Published: 15 November 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Jewish voters need to get past the manufactured narrative on Israel and vote on social justice issues, candidate RACHEL IAMPOLSKI tells ASHLEY BROWNE.
Rachel Iampolksi sips on her coffee at a fashionable Ripponlea café and makes a sweeping hand gesture towards the streets and the suburb to the east.
“It’s a bit hard in this seat,” she says. “People are very set in their ways. It’s not the easiest place to be a Greens candidate. There is a perception about the party and we have to get over the hump.”
Iampolksi is an urban geographer at RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research and in addition to running for parliament, is also working towards attaining a PHD in cultural geography.
She is proudly Jewish, although avowedly secular. Her parents are Ukrainian Jews who moved to Melbourne 35 years ago and she grew up in Melbourne, attending McKinnon Secondary College.
“It was important to them to feel assimilated so part of that was not being actively involved in the community. I realise that was a mistake at the time, but back then as 20-something immigrants from a place where you were persecuted for being Jewish, it was a case of, ‘Let’s run from it as fast as you can’.”
“The Diaspora really cares about social justice and caring for each other. These are things that we at the Greens have been fighting for forever."
Part of being the Greens candidate for Caulfield is to unpack what has happened before and to understand that plenty of it was beyond her control. Iampolksi believes issues with the party’s brand in the Jewish community, and therefore, the Caulfield region, began before the 2016 federal election when Steph Hodgins-May, the Greens candidate for the federal seat of McNamara, boycotted the pre-election debate at Beth Weizmann because of issues with the term "Zionism".
“I think she had conflicting advice, but more importantly, she underestimated what a big deal it was.”
