Leibler’s mother lived to 103 and died in Israel. It was she who had realised the dangers emerging for Jews in Europe. Her parents were subsequently murdered at Auschwitz, having perhaps cheated the Nazis in a small way by hiding some diamonds in the brickwork of their home, a bundle that Mark’s parents managed to recover around 1954 after visiting from what had become their new home in Australia.

Gawenda, the skilled writer of this biography, is also a product of a Jewish refugee family that managed to migrate to Melbourne. His own parents fled to the Soviet Union just before the invasion of Poland and arrived in Australia after the war. Unlike the Leiblers, they were working class, Gawenda’s mother labouring in a sock-manufacturing factory and his father weaving carpets. This book is in many ways a dialogue between the two men, who have shared migrant family experiences yet diverged in their versions of living a Jewish life. While Leibler’s family was and has remained both religiously orthodox and Zionist, Gawenda describes his political identity as ‘of the left, socialist and universalist in outlook’.

Joining in 1966 what became the well-known law firm of Arnold Bloch Leibler, Mark Leibler developed, over a career of some fifty years, a reputation as a highly successful adviser and advocate especially in tax law. He established working relationships with the Australian Taxation Office and assisted his firm’s clients, including some major companies. For several decades the clientele included many Jewish businesses, initially smallto medium-sized and then some large and wealthy companies, though in the latter parts of the book Gawenda canvasses how the scope of work and range of clients has now expanded very much beyond the ethnic network.

The formal establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was central to Leibler’s Jewish identity, a view that most studies show is shared among the majority of Jewish Australians, despite a host of differences regarding particular Israeli governments and policies including the issue of Palestinian rights. Leibler, over decades, has led several major Zionist organisations and has devoted himself to articulating the case for Israel as having brought ‘light and hope into lives that had been consumed’ by the darkness of anti-Semitism. Among his successes was a significant role in garnering support from Australian politicians and others to overturn the 1975 UN General Assembly resolution that identified Zionism as a form of racism. Gawenda portrays the outrage of most Jews in finding that ‘in just three decades the victims of the most murderous form of racism had been turned into racists’ in a campaign by Arab states with the support of the then Soviet Union.

The book brings a welcome sophistication to analysing the meanings of being a Zionist, a label that has over recent decades in countries like Australia assumed negative connotations among many in the progressive left. Such anti-Zionists embrace Palestinian narratives to the exclusion of any recognition of Israel as the product of an often-persecuted Jewish history and of a modern struggle for Jewish national liberation. Gawenda is hardly celebratory about all aspects of Leibler’s Zionist commitment, but the circumstances of his own life disallow any easy one-dimensional dismissal of the entire project of a Jewish State as simply European colonialism that should somehow be disbanded. In recounting Leibler’s work for major Zionist organisations, Gawenda also addresses how Zionism can include those who want a ‘two state solution’ for Israel–Palestine, and who would prefer an Israeli government more progressive than the current one.

Leibler’s personal politics confound any simplistic portrayal of him as an unbending conservative. Yes, he has resisted criticism of Israel’s approach to military security, and believes critique from the Jewish diaspora should not be made publicly. Yet his law firm was among the first to support the Yes vote for same-sex marriage. He enjoyed a professionally close relationship with major figures in the Labor Party, among them Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female prime minister. One of his major successes, in 2014, was to convince government to announce an amnesty scheme for a range of migrant groups, including Italians, Greeks, Chinese, Jews, and others, enabling them to repatriate to Australia substantial funds they had left behind through uncertainties regarding tax payable.

Moreover, Leibler has for some time been committed to assisting achievement of legal justice for Indigenous Australians. The book recounts his strong working relationships with significant Indigenous intellectuals and strategists, Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton among them. Leibler is said to contribute half of his pro-bono hours to Indigenous issues. He committed the law firm to some innovative native title cases from the 1990s onwards, and he has been a strong supporter of initiatives seeking reconciliation and constitutional recognition of Aboriginal interests. With others in the Jewish community, he reportedly feels deep appreciation of the extraordinary action of Aboriginal man William Cooper, who courageously presented a signed petition in 1938 to the German Consulate protesting ‘the cruel persecution of the Jewish people’.

From his perspective, Noel Pearson says his close relationship with Leibler, and his observations of parts of the Melbourne Jewish community, have provided a window onto a people who have admirably resisted embracing any debilitating sense of victimhood, despite a long collective history of victimisation. Pearson’s speech in launching Leibler’s biography expressed his deep appreciation and personal friendship over many years.

The book’s title presents Mark Leibler’s life as exhibiting success as a ‘power broker’. Gawenda acknowledges that such a portrayal is ‘fraught with risks’, given deeply embedded stereotypes and falsehoods about secret nefarious Jewish influence, racist stereotypes that have been embraced by anti-Semites over centuries. Nevertheless, Leibler’s professional relationships and friendships with prime ministers and a host of significant public figures are clear enough, positioning him as an unusually influential advocate for the causes that have informed his energetic working life.