Israeli Ambassador Roasted On Twitter Over Attempt To Scribble Out Lobster Dish In Photo
Israel’s ambassador to Brazil found himself in hot water earlier this week, not long after his lunch had found itself in a bit of hot water, too.
On Sunday, Yossi Shelley posted a picture of himself having lunch with Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist.
But the source the lunch’s infamy wasn’t Bolsonaro’s policies, which may threaten indigenous Brazilians, LGBTQ Brazilians and the environment. It was the lobster on Shelley’s plate.
In a picture posted to Twitter, the lobster that is fairly obviously sitting on Shelley’s plate is hastily scribbled out in not-quite-totally-opaque black digital marker. As the Washington Post reported, observers picked up on the poorly concealed crustacean and pounced.
“Lobster ain’t kosher,” one user correctly noted.
Noa Landau, a senior diplomatic correspondent for the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, wrote, “Israel’s ambassador to Brazil urgently needs: Photoshop experts at a higher level.”
Other Israeli politicians, from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Shimon Peres, have faced fury from Orthodox constituents and lawmakers for not adhering to the laws of kashrut.
Bolsonaro has forged particularly close ties to Netanyahu since his election last year. In January, Netanyahu became the the first Israeli PM to visit Brazil.
In April, Bolsonaro said that Nazism was a left wing movement after visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Update, 12:30 p.m. — Landau reported on Twitter that Shelley denied that the food on his plate was lobster, saying instead that it was salmon.
#Lobstergate update: Bibi bro Ambo Yossi Shelly says “I didn’t eat a lobster, I got salmon, its the same color. People just don’t know how to understand.” https://t.co/pmK6LWDx3p pic.twitter.com/5dVkBREDqf
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) July 8, 2019
Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at feldman@forward.com or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO