section on that. Want to know whether whisky should be spelled with an “e” or not, there’s a very sensible section on that (spoiler: it doesn’t matter, but you should stick to one). Want to know about how Metallica’s Blackened whisky uses sonic waves in its maturation process — there’s a section on that too.

Part of the broader story — which Rothbaum stressed during his visit to the 92Y — is that Jews have been central in the American whisky story. Looking at POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Poland you can see how Jews were disproportionately represented in the hospitality trade. That’s because in the Pale of Settlement, Jews were often barred from owning land, so they gravitated to the things they were allowed to touch: money, grain and booze.

“You see it over and over,” Rothbaum told the 92Y audience. ”Because of antisemitism in Europe, Jews were pushed into roles like collecting taxes, running inns, and overseeing alcohol production for the local noble. When they get to America, suddenly that work is not only useful — it’s welcome.”

In America, Jews were often merchants who later set up a distillery to supply their distribution network. Alternatively, existing distillers needed a liquor expert to scale up their business and Jews were cheap and ready to bring over European know-how. That first pattern repeats: A young man arrives, peddles wares from a pack, graduates to a general store, then to wholesaling and, eventually, to owning or running a distillery. Whichever way they were pushed, the Jews comprised such a major part of American whisky production that by the early 20th century, many of the biggest liquor companies in the country were owned or run by Jews.

Rothbaum rattles off the names the way other people recite old team lineups or film casts:

• The Bernheim brothers, who built one of the largest distilleries in America in the 1800s and launched the I.W. Harper brand — which is still on shelves today.
• The Shapira family in Kentucky, peddlers turned five-and-dime proprietors turned co-founders of Heaven Hill after Prohibition, makers of Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, and Rittenhouse Rye among others.
• The Rosens and Rosenstiels, running Schenley (long absorbed by Diageo the corporate drinks giant) by a few different names.
• The Bronfmans who ran the Seagram’s empire until they didn’t.
• The Goldring family, still at the helm of Sazerac, owners of Buffalo Trace.

“In all these little towns in Kentucky and the Midwest, Jews are a tiny percentage of the population,” Rothbaum says. “But a huge percentage of the booze business.”

Jews become so identified with alcohol that some of the most antisemitic, anti-immigrant figures of the early 20th century seized on Prohibition as a way to drive them out. Henry Ford and his allies, Rothbaum notes, didn’t just hate liquor; they hated the people who made it.

“That’s how famous Jews were for making alcohol,” he told me. “The people who didn’t like Jews tried to shut down alcohol to drive them away.”

And yet, when people lift their glasses today, almost no one thinks of whisky as a Jewish story.

The rule, not the exception

If Jews were so central to the industry, how did they vanish from its mythology? Part of the answer lies right on the label (another topic that Rothbaum wrote about in The Art of American Whiskey: A Visual History of the Nation’s Most Storied Spirit, Through 100 Iconic Labels).

“Somebody like Bernheim, in the late 1800s, can’t put ‘Bernheim’ on a bottle and expect it to sell,” Rothbaum explains. “So you get I.W. Harper instead — something that sounds safely Anglo.” Almost no one knew then or even knows now that I.W. comes from the initials of the founder Isaac Wolfe Bernheim.

For reasons of marketing and survival, Jewish distillers and owners hid behind WASPy brand identities. Despite its name, Old Fitzgerald is not the legacy of a charming Irishman but of Jewish distiller Solomon S.C. Herbst. The name “Old Fitzgerald,” Rothbaum argues, is practically a caricature of Irish respectability — a Gentile mask on a Jewish business.

After Prohibition, when all booze acquired a gangster sheen, there were even more incentives for upwardly mobile Jews to downplay the connection. Any Jewish involvement in illicit liquor trading was attributed to the useful religious exemption for kiddush wine.

So the Jewish role was sanded off both ends: Jews soft-pedaled their attachment to liquor; the whisky world packaged itself with mythologies of Scottish workmen, Irish storytellers, and, in America, the Uncle Jesse myth — that shirtless guy in the Appalachian holler. “When I first started writing about whisky, I knew about a couple of big Jewish names — the Shapiros, Louis Rosenstiel,” Rothbaum says. ”What I didn’t realize was that they weren’t the exceptions. They were the rule.”

I myself had bumped into the deep connection between Jews and whisky in North America when I noticed in 2010 that Glenmorangie was getting an Orthodox Union hecksher to prove it was kosher and set out to investigate. I went all the way to the Highlands the following spring to write about kosher scotch. Rothbaum told me that the key to that whole story was Glenmorangies ambassador David Blackmore and a whisky tasting a scant few miles from the Forward offices:

He’s Scottish, his wife is Jewish and from New Jersey. And Blackmore was doing a whisky tasting in Borough Park. It was a Friday afternoon, and all these Orthodox Jews were buying a ton of whisky. He was like, “does this go on every Friday?” 

When the answer was a resounding “Yes!” Blackmore asked himself what would help his brand stand out and the result was kosher certification on flagship single malts that — because they are made of barley, water and yeast only — do not even need one.

There are now scores of whiskies across the continents that have heckshers on them, whether from OU, Star-K, or local boards. One rabbi in Kentucky even branched out from his day job heckshering bourbon to bottle his own.

Part of Rothbaum’s mission in The Whiskey Bible is to separate real history from romantic marketing slop. Even the famous spelling debate — “whisky” versus “whiskey” — turns out to be newer and messier than most enthusiasts think.

“If you look back at government documents from the early 1900s, you see all kinds of spellings,” he told me. “Brands in Scotland and America both use ‘whisky’ and ‘whiskey’ more or less interchangeably. A lot of what we treat as sacred rules were invented in the last 25 years.”

Even our contemporary practice of reverently sipping neat brown liquor is historically unusual. Scotch conquered America as a highball: Scotch and soda.

“It’s funny,” Rothbaum says. “The entire Scotch industry in the U.S. is built on whisky and seltzer. And 120 years later, people will tell you it’s somehow sacrilegious to add soda.”

Although the marketers and the hipster artisans want to sell you the ritual or the expensive specialty products, the most important ingredient to set your whisky glass straight is information. Beyond that it is just a case of trying different expressions — and there are some great $30 bottles — working out what you like, and how you like to drink it.

From language, to history, to science, to the way we approach the many varieties of the drink itself, Rothbaum’s Bible is no-nonsense, helpful, and engaging — the perfect accompaniment to a nice glass of Scotch.

 

The post In the beginning was the word — and the word was whisky appeared first on The Forward.