Do we like them?

Do we like Eddie Jaku?

Our score: 9 out of 10. A lifetime of preaching kindness over hate, decades of volunteering, and nothing nasty turned up anywhere.

Eddie Jaku was born in Leipzig, Germany, in 1920 to a Jewish family who saw themselves as German first. He was expelled from school as a young teen because he was Jewish, so he enrolled in another city under an alias, studied engineering and trained as a toolmaker. That trade ended up keeping him alive.

He survived four concentration camps and multiple death marches, with his toolmaking skills getting him work as a forced labourer rather than a place in the gas chamber. He escaped during a death march, hid in a cave and was found by US troops. After the war he married, and the couple moved to Australia and raised a family.

On the harm test, there is simply nothing to report. We searched for anything he said or did against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, people of colour or public health and found nothing, and no dodgy company either. What he's on the record saying is the opposite: hate is a disease, and it wrecks the person carrying it. Where he stood on specific issues beyond that, honestly, the record we found is thin.

No court cases, no allegations, no scandal. We went looking for criticism and came back with nothing about him, so we won't invent a stain to look balanced. That's honestly the whole list.

The good stuff is the real stuff. He volunteered at the Sydney Jewish Museum from its opening in 1992 until COVID shut it in March 2020, then kept talking to groups around the world online through lockdown. At 100 he published The Happiest Man on Earth, and he'd given a TEDxSydney talk the year before.

His line on happiness wasn't fluffy. He said “this life can be beautiful, if you make it beautiful,” and that “Happiness does not fall from the sky. It's in your hands.” From a man who lost what he lost, that carries weight.