This study is largely based on 93 interviews conducted in the 1990s with current or ex-New Zealand Jews of widely differing backgrounds. Ch. 5 (pp. 85-99) discusses antisemitism (as do pp. 15-18, 28-30 in ch. 1). Jews in New Zealand (who in 1991 numbered 3,048 or 0.1% of the total population) generally have kept a low profile. Most of the interviewees view present-day antisemitism as slight, despite some anti-Jewish Christian attitudes. Four types of antisemitism are noted: ignorant, petty (e.g. jokes), political (including anti-Zionist and anti-Israel), and malicious (including vandalism and Holocaust denial). Local Jews have been cautious in responding to antisemitism, though there has been some effort to speak out. While the identities of survivors and their descendants have been strongly affected by the Holocaust, those of other new Zealand Jews have not. Commemoration of the Holocaust has been much more modest than in Australia or in Israel. Some Jews continue to feel that "'it' could happen again, even in New Zealand".

Nazi persecution, oppression behind the Iron Curtain, the struggle of strangers in a strange land. This sombre history haunts the adults in Ann Beaglehole's novel Replacement Girl while their children expand into the bright, wide open landscape of their adopted country.Set in fifties to seventies Wellington, Replacement Girl vividly brings the immigrant experience to life. The story moves back and forwards in time and between New Zealand and Budapest, as Eva grows up in a family struggling with the after-effects of earlier losses and adjustment to a new culture. Eva and her group of four friends, all immigrant children and 'different', have to make their own adjustments and choices to survive and thrive in 1950s Wellington. They just want to leave the parents' past behind and live the carefree life of their schoolmates.With sensitivity and humour, Ann Beaglehole takes the reader inside the immigrant experience so that we see mid-century New Zealand through their eyes. Replacement Girl explores the tensions between generations and cultures. It is a story of love, relationships and cross-cultural marriage.

Focuses on the lives of the children of wartime immigrants, whose perceptions and experiences of both the old and the new world were very different from their parents'. At school, in the neighbourhood, or on the sportsfield, many of them were painfully aware of being 'outsiders' in a society unused to cultural diversity. Yet their need to belong was frequently complicated by loyalty to the very different ideals and expectations of their parents. Based on a wide range of interviews as well as documentary evidence from second-generation refugees worldwide, this is an account of the lives of immigrant children growing up in the decades between the 1940s and the 1960s.