20
(pt. 2)
JEWISH INFLUENCE IN
POPULAR CULTURE
"Since the last great wave," says
Woocher, "of social activism in America in the 1960's, the rhetoric of
Jewish pursuit of social justice has been somewhat muted within the polity.
Greater attention has been paid to the tasks of Jewish self-preservation;
the polity has, in the view of many observers, 'turned inward.' [WOOCHER,
p. 87] In other words, as the Jewish community achieves increasing influence
in the American economic and political worlds, it is inevitably gravitating
back to the ideological base that has served Jews throughout history: the insular preoccupation with "being
Jewish," Jewish self-promotion at others' expense, and the refocusing
of a delineation between Jewish selves and outsiders. "For most of [American]
history," says Gordon Lafar,
"American Jewry avoided the conflict
between universalism and
particularism by identifying its selfish
interests with the broader
dictates of liberal universalism. Indeed,
in the early part of this
century, the circumstances of American politics
conspired to offer
Jews an easy congruence between the general
principles of liberalism
and their particular economic and social
interest ... In recent years,
however, the marriage between liberal universalism
and Jewish
particularism has unraveled ... It has become
increasingly apparent
that the community's selfish interests diverge
from the dictates of
abstract universalism, leading the Central
Conference of American
Rabbis to note in 1976 that 'until the recent
past our obligations to
the Jewish people and all humanity seemed
congruent. At times now
these two perspectives appear to conflict.'"
[LAFAR, p. 181]
"Even during the Berkeley sit-in of
1964," notes Stephen Whitfield, "according to one report, Hatvikah [the Israeli national anthem]
was sung; and Students for a Democratic Society was packed with Jews, whose
Jewish identity was often disguised or downplayed." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN,
p. 114]
Using the always reliable Jewish device
pointing to an irrational, endemic anti-Semitism as an omnipotent threat to
Jews, Ruth Wisse in 1992 framed her move to political conservatism in terms
of Jewish self-protection:
"Gentiles invented ... [anti-Semitism].
Its defeat requires, on the part of
the victims and onlookers, a temporary
sacrifice of the liberal optimism
upon which the whole of democratic society
is founded." [WISSE, p.
46]
Large scale Jewish abandonment of social
justice movements was evidenced during the wake of the Vietnam war era, especially
after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. There were many Jews active in leftist political
organizations, but with the state of Israel increasingly understood by the
Left to be an imperialist and/or colonialist nation positioned against Third
World struggles, "faced with the choice," says Seymour Lipset, "of
giving up their attachments to Israel or dropping their ties to the Left ...
a significant and visible number of Jewish leftists dropped out of the New
Left." [LIPSET, p. 158] "Jews who had thought that being Jewish
did not matter," says Charles Silberman, "... discovered in 1967
that Jewishness lay at the heart of their being." [SILBERMAN, p. 201]
"We believe," proclaimed a Jewish socialist group called Chutzpah,
"that the form and content of most Left criticism [of Israel] is inescapably
anti-Semitic." [LIEBMAN, A, ANTISEM, p. 350] A Jewish sociologist in
France, Raymond Aron, even declared that "If Israel disappears, I do
not wish to survive." [ELLIS, M., 1990, p. 9]
"Resigning in droves," notes
J.J. Goldberg, "from liberal and left-wing groups, [Jews] attacked those
who did not do so as traitors to their own kind." [GOLDBERG, p. 140]
"[Jews] were forced to choose," says Arthur Liebman, "between
their ethnic identification and community and their universalist political
movement ... Most chose their ethnic identity." [LIEBMAN, A. p. 526] "When universalistic policies conflicted
with ethnic imperatives," note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
"as in the case of radical critiques of Israel, Jews were torn in opposite
directions, and their attachment to radicalism was weakened." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER,
1982, p. 114] "After 1967," remarks Gerald Sorin, "support
for Israel became the common denominator of American Jewish life, so much
so that no Jew who was not a staunch advocate for the Jewish state could expect
to occupy a responsible position in any major Jewish organization." [SORKIN,
p. 215] "A number of ex-revolutionary
Marxists of Jewish background," says Alan Wald, "had become pro-Israel
after 1948 and had substituted either Zionism or some other form of Jewish
ethnic identity for the revolutionary internationalism to which they had once
adhered." [WALD, p. 15]
A 1996 book about convicted anti-Arab terrorist
Era Rapaport even begins: "How does a nice Jewish boy from East Flatbush,
Brooklyn, a gifted social worker, a marcher for civil rights, a loving husband
and father, end up blowing off the legs of the PLO mayor of Nablus [in Israel]?"
[RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 1] "Ezra," wrote an old friend to him in
prison, "what did Israel do to you? You, the freedom fighter. You who
walked arm in arm with thousands of Blacks in D.C. You, one of the best drug-prevention
workers I've chanced on. The devoted social worker who could make a desolate
human being feel like this life was worth living. Who got beaten up for defending
the underprivileged. What happened to you? How could you? Are Arabs not people?"
[RAPAPORT, E., 1996, p. 22]
Left-wing journalist (Village Voice)
Paul Cowan recalls being in the Peace Corps when the 1967 war began:
"I remember walking down to the Peace Corps
office, and feeling quite lonely
when I realized that none of the other volunteers
was as disturbed as I was. I
decided
to go to the Israeli Embassy, and volunteer to serve ... When I got back
to the United States, and became part of the
[Vietnam] anti-war movement, I
found myself increasingly uncomfortable with
the left's attitude toward
Israel. I was a dove, but sometimes [non-Jewish
girlfriend] Rachel and I
would hear a criticism of Israeli military policy
and find ourselves reacting very
differently. She would assume that Israel was
partly to blame; I'd
wonder whether the criticisms contained a hint
of anti-Semitism."
[COWAN, P., 1987, p. 19]
Israel's 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom
Kippur War, says Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, "evoked a sense of Jewish solidarity
on the one hand, and distinctiveness from the gentile nations on the other.
It strengthened deeply rooted tendencies in the Jewish tradition to stress
the uniqueness and isolation of the Jewish people." [SAIDEL, p. 19] In
1969, in the midst of this Jewish exodus from universalist ideals, Leonard
Fein surveyed his people and wrote that "the overwhelming ambiguity --
one might even say contradiction -- of the modern era may be stated as follows:
precisely at a time when the rhetoric of universalism has reached an unprecedented
peak, and precisely at a time when the myths associated with universalism
have become part of conventional wisdom, the tribal instinct has reasserted
itself with overwhelming vigor." [FEIN, ISRAEL, p. 3]
By the late sixties, says Common Cause
president David Cohen, "the Jewish community began to look inward and
deal with its own interests." [STANFIELD, p. 1849] By the early seventies,
says Jack Porter and Peter Drexler, "the Jewish Left concern[ed] itself
primarily with four basic issues: Israel, Soviet Jewry, the Jewish Establishment,
and Jewish oppression in America [sic: the alleged oppression of Jews]. A
conspicuous phenomena [was] the revival of the Zionist ideology on campus."
[PORTER, p. xxx]
Jonathan Sacks also noted Jewry's trend
towards turning back to traditional Jewish religion (and its "particularism")
in 1994: "In the past two decades [Jewish] orthodoxy has risen to great
prominence within most Jewish communities throughout the world, most strikingly
within Israel and the United States, two communities where it had previously
seemed a marginal presence destined for eclipse. In part this has been due
to demographic factors, in part to the clarity of orthodoxy's beliefs and
the high level of commitment it evokes from its adherents." [SACKS, J.,
p. ix] "Orthodox Jews," noted Jack Wertheimer in 1993,
"have assumed unprecedented positions of
power and influence within the Jewish
the organized Jewish community. Since the mid-1970s
individual Orthodox Jews
have risen to leading administrative posts in the
Council of Jewish Federations,
the American Jewish Committee, the American
Jewish Congress, the Conference
of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,
the World Jewish Congress, and a
range of local federations and other Jewish
agencies. Their presence is symptomatic
of a shift in priorities in these organizations
to what have been deemed 'survivalist'
issues' and away from the traditional 'integrationist'
agendas." [WERTHEMIER, J.,
1993, p. 122]
Even the Reform Judaism movement, the largest
and most liberal Jewish religious branch in America, by 1999 was formally
turning back to the past. Its Central Conference of American Rabbis, by a
324-68 vote, "endorsed a return to traditional practices such as wearing
yarmulkes, keeping kosher, and praying in Hebrew" which reflected "a
yearn for a return to some of the old ways." [STORY, P., 5-27-99, p.
A3]
In
2001, David Berger noted the extraordinary presence of the international
ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher Chabad movement:
"I was recently taken aback to learn,
for example, that Chabad rabbis constitute
50 percent of the rabbinate in England. In
Italy, Milan has a powerful Chabad
presence ... Any Jewish traveler in France,
where the Lubavitcher directory lists
35 major emissaries, will testify to the visibility
and significance of Chabad
institutions and services there. 13 of 26
synagogues in Sydney, Australia, are
led by Chabad rabbis, and the kashrut authority
in that city, in the words of my
informant, 'is supervised by one rabbi only
-- Chabad of course.'
A Dutch Jewish
journalist infomrs me that more than half
of the major Orthodox rabbis in Holland
are Lubavitch Hasidim. The head of the rabbinic
court for the entire city of Montreal
is a Chabad rabbi. The Lubavitch directory
lists eighteen major centers in
Brazil ... In a significant number of Amreican
communities anyone seeking an
Orthodox presence -- sometimes any religious Jewish
presence -- will find it only
in Chabad. As for Israel, the movement is disproportionately
represented there
among the country's rabbis and religious functionaries
and its political influence
testifies to its impact. Finally, the role of Chabad
in the former Soviet Union, a vast
territory with a population of a half-million Jews,
deserves special mention. The
recently formed federation of Jewish communities
has intalled a Chabad emissary
named Berel Lazar as the country's chief rabbi
... The activities of Chabad dwarf
those of all other Jewish religious kmovements.
According to one very informed
Russian Jew, Chabad will before long come to be
seen in his couintry as synonymous
with Judaism, and all other Jewish religious groups
will be perceived as sects."
[BERGER, D., 2001, p. 25]
Reflecting a growing chauvinist sentiment
in the United States -- Eugene Borowitz argued in the 1970s that it was time
for a Jewish unmasking, a shedding of self-deceptions, a removal of inauthentic
American assimilationist skins in a return to a fundamental, and primal Jewish identity. Borowitz
wrote that the traditional melting pot ideal (of all immigrants coming to
America to mix into a collective cultural soup) was malevolently conceived.
"The melting pot ideal," he said, "[is] a maneuver by WASPS
to maintain power by making themselves the image of American life, thereby
relegating all other groups to inferior status ... the individual remains
the legal recipient of civil rights, but his community now demands proper
recognition and significant power." [BOROWITZ, . 50]
Borowitz is reflecting here on modern Jewish
power shifts in changing traditional Jewish aims to hide in public the private
Jewish identity. As one old "Jewish
aphorism" phrases it: "Be a person when you go out in the street
and a Jew in your home." [HEILMAN, C., 19992, p. 16]
In modern days, this clandestine approach
to Jewish identity has been completely reversed -- "being Jewish"
is openly celebrated everywhere
in popular culture at-large. Howard Jacobson notes his own experience in renewing,
to obsessive degree, like so many, his Jewish identity:
"My own progression from thinking I
must have been a switched
baby, so Jewish didn't I feel, to knowing
myself to be so exclusively
Jewish that I barely had room to know anything
else, was not
entirely welcome to me. Jew, Jew, Jew. The
word hurt my eyes.
Friends -- even Jew, Jew, Jew friends --
began to wonder whether
I
had other subjects of conversation. [JACOBSON, H., 1993/1995,
p. 6]
"It may be hard to recollect -- or,
for younger people, even to imagine," wrote Jewish professor Paul Lauter
in 1996, "but a quarter century ago few Jewish-American intellectuals,
where ever they located themselves on the political spectrum, saw Israel as
central to their political, much less personal, identity. Within a year or
two, however, the state of Israel launched its quite successful effort to
convert American Jewish identity with Israeli nationalism ... The sharply secular Jewishness
that had shaped my conscience flagged before the revival of an organized piety
generally linked to a fevered Zionism." [LAUTER, p. 43]
Spearheading "Jewish revival,"
American Jewish institutions are even active in pulling Jews who had successfully
assimilated into other peoples in other lands back into the international
tribe. In Poland, for example, many of the few Jews remaining there in the
communist era after World War II married non-Jews and raised their children
as Poles. With the return of capitalism to the Polish state in the 1990s,
however, American Jewish cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder (founder of the "Ronald
Lauder Foundation") and "his advisor, Rabbi Chaskel Besser, believe
in the viability of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and emphasize
the
return of assimilated youth to the Jewish fold." [Weinbaum, p. 27]
This includes Lauder's establishment of a Jewish school, summer camps, publications,
genealogy projects to trace lost Jewish roots, and other programs. "Indeed,"
notes Laurence Weinbaum, "in recent years the Lauder Foundation and Jewish
communal life in Poland may have become synonymous." [WEINBAUM, p. 27]
Lauder, an avid Zionist, has also been a key economic supporter of former
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In 1998, during a visit to Poland,
Netanyahu "called on young Polish Jews to learn Hebrew and move to Israel."
[WEINBAUM, p. 8] The dimensions of this new-found Jewishness struggling to
be reborn in Poland may be clearly noted in the subtext of this observation
of Laurence Weinbaum:
"A heated debate erupted [at the
Jewish Community of Warsaw
organization] over whether or not non-Jewish
spouses of Jews
could qualify for membership [in the
JCW]. The most interesting
aspect of this debate was the fact that
many of the younger Jews
-- who had come out of the closet more
recently -- were the most
adamant in refusing to admit the non-Jewish
spouses. This new-found
orthodoxy mirrors trends that can be
found in other Jewish
communities that have undergone revival."
[WEINBAUM, p. 43]
[Among the pioneers of the Jewish orthodox
revival in Poland
is Konstanty Gebert, editor of the Jewish
journal Midrash and
a journalist who writes for one of Poland's
largest newspapers,
under the name of Dawid Warszawski.]
[WEINBAUM, p. 32] )
"Many Jews," says Lucy Dawidowicz,
"found [that] their ideas of war, which had been shaped by Vietnam, were
irrelevant to Israel. Views on pacifism, civil disobedience, resistance to
government, and the inherent evil of military might were suddenly questioned."
[GLAZER, AMERICAN, p. 171] "In 1967," wrote Village Voice
columnist Nat Hentoff, "I was trying to learn how to be a pacifist ...
Then came the Six Day War. 'How are we doing?' I'd ask .... I wasn't asking
about the state of nonviolence in the world." [BRENNER, p. 341]
Hence, as is so common throughout their
long history, another Jewish moral double standard was asserted: arm Israel
to the teeth and cut back American military spending. "Though it is true that Jews," says Seymour Lipset, "almost
to a person, are supportive of Israel against the Arabs, and favour giving
military and economic aid to Israel, they, more than any other identifiable
ethno-religious group, also tend to be against a strong American military
posture and a high spending level for Americans armaments." [LIPSET,
p. 153] During the Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson complained that "a
bunch of rabbis came here one day in 1967 to tell me that I ought not send
a single screwdriver to Viet Nam, but on the other hand, [the United States]
should push all our aircraft carriers through the Strait of Tiran to help
Israel." [HERSH, p. 191] The results of a Carnegie Commission of Higher
Education study in 1975 noted that "the proportion of Jews favoring immediate
withdrawal from Vietnam as of spring 1969 was twice that of non-Jews."
[LADD/LIPSET, p. 159]
Yet, notes Chaim Waxman, "American
Jews who subscribe to the basic tenets
of political liberalism do not apply the same rules to Israel ... Israel is
not subject to the same rules that apply to political entities, but rather
to what may be called 'family rules.'" [WAXMAN, p. 142] "In other words," says Charles Silberman, "the rules
of genteel civility are limited to Gentile society; the rules of personalistic
familism apply to the extended Jewish family, to all members, rich or poor."
[LEIBMAN/COHEN, p. 21] This double standard of "family rules" is
dramatically illustrated by a Canadian Jew, Mordechai Nisan (who was raised
in western democracy) and his views of non-Jews in his second homeland, Israel.
Writing for the World Zionist Organization, Nisan says:
"The Land was the special divinely
granted territorial promise of
Abraham and his seed ... Non-Jews, without
a role on the highest plane
of religious endeavor, are thus without
a role on the plane of public
activity ... Those of 'the tribe' are
the sole bearers of authority to
determine national affairs in the state
of Israel." [HARKABI, p. 154]
"I don't know how many Jews share
his belief," wrote Yehoshafat Harkabi in 1989, "but the publication
[of Nisan's] article in a leading Zionist periodical is cause for grave concern."
[HARKABI, p. 154] Even in an "American issues" context, the Jewish
double moral standard is blatant. "It is remarkable," wrote Alan Dershowitz in 1991, "how
some secular Jews who regard United States senator Jesse Helms as a Neanderthal,
regard the Lubavitcher [an Orthodox Judaism movement] rabbi -- who shares
Helm's right-wing views on virtually every issue -- as the epitome of wisdom."
[DERSHOWITZ, p. 335]
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen are especially
critical about American Jewry and its in-group chauvinism. In 1990 they wrote
that
"American Jews need to square their
Jewish familistic sentiment with
American conceptions of equality and western
conceptions of liberalism
and humanism. In these conceptions there
is something archaic,
unenlightened, and intolerant about asserting
the primacy of one's kin or
clan ... The primary attachments ought
to be their friends or coworkers
or to those with whom they share acquired
traits, not to those among
whom they happen to be born. Jews in the
United States have to answer
for the implicit particularism of the
Jewish tradition, not to mention the
notion of chosenness, which has implications
of superiority."
Many observers even
argue that the presumed Jewish altruism and social activism in the American
civil rights movement of the 1960's had baser motives. Benjamin Ginsberg argues
that the multicultural coalitions spearheaded by Jews in the civil rights
era "was a political tactic" to "undermine the power"
of those establishment social forces that hindered further Jewish socio-economic
advancement. [GINSBERG, p. 125] In
1975 Hasia Dinner wrote a PhD thesis about the way that "Jewish support
for black causes was a way for Jews to broaden their own rights without becoming
conspicuous by advocating their group interests." [FEINGOLD, p. 130] "Jewish leaders,"
wrote Diner, "representing different socio-economic classes, ideologies,
and cultural experiences committed themselves to black betterment and gave
time, money, and energy to black organizations. The spectrum was so wide and
the involvement so extensive that one must conclude that these leaders acted
out of peculiarly Jewish motives ... [My] book demonstrates that Jewish ends
were secured by involvement with blacks." [DINER, p. xiv, xii]
(Similarly, Jewish author Peter Novick notes
the changing Jewish strategy in using massive Jewish attack against generic
prejudice as a tool in fending off specific anti-Jewish hostility:
"In recent decades, the leading Jewish organizations
have invoked the Holocaust
to argue that anti-Semitism is a distinctively
virulent and murderous form of
hatred. But in the first postwar decades their
emphasis -- powerfully reinforced
by contemporary scholarly opinion
-- was on the common psychological roots
of
all forms of prejudice. Their research, educational, and political action
programs
consistently minimized diffrences between
different targets of discrimination. If
prejudice
and discrimination were all of a piece, they reasoned that they could
serve the cause of Jewish self-defense as well by
attacking prejudice and
discrimination against blacks as by tackling anti-Semitism
directly.") [NOVICK., P.,
1999, p. 116]
As Jonathan Reider frames this issue: "Jewish
liberalism can also be seen as a self-protective device of a minority caught
in a hostile plural society. Milton Himmelfarb has described this logic as
'that Jewish particularism which likes to regard itself as universalism."
[sic] [REDIER, J., 1985, p. 48]
"The Jewish struggle for equality and
fair treatment," says Jonathan Kaufman, "was linked to the struggles
of Blacks for greater opportunity. It was not a struggle of equals; Jews did
not consider their plight equal to that of Blacks. But they recognized in
the Black struggle for civil rights elements that could benefit them and conditions
with which they sympathized." [MARTIN, p. 131] Hence, perhaps three-quarters
of the funding for the three major civil rights organizations -- the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, The Congress of Racial Equality, and Martin
Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference is attributed to Jewish
sponsorship. [MARTIN, p. 132]
"Any support of human rights in general
by Jews," says Israel Shahak, "which does not include the support
of human rights of non-Jews whose rights are being violated by [Israel] is
deceitful ... [Jewish] support of Blacks in the South was motivated only by
consideration of Jewish self-interest." [SHAHAK, p. 103] "The major
role [that Jews] once played in the civil rights movement," says Charles
Liebman and Stephen Cohen, "[is a] myth ... [that] enhances the self-image
of a Jew as a caring and sensitive minority selflessly contributing to improve
the lot of other minorities." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 17] "Among the many myths life and history
have imposed on Negroes," wrote Black author Harold Cruse in 1967, "...
is the myth that the Negroes' best friend is the Jew." [CRUSE, p. 476]
"The Jews who were to become neoconservatives re-examined their relationship
to blacks," obseved Jewish commentator Earl Shorris, in 1982,
"They had always agreed with Cervantes' decription
of the world as composed
of two families, the Haves and the Have-Nots,
but they realized that Jews in
America had moved into a new family and blacks
had not. The interests of the
Haves are different than the Have-Nots ...
The new attitude toward blacks led to
a new attitude toward affirmative action and
public welfare ... A return to quotas
["affirmative
action"] would have the effect of displacing many Jews ... Only a
large and very powerful central government
could redistribute wealth on an
qual basis, and the Jews stood to lose a great
deal in the equalizing of wealth.
In the language of the neoconservatives, all
of this had to do with Jewish interests
... Among the chief Jewish interests, said
the neoconservatives, was Israel."
[SHORRIS,
E., 1982, p. 23-24]
Jews in the academic world have had a well-known
reputation for political liberalism, a tendency confirmed in American academia
by a 1975 Carnegie Commission on Higher Education study that surveyed 60,000
American college and university faculty members. Jewish professors, for example,
were found to be about twice as likely as their Catholic and Protestant
counterparts to support the legalization of marijuana. They were significantly
higher in support of "student radicalism" on campus and other deconstructions
of the WASP-created status quo of society. Yet, when Jewish faculty members
were questioned about issues that were more poignantly closer to home (i.e.,
the "standards" of the American university system itself of which
Jewish professors now had a power stake), "it is striking," noted
the authors of the Commission study, "that the gap between Jewish and
non-Jewish faculty is smaller for items which pertain to academic standards.
Jews were only moderately more willing than others to waive academic standards
in appointing members of minority groups to the faculty, or in admitting them
to the student body. Jewish faculty were only slightly more favorable than
the faculty as a whole to offering a program of black studies." [LADD/LIPSET,
p. 159]
"In candor," wrote Arthur Hertzberg
in 1964 about American Jewry in general, "it need be added that the Jewish
masses appear to be moving toward a position on race less liberal than the
views of their leaders and more akin to the outlook that is conventional in
comparable segments of the gentile community." [HERTZBERG, p. 286]
Not quite. In fact, according to a Harris survey in 1978, full
in the face of the Jewish myth of their exceptional concern for pan-human
justice, Jews were significantly more inclined to racist attitudes
than other ("non-Jewish") whites:
"Jews were less likely to state that
they wanted their children to go to
school with blacks (21% of Jews, 32% of
non-Jewish whites), and more
likely to say that they did not want their
children to go to school with
blacks (21% of Jews, 14% of non-Jewish
whites), less likely to favour
residential integration than non-Jewish
whites (46% versus 39%), [and]
less likely to favour full racial integration
than non-Jewish whites (25%
versus 35%)." [RUBINSTEIN, p. 144]
[Note also the Israel chapter, where anti-black racism against Ethiopian Jewish
immigrants to the state is endemic, and the Black Hebrew (African-American
immigrants) have been for years refused land for a cemetery: they have been
forced to bury their dead in the local dump]. [ARBELI, 10-3-99]
In 1998 two Jewish researchers reported the
results of their study of ethnocentrism among 330 students at Canada's York
University. Citing "intrafamilial nepotism" as "sometimes referred
to as kin selection," Jews (among WASPS, Asians, Italians, Blacks, and
"other Europeans") were found to have the highest "mean ethnocentrism
scores" -- i.e., were the most ethnocentric in perception. [SILVERMAN/CASE,
p. 400] "WASPS" were the least ethnocentric of all groups measured.
In a 1960's civil rights era study, three
researchers, notes Seymour Lipset, "isolated a large sample of Jews"
and "discovered, among other things, that at the same middle-class
income level, 40 to 60% of the Jews had part time servants, as against 0 to
5% of the Protestants. People outside the South who had a full-time servant
were preponderantly Jewish. Relatively few Christians had one ... Since these
servants are almost invariably Negro, this fact reinforces the image in the
Black community of the Jew as economic exploiter." [LIPSET, The Soc
of, p. 124]
The severe class-conscious tradition of
having non-Jews do their menial work goes back far into Jewish history.
Even as early as 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau found that 70% of the 10,000
Jewish American families surveyed had at least one servant. [SILBERMAN,
p. 45; HIGHAM, J., 1957, p. 9] ] And, as Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter
note about the Jews of Germany:
"While most Irishmen were still day laborers
in the 1880s, only one in
eight German Jews was a manual laborer ... The
fact that 40 percent of
German Jewish families had at least one servant
indicates that many were
'making it.'" [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 95]
Jewish author Ann Roiphe wrote in 1981 about her childhood:
"I have a picture of myself at a birthday
party. I am perhaps three
or four. I am watching a magician with
a group of other children.
My governess stands in the doorway with
the other governesses.
They are all wearing white uniforms. They
are smiling at the
magician. I am in velvet and party shoes
and my hair has been
brushed as straight as possible. I look
at the other governesses:
Shinke, Ilse, Greta, and Hanna. Guardians
of my childhood
companions. All the governesses are German
and all the children
are Jewish and the year is 1938."
[ROIPHE, 1981, p. 127]
Roiphe was from a very wealthy family. Not
all Jews could afford German maids. "On the eve of the Depression,"
writes Roberta Feuerlicht,
"more than half of working Black women
and a quarter of working
Black men were servants. In the 1930s,
when most Black women
were unemployed because of the Depression,
on certain corners
of the Bronx there existed what was called
the Bronx Slave Market.
Black women gathered at 8 AM, rain or
shine, summer or winter,
hoping to be hired by Bronx women to do
housework for fifteen
to thirty cents an hour. Most of these
housewives were Jewish;
business was best before the Jewish holidays
... Most middle-class
Jews grew up with the 'schvartze' (literally,
'black,' but actually 'nigger')
who came to clean once or twice a week.
She never really had a name;
she was always the 'schvartze.' Women
used to ask each other, 'Is
your schvartze free on Thursday? My schvartze
didn't come in this
week." [FEUERLICHT, p. 190-191]
Another Jewish author, B. Z. Goldberg,
portraying employing Jews and employed Blacks as somehow economic equals,
wrote the following apologetic about the Jewish-dominated "slave market":
"These slave markets were located in
the poorer Jewish neighborhoods.
Many of the women coming to select Negro
help had never had
their housework done for them -- they now
first came to the market
because of the cheapness of the labor. Poor
themselves they had
the Negro woman do the heavy work, the easier
chores they did
for themselves, and they were stern taskmasters."
[GOLDBERG,
B.Z., 1967, p. 57]
In 1935, the NAACP magazine The Crisis
featured an article entitled "The Bronx Slave Trade." "Fortunate
indeed," it noted, "is she who gets the full hourly rate promised.
Often, her day's slavery is rewarded with a single dollar bill or whatever
her unscrupulous employer pleases to pay. More often, the clock is set back
for an hour or more. Too often, she is sent away without any pay at all."
[MAGIDA, p. 165] "Some Negro
domestics," wrote Black scholar Kennth Clark in 1946, "assert that
Jewish housewives who employ them are unreasonably and brazenly exploitive."
[GLAZER, Negroes, p. 29] Whatever the case, remarked Jewish observer Lenni Brenner about
the Jewish community in the 1980s, "It may be said with scientific certainty,
that in this day and age a social stratum with such a vastly disproportionate
addiction for maids can never again be the cutting edge of ideological progress."
[BRENNER, p. 81]
The Jewish author of a biography on Nation
of Islam leader Lewis Farrakhan "believes [that Farrakhan's] Depression-era
childhood and his mother's employment in the service of Jewish families may
have sparked his early gripes against Jews." [KATZ, p. 4] "Quite
possibly," says this biographer, Arthur Magida, "Farrakhan ... absorbed
his mother's attitudes towards Jews ... She and other black women congregated
on street corners and bargained with mostly Jewish middle-class housewives
for their services as day laborers." [MAGIDA, p. 165]
"For most Jews," noted James Yaffe
in 1968, "the only Negroes they ever meet are either domestic servants,
menial employees or delivery boys. The [Jewish] immigrant housewife used to
refer to the Negro woman who helped her around the house as the
schwartse -- a Yiddish word meaning 'the
black one.' It wasn't a term of hatred but of contempt, and its connotations
remain in the minds of many Jews today." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 263]
"Like
many Hasidim [ultra-Orthodox Jews]," says Stephen Bloom in his book
about the Chabad organization in Iowa,
"Lazar made no point in concealing his
dislike of 'the niggers,' as he called them.
They were not only goyim, they were
black -- two of the worst characteristics
anyone could possess ... Lazar's reference
to shvartzers brought back a memory
from long ago. During the summers I spent
in Miami Beach as a boy, my
grandparents automatically referred to blacks
as shvartzers, as did millions
of American Jews at the time, and as some American
Jews still do ... Grandma
Rose
told me that 'the shvartzeh' was coming. 'Whose that?' I asked. 'You
know,
the cleaning lady,' she replied." [BLOOM,
S., 2001, p. 231]
"Anti-Negro sentiments," notes
Hasia Diner, "was a subject of real pain in [New York's] Yiddish newspapers
and they took every possible opportunity to expose and condemn it." [DINER,
p. 71] In recent history, the first
time John Grethren, a Black convert to Judaism, entered a synagogue, "he
had barely advanced a few steps before he was handed a coat and hat by an
older woman, who sweetly asked him to 'take care of it' for her." [ROMANOFF,
p. 215] (And who too often are the security guards and janitors at Jewish
synagogues and other communal sites? Howard Jacobson's travels, for instance,
led him to African-American guards at a gay synagogue in Los Angeles, and
a Black janitor at the World Lubavitch Headquarters synagogue in New York
City. [JACOBSON, H., 1995, p. 147, 197-198] The Los Angeles Simon Wiesenthal Center likewise
employs African-Americans to physically protect visitors and staff).
When Nina Skopnic told her parents that
she was romantically involved with a Black man, "they were appalled --
they stopped paying my college tuition and wouldn't return my phone calls.
Even later, when Jim decided to convert [to Judaism], they wanted nothing
to do with us. It was very painful.... [My] parents had always been active
in liberal causes, particularly in cultivating Black-Jewish relations in my
home town. I really had no idea they were bigots ... I had not only lost my
parents, but I lost total faith in everything they had taught me to believe
in." [ROMANOFF, p. 214]
Edwin Diamond notes the comments of the chief
editor of the New York Times, A. M. Rosenthal, when he spok eat the
Sutton Place Synagogue in 1988 -- soon after Jesse Jackson's well-publicized
reference to New York City as "Hymietown":
"'I advised Jesse to make a healing gesture,'
perhaps by meeting with Jewish
leaders to counteract the effects of his 'Hymietown'
reference to New York. 'But
he couldn't rise to it, and that was pity. The
proper question is, 'What can we do
to heal the rift between these historic allies,
Jews and blacks?' Several members of
the audience were visibly displeased. Rosenthal
sought to reassure them. 'The
Hymietown remark was disgusting,' Rosenthal
said, 'But has no one in this room
ever made an antiblack remark?' A woman quickly
shouted, 'No!' Rosenthal
just as quickly turned to her, and said with
the fast mouth of a New Yorker, 'Then
you should run for president." [DIAMOND,
E., 1993, p. 172]
In 1998, the New York Daily News
reviewed an autobiography of Edgar Bronfman, the head of the World Jewish
Congress (one of the most powerful Jewish lobbying organizations), starting
out by noting that:
"Billionaire Edgar Bronfman has campaigned
vigorously against
anti-Semitism, but the Seagram's chairman
saw red when his son
wanted to marry a black woman.
'Sherry offered to convert [to
Judaism],' wrote Bronfman, 'which, though
well intentioned, was
not the point.'" [RUSH, p. 14]
In
June 2001, Mel Lastman, the New York-born Jewish mayor of Toronto, made the
international news with a racist statement that effectively destroyed that
city's bid for the Olympic games. As Canada's National Post reported:
"An 'ignorant, racist' joke by Toronto's
Mayor may have sunk the city's bid
for the 2008 Olympics, Canadian politicans and
communityg roups say. Before
leaving on a goodwill visit to Kenya this month
to promote the city's quest for
for the Summer Games, Mel Lastman spoke to a
freelance journalist about the
trip. 'What the hell do I want to go to place
like Mombasa [for]?' Mr. Lastman
asked. 'Snakes scare the hell out of me. I'm
scared about going there, but the
wife is really nervous,' he said. 'I just see
myself in a pot of boiling water with all
these natives dancing around me.' The remarks
met universal condemnation
yesterday." [WALLACE/WANAGAS, 6-21-01]
Marx Kahende, Kenya's deputy ambassador to the
United Nations complained that "the racial intonation of his statement
speaks well of his state of mind. I think he is deranged." Margaret Parsons,
executive director of the African Canadian Legal Centre, added that Lastman's
comment was "not only uninformed [and] ignorant but it is also racist
... He should know in this day and age that these kinds of remarks are not
acceptable." [WALLACE/WANAGAS, 6-21-01]
Also in 2001, the coach (Phil Gershon)
of Israel's champion basketball team, Maccabi Tel Aviv, spoke to a group of
Israeli military officers. While discussing African-Americans who play in
Israel's professional league, an Israeli newspaper noted his comments:
"'Even among blacks there are different
colors. There is dark black, and there is
is mocha. The mocha type are more clever, and
the darker color usually come
from the street.' The report said that the often
overly-vivacious Gerson drew
laughter from his listeners. He then continued
unfazed: 'I am not joking. You
can
see the standing of those with a bit more mixture in their color, such as
Andrew
Kennedy. You can see his personality. He will
check you out, he is clever.
The other (darker) blacks are stupid. They will
do whatever you tell them,
like slaves." [ALON, G., 7-4-01]
Jonathan Kaufman notes that African American
author Alice Walker ("The Color Purple") is married to Mel Levanthol,
a civil rights lawyer but that
"One day, she traveled to Brooklyn
where Levanthol was cleaning
out his apartment, and she was shocked by
how coldly his family
treated her. A woman on the street -- who,
she said, was not
Levanthol's grandmother but 'could have
been' -- came up to her
and said, 'You don't belong here.' It was
her first exposure to Jews
who could be bigots like white southerners."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988,
p. 262]
"A new focus has been found for racial
hatreds," wrote Chaim Bermant in 1977,
"and possibly next to a Black or a Hindu
even the immigrant Jew can feel
more like a WASP or an Englishman. In any case
few Jews are now immigrants
and they are established sufficiently to regard
themselves as part of the host
society and, indeed, to share in its prejudices.
If some Jews ... were in
the vanguard of the movement for racial equalities,
not a few have the disdain
for the schwartzes (Blacks) which they
used to have for the Ukrainian
peasant and may, indeed, feel the more integrated
in the host society for
sharing its antipathies." [BERMANT, C.,
1977, p. 37]
With the rise of Nelson Mandela and black
power against white hegemony in South Africa, an estimated 40,000 of the 130,000
Jews of that country emigrated elsewhere. [KRAMER, L., 11-27-98, p. 24a]
In 1997, South African Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris, now that white rule
had collapsed, found it expeditious to formally apologize to the Black community
around them: "The Jewish community of South Africa
confesses to a collective failure to protest against apartheid. Distancing
oneself from the anguished cry of the majority and myopically pursuing one's
own interests can never be morally justified." [BELLING, p. 11] This echoes the Jewish community's self-protective
neglect of human rights issues for Blacks in America's Civil War era. "The
oldest fraternal organization in America," wrote Black author Harold
Cruse, "the Germanic B'nai B'rith, established in 1843, never involved
itself even in the moral crusade of the [anti-slavery] abolitionists. As a
body, American Jewry took no actions, either pro or con, even while the Christian
churches were vent by warring factions over the issue." [CRUSE, p. 478]
"Racial intolerance is the Jewish
community's dirty little secret," wrote Michael Davis, the editor of
the Baltimore Jewish Times, in 1994, "... Let's acknowledge that
there are men and women in our community who would not abide stereotypical
comments about Jews, but would not hesitate in making stereotypical remarks
about their neighbors half a mile away." [DAVIS, M., p. 17] Perhaps
real estate giant William Levitt was the kind of Jew the Baltimore Jewish
Times had in mind. The highly public Levitt maintained a "policy
of racial exclusion" in his famous Levittown development tracts in the
1950s, refusing the allow African-Americans to purchase homes. He lost a lawsuit
about the issue in 1959. [SVONKIN, S., 1997, p. 104-106]
"The
image of Judaism I grew up with was almost all negative," wrote
Village Voice senior editor Jack Newfield, "I grew up in a house
owned by my grandfather who would not let Blacks into the house. He was a
religious bigot ... But I think I have always been very positive about Jewish
culture and Israel ... I was always instinctively a supporter of Israel."
[BRENNER, p. 340]
"One is driven to the hypothesis,"
says Israel Shahak, "that quite a few of Martin Luther King's rabbinical
supporters were either anti-Black racists who supported him for tactical reasons
(wishing to win black support for American Jewry and for Israel) or were accomplished
hypocrites." [SHAHAK, p. 26] "[Jewish] loyalists," declared
Thelma Thomas Dalevy, president of the mostly Black Delta Sigma Theta sorority
in 1979, "are not compatible with the struggle of black Americans for
equal opportunity under the law. Indeed, we question whether their loyalties are first
with the state of Israel or the United States." [STANFIELD, p. 1849]
Yet, "Jews cannot afford to engage
in or tolerate political tactics or public rhetoric that seriously threatens
to discredit blacks," observes Benjamin Ginzburg, "This is one of
the major reasons that Jewish racism, often expressed privately, seldom manifests
itself publicly. African-Americans are simply too important to the legitimacy
of the American domestic state. If Jews engage in attacks on blacks or permit
doubts to be raised about the merits of their political claims, then Jews
are, in effect, undermining a major moral prop supporting the institutions
from which they themselves derive enormous benefits and through which they
exercise considerable power." [GINZBURG, p. 153]
Harold Rosenberg, reflecting on the largely
Jewish leftist intellectual circles around him remarked in 1959 that
"The new [leftist] elite was less concerned
with social criticism
that with the imminent rewards of bonding
together. The fact that a
new togetherness, not new ideas, was its
aim accounts for the murderous
style of its factional fights and its vile
treatment of dissident individuals."
[in KOSTELANETZ,
p. 71]
Many Jews, says African-American scholar
C. Eric Lincoln, expect that "support of black causes in the past should
in effect provide them with some immunity from black rage when Jews themselves
assume the role of oppressor. But Blacks are likely to view any Jewish oppression as being doubly
damning because it is two-faced." [LINCOLN, p. 178]
Jewish
author Milton Plesur leans on some old stereotypes to explain Black-Jewish
tensions this way:
"Negroes and Jews, despite a common alliance
in past years against discrimination,
have evidently gone separate ways. The Jew,
using education as a leverage,
has become one of the most successful minorities
from the point of view of
assimilation, and the anti-intellectual blacks,
the least successful. Another
explanation for negative Jewish-Black feelings
is that even though Jews have
real concern for the rights of the Negro, many disdain
what they perceive as
their carefree and careless life, seemingly
the very antithesis of the work ethic that
most Jews cherish." [PLESUR, M., 1982,
p. 129-130]
The many laws resulting from Jewish efforts
to aid the Black underclass in attaining a fair "piece of the American
pie" can -- and have been -- used,
and exploited, by the Jewish middle and upper-class to further their own already
existent economic advantages and secure even more pie slices for themselves.
By the end of the twentieth century Jews have created a very comfortable and
profitable socio-economic niche for themselves: they self-configure as part
of the "white" establishment power structure or, alternatively,
as a hideously oppressed minority, depending upon the benefits or disadvantages
of any given situation. "It is no accident," notes Naomi Seidman, "that a
film like the recent Zebrahead (1992) portrays a Jewish adolescent
in the role of would-be African-American, or that Woody Allen's Zelig
(1983) wryly describes its protagonist as a Jewish man who is able to transform
himself into a Negro or an Indian." [SEIDMAN, p. 256] "We must learn
to live," advises Felice Yeskel, "in this contradictory position
of relatively privileged insiders, who are also invisible outsiders." [YESKEL, p. 3]
"The consciousness Jews have of themselves,"
noted David Biale in 1998,
"[is that of] occupying an anomalous
status: insiders who are outsiders
or outsiders who are insiders ... In contemporary
America their historical
dualism has reached its greatest extremes.
Never before have so few
barriers existed to Jews entering the corridors
of political, cultural, and
economic power. Yet the path to integration
has also created enormous
contradictions in Jewish self-consciousness
... At a time when Jews are
enjoying their greatest acceptance as part
of the majority, never before
has Jewish identity been founded so centrally
on a history of
victimization." [BIALE, D., 1998, p.
5]
This two-faced capacity -- as "insider"
and "outsider" -- is evident, for example, in the academic world.
Numerically empowered (profoundly disproportionately represented: see numbers
elsewhere) throughout America's prominent universities as faculty members
and administrators, some in the Jewish community see themselves and their
"particularity" as integral to western culture and are demanding
inclusion in academe at the most powerful levels: in the so-called "canon,"
that core of literature western universities have always required of its students
as essential to the comprehension -- and continuance -- of western civilization.
Professor Bennett Graff, for instance, demands the "opening of the canon
to Jewish works"; he objects that the many Jewish studies programs proliferating
across America thanks to rich Jewish sponsors are "merely ghettos that
gentiles visit once and a while." He wants Jews to "fight"
for the place of Jewishness in the core requirements of the modern university.
[GRAFF, p. 8-9] Lisa Bean at the University of Michigan throws a feminist
slant on the issue; she's disturbed by the "regular diet of white, Christian
male authors [in] ... courses in the university setting ... I have been somewhat
resentful." [BEAN, p. ] David Kaufman at Brandeis University wonders,
"Should not every student be required to study the Holocaust, for instance?"
[KAUFMAN, p. 14] Stuart Svonkin at Columbia University also suggests that
"only an environment which fosters an appreciation of Jewish contribution
to American culture among Jews and non-Jews alike can alleviate anti-Semitism
which [engenders] stereotypes [of Jews]." [SVONKIN, p. 16]
These, of course, are the growlings of a
powerful community (but only 2.5% of the American population) at the top of
the socio-economic pyramid demanding changes of traditional standards of knowledge
to suit their own world view. On
the other hand, while Jews demand pre-eminence for their own sense
of themselves as a kind of communal centerpiece in western -- and human --
history, they also attempt to self-adjust to a role as a marginalized, oppressed
minority in order to reap attendant benefits there. Few Jews can understand
that the authentically oppressed and marginalized ethnic Americans don't want
to share scraps with Jews who are so socially, economically, and culturally
predominant as oppressors themselves.
A Jewish professor, Edward Alexander, expressed
his bewilderment and indignation when Jews were unanimously rejected for inclusion
by a coalition of multicultural groups at the University of Washington:
"Although someone schooled in the
ways of diversity-training might
suppose that such questions as whether
the Jews are a minority in this
country and whether anti-Semitism is
a form of racism are hardly
abstruse, they aroused intense debate. All the minority student
groups
-- African-Americans, Native Americans,
Asian-Americans, and
Chicano/Latino --vigorously opposed
the inclusion of Jews [for an
Ethnic Studies course requirement] because
they are not 'people of
color.'" [ALEXANDER, p. 7]
As noted here, despite affluent Jewry's
claim to still be minority victims, Jewish men are easily understood by Third
World coalition groups as "white"
males. And, as Cheryl Greenberg notes, "little can be generalized about
multiculturalism beyond its commitment to dethroning the white male voice."
[GREENBERG, C., 1998, p. 56]
Jewish sociologist Irving Horowitz even
declares an "anti-Semitic" element underpinning such rejection:
"It is a matter of historical irony that a profession [sociology] mired
in genteel right-wing anti-Semitism at the beginning of the century should
now find itself enmeshed in a far more acerbic left-oriented anti-Semitism
by the end of the century. Thus, well-respected figures in sociology like
Joseph Scott vigorously oppose the inclusion of Jews in minority student groups
because they are not 'people of color.'" [HOROWITZ, I., p. 92]
Kicked out of the "minority"
world, Jews are thereby lumped together with their historical enemies, largely
"whites" of European heritage. And once frozen out of the coveted
victim circle, some Jews get mad. In
1999, for example, another Horowitz, this one David, faced -- and embraced
-- the inevitability of Jewish "whiteness" in the American cultural
milieu. Horowitz, a former 1960s leftist now-turned Republican, wrote a book
(Hating Whitey) that evidences and assails endemic African-American
racism against generic "white' people, of which Jews are now considered
so much a part. Horowitz, angered by Black racism and the profound double
standard in American culture, as he argues, against examining it (while "white"
racism is highlighted at every turn), nonetheless is silent about the way
that "anti-Semitism" is constantly used as a device against all
others in quite the same way. Horowitz even wields
the charge of anti-Semitism as part of his own "white" polemic.
Complaining about the endless insistence of African-American demand, he heralds
(in contradistinction) his successful Jewish identity, declaring that:
"Ask the Jews. For two thousand years
Jews of the diaspora have
not been able to free their destiny from
the power of gentiles. But
in America, they have done very well, thank
you, and do not feel
oppressed." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p.
83]
This assertion, that "Jews don't feel
oppressed," is absurd. Four pages
later, Horowitz admits as much, declaring that "the racial left wants
to redistribute social goods according to its own plan and its own standards
of 'justice,' which exclude persecuted minorities like Asians, Armenians,
and Jews." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 87] Suddenly Horowitz's Jews go from
"do not feel oppressed" to being "persecuted minorities."
(And Asians and Armenians are "persecuted" in America?) The socio-psycho-political foundation of "being
Jewish," to this day,
is after all a claim that anti-Semitism in America (even when it is by all
evidence nonexistent) is omnipresent and everywhere a threat. This Jewish
world view is exploited as a political device and is an exact parallel to Black demands about the omnipresence of white
racism, and the continuous demand for amends. Horowitz declares the Black
claim to be an erroneous crutch; but he cannot grasp the same fiber in his
own heritage. Indeed, African-American
collectivist demands follow the well-hewn Jewish model.
"Although our self-perception is that
the Jewish people in America are a minority and subject to exclusion and/or
discrimination in various contexts," bemoaned Jewish professor Charles
Sheer, "the ethnic groups involved in the multi-culturalism movement
do not view us in this fashion. Often they go to great lengths to exclude
us." [SHEER, p. 6] "Most
Jews," observes Cheryl Greenberg, "do not see themselves as privileged,
as simply white people, as insiders in American society. Instead, they view
themselves as outsiders who belong beneath the multicultural umbrella as an
insecure minority with a separate culture and set of beliefs and values."
[GREENBERG, p. 60] "My natural allies [African Americans, Hispanics,
etc.]" says Sara Horowitz, "do not always seek dialogue with me.
Increasingly I and a growing number of progressive critics and scholars in
Jewish studies notice that we are talking almost exclusively to each other."
[HOROWITZ, S., 1998, p. 118-119] In a testament to Jewish power and chutzpah,
the exception that proves the rule, another Jewish professor, Stephen Whitfield,
notes that "multiculturalism represents the only formulation in this
century from which Jews have largely been excluded." [WHITFIELD, Most
p. 8,]
This kind of rejection is hard to swallow
for most Jews, since the "oppressed, persecuted minority group"
template demanding power is, after all, quintessentially Jewish. In 1992 Charles
Sykes wrote a popular book entitled A Nation of Victims: The Decay of the
American Character. The first chapter has the following observations:
"Something extraordinary is happening
in American society ... American
life is increasingly characterized by the
plaintive insistence, I am a victim
... The mantra of the victims
is the same: I am not responsible; it's not
my fault ...The ethos of victimization
has an endless capacity not only for
exculpating one's self from blame, washing
away responsibility ... but
also for projecting guilt onto others ...
The new culture reflects a
readiness not merely to feel sorry for
oneself but to wield one's
resentments as weapons of social advantage
... The route to moral
superiority and premier griping rights
can be gained more efficiently
through being a victim ... [SYKES, p. 11]
... Tragically, a victim's rage
that is redirected from the oppressor toward
rival victim groups
ultimately turns against the victim himself. For self-hatred is
the final
destination of any attempt to yoke one's
sense of identity and power to
one's weaknesses, deficiencies, and perceived
victimization." [SYKES,
p. 17]
All such jargon describing the victimhood
cosmology -- self-hatred, the eschewing of responsibility, ascribing blame
to others, instilling guilt in others to assuage one's own, wielding resentments
as "weapons of social advantage," the claim to moral superiority,
et al, is -- as we have more than amply seen earlier -- historically and seminally
Jewish. These are notions that have been developed, nurtured, and cultivated
for many hundreds of years from the very roots of the Jewish martyrological
and chosen sufferer traditions. The Jewish victimhood mythos, however, is
enforced and afforded a special strata for itself and cannot be itself criticized,
investigated, or even noted in respectable discourse. Even Sykes overlooks
(or intentionally skirts) the important Jewish dimensions of his discussion
about modern America's obsession with psychotherapy, a lawyer-ridden society
that seeks to dismiss personal responsibility for profit, and the full-blown
expression of the victimhood syndrome in America; Sykes falls prey to one
of his own insights into current censorship:
"Victimspeak insists upon moral superiority
and moral absolutism and
thus tends to put an abrupt end to conversation;
the threat of deployment
is usually enough to keep others from ever
considering raising a
controversial subject." [SYKES, p.
16]
American victim culture is a relatively
recent historical development, born only after World War II, taking firm hold
in the 1960s, and spreading in the wake of the systematically developed Jewish
Holocaust model that is manipulated as a moral control prestige system over
all others. Blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, women, homosexuals, and later
the handicapped, fat people, short people, and virtually anyone else who dreams
of some impairment later joined the struggle for entrée into the Victimhood
Galaxy and its attendant homage. And rewards. In the ratings system of victimhood
power, note the feelings of Gene Oishi, a Japanese American, about his internment
in a camp for those of Japanese descent during World War II:
"It occurred to me ... that I did not like talking about the experience
not
because it was so bad, but because it was
not bad enough ... I envied the
survivors of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps
for the stories of brutal
mistreatment they had to tell. I even envied
the Jews for what they
suffered in the German concentration camps."
[AMATO, p. 183]
"Odd as this sounds," says Terence
de Pres, "there is among us an envy of suffering. It increases with education,
and it reveals the bitterness felt when history renders our own pain trivial."
[AMATO, p. 183] "The all-pervasive
claim to victimhood," notes art critic Robert Hughes, "tops off
America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics ... To be vulnerable is to
be invincible. Complaint gives you power ..." [HUGHES, p. 9] "Jews cherish feelings of exclusion [from
American mainstream society]," says Philip Weiss, "not just because
there is wisdom in foreboding but because these feelings are useful. They
preserve our position as outsiders, a status that has certain moral and practical
advantages. As an outsider you have motivation: to get in. And you get to
be demanding without any sense of reciprocity." [WEISS, p. 30]
Post-Holocaust, popular western culture
reflects ancient Jewish religious self-identity in rendering the world's Jews,
categorically, as a persecuted and marginalized underclass. In Germany, where German guilt for World War II
crimes remains so high, Carmelite prioress Anna Maria Strehle equates the modern misery of the world's
drug addicts, the homeless, and other disempowered people with generic Jewry,
the wealthiest ethnic strata in most countries in which they exist in any
sizeable number:
"What is our attitude toward Jews and
other minorities, guest workers
and refugees, toward the ever-growing number
of unemployed, drug
addicts, homeless? Do we feel solidarity
with them, do we take their
part even when it leads to disadvantages
for us?" [STREHLE, A., 1998,
p. 17]
(Ms. Strehle, it would seem, has it in reverse.
What "disadvantages" are in store for those who are inclined to
not rally around Jewish victimhood mythologies?)
"Identifying oneself with the 'real
suffering' of a chosen class," notes Joseph Amato, subtly alluding to
the Chosen People ethos, "people, group, race, sex, or historical victim
is the communion call of the twentieth century individual. It is his sincerity,
his holiness, his martyrdom." [SYKES, p. 16] "In the waning years of the twentieth century," notes
Shalom Carmy, "as other sources of authority have lost their power, victimhood
has come into its own ... Members of groups, with access to some historical
grievance, find it convenient to be judged not by the color of their skin,
nor by the content of their character, but by the size of the chip on their
shoulder." [CARMY, p. 61] "Victimhood," notes David Klinghoffer,
"used to be considered something about which a normal person would feel
ashamed. No longer. Amid the clamoring of would-be victims we find -- ourselves,
American Jews." [KLINGHOFFER, p. 10-13]
Famous
talk show moralist "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger demonstrates the powerful
lure of the Jewish victim mythos precisely -- how she suddenly decided that
she was Jewish (her father's heritage, not her mother's) while watching a
TV program about the Holocaust:
"Suddenly, we're hearing Elizabeth Taylor's voice-over
as they're showing
actual footage of the Nazis lining up women
with their babies, and mowing them
down into a pit. My son says, 'What is this? Who
are they?' And I say, 'Those
are Nazi soldiers.' And he says, 'What are they
doing?' And I say, 'They're
murdering Jews.' He say, 'What are Jews?' And
I say, 'Our people.' He turns
to me and says, 'What are you talking about?'
And at that moment I thought, It's
time I claim my heritage." [BANE, V., 1999,
p. 184]
Jewish author Earl Shorris frames premiere
(Jewish) victimhood identity this way, wrapped in pseudo-religiosity: "To
be a Jew gives a man a hint of how to live as if he were made in the image
of a perfect being. If there is no justice, he will be the first to suffer
injustice. If there is no mercy, he will be the first to suffer cruelty."
[SHORRIS, E. 1982, p. 46]
Yet Jewish scholar Peter Novick notes the absurdity
of considering American Jews today as "victims":
"By the 1980s and 1990s many Jews, for
various reasons, wanted to establish
that they too were members of a 'victim community.'
Their contemporary
situation offered little in the way of credentials.
American Jews were by far
the wealthiest, best educated, most influential,
in-every-way-most-successful
group in American society -- a group that, compared
to most other identifiable
minority groups, suffered no measurable discrimination
and no disadvantages
on account of their minority status. But insofar
as Jewish identity could be
anchored in the agony [Holocaust] of European
Jewry, certification as (vicarious)
victims could
be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such
certification." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 8-9]
Hence, being a child of Holocaust survivors
frees feminist Evie Litwok, for instance, to feel comfortable in being completely
obnoxious to other people. And she knows she's obnoxious. The world
owes her, after all. "I'm perceived as intimidating and
overbearing: in other words, Jewish," she says, "Well, my style
is the result of my being a child of survivors of the Holocaust. I was brought
up to take risks. That style is a threat to some women. They've tried to destroy
the behavior I need to survive." [POGREBIN, p. 64] "One woman, addressing a Jewish conference,"
notes Susan Schneider, "astonished her audience by comparing her outcast
status as a lesbian to the characteristic alienation of the Jews. 'What's
most lesbian about me is also what is most Jewish about me.'" [SCHNEIDER,
p. 315]
Jewish lesbian Andrea Dworkin (self-declared
child molestation victim, rape victim, and former prostitute) even guises
her hatred of men literally, and bizarrely, within the Jewish victimhood model.
In Dworkin's book, Scapegoat, notes reviewer Nicci Gerrard:
"she tells the history of the making
of Israel and draws parallels
between the Jews and women. Her sections
are (often relentlessly)
comparative -- the chapter titles make this
absolutely clear: Pogroms/
Rapes; The State/ The Family; Hate Literature/Pornography
... The
Holocaust is put side by side with the systematic
oppression of
women ... Women are metaphorical Jews. Men
are the Nazis."
[GERRARD, N., 6-18-2000, p. 11]
Other chapters are entitled Zionism/Women's
Liberation, Homeland/Home, The Chosen/The Evil, and Jew Hate/Women Hate. "Male
pleasure," writes Ms. Dworkin, "is inextricably tied to victimizing,
hurting, exploiting." [SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 11-29-92]
In 1999, a group of Israeli teenagers on
a tour of Auschwitz and other concentration camp sites in Poland made international
news when, after making the rounds of the death camps, they invited some strippers
to entertain them at night. Thane Rosenbaum decided to excuse this Jewish
embarrassment by asserting that the atrocities borne by Jews in the Holocaust
is, apparently, a kind of Jewish license for virtually any immoral behavior:
"The Nazis rewrote the rules of offensiveness and redefined for eternity
what is barbaric and grotesque. When in the presence of monstrous deeds, maybe
it's appropriate not to be on one's best behavior." [ROSENBAUM, T., 12-2-1999,
p. B11]
By virtual of being an oppressed "outsider"
and bearing its long tradition of victimhood, Gail Shulman proclaims her entitlement
to moral superiority and the renewed "apartness" of Jewish tradition:
"Despite my being a feminist who is
not a traditional Jew, it is my
very Jewishness which is at the root of
my feminism. Feminism
is prophetic movement concerned with justice
for the oppressed,
compassion for those who suffer, a sense
of history, of community,
of righteousness, and the courage to live
in opposition." [SHULMAN,
p. 108]
(Curiously, in the very same book (On
Being a Jewish Feminist), Shulman's editor, Susannah Heschel, notes --
with the weight of history behind her -- that "the examination of Judaism's
treatment of women in its laws, customs, and teachings makes many of us [Jewish
women] question whether it is desirable -- even possible -- for a feminist
to be a Jew." [HESCHEL, S., 1983, p. 113]
Jewish apologetic usually works to reconcile the intrinsic "Being
a Jew liberates me"/"Being a Jew suffocates me" schizophrenia
evidenced by these women.)
While paying lip service to all requisite
minority platitudes, at root the Jewish propensity is, however, to cut slack
from all others in the continuing minority battles for social justice when
Jewish collective self-interests are jeopardized. This is evidenced for instance,
in massive Jewish activism against affirmative action quota programs in the
1970's -- led by the three major Jewish "rights" organizations:
the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation
League. [GINSBERG, p. 149] Jews -- deeply and disproportionately empowered
throughout the American socio-economic and political scene, stood to lose
considerable rungs up the ladder to the chronically underrepresented if affirmative
action rules and laws remained firm. If a certain number of African-Americans
must be included in pieces of the American pie, conversely, how could, Jews,
representing merely 2.5 percent of America's population, justify and safely
secure their 20, 30, 40 or more percent of the powerful rungs of professional
America (lawyers, professors, students, etc.)? Would it only be generic "whites"
displaced by quotas to promote disadvantaged minorities? (This profound
Jewish affluence even has parallels in the Soviet Union. "Soviet 'affimrative
action' policies that began in the 1960s," notes Michael Paul Sacks,
"favored the growing pool of qualified candidates among the eponymous
ethnic groups of the fifteen union republics, especially when they resided
within their homelands. Jews were also losing out because they were already
greatly overrepresented in higher education relative to their proportion in
their population.") [SACKS, M. 1998, p. 250]
As Jonathan Kaufman notes:
"Faced with the prominent opposition
of many Jews to aggressive
affirmative action programs, many blacks
cried betrayal. Jews
appeared to be willing to fight for civil
rights when it affected
rednecks
in the South but not when it threatened their own interests.
There was admittedly a healthy degree of
self-interest at stake.
Jews had not raised great objections to
affirmative action programs
that focused on blue-collar jobs. But large
numbers of Jews routinely
applied to medical school, law school, and
other graduate schools."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 223]
The most famous legal challenge to quota-based
affirmative action programs was in 1973, by Allan Bakke, a white male denied
a place in a California medical school because of minority quota rules. His
lawyer was Reynold Colvin, "an active member of San Francisco's Jewish
community" who "served several terms as president of Temple Emanu-el,
the most influential and politically powerful synagogue in the city, and he
has also been president of the San Francisco chapter of the American Jewish
Committee." [DREYFUSS/LAWRENCE, p. 33] Among those Jewish organizations
filing formal legal briefs in Bakke's behalf was the American Jewish Committee
itself. Adapting to the needs of the case, as it is grossly advantageous to
Jewish collectivity, the Jewish community configured in defense of individualist
expression: "Bakke should be judged as an individual when the medical
school decides whether to take him or not. He should not be denied admission
just because he is a member of a particular group." [DREYFUSS/LAWRENCE,
p. 95]
A second pioneer lawsuit was filed by Marco
De Funis, a Sephardic Jew, who was trying to be admitted to the University
of Washington Law School. "In
both cases," says Cheryl Greenberg,
"black organizations filed amicus curiae briefs in behalf of the
university's affirmative action policies
while most Jewish agencies
filed briefs in opposition. It was the first
time black and Jewish
organizations had publicly and formally
positioned themselves on
opposite sides of the civil rights question."
[GREENBERG, C., 1998,
p. 72]
In 1969, Albert Vorspan, Director of the
Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism of the American Hebrew Congregations
and Central Conference of American Rabbis, noted the essential disengagement
of the Jewish community from distinctly American problems to reinvest itself into concerns particularly
Jewish:
"The American Jewish community
is silent on the paramount moral
issues facing the nation ... As the
inner city has become the new racial
frontier in American life, Jewish groups
increasingly lag behind
Christian involvement in the urban setting.
Christian leaders talk about
the urban crisis the way Jews talk about
the Israeli crisis -- as a matter
of sheer survival .... Most synagogues
stand in suspended isolation
from the central problems of the [American]
community." [COX, p.
186]
In 1968, after noting some historical Jewish
pluses in the civil rights world, Jewish author James Yaffe then noted the
softer Jewish underbelly on the same theme:
"The [Jewish] defense agencies, which
took an early lead in the civil
rights struggle, appear to have fallen
behind in recent years. In poverty
programs, street demonstrations, and other
activist tactics the Christian
churches are way ahead of the Jews; the
implication is that the Jews
withdrew from the fight as soon as it
really became dangerous. Official
Jewish support of open housing has been
compared by certain skeptics
to actual Jewish practice. When Negroes
move into a neighborhood, the
Jews move out; they don't have to riot,
as the Poles or the Italians did,
because they're wealthy enough to buy
houses elsewhere ... The
synagogues are as much a part of this
recent withdrawal as the [Jewish]
secular agencies ... Furthermore, under certain circumstances Jews
are
just as capable of active anti-Negro behavior
as anyone else. At a
meeting on bussing in Long Island a Jewish
housewife said, 'The niggers
should be sent South to be lynched!' She
turned out to be a member of
the local chapter of the American Jewish
Congress ... On the personal
level few Jewish parents would react with
anything less than horror if
their child married a Negro." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 260]
"Some [Blacks] ... perceive a new Jewish
hard line towards blacks," notes African-American scholar C. Eric Lincoln,
"and they attribute it to the supposition
that since the Jews have
finally arrived, and Blacks are no longer
needed as levers for their
advancement, then Blacks are expendable
... [LINCOLN, p. 181] ...
Many blacks see [Jewish charges of] anti-Semitism
as nothing more
than a product of Jewish guilt for the
Jews' progressive abandonment
of the Civil Rights cause." [LINCOLN,
p. 178]
The struggle to disempower "mainstream"
non-Jewish America by Jews singularly bent on self-propulsion has often found
Jewish expression via the cloak of the Black community. In using African-Americans
to argue the merits of ethnocentrism, one recent Jewish author even condemned
the principle of universalism (in a latent defense of Jewish particularism),
as another form of "white" oppression:
"The celebration of communitarian real-life experience [of minorities]
helped resist the alienating representations of 'universality' that actually
addressed only the needs of the white males." [FEHER, p. 275]
This of course is transparent nonsense. Were it not for the universalist
tolerance of the "white male" majority in America, and the self-conscious
attempt at the destruction of its own ethnocentrism, by sheer force of numbers
minority particularism would not have ever
been permitted to exist, if
"minorities" were even allowed to immigrate here. And the fact remains
that the best example we have of the ultimate fulfillment of ethnic particularism
in recent history is "white universalism's" opposite: the "particularism"
of Aryan Nazi Germany.
From the very start of Black civil rights
struggles in America, as well in the legal battles to eliminate any vestiges
of religion out of the public education system,
Jews have funded, directed, and pulled the strings of nearly every
important legal battle, but hidden themselves from public view. Moving with
United States Presidents, members of Congress, cabinet members, and diplomats,
from the 1880's til World War I wealthy and prominent Jewish Americans (like
Jacob Schiff, Oscar Strauss, Lewis Marshall, and others) functioned as revitalized
"Court Jews" in an American context. "They were prepared to
use their influence," says Naomi Cohen, "on behalf of fellow Jews
... [They] co-opted [non-Jewish] men of similar stature and outlook to whom
they were tied socially or by business ... singly or in small groups they
presented their request to the proper official. The basic rule was
secrecy." [COHEN, p. 315] (Such
under the table intrigues by the Jewish rich and powerful was, and is, intrinsic
to Jewish history. Jewish researcher Kevin Avruch notes the case of Jewish
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis during the World War I era: "[He
was] a confidant of President [Woodrow] Wilson ... Through Wilson, he had
access to American power. He gradually assembled about him a particularly
able group ... For the first time an efficient Zionist apparatus was organized
in America." [AVRUCH, K., 1981, p. 30] An Israeli historian, Michael
Stone, notes its expression in later years, in another political context:
"During [President] Truman's first term, there grew up a small, almost
clandestine circle of wealthy Jews ... who had entrée into Truman's inner
sanctum [who] subtly pull[ed] strings behind the scenes ... By virtue of their
influence at the White House [they] enjoy[ed] positions of prestige in the
fledgling state of Israel." [COCKBURN, p. 26]
This ancient behind-the-scenes Jewish strategy
was also exemplified by Louis Marshall, a wealthy lawyer, who was elected
President of the American Jewish Committee lobbying group in 1906, a position
he held for the next 23 years. He was the most prominent Jewish activist of
his era and he was opposed to civil rights lawsuits being instigated by Jewish
organizations "because he believed that it would bring the dissatisfaction
of American Jews out in the open" and engender anti-Jewish sentiment
in the broader American population. Grounded and founded as a "federation
of Zionist groups concerned with the affairs of international Jewry,"
[IVERS, p. 55] Marshall's American Jewish Committee strategy entailed the
use of dispossessed African-Americans as their own legal ramrod, recognizing
"that a legal principle established by one minority group will often
accrue to the benefit of the other." [IVERS, p. 54]
Marshall, and all other Jewish planners,
had no qualms in sacrificing the African-American community, for example via
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- a group not only largely developed and funded
by Jews, but essentially run by Jewish leaders until the Black empowerment
movement of the 1960's took issue with the idea of Jews and their money controlling
a supposedly Black organization. "Jewish involvement with Afro-Americans intensified after 1915,"
notes David Levering Lewis, "taking on the urgency of a special mission;
Jews of influence and wealth rapidly moved ... to virtual management of Afro-American
civil rights organizations ... [LEWIS, p. 547] ... Privileged Ashkenazim reached
for the Afro-American leadership and even helped create it, hoping, as Louis
Marshall remarked in 1924, that the success of Afro-American civil rights
organizations 'may incidentally benefit Jews.'" [LEWIS, p. 564] One Jewish
acquaintance of Roland Gittelsohn put the underlying issue at stake more bluntly:
"The more prejudice exists in this country against the blacks, the safer
we Jews will be. They are a lightening-rod for our protection." [GITTELSOHN, R.,
1967, p. 43]
Jewish author Hasia Diner suggests another
reason why Jews took such keen interest in the control of Black civil rights
organizations. While Blacks as a collective group in early twentieth century
America were themselves powerless, Jews, notes Diner, forged links with "powerful
liberal whites" interested in Black issues: "The Jews undoubtedly
realized that blacks possessed no power, but it was not among them they were
casting about for friends." [DINER, p. 154] Jewish authors Stanley
Rothman and S. Robert Lichter even psychoanalyze the many Jewish leadership
adventures in civil and minority rights movements:
"The identification of some
Jewish males and females with the Russian
proletariat during the Soviet revolution, with
Irish and Italian workers
during the 1930s, and with the black underclass
or third world nations
during the 1960s may have reflected motives
beyond mere sympathy
with the underdog. Kazin and Himmelfarb have
suggested that in
both the 1930s and the 1960s many Jewish radicals
were projecting
their own needs and desires upon those groups.
The needs of male and female radicals
were somewhat different,
though. Both were driven by the desire to fill
narcissistic deficits.
Males could identify with a powerful cause to
quiet doubts about
their masculinity ... Both sought a sense of
power but for slightly
different reasons: the male to convince himself
he was a male,
the woman to satisfy that part of her psyche
that shared a male
identification." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 129]
For years W.E.B. DuBois was the only Black
officer in the NAACP, which was largely directed, funded, and controlled in
its early decades by Jews like Henry Moskowitz and Joel Spingarn. [ARSON,
p. 140] (In 1913 Spingarn announced
a yearly award named after himself, the "Spingarn Medal," for the
"highest and noblest achievement of an American Negro." [DINER,
p. 138] ) In a later era, and another Black organization, the Southern Leadership
Christian Conference, a Jew -- Stanley
Levison -- even wrote Martin Luther King's speeches for him. [MARTIN, p. 132]
Levison has been described as one of King's "closest personal advisers."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 66] This voice of "Christian Leadership,"
Levison, was also discovered by the FBI to have been a former Communist party
member. [KAUFMAN, J., p. 66]
Another Jew, Marvin Rich, was the "chief
fundraiser and key speech writer for the Congress of Racial Equality -- CORE",
[GINZBURG, p. 145] and his position was later filled by another Jewish attorney,
Alan Gartner. In the 1960s, "in CORE, younger and more militant members
blocked efforts by [James] Farmer to name one of his Jewish advisers president
of CORE, insisting the post be filled with a black." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988,
p. 76] In the same era, the Executive
Director of the American Jewish Congress, Will Maslow, was also a CORE national
board member. (He resigned in outrage when one African-American CORE official,
Clifford Brown, angrily declared that Hitler hadn't "killed enough"
Jews). [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 327]
Another such Black civil rights group was
the National Urban League, greatly funded by the Sears-Roebuck magnate, Julius
Rosenwald. Edwin Seligman ("descended
from one of the wealthiest and most prestigious Jewish families"), was
the first chairman of the organization. Its first Executive Board included
Abraham Lefkowitz and Felix Adler -- later joined by Seligman's brother George
and Ella Sachs Plotz. In 1932, six Jews "served as officials" at
the Urban League's Chicago branch. [DINER, p. 186] Following Jewish philanthropic
donations, Salmon O. Levinson began directorship of the Abraham Lincoln Center
(a social work center for Blacks and whites) in 1917. [DINER, p. 181] Jacob
Billikopf, also Jewish, became chairman of Howard University, a Black college,
in 1935. Fisk University also had influential Jewish board members. To this
day, Rabbi David Saperstein serves as an NAACP board member.
"By the mid-1960s," says Jonathan
Kaufman,
"Jewish contributions made up three-quarters
of the money raised
by SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee], CORE,
and SCLC. So important were contributions
from Jews to SCLC,
Jesse Jackson recalled later, that for
a time King's advisers debated
whether they should call the group simply
the Southern Leadership
Conference, eliminating the reference to
'Christian.' In phone
conversations with King, Bayard Rustin,
one of King's top advisers,
would remind him to include references
in his speeches to the 'Judeo-
Christian tradition.'" [KAUFMAN, J.,
1988, p. 66]
Jewish actor Theodore Bikel, a Zionist activist,
was once "one of SNCC's most prominent supporters." [VOLKMAN, p.
215] Howard Zinn was also a Jewish SNCC "adviser." [KAUFMAN, J.,
1988, p. 67] SNCC African-American
leader Stokely Carmichael's "first demonstration was a pro-Israel rally
held in front of the United Nations by the Young Socialist League." (He
later became very vocally anti-Zionist). Another SNCC Black leader, Robert
Moses, "had gone to the Jewish socialist camp, Camp Wo-Chi-Ca, as a child
and befriended many Jews from radical and socialist homes." [KAUFMAN,
J., 1988, p. 67]
Even the sometimes violent Black Panthers
had Jewish sponsors. David Horowitz, once co-editor of Ramparts and
head of a Black Panther's Learning Center Planning Committee, recalls the
Baptist school the radical organization wanted to buy in Oakland, California:
"Ramparts had helped [the Black
Panther] Party become a national
franchise ... I offered to help [Black Panther
leader] Huey Newton with
the Party's community projects and to raise
money for the Panther
school ... In the next months, I raised
more than one hundred
thousand dollars to purchase the building
... The Center [the Church]
was operated by a front I had created called
the Educational
Opportunities Corporation ... [Later] underneath
all the political rhetoric
and social uplift, I suddenly realized was
the stark reality of the
[criminal] gang." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999,
p. 98, 99, 100, 104]
Prominent (Jewish) Hollywood movie mogul,
Bert Schneider, notes Horowitz, was "Huey's Hollywood patron." [HOROWITZ,
D., 1999, p. 112] Schneider even bought Newton a "two-story house"
in "the Oakland Hills." [HOROWITZ, D., 1999, p. 113]
What about the Southern Poverty Law Center,
famed fighter for the impoverished and African-American rights, especially
in the South? It is based in Montgomery, Alabama, and in 1996 the local Montgomery
Advertiser printed an embarrassing expose about the Center. The salary,
noted the paper, for SPLC president and CEO (as well as SPLC co-founder) Joseph
Levin was $137,798 a year. Not bad for a fighter on behalf of those mired
in poverty. The Center's Legal Director, Richard Cohen, made $151,420. But
that's not all. The Advertiser further noted that
"One thing remains a constant at the
nation's wealthiest civil rights
charity, the Montgomery-based Southern Poverty
Law Center: All the
top-paid, top-level management jobs are
held by whites."
[RICHARDSON, S., 8-29, p. D7] [No notation
of the percentage
of Jews within this "white" nomenclature
is noted]
In SPLC's 25-year history "no black
person has held a top-level management position, and only one black staffer
has ever been among the top five paid positions." In SPLC's team of five
lawyers, one was African-American. [RICHARDSON, S., 8-29-96, p. D7]
The next year, an editorial writer, Rose
Sanders, expressed outrage in the same newspaper that the SPLC publicly condemned
Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam (a hero in large parts of the Black
community) as a racist. She pointed out the hypocrisy of the charge, noting
that
"Joseph Levin says he is not a bigot,
but how does he explain the
bigotry evidenced by the employment practices
at the Poverty
Law Center? An example of the Center's racial
prejudice is illustrated
by its racial tolerance program. The program
did not have a single
black employee. No black person helped shape
or design the program."
[SANDERS, R., 9-22-97, p. 7A]
The granddaddy of Black civil rights organizations,
the NAACP, "took shape" at the estate ("Troutbeck") of Joel Spingarn who
became its Board Chairman in 1915. He served in this position until 1929 when
he became, instead, the president, til 1939. He was succeeded by his brother
Arthur (for many years head of the NAACP's Legal Committee) till 1966, when
another Jew, Kivie Kaplan, "a millionaire manufacturer of patent leather,"
[HILLEL/LEVINE, p. 127] took over. "By 1968," note Hillel Levine
and Lawrence Harmon, "the perceived paternalistic leadership style of
Kaplan and other prominent Jews in the civil rights movement was coming under
increasingly sharp attack. Activists called for his resignation; Kaplan refused."
[HILLEL/ HARMON, p. 127] Only with
Kaplan's death in 1975 did the NAACP -- 64 years after its founding -- have
the opportunity to elect its first Black president. [GOLDBERG, p. 24]
"Litigation," notes Hasia Diner,
"was the Association's most potent weapon ... Many of those lawyers and
legal advisors were Jews. In fact, Jews made their greatest impact on the
Association in this area." [DINER, p. 128] Jewish lawyer Nathan Margold's
1929 "report became the bible of the NAACP's legal efforts." [KAUFMAN,
J., 1988, p. 91] Jack Greenberg headed the 1960s-era NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
In 1982, still at the helm, a Black student coalition at Harvard protested
Jewish paternalism and the fact that a white Jew "was heading the country's
premier black legal organization." [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 119-121]
Joel Spingarn, who served as both the NAACP
Chairman of the Board and as a major in the U.S. Military Intelligence Department
(MID) during World War I, was revealed in recent years by the Memphis Commercial
Appeal to have "used his [NAACP] post to obtain critical information
for MID." [MARTIN, p. 49] Another
such "liberal" Jew on the NAACP membership rolls included Judge
Julian Mack (of the U.S. Court of Appeals), the first President of the American
Jewish Congress. Mack was also president of the Zionist Organization of America
from 1918 to 1921. He and Louis Brandeis, notes Thomas Kolsky, "dominated
American Zionism from 1914 to 1921 and also in the 1930s." [KOLSKY, T.,
p. 26]
With Jews holding the purse strings to many
ostensibly Black organizations, in 1976 Black activist Julian Bond sought
the directorship of the NAACP. Although critical of Israel, Bond found it
necessary to sign a yearly "Black Americans in Support of Israel (BASIC)"
statement "if he was to have any chance of winning the NAACP position,
given the powerful influence of Jews within the organization." [GINZBURG,
p. 169] In the early years of the
NAACP, adds Hasia Diner, "heavy Jewish involvement may explain why the
[NAACP] conference passed the 'Russian Resolution,' which protested the expulsion
of Jews from the city of Kiev, Russia." [DINER, p. 136] Later, African
Americans like William Pollard, Deputy Director of the NAACP, took "many
trips" to Israel, although socialization to the Jewish/Israeli perspectives
was not always completely successful. [STARR, J., 1990, p. 251]
Clues to the nature of Spingarn's NAACP
may be gleaned from the following quotes from B. Joyce Ross, author of J.E.
Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP:
* "Spingarn's failure to relinquish
the power he wielded in the NAACP
comprised one of the greatest paradoxes
of his career." [p. 69]
* "Spingarn's familiarity with New
York's most reputable financial
institutions and his expertise in the
management of stocks and bonds
enabled him to become one of the key
formulators of the NAACP's
financial policy." [p. 57] (He
also had a "special influence" at
publishers Harcourt, Brace and a "special relationship" at
Alfred
Knopf). [LEWIS, p. 562]
* 'The
NAACP became a closed corporation ... [resulting in] a
tremendous narrowing of the broad
base of authority suggested by
the Association's constitutional structure,
with a concomitant
tendency toward a self-perpetuating
Board of Directors." [p. 52]
* "The central office's tight control
of the branches meant essentially that
a few New York administrators determined
NAACP policy on a
nationwide scale." [p. 58-59]
* "[W.E.B.
Du Bois], the only Black executive officer [until 1916]
contended that it was absolutely necessary
that he have a large
measure of autonomy lest the Association
with its preponderance
of white executives, should become
a white dominated organization
with Negroes as mere helpers ... From
an administrative standpoint
[Du Bois'] demand for autonomy was
a potential threat to the
organization's basic unity."
[p. 61-62]
* Even
though W. E. Du Bois, one of the foremost Black leaders of
the day, received a full salary from
the Association for his services,
he frequently was obliged to solicit
personal loans from Spingarn."
[ p. 57]
The early Black nationalist Marcus Garvey
"stormed out of the NAACP's headquarters in 1917, 'dumbfounded' by the
apparent domination of whites." These included Board Chairman Joel Spingarn,
his brother Arthur who was pro bono counsel, Herbert Lehman of the Executive
Committee, Arthur Sachs, Herbert Seligmann - director of public relations,
and his secretary Martha Gruening. [LEWIS, p. 553] (A particularly curious
instance occurred in 1962-63 when the labor union expert at the NAACP, a Jew
named Herbert Hill, led an attack on the -- largely Jewish -- International
Ladies Garment workers union, for racism ["discrimination."] [GLAZER/MOYNIHAN,
p. 178] Other NAACP activists included Felix Frankfurter ("an active
Zionist who is credited with drafting the Balfour Declaration, the 1918 statement
of the British government favoring the establishment of the Jewish homeland
in Palestine" and Herman Lehman who "was also a Zionist and lent
a hand in the Palestine Economic Corporation. Among Louis Marshall's "primary
activities" included "serving as president of the American Jewish
Committee." Herman Moskowitz "worked ardently in the Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee and the Jewish Social Service Association." [DINER,
p. 123]
In later years Marcus Garvey ran into trouble
with the law concerning his part-ownership of a steam line business. "I
am being punished for the crime of the Jew Silverstone [an agent of the Black
Star line]," he complained, "I was persecuted by Maxwell Mattuck,
another Jew, and I am to be sentenced by Judge Julian Mack, the eminent jurist
[and an NAACP board member]. Truly, I may say, 'I am going to Jericho and
fell among thieves.'" [MAGIDA, p. 166]
The omnipresence of Jewish investment in
Black life was elsewhere to be found. "There were musical and literary
equivalents of the role that the Spingarns were to play in the operation of
the NAACP," says Stephen Whitfield, "that Melville Herskovits was
to play in the discovery of a viable African past, that other scholars of
Jewish birth were to achieve in reconstructing Afro-American history."
[WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 48]
In spite of all this socio-economic evidence
of Jewish paternalism and oppression of the Black community, some Jews, like
Roland Gittelsohn, have insisted upon understanding in Freudian and Christian-Jewish
dialectical terms the resultant African-American "anti-Semitism."
Gittlelson plunges his periscope into the Black man's unconscious, dredging
up stuff, he says, the African-American does not recognize:
"Anti-Semitism is perhaps the only
sociological phenomenon through
which the Negro can identify with the white
majority, can himself become
part of the dominant social sector by which
he is ordinarily excluded and
victimized. By virtue of his black rather
than white skin, the Negro feels
inferior. By virtue of his Christian rather
than Jewish faith, in a
predominantly Christian nation he acquires
an illusion of superiority.
Not that a psychological process so subtle
as this is actually articulated.
But the very fact of its being unconscious
makes it more operative
and insidious." [GITTELSOHN, R., 1967,
p. 42]
The Jewish dictation of what African-Americans
even -- unbeknownst to themselves -- think, and the defining of the parameters of Black history and identity
by scholarly Jewish patriarchs, are among the most galling of Jewish usurpations
in the eyes of many African-American intellectuals and social activists.
Among the many Jewish experts on the African-American community is
Herbert Aptheker, a famous American communist, who has alone written or edited
80 books on the subject of African-Americans. (Apetheker became interested
in Blacks in his youth through his parents' Black maid). [FISCHER, J., p.
A12] This is not an unusual theme. Jewish activist Esther Brown became
interested in African-American school issues through her own Black maid. [KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 92] )
In 1996, Arthur Magida of the Baltimore
Jewish News wrote a Pulitzer Prize finalist book about the about Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan.
Another book, called Looking for Farrakhan, is by Jewish author Frances
Lewisohn. Peter Goldman wrote a book about Malcolm X. Martin Duberman wrote
a biography of Paul Robeson. David Levering Lewis has recent book about W.E.B.
DuBois. A recent book by Jewish author Ken Timerman is "Shakedown:"
Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson." (When the last time you read a book
by a Black author exposing a Jewish public figure?) "The black model,"
says sociologist Irving Horowitz, "has served as a stimulus to those
Jewish sociologists interested in specifically ethnic themes." [HOROWITZ,
I., p. 78] (Conversely, there are Jewish authors like Daniel Levitas
who has written a book on anti-Semitism and "is an expert on the subject
of white supremacist and neo-Nazi organizations." [ATLANTA BUSINESS LEAGUE,
2001] In this vein, Jews also tend to dominate modern "hate-monitoring"
organizations, founded to discredit ethnocentric activism parallel to their
own. Central focus is upon "white hate" and sometimes the likes
of African-American hero Louis Farrakhan, but mention of Jewish racist currents
-- especially abundant in pro-Israeli and ultra-Orthodox organizations --
are extremely rare. For most "hate-watch" groups, mention of Jewish
"hate" is non-existent. Examples of this trend include the (Jewish-run)
Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, Rabbi Hier's Simon Wiesenthal Center,
Brian Levin's Study of Hate and Extremism department at California State University,
and David Goldman's "Hate Watch" organization.)
"Those who wrote of blacks as subjects,"
says Jewish scholar Peter Novick, "were overwhelmingly Jewish."
However, notes fellow Jewish scholar Jonathan Schorsch, "Blacks ... could
safely stand as subjects [in Jewish historical review] in their own right
only if such subjectivity did not threaten certain conceptions of Jewish passivity
and disempowerment." In other words, as always, Jews are never interested
in taking responsibility for their own honest history. Schorsch speaks here
of the foundation of Jewish self-understanding: its myths of noble moral virtue
and chronic victimization. Hence, Jews, even as slaveholders, routinely categorize
themselves as victims, and powerless. Modern Jewish histories about African-Americans
demand the location of both
Blacks and Jews as victims, no matter what the historical scenario.
When this paradigm does not fit, which is often, as in the case of Jewish
slaveholding, Jewish victimization of others is routinely ignored, blamed
on others (usually "Christian" society), or minimalized. [See Schorsch's
article about Jewish historians' dissimulation of Jewry's slaveholding past:
SCHORSCH, J., 2000]
In 1967, African-American author Harold Cruse
observed in "one of the most influential books ever published in the
black community," that
"In fact, the main job of researching
and interpreting the
American Negro has been taken over by the
Jewish intelligentsia
to the extent where it is practically impossible
for the Negro
to deal with the Anglo-Saxon majority in
this country unless
he first comes to the Jews to get his instructions."
[VOLKMAN,
p. 215-216]
While Jewish authors have fallen over one
another defining all aspects Black life, African-American sociologist Kenneth
Clark noted also that "in practically every area of contact between Negroes
and Jewish people, some real or imagined ground for mutual antagonism exists."
[HERTZBERG, A., 1989, p. 338] "When
Jews called conferences about 'the Negro in the United States,'" notes
Arthur Hertzberg, "blacks felt patronized." [HERTZBERG, A., 1989,
p. 338] Not only were they patronized, they often were tokenized -- even smothered.
When, for example, at the height of Black-Jewish tensions in 1967, Shlomo
Katz edited a volume entitled
Negro and Jew. An Encounter in America,
featuring 27 authors from a "symposium" by
Midstream magazine
about the subject, only four were African-American. All the other 23 authors
afforded commentary were Jewish. [KATZ, S., 1967]
[Click here for excerpts from other chapters, about
African-Americans
in the Jewish sports agent and sports entrepreneurial world, as well
Jewish
economic dominance of Black musical artists, and
Jews
in power positions in the African-American media world]
Likewise, Jewish pre-eminence in academic
circles in authoritatively defining and legislating another peoples' culture
and identity even has parallels in Islamic and Arab studies, a field that
is extremely politically charged. "In the universities of the West in
the 1950s," says Norman Cantor, "Jews were still holders of many
important chairs of Islamic Studies, whereas, at that time only one ethnic
Arab, Philip Hitti, a Lebanese Christian teaching at Princeton enjoyed a major
reputation ... In the 1970s ... the three leading historians (in Princeton's
Department of Near Eastern Studies Department) were all Jews ... the most
eminent of all, Bernard Lewis ... a confirmed Zionist. [Edward] Said's celebrated Orientalism
(1978) sounded a clarion call to ethnic Arabs to liberate their historiography
from Jewish imperialists." [CANTOR, p. 126] In 2001, Jewish scholar Hillel
Fradkin became head of the "Ethics and Public Policy Center" --
a Washington think tank that focuses on religion, ethics, and public policy.
Fradkin, who replaced Jewish scholar Elliot Abrams, has a degree in Islamic
thought and "said programs on Muslims in society will be one of his priorities."
[WITHAM, H., 10-29-01]
James Zogby, president of the Arab American
Institute once noted the profound credibility gap between Jewish and Arab
commentators about the Middle East: "Time and time again, Arabs are regarded
as having a bias, a point of view, while Jews are considered Mideast experts."
[HALSELL, G., MARCH 1993, p. 9]
Jewish author Peter Novick notes a recent case
of astounding historical revisionism that suits the ideological and propagandistic
needs of modern Israel:
"The assertion that Palestinians were complicit
in the Holocaust was mostly
based on the case of the Mufti of Jerusalem,
a pre-World War II Palestinian
nationalist leader who, to escape imprisonment
by the British, sought refuge
during the war in Germany. The Mufti in many
ways was a disreputable character,
but postwar claims that he played any significant
part in the Holocaust has
never been sustained. This did not prevent the editors
of the four-volume
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust from giving him
a starring role. The
article on the Mufti is more than twice as long
as the articles on [top Nazi leaders]
Goebbels and
Goring, longer than the articles on Himler and Heydrich combined,
longer than the article on Eichmann -- of all the
biographical articles, it is exceeded
in length, but only slightly, by the entry for Hitler."
[NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 158]
Jewish historical interpretation of others'
lives is everywhere to be found, recently including the likes of Daniel Levine's
Popular Voices in Latin American Catholicism, Miriam Cohen's Workshop
to Office: Two Generations of Italian Women in New York City, and Ivor
Shapiro's muckraking volume subtitled The Crisis of Faith and Conscience
in One Catholic Church (Shapiro was apparently once an Anglican minister
from South Africa) and on and on.
How about Russian culture and history,
say Dostoyevsky? "[I and] many other Jewish literary critics," says
Leonid Tsypkin, "... have gained what amounts to a monopoly in the study
of Dostoyevsky.” [TSPKIN, L., 1987, p. 116]
Jewish professor Barry Shain is described
by one newspaper this way: "Although he was raised in Beverly Hills,
California, and is Jewish, his specialty is the study of how Protestantism
and Catholicism have influenced American culture since the founding of the
republic." [LUCIER, J., 3-2-98, p. 12] (Where, one wonders, is the book
by anyone [other than Jewish self-congratulatory fluff] about the profound Jewish influence upon the same
thing?)
Interested in the Miami-based American Institute of Polish Culture? It
was founded in 1972 by Blanka Rosenstiel, also Jewish, who remains the organization's
president. Her Special Projects department lists her two special interests
at the Institute: "the lack of information about Polish history and culture
in American school textbooks, and Polish-Jewish relations." Institute
policy also declares that "Jewish American organizations are calling
for the introduction of the Holocaust to the curriculum of our public schools.
We, at the American Institute of Polish Culture, fully support this initiative."
[AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF POLISH CULTURE, 2000, ONLINE]
The natural right and obvious merits of
any individual to investigate (or even champion, as in Rosentiel's case) another
ethnic community is not the issue here, of course. This volume itself is a
case in point. The issue is collective ethnic power and its influence in the
limitation of the full expression of ideas. And interpretive balance. One would be very hard pressed,
for example, to find a non-Jewish academic willing to risk his or her career
within the context of omnipresent Jewish hypersensitivity to write a critically interpretive book (unlike the
recent fawning "The Gifts of the Jews. How a Tribe of Desert Nomads
Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels," ad nauseum) on "popular
voices of Judaism," the "crisis of faith and conscience" in
Judaism, or "two generations" of anything Jewish. (Two that do come to mind
in very recent history, however critically guarded, are California professors
Albert Lindemann and Kevin MacDonald. Both have both faced defamatory charges
of anti-Semitism by Jewish reviewers for their work). As (controversial)
African-American professor Tony Martin observes, "Aside from the exceptional
occasional work by a Gentile Judeophile, scholarly writing on the Jewish experience
is for all intents and purposes a Jewish monopoly." [MARTIN, T., p. 52]
The issue here is also the degree to which
any academic investigation might be unduly influenced by an interpretive ethnocentric
convention, part of an intellectual unity that expresses a "particularist"
Jewish (including Zionist)
perspective (a world view that is emphatically and widely declared these
days as an inescapable matter of self-introspection by the Jewish community itself).
Few academics would impugn, for example, the massive attack in recent decades
upon "white" anthropology's collective power in interpreting --
and hence dictating -- from its own lofty perch the essential life experiences
of disempowered, vulnerable Third World Others. As, for example, Wilbur Jacobs,
in his 1972 book about American Indians, noted: "Since most of our history
is written by white writers, many have come to ask whether much that has appeared
in print is biased or unreliable." [JACOBS, W., 1972, p. 1]
If political correctness dictates that "whites"
view the world through a biased lens, why spare the Jewish (a formidable and populous subgroup
within the "white" author elite) lens the same kind of critical
scrutiny? A Jewish member of academe or the publishing elite is also a member
of a collectivist power group with an extremely strong, and particular, political agenda, overtly
or covertly, and bearing a much
ballyhooed community self-assertion of "specialness" in understanding
the world. When it comes to "objective" Jewish scholarship on Jewish
history and identity, the Middle East, and Israel, for example, its collective
bias is in most cases transparent.
Take, for example, secular social anthropologist
Samuel Heilman's Orthodox "in-house" field work with ultra-Orthodox Jews. As Heilman writes,
about the illusion of social scientist objectivity, and his own myths about
the Jewish past:
"One cannot separate the observer from
the observations. Even though
he restrains himself by 'objectivity,' his
personal experiences, participation,
and empathy are crucial to what he sees ...
My interest in [ultra-Orthodox
Jews], as I reflect upon it now, affected
not only my search for roots and
experiences in Judaism. It was also influenced
by the fact that I had been
raised and still am an Orthodox Jew ... For me the search for the
haredim
began indeed as a search for the utopia of
the past in which my
grandparents lived." [HEILMAN, S., 1992, p. xvi-xvii]
Take also, for example, in the case of Jewish
review of the Gentile outsider, the aforementioned author of a biography about
Louis Farrakhan. Among the experiences that shape Arthur Magida's lens to
view the world were his positions as the Senior Editor of the Baltimore
Jewish News and Editorial Director of Jewish
Lights Publishing. Noting the growing animosity between Blacks and Jews
and the Nation of Islam's role in this, Magida writes that
"Jews and Farrakhan spoke a different
language. Each said they
were espousing 'truths,' but they were
truths of different colors
... Farrakhan's truths, while clothed
as historical and verifiable,
were emotive truths rooted in the furies
of black pain, fueled by
the NOI's racial-religious messianism,
and stirred by a clever
strategy
to catapult separatism to the vanguard of the black
agenda." [MAGIDA, p. 141]
And the Jewish "truths" that
grappled against Farrakhan's ahistorical emotionalism? Magida sums them up
in one sentence, merely in passing, as if they are -- to the rational mind
-- unassailable: "The Jewish truths were linear and historical."
[MAGIDA, p. 141]
Let's switch Magida's attack upon Farrakhan's
"truths," placing the word "Jews" where "Farrakhan"
was, and see what we have:
"Jews and Farrakhan spoke a different language. Each said they
were espousing 'truths,' but they were
truths of different colors.
... The Jews' truths, while clothed as
historical and verifiable,
were emotive truths rooted in the furies
of Jewish pain, fueled by
the Jewish community's racial-religious
messianism, and stirred by
a clever strategy to catapult separatism
to the vanguard of the
Jewish agenda."
This Jewish/Zionist revision more than fits;
as amply evidenced throughout this volume, it is "true," as "linear"
and "historical" as any "truth" can be.
While Jews have marched to the fore in defining
Black Studies, throughout American popular culture Jews have likewise hidden
behind a Black veil. "For most of the twentieth century," notes
Stephen Whitfield, "Jewishness as an explicit subject was mostly concealed
... [and often] disguised in blackface ... In 1954 a Cleveland disc jockey
named Alan Freed brought to a certain culmination this Jewish penchant to
wear a black mask. Freed introduced white teenagers listening to his radio
program to the [Black] music that he named 'rock and roll.'" [WHITFIELD,
American, p. 48-49]
"A Negro actor states in bitter terms,"
noted Kenneth Clark in 1946, "that he is being flagrantly underpaid by
a Jewish producer. A Negro entertainer is antagonistic to his Jewish agent,
who, he is convinced, is exploiting him." [GLAZER, NEGROES, p. 29]
"We've been loyal to you [Jews]," bitterly challenged Nation
of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, reflecting widespread Black opinion, "We
give you our talent. You manage us. You get the money." [GOULD, p. 560-561]
[See later sections for further information about common Jewish managerial
control over African-American professional sports stars and the music world].
Taking agency and entrepreneurship to a
new level, the African-American New York Beacon pointed out the central
roll of middleman Jose "Yosi" Medina in the extortion plot to elicit
millions of dollars from African-American actor Bill Cosby by Autumn Jackson,
a woman who claimed to be Cosby's illegitimate daughter. Once Medina was in
court and on trial for his role in the scheme, Medina's lawyer announced that
his client -- due to hitting his head in a bathtub accident in 1983, "doesn't
remember where he's from" but he remembers "always being Jewish."
[HAYS, p. 3]
Another such Medina character is Michael
Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick's mother was Jewish and he asserted a radical Jewish
identity as an activist in the right-wing Jewish Defense League. In 1977 he
was arrested for his involvement in the bombing of a Russian book store in
New York City. In the 1990s he became newsworthy again. As the estranged father
of the son of Qubillah Shabazz (Malcom X's daughter), he made plans with her
to assassinate Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan. (Shabazz blamed Louis
Farrakhan for a role in the murder of her father). The FBI wiretapped their
conversations. Eventually Fitzpatrick came under increased media scrutiny
and suspicion, that it was he who was implanting the idea of murder in Shabazz's
mind, a device by which he could get FBI aid in seeking relief from a Minneapolis
cocaine charge. [MCENROE, P., 1-14-95, p. 1A; DALY, M. 6-4-97; TERRY, D.,
3-5-95, p. 20]
For decades Blacks were used by Jewish generals
as the front-line troops in litigation battles over discrimination and minority
rights. Louis Marshall had even begun,
in 1909, to litigate NAACP cases himself, and he later served on that organization's
Board of Directors. [IVERS, p. 40] With Jewish leaders safely nestled and
hidden in the heart of what was publicly known as a Black organization, "in
the South no small number of African-Americans feared that forcing whites
to implement such radical legal doctrines would intensify their resentment
towards blacks." [IVERS, p. 221]
"High public profile as Jews was anathema," notes
David Levering Lewis about decades of Jewish civil rights involvement, "Support
of and participation in the Afro-American civil rights movement was seen ...
as a stratagem exactly meeting Jewish needs ... [LEWIS, p. 554-555] ... Upper
class Jews ... increasingly encouraged the new Afro-American leadership ...
which employed agitation and publicity as principal weapons to force the glacial
pace of civil rights. By establishing a presence at the center of the civil
rights movement with intelligence, money, and influence, elite Jews and their
delegates could fight anti-Semitism by remote control." [LEWIS, p. 555]
In academe, notes Irving Horowitz, "while
other minorities such as blacks, women, and gay-rights activists take a high
profile, the Jewish group has opted for a low profile." [HOROWITZ, I.,
p. 91] A good case in point is Jewish social scientist Franz Boas, often called
the "father of anthropology." As Marshall Hyatt notes,
"Feeling that a scientific investigation
of race prejudice centered on
Jews would leave him open to charges of
subjectivity, Boas used
Afro-Americans as a substitute ... He surmised
that if he could abolish
racism as it pertained to blacks, Jews would
also benefit to some
extent. Boas was guilty of ethnic chauvinism.
By his own example and
his pronouncements, he demonstrated that
Jews had progressed under
persecution. He did not make the same claim
for blacks ... He sought
to focus on racism itself, using blacks
as a surrogate for his real
concern [Jews]." [HYATT, M., 1990,
p. 97-98]
The Black civil rights movement has provided
Jewish nationalism plenty of hiding places over the years. Nathan Glazer even
used it as an apologetic for the standard charge against Jews of dual national
loyalty. "Some Jews had always been troubled by the problem of dual loyalty,"
he admits, and then leaves the essence of this "troubling problem"
hanging, merely excusing it away by noting that Black civil rights militancy
(and its "distinctive group interests") "made it easier for
Jews, too, directly to support the interests of the state of Israel."
[GLAZER, AMERICAN, p. 174] "The conventional wisdom among Jews,"
says Henry Feingold, "has long since concluded that the animosity toward
African-Americans has served as a major deflector of hatred against themselves.
Thus, a group that has inadvertently served as a shield for American Jewry
is generating what may ultimately be identified as the most indigenous form
of American anti-Semitism." [FEINGOLD, p. 77] "All the bigotry and hatred focused on
the Black man," complained Malcolm X, "keeps off the Jew a lot of
heat that would be on him otherwise." [GOULD, p. 565] Barnet Litvinoff noted the comparable situation
in Great Britain: "A million colored people, mostly from the Caribbean
Islands, India, and Pakistan, have arrived in Britain in recent years, ...
providing new targets for the Englishman's prejudices ... Each one has unwittingly
done the Jews a service. He has diverted attention from one kind of minority
to another." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 170]
Even in far left-wing American political
organizations like the Communist Party, in the 1960s Blacks began rejecting
Jewish hegemony. "The period of Jewish dominance in the Communist Party,"
says Harold Cruse, a Black intellectual and former communist, "... culminated
in the emergence of Herbert Aptheker and other assimilated Jewish communists,
who assumed the mantle of spokesmanship on Negro affairs, thus burying the
Negro radical potential deeper and deeper in the slough of white intellectual
paternalism." [CRUSE, p. 147]
Jewish leadership efforts to exploit the
impoverished Blacks for Jewish struggles for upper class aims (i.e., access
to exclusivist clubs, hotels, and universities) was even reflected in the
comments of the President of the Hebrew Union College, Julius Morgenstern,
in 1913: "It is not the Negro, nor the Chinese, nor the Indian who seeks
to force their way into hotels where he is not wanted ... It is the Jews,
and Jews alone ..." [IVERS, p. 59] In 1947 Black NAACP director Roy Wilkins
was asked to join the steering committee of an American Jewish Congress campaign
to outlaw discrimination in New York graduate schools. Wilkins, recalls a
former AJC head, "said it was not a major problem for [African-Americans].
He said they had very few people in colleges seeking admission to graduate
schools." [GOLDBERG, p. 314]
Another American Jew at the turn of the
century, Walter Lippmann, (who generally steered clear of the Jewish community)
wrote:
"I waste no time myself worrying about
the injustice of anti-Semitism.
There is too much injustice in the world
for any particular concern
about [Jewish access to] summer hotels
and college fraternities."
[CUDDIHY, p.143]
"In Boston," says Norman Cantor,
"[Jews] sought entry to Harvard in 1910, to solidify their fellowship
with the Brahmins against the Irish proletarian immigrants." [CANTOR,
p. 269] Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the "Reconstructionist"
Judaism movement, noted in 1933 the "different class interests"
of Eastern European Jews coming to America, their "professional careerism,"
and their strong "desire for social climbing." [EISEN, p. 27] The 1922 Jewish enrollment at Harvard -- the most elite, most status-conscious,
and one of the most expensive schools in America -- was already 20% of the
student body. [FEINGOLD, p. 95] (Columbia University's 1920 enrollment was
40% Jewish). [BELTH, p. 98] A quota was suggested by Harvard administrators
to limit further Jewish enrollment. While Blacks barely could find the most
menial of jobs, and immigrant Slavs, Catholics, and others faced prejudice
and discrimination where they mostly rested at the bottom of the socio-economic
ladder, the Harvard quota is immortalized by elitist-minded Jews today as
one of the most famous evidences of "anti-Semitism" in American
history, still examined with outrage by Jewish scholars in our own day. As
early as 1918, Jews made up 9.7 percent of American college enrollment, including
23.4 percent of all students in dentistry, 27.9 percent in pharmacy, 21.6
in law, and 16.4 of all those studying medicine. "Clearly," notes
Hasia Diner, "this group eagerly sought economic mobility." [DINER,
p. 5]
(Note in contrast the mood of a private
Jewish club, noted by James Yaffe in 1968: "Most Jews seem to feel like
the members of a club in the Midwest whose admissions committee recently proposed
to admit non-Jews. There was loud opposition and the proposal was turned down.
One man expressed the consensus of opinion: 'We'll be overrun by non-Jews.
We won't feel comfortable here any more.'" [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 64] A
similar hypocrisy was noted by researcher Jonathan Reider in 1985: "A
Jewish civic leader [in New York] resorted to the most convoluted apologetic
to justify exclusion [of Blacks from his neighborhood]: 'The black is infringing
on the right of those who don't want him. I understand his reason for leaving
the ghetto, but he has to understand my reasons for not wanting him. I wouldn't
want to move into a neighborhood where I wasn't wanted.") [REIDER, J.,
1985, p. 83]
By 1972-74, as about 2.5% of the American
population, Jews constituted the following percentages of major university
undergraduate enrollment: UCLA 29%; University of Miami 31.5%; University
of Chicago 27.5%; John Hopkins 40%;
Brandeis 60%; Rutgers 29%; Princeton
29%; Columbia 32.5%; Boston University 38.1%; Cornell 27.8%; Hofstra 43.5%;
New York University 40%; Syracuse 35%; Temple 32.5%; SUNY-Albany 25%; University
of Pennsylvania 40%; Brown 22.5%; Emory 25%; University of California at Berkeley
19.5%; Harvard 25%. [SLAVIN, p. 172-179] By 1969 a study by the Carnegie Commission
on Higher Education found that 17% of the faculty at the seventeen top-ranked
universities were Jewish. In law schools the percentage went up to 36%, in
sociology 34%, economics 28%, physics 26%, history 22%, and philosophy 20%.
[HOLLINGER]
In Canada, where Jews are less than one
and a half percent of the Canadian population, by 1969 "more than a quarter"
of the enrollment at Montreal's prominent McGill University was Jewish. [LITVINOFF,
B., p. 172] A Jew, Ruth Wolfe, became
chancellor of the University of Toronto in 1993. Bernard Shapiro was appointed
to be "principal of McGill University" in 1994, the same year that
Ian Segal became head of Canada's Simon Fraser University. [SINGER/SELDIN,
1995, p. 225] Gloria Gerson, an American visitor to Brazil, noted in 1999
that Rio de Janeiro's Pontifica Catholic University
"is among the most prestigious schools
in Brazil. Surprised to encounter
another Jew [there], I was shocked to discover
that the school, where
Christianity is a required course and nuns
run a snack bar, is in fact
20% Jewish." [GERSON, G., 11-19-99,
p. 1]
By the 1960s, numbering about two and a half
percent of the American population, as two Jewish scholars note:
"One in five lawyers in the United States
was of Jewish ancestry. Jews
also constituted 12 percent of the faculty of
law schools in the United
States and, more importantly, 38 percent of
the faculty at elite law
schools ... In sum, Americans of Jewish background
have become
an elite group in American society, with a cultural
and intellectual
influence far beyond their numbers. Writing about
the 'Eastern
Establishment,' Thomas Dye lists a number of
symbolic figures to
which this establishment looks. Four of seven
listed are of Jewish
background." [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p.
98]
And Jewish mothers beaming about "my
son the Jewish doctor" is no gross stereotype. In 1934, for example,
"more than 60% of the 33,000 applicants to medical schools were Jews
... Between 1932 and 1933, more than 90% of Americans studying medicine in
Europe were Jewish." [JUTHANI, 3-5-97] "In 1948," says James
Yaffe, "10 to 15 percent of the medical students in New York state were
Jewish. By 1954 this had risen to 50 percent -- in some schools it was as
high as 80 percent." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 52] Because the field is so
much populated by Jews, Ann Roiphe notes that "Even anti-Semites may
one day need a Jewish doctor." [ROIPHE, 1981, p. 177]
A speculative
medical aside for a moment: With all these Jews going to medical school
over the last few decades, what are we to make of the fact that American secular
medical culture has for decades emulated Jewish religious tradition in dictatorially
circumcising the vast majority of American Gentile males? This century the
American circumcision rate has been as high as 85% of the male population.
A Jewish author, Ronald Goldman, notes that "from a global perspective,
most of the world rejects circumcision: over 80 percent of the world's males
are intact (not circumcised). Most circumcised men are Muslim or Jewish. The
United States is the only country in the world that circumcises most of its
male infants for nonreligious reasons." [GOLDMAN, R., p. 2]
Surveys have found that a huge number of Americans are ignorant
about this extremely personal subject; many aren't even aware, with certainty,
what circumcision is. Because it has not often -- until recently -- been a
subject of public discussion, because infants had no choice in the matter,
and because the medical world has been routinely trusted to know what's best
for babies, for decades a veil of ignorance has been draped across the subject.
"In one study," notes Goldman, "34 percent of men incorrectly
identified their own circumcision status. In another study, half of the mothers
questioned did not know if the father of their child was circumcised ... My
own research of 60 adult graduate students revealed that 38 percent of the
women and 45 percent of the men were not sure of the difference between a
circumcised male and an intact penis." [GOLDMAN, R., p. 29]
In recent years, there are increasing objections -- even from
some Jews, like Goldman -- to the
routine circumcision of American male infants. More and more medical practitioners
are rejecting claims that a circumcised penis is more hygienic than an uncut
organ, as well as that it helps to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.
Most perplexing in all this is how and why circumcision has developed as a
norm for behavior in America on such a wide scale, a dictate of the medical
profession and not the populace at-large. Rosemary Romberg, married to a Jew,
is among those who have written an entire volume criticizing the omnipresence
of circumcision in American medical society. As she notes, "I have learned
that none of the medical arguments for circumcision are justified." [ROMBERG,
p. xxi] Yet, she observes, "If we take a stand against Jewish ritual
circumcision we run the risk of being labeled anti-Semitic." [ROMBERG,
p. 59]
In her investigations into the subject, Romberg once even interviewed
a rabbi, asking, "There are many Jewish doctors in the United States.
Do you think that their influence
could have anything to do with the popularity of circumcision in the United
States today?" [ROMBERG, p. 71] The
rabbi of course said no, and Romberg herself later rejected the possibilities
of a conscious Jewish influence on the issue as being unfounded. She
ultimately decided it may be, at least in part, the result of an abstract
openness to the idea of circumcision because of the Judeo-Christian link.
[ROMBERG, p. 105] Others suggest its prominence rooted in a Christian-based
anti-sexual morality, an American obsession with hygiene, and other postulates.
But is Romberg's question to the rabbi -- inferring that Jews
would have a vested interest in mass circumcision -- one that is so easily dismissed? With the huge numbers
of Jews in the medical world, their high proclivity to publish their medical
opinions, and their disproportionate
influence in the field, is it an unreasonable question to wonder about? Romberg
notes a very important point in her initial speculations about Jewish medical
influence in having American males, in large numbers, circumcised. To traditional
Jewish thinking, a Jewish male must be circumcised. There is no choice
in the matter. Given this fact, as Romberg says, "In other times and
places [circumcision] has brought ridicule and persecution upon the Jews.
In the United States today, the Jew does not stand out as different for having
a circumcised penis. Have Jews been the cause, directly or indirectly, of
the widespread popularity of routine infant circumcision in the U.S.? There
are many Jewish doctors in the U.S." [ROMBERG, p. 104]
Always highly attuned to threats of anti-Semitism, religiously
convinced that Gentiles must sooner or later rise up for no reason against
them, and for centuries seeking to mold the safest niches possible within
non-Jewish communities, the secular American custom of circumcision offers
the Jewish (male) community the extraordinary opportunity to physically blend
into American society, without having to abandon its traditional genital marker
which, in European society, was the absolute test for determining who was,
and who was not, Jewish. There was no hiding from the malicious anti-Semite.
"The exposed penis," writes Jewish feminist Andrea Dworkin, taking
it to the furthest abstraction, "reifies the vulnerability of the Jewish
male." [DWORKIN, A., 2000, p. 115] For whatever reason, the fact remains
that the careful -- and guarded -- Jewish process of assimilation in America
is such that in this regard, on the procreative organ, it is the Gentile
males who have effectively assimilated, only this century, to Jewish religious
tradition.
At Princeton, when by 1999 the Jewish percentage
of the entering freshman class dipped to 10% (still a Jewish overrepresentation
of their American population by 400%), it was cause for alarm in Jewish circles
that they were there dwindling. Princeton, noted the Jewish Week, is
a wonderful place for Jews. It had even "financed the $4.5 million construction
of a state-of-the-art center for Jewish life, which operated in 1993 and is
operated jointly by the university and Hillel." [GOLBERG, Trouble,
p. 16] (Likewise, at Harvard, noted
Charles Silberman, the national Jewish Hillel organization had moved "from
the periphery of the campus to its very center." [SILBERMAN, p. 255]
At UCLA, in 1998 Jewish media moguls Edgar Bronfman, Lew Wasserman,
and Steven Spielberg each contributed $1 million to the $6 million Hillel
community center at UCLA, "one of the largest Jewish student centers
in the country.") [HOWARD, B., 6-2-98, p. D12] At the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor, in 1993 18% of the undergraduate student body was Jewish. "Ann
Arbor's [Hillel Center] is largely a social and political center," noted
the Baltimore Jewish Times, "... [It] houses seven Israel-related
groups ..." [NEUSNER, N., 2-26-93, p. 68]
"What does it mean," wondered concerned
Jewish journalist Philip Weiss
in
1996, "that members of a group that makes up 2.5 percent of the population
accounts for two-fifths of the [student] positions at one of the principal
staging areas for the American Establishment [Yale]?" [WEISS, p. 30] (Weiss neglected to mention that the president
of Yale, Richard Levin, appointed in 1993, is also Jewish, as is, for that
matter, the president of Harvard, Neil Rudenstein, and Princeton, Harvey Shapiro.
In fact, noted Edward Shapiro in 1998, "five of the eight presidents
of the Ivy League colleges and universities have Jewish parents.") [SHAPIRO,
E., 1998] (In 2001, Jewish economist
Larry Summers replaced Rudenstein as the head of Harvard). The Dean of King's
College in England and the president of prestigious Cal Tech are also Jewish.
In recent years Barry Munitz stepped down as the chancellor of the California
State University system for a position in the art world. By the early 1970s,
Jews were also presidents of the University
of Pennsylvania, University of Cincinnati, MIT, Rutgers, [SKLARE, 1974, p.
261] and so on. (In Chicago alone, in 1973 Jewish presidents headed the University
of Chicago, Roosevelt University, and Chicago City College). [GOLDEN, H.,
1973, p. 207]
In 2001 the Cleveland Jewish News noted
some of the concerns of new Cleveland State University president Michael Schwartz:
"Four antisemitic incidents have recently
occurred on the campus of Cleveland
State University (CSU), prompting new president
Michael Schwarz to issue a
'zero tolerance' policy. 'If we find the people
(who committed the acts), they are
out (expelled),' he says .... The first incident
happened shortly after Sept. 11.
The Cleveland Hillel Foundation, which serves
Case Western University, Kent
State University and Oberlin College in addition
to CSU, received a threatening
phone call with regard to a Hillel banner featuring
a Star of David that hangs in
CSU's University Center. The call was placed
shortly after the banner was hung,
and the caller warned, 'If you don't take down
that f--ing flag, we are going to kill
you,' reports Hillel executive director Marcia
Bloomberg ... The second call came
'just after we hung a big banner announcing
the Birthright Israel trip' at CSU, she
added .. Also during this time, an Israeli
flag was stolen from the University Center
and a large globe on the first floor of the
main library was defaced. 'It looks like
someone
took a key and scratched out the name of Israel. The intent was pretty
clear,' Schwartz explains." [HERWALD,
M., 11-20-01, p. 3-]
In 1998, Justin Danielewitz, a Jewish student
at Harvard University, was afforded space in a major Jewish magazine to complain
that he had been passed over in his application for an "executive position"
at the university newspaper, a forum whose "prominent alumni are too
numerous to list; their bylines grace the pages of the country's most prestigious
newspapers and magazines." The college employers, it seems, wanted more
ethnic "diversity" on the newspaper staff. Already, as Danielewitz
observed, at least seven of the ten columnists were not only Jewish, but also
from the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut area. Of course the author's complaint
was not that Jews dominate the campus newspaper, but that their influence
was too liberal for his taste. Ultimately, the two individuals chosen over
him to be co-chairmen of the newspaper's editorial board were those who overtly
championed in their interviews the importance of ethnic diversity. But, incredibly,
notes Danielewitz, not only were those selected over him "white Jews
themselves, but white Jews from that most dreadfully over represented tri-state
area. In light of this embarrassing fact, how they could have considered themselves
appropriate role models for a newly diverse paper remains a mystery."
[DANIELEWITZ, April 1998]
Way back in 1968 Jewish author James Yaffe
noted Jewish dominance in prestigious Ivy League schools. "At Harvard,"
he wrote, "the faculty, dominated by Jews, makes a special effort to
hire qualified non-Jews. At Brown a few years ago the Jewish editors of the
newspaper ran an editorial urging non-Jews to join, assuring them that they
wouldn't meet with prejudice." [YAFFE,
J., 1968, p. 52] At the University of Michigan, noted the Baltimore Jewish
Times in 1993, "Many of the staffers on the Daily, the campus
newspaper, are Jewish ... Many prominent faculty members are Jewish ... Virtually
the only major activity in which Jews don't have a high profile is athletics."
[NEUSNER, N., 1993, p. 68]
Among the most important Harvard keys to
a career in Washington DC political journalism is Martin Peretz, a 1960s-era
professor of American vice-president Al Gore. "For more than a quarter
of a century," notes Todd Kliman, "Marty's Peretz's undergraduate
seminar in social theory at Harvard has functioned as a kind of Future Pundits
of America clubhouse." [KLIMAN, 9-98]
Peretz is the owner of the New Republic, a prominent journal
he and his wife bought years ago with her inherited Singer Sewing Machine
fortune. The New Republic's "Jewish-consciousness is more than
palpable," reports Kliman, "It's pervasive (says Peretz: 'I will
not publish anything in the magazine that is anti-Israel') ... Proof of the
New Republic's Jewishness is not merely to be found in its unwavering
support of Israel, as many have noted. It's also seen in its brand of inquiry,
its willfully contrarian approach to so many issues of the day." [KLIMAN,
9-98] (Peretz was a prominent anti-Vietnam War activist, which he did
not consider incongruous with his support for Israel's 1967 war against surrounding
Arab nations. [RADOSH, R., 1996, p. 27]
Elsewhere in the college field, in 1995
the Anti-Defamation League arranged to send 13 university newspaper editors
to Holocaust sites in Poland. (Editors included those from the University
of California, Duke, Emory, Harvard, John Hopkins, University of Michigan,
Michigan State, University of Mississippi, University of Notre Dame, Vanderbilt,
West Virginia, and the University of Wisconsin.) "The aim of the mission,"
said ADL, "is to sensitize tomorrow's journalists to the Holocaust and
issues of concern to the Jewish community." ADL ON THE FRONTLINE, OCT/NOV
1995]
Of all the imaginable expressions of discrimination against Jews, another of
the most famous "anti-Semitic" incidents in American history occurred
in 1877 when a wealthy and prominent Jew, Joseph Seligman (who had once been
offered the Secretary of Treasury position by President Ulysses S. Grant)
was refused lodging at the Grand Union Hotel in the vacation resort town of
Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York. [ZWEIGENHAFT, p. 131] The hotel --
described as the "Queen of American resorts" -- was managed by Judge
Henry Hilton who had a personal grudge against the prominent Jewish investment
banker. "The controversy was front-page news for the entire summer."
[SILBERMAN, p. 48]
Meanwhile, upper-class German Jews like
Seligman, with their own nose-to-the-sky postures of arrogance and elitism,
were saints? As Edwin Freedland notes,
"there was a time when in some cities, Baltimore for example, Jews of
different backgrounds exclusively joined different country clubs. B'nai B'rith,
created by German Jews, originally would not allow the admission of Eastern
European Jews." [FREEDLAND, p. 514] And, "the Harmony Club
of New York, undoubtedly the most important German Jewish club in the country,
excluded [Jewish] East Europeans. Its slogan over the years was: 'More polish
and less Polish.'" [GRINSTEIN, H., 1959, p. 76]
Past incidents of American Gentile "anti-Semitism,"
per the likes of Seligman, still referenced and complained about by Jewish
scholars in our own day, bear further reflection, for it echoes a fundamental
undercurrent of Jewish complaint as
they continue to move en masse quickly up the American socio-economic ladder.
Jews have never been disbarred from the best jobs working in coal mines
or dumping molten steel at smelting plants. And it remains a fact today that
discrimination against 99% of the American population at such elite hotels,
clubs, Harvard, and other haughty reservoirs of wealth and power remains endemic
to the fundamental dividing lines of modern -- and past -- society: money
and class, not "anti-Semitism." The Jewish stampede to the top of everything
in the socio-economic pyramid knows no shame, and those they stood (and stand)
upon in their wars of admittance to the highest of WASP echelons are the unmentioned
rungs -- as always -- of Jewish history. As David Desser and Lester Friedman
note, despite grandiose mythologies about Jewish "social conscience,"
the overwhelming majority of Jews have been far more concerned with maids,
their yicchus, and other signs of social status: "Instead
of turning to secular political movements, the majority of American Jews
pursued ... materialism and economic gain." [DESSER, p. 17]
For all the Jewish obsessions of an alleged
endemic American anti-Semitism, it is a fact that nothing in the American
historical record compares in Jewish life to the "animus against Catholics
[which] was translated into a political one by the Know Nothing Party."
[FEINGOLD, p. 75] Nathan Belth notes that "the torments suffered
by the Catholic immigrants of the nineteenth century fill some of the blackest
pages of American history. Violence -- killings, burnings, general destruction
-- were commonplace. Vilification, degradation, constant political attack
was their ever-present burden." [BELTH, p. 16] In the 1854 United States
Congress, the Know Nothing party "held 8 of 62 seats in the Senate, and
104 of 234 seats in the House." [BELTH, p. 18]
And no anti-immigrant incident matches the mass massacres of Chinese
workers in the 1880s. In an ethnic dispute among miners in 1885, a mob of
150 people -- half armed with rifles
-- attacked the Chinese section of Rock Springs, Wyoming, killing 28 people
and wounding 15 others. In 1887, in what became known as the Snake River Massacre,
31 more Chinese miners were murdered by a mob in Oregon. [DANIELS] John Higham also notes that
"As late as 1916, the leading anti-Japanese
organization in San Francisco, the
Native Sons of the Golden West, held a mass
meeting to raise funds for persecuted
European Jews." [HIGHAM, J. 1957, p. 25]
Jewish obsession with status and control
is made quite clear in a 1991 book, Chutzpah (Yiddish for pushiness),
by Harvard teacher and lawyer Alan Dershowitz:
"The byword of past generations of
Jewish Americans has been shanda
-- fear of embarrassment -- in
front of our hosts. The byword of the
next generation should be chutzpah -- assertive insistence on first
class
status among our peers." [DERSHOWTIZ,
p. 9]
As Dershowitz so deftly puts it, the issue
is not Jewish "equality" with other Americans, but collective supremacy
as "first class" citizens. (Apparently reflecting a long Jewish
tradition about themselves, even today’s' ultra-Orthodox male Hasidic dress
of "black knee breeches, white
stockings, and long back caftan, topped by the fur-brimmed shrayml on Saturdays and holidays, the
discarding of which is considered to this very day by the Hasidic Jews as
the equivalent of becoming a renegade, was adopted by their ancestors in the
sixteenth century in imitation of the costume worn by the Polish and Russian
upper classes.") [PATAI, R., 1971, p. 159-160] Steven Aschheim notes
collective Jewish class goals during their assimilative efforts in pre-Nazi
Germany:
"What was the substance of Jewish assimilation?
In practice it was linked to the
process of embourgeoisement. German Jewry
never had a wide social base. Jews
did not integrate into some abstract volk
but into the middle class, and they spent
much of the nineteenth century internalizing
the economic, ethical, and aesthetic
standards of that class." [ASCHHEIM, S.,
1982, p. 7]
The current rupture in Black-Jewish relations
(surveys consistently show Blacks with the highest anti-Jewish feelings in
America) is in part the result of the fact that the Black community has merely
evolved and followed the particularist Jewish model that formerly directed
them under the guise of collective universalism. For decades both Jewish and
Black communities largely followed, at least ostensibly, a purely assimilationist
strategy in America (as epitomized by the NAACP). The universalist and assimilationist
ideal (which has been trashed by Jews and their subgroup emulators in today's America)
was actually championed by some African-Americans in the early Civil Rights
era, a perspective that threatened the Jewish model of tribal particularism.
The Jewish scholar Nathan Glazer wrote in 1964 that:
"The force of present-day Negro demands
is that the sub-community,
because it either protects privilege or
creates inequalities, has no right
to
exist. That is why these demands pose a quite new challenge to the
Jewish
or to any other sub-community. The Jewish community has come
up with a convenient defense of Jewish exclusiveness
-- namely, that
everyone else is doing it too. The thrust
of present-day Negro demands
is that everyone should stop doing it."
[GLAZER, NEGRO, p. 34]
By 1993 the Congressional Black Caucus
was even borrowing the standard Jewish tribal word -- "Covenant"
-- to describe their own solidarity with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
[GOLDBERG, p. 329] In fact, even the Black nationalism of the Marcus Garvey
movement in the early 1900s (which some called "African Zionism")
was modeled on Jewish nationalist concepts. "'Africa for Africans!,'
and a strident doctrine of a unique, racially purified destiny in renascent
Mother Africa exploded upon the American scene in 1917," notes David
Levering Lewis, "... Afro-American leadership was .. influenced by analogies
of history and intellect and prone to describe itself in the manner of Jews,
as an ancient special people, achieving superiority by suffering ... [LEWIS,
p. 562] ... Pan-Africanism was strikingly similar to ... intellectual Zionism."
[LEWIS, p. 557] Hasia Diner notes that "the [New York] Yiddish newspapers
described Galvanism in the language of Zionism. The anthem sung at Garvey's
conventions were called 'the Negro Hatikvah' (the 'Hatikvah' being the Zionist
anthem), and the newspapers claimed that Garvey wanted to take his people
out of Galut, the Hebrew word for diaspora." [DINER, p. 76] As Garvey himself noted: "A new spirit,
a new courage, has come to us ... at the same time as it came to the Jew:
When the Jew said, 'We shall have Palestine,' the same sentiment came to us
when we said, 'We shall have Africa.'" [MAGIDA, p. 166]
Internationally too, some African nations have followed
the "Holocaust/Jewish victimization is unique" model (also part
of the Zionist ideogical package) to demand international reparations for
the old slave trade. A presentation to the United Nations from African nations
in 2001 asked the UN to
"affirm that the slave trade is a unique
tragedy in the history of humanity, particularly
against Africans -- a crime against
humanity which is unparalleled, not only in
its abhorrent barbaric feature but
also in terms of its enormous magnitude, its
institutionalized
nature, its transnational dimensions and especially its negation
of the essence of the human nature of
the victims." [MCGREAT, C., 5-21-01]
Jewish philanthropy, including Sears-Roebuck
mogul Julius Rosenthal, also aided the projects of the prominent Black southern
activist, Booker T. Washington. "It seems," says Hasia Diner, "that
Washington's views on the meaning of ethnic group identity and success were
reinforced by his contacts with Jewish philanthropists ... Washington mentioned
that black separation was a necessary expedient in the economic development
of the race." [DINER, p. 171] Washington's own association with Jewish
benefactors led him to write what they themselves could have written:
"There is, perhaps, no race that has
suffered so much [as the Jews]
... But these people have clung together.
They have a certain ...
unity, pride, and love of race; and, as
the years go on, they will
be more influential in this country ...
The Negro [must] learn ...
to imitate the Jew in these matters."
[DINER, p. 171]
By the 1930s Julius Rosenthal was "condemned
by a group of black doctors from New York" for "his policy of financing
and advocating separate [medical] institutions for American citizens of Negro
descent," arguing that such a system produces "a sense of servility,
suppressed inspiration and creates artificial and dishonest standards."
[DINER, p. 178]
In a 1974 article in Sociological Review
entitled Jewish Self-Interest in Black Pluralism, sociologist Oliver
Cox explored the way that organized American Jewry has guided the multiethnic
plurality movement to make its own Jewish nationalist commitment less conspicuous.
One of the most important proponents of the new divisive worldview (in which
comparatively weak minority ethnic identities are encouraged, and the dominant
"white and/or Christian" identity is systematically pathologized
and dismantled) was the American Jewish Congress. The AJC, says Cox, "put
out considerable literature (purportedly scientific and impartial) and influenced
public information media; and, most spectacularly, it has sponsored an Annual
Conference of Ethnic Communities in many large metropolitan centers. In the
process of producing these national celebrations the Jewish promoters are
largely hidden." [COX, p. 192]
Widespread Jewish support for "cultural
tolerance," says Charles Silberman, "stems from Jewish conviction
that they are only 'safe' from unwanted attention when they are surrounded
by a plethora of other communal self-identities and behaviors. It is this
belief, for example, not approval of homosexuality, that leads the overwhelming
majority of American Jews to endorse gay rights and to take a liberal stand
on most other so-called 'social issues.'" [SILBERMAN, p. 350]
"Jews," says Oliver Cox, "have
been campaigning intensively against the tradition of cultural assimilation
in the United States. Assimilation has been disparaged and referred to in
pejorative terms ... If ... Americans
could conceive of their ideal society as a stable network of national cultural
'ethnics,' they could reverse their traditional tendency toward cultural assimilation
and establish a new kind of society hospitable to the peculiar Jewish isolationism.
The desideratum comes in many guises." [COX, p. 187]
"The drive for Black Power, "wrote
Jewish author Alan Vorspan in 1969, "is, ideally, opening Americans to
new and true pluralism in which Jews will be one of the most important beneficiary
groups." [COX, p. 188]
The segregationist Black Power movement,
and its own 'dual citizenship,' notes Cox, whatever its short term positives,
with its Jewish model of tribal chauvinism and isolationism, risks ensuring
anti-Black racism the same way that Jewish chauvinism has always created anti-Semitism.
Ironically too, the Jewish desire to "retard Negro assimilation in the
interests of social pluralism," says Cox, has an inevitable backlash:
Black anti-Semitism. "No matter ... how specious or inapplicable such
a program might be for Negroes, it still will be advocated for them if it
seems to serve the purpose of the Jews." [COX, p. 190-191]
This whole scenario -- of Jewish inculcating
in Black political consciousness its own Black tribal chauvinism to protect
Jewish tribalism -- has had some backlash, in that the Black community has
turned hostile to Jewish "exclusivity." This backfired strategy
has parallel in the political machinations of the Jews in Israel where, in
the Israeli nurturing of the Muslim political organization, Hamas, against
the PLO, Hamas has grown to be the far greater threat to the Israeli state.
Ironically, while the Jewish community has
actively sought to destroy the unified socio-cultural model in America to
foster its own ethnocentric aims and agenda, the central magnet of distinctly
Jewish allegiance -- the modern state of Israel -- is a country modeled on
America's own deconstructed "melting pot" paradigm, with the simple
racist twist that it is exclusively structured for Jews only. As the first President of Israel, Ben Gurion,
proclaimed:
"Within the State the difference
between various kinds of Jews will be
obliterated in the course of time, the
communities and tribes will
sooner or later fuse into our national
and cultural entity." [COX, p.
187]
Particularly since the 1960's, with growing
Jewish chauvinism about Israel and renewed obsession with "particularist"
Jewish identity (both of which ran vehemently counter to the ideal of the
American ethnic "melting pot"), as well as enduring racial problems,
the Black community evolved into the same paradigm as the Jewish one, completely
rejecting not only the "white" values of mainstream "melting
pot" American society, but also -- by now nakedly apparent -- the Jewish
chauvinism that exploited Black suffering for Jewish economic, social, political,
and nationalist gain.
"I was in college with Jews in 1955
when the society was closed to them," says controversial African-American
professor Leonard Jeffries, "The civil rights struggle helped to open
up American society to Jewish people. But the tragedy is that once they got
in and won access to jobs and wealth, they closed the door behind them."
[GOLDBERG, p. 328]
Even in the history of American theatrical
entertainment, with Jews like Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Sophie Tucker, and
Fanny Brice rubbing burnt cork on their faces to appear onstage as "mammy
singers" and "coon callers," upwardly mobile Jewish exploitation
of a static, immovable and disempowered
Black underclass is symbolically revealed in this observation by Claire
Pajackowska :
"Of the number of Jewish performers
who appeared in 'black-face,' it
has been said: 'Blacks became a mask for
Jewish expressiveness with
one woe speaking through the voice of another."
[PAJACKOWSKA, p.
24]
Not quite. As Stephen Whitfield writes:
"The histories of African-American
and American Jews may not mirror
each other very much; it now looks a bit
eccentric ever to have believed
that their destinies were entwined ...
Irving Berlin ... wrote 'God Bless
America' (1938) in the same year that
Langston Hughes lamented that
'America never was America to me.'"
[WHITFIELD, A of B, p. 35
For starters, unlike the Black community,
from which there can be no escape from expressly racist discrimination, modern
Jews choose a worldview and allegiance that, by its very exclusionist
tenets of intra-Jewish tribal solidarity, has always -- sooner or later --
attracted anti-Jewish hostility, wherever they have lived in their diaspora.
In America, while Blacks floundered in social
and economic despair, Jews used them like stepstools to zoom up throughout
American society. "Because of the speed with which talented Jews injected
themselves into general society," says Jewish scholar Stephen Whitfield,
"a sensation of being shot from cannons, American Jewish culture could
never be far from its demotic origins." [WHITFIELD, AMERICAN, p. 10]
"Jews," says Gordon Lafar, another Jewish scholar, "... are
sufficiently integrated into positions of social and economic power that it
makes sense to think of them as bearing a special responsibility for those
made poor in the cause of the [American economic] system's operation."
[LAFAR, p. 204]
Jewish exploitation of the Black community
in the slums of New York City, for example, is legendary. It is also a situation
that some Jews have tried to disguise by hiding behind, as deemed necessary,
a generalized, and universalized "white face." A good example of
this is a 1973 scholarly study by a Jewish academic, David Caplovitz, entitled
Merchants of Harlem. Conducted through Columbia University for the
Harlem Commonwealth Council, "an organization that strives to stimulate
Black enterprise," the survey divided 259 interviews with business owners
in Central Harlem into two categories: "black" and "white."
Never in his discussion of the survey does Caplovitz mention the word "Jew."
This is profoundly disingenuous, especially
disturbing for a scholar supposedly seeking the sharpest of truths. Simply
stated: Caplovitz attempted to hide the crucial fact that the overwhelming
majority of the hated business exploiters in the poor Black slums, who went
home to better communities at night, were Jewish.
How Jewish were these "whites"
in Harlem? A reading of one of Caplovitz's own bibliographic sources notes
that an earlier study in the same area -- central Harlem -- found 80% of the
"white" store owners to be Jewish. But the real percentage was probably
even higher. Sociologist Herbert Gans (also Jewish) noted that "since
the study limited itself to 'neighborhood stores,' and excluded the large
shops on 125th and other major business streets, it underestimates [my
emphasis] the proportion of Jewish ownership." [GANS, p. 4]
Hasia Diner notes that in 1935 there was
"a Harlem campaign against white merchants.
The goal of the
campaign was to force white merchants in
the black community,
by means of a boycott, to hire black employees,
and pickets
were set up around selected shops. The
campaign was led by
Sufi Abdul Hamid (Eugene Brown), and its
rhetoric was laced
with anti-Semitism since many of the Harlem
merchants were
Jewish ... Referred to [in Jewish newspapers]
as the 'Black
Hitler,' Sufi's anti-Semitism was seen
as part of a worldwide
outbreak rather than as a natural outgrowth
of black-Jewish
economic relations. [DINER, p. 79] ...
By mid-March 1935
the Yiddish newspapers could not help but
discuss the
existence of intense wide-spread anti-Jewish
feeling in Harlem...
For three nights, beginning on March 19,
rioting ravaged the
business district of Harlem ... [200 stores
were destroyed and
the Yiddish newspapers referred to the
riots as pogroms]." [DINER,
p.
80]
How widespread has been the Jewish commercial
exploitation in the slums and ghettos in America at-large? "Whites"
(with the 80+ percent Jewish presence) were found to own about 47% of the
stores in Central Harlem. [GANS, p. 5] A U.S. government Kerner Commission
study of fifteen other American cities found parallel situations, that "39%
of the ghetto storeowners were Jewish." As evidenced in Caplovitz's Harlem
study, Black ownership was usually in small scale service establishments like
barber and beauty shops; "whites" owned 74% of the food stores,
72% of the apparel stores, 89% of the hardware stores, furniture, and appliance
stores, and over 60% of the liquor and drug stores. [GANS, p. 5]
And as Cheryl Greenberg notes:
"Walter White of the NAACP investigated
anti-Jewish attitudes in
the black community. His informal survey
of black leaders around
the country revealed widespread concern
about Jewish business
exploitation of African-Americans and a
certain level of frustration
of Jewish unresponsiveness to such problems
... Even Jewish
civil rights agencies recognized the patronizing
and occasionally
racist behavior of Jewish store owners and
launched programs in
New York, Chicago, Miami, Detroit and several
other cities to
improve their interaction with the local
African American
community." [GREENBERG, C., 1998, p.
66]
In 1964, Jewish scholar Gary Marx noted
that anti-Jewish attitudes among African-Americans especially existed in "Negro
city slums, such as New York's Harlem and Chicago's Bronzeville, where the
tradesmen, rent collectors, and real estate agents tend to be Jews."
[ROSE, P., 1981, p. 62] (Pro-Israel activist and wealthy 1960s leftist
Martin Peretz once became outraged when "he was awakened by the sound
of some of the [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee/SNCC] activists
camping out on his living room floor singing anti-Semitic doggerel about Jewish
landlords exploiting the black poor. The episode led to a confrontation with
Jim Forman, who told Peretz that Jews who owned stores in Harlam owed blacks
reparations." [RADOSH, R., 1996, p. 29]
In 1967, Thomas P. Hoving, then director
of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art
in New York City, came under fierce Jewish attack for his support of a museum
exhibition about the local African-American community, Harlem on My Mind.
This title, referring to a song written by Jewish composer Irving Berlin,
also came under heavy criticism by African-Americans for its implicit paternalism.
Such paternalism was also reflected in the fact that the show's curator, Allon
Schoener, was also Jewish. Hoving's crime against the Jews was to refuse to
censor the introduction to the exhibition's 255-page catalogue. Written by
a young African-American woman, Candice Van Ellison, it included the likes
of the following:
"Behind every hurdle that the Afro-American
has yet to jump, stands
the Jew who has already cleared it. Jewish
shopkeepers are the only
remaining 'survivors' in the expanding black
ghettos ... the lack of
competition in the area allows the already-exploited
blacks to be
further exploited by Jews ... Psychologically
speaking, blacks may
find that anti-Jewish sentiments place them,
for once, within a
majority ... our contempt for Jews makes
us feel more completely
American in sharing a national prejudice."
[VOLKMAN, p. 207]
Hoving, "under unbelievable pressure,
so great I don't think one person could stand it," finally caved in and
ordered the withdrawal of the catalogue (16,000 had been already sold). [VOLKMAN,
p. 208] For curator Allon Schoener's part, he publicly insisted, "There
was no attempt on my part to provoke anti-Semitic feelings. As a member of
the New York Jewish community, I believe we must face the realities of the
world in which we live. Miss Van Ellison has merely drawn attention to the
facts." [HOVING, T., 1993, p. 172]
In 1967, Harry Golden put an apologetic,
noble breadwinner spin on Jewish economic pre-eminence in America's ghettos,
and that massive Jewish exploitation of the African-American poor had its
positive sides:
"The Negroes burned the Jewish stores
in Watts in 1965 and Jewish
stores in Detroit twenty years earlier,
because, in the main, Jewish
stores were the only ones to burn. The Jew
was often the only
white man in a Negro ghetto. He was there
because he was willing
to take a chance he could make a modest
living out of the
poverty-stricken slum ... In countless instances,
the Jewish store
was the place to which the Negro came when
in trouble, when a
Negro parent needed a lawyer, or advice
on other important matters.
I do not mean that there was no exploitation
of the slum Negro. Indeed
there was. The poor always pay more for
less and the Negro is no
exception." [GOLDEN, H. 1967, p. 61-62]
"Before August 1965," says Jewish
author Paul Jacobs,
"when the burning and rioting [in the
Watts section of Los Angeles]
took place, most of the furniture and clothing,
and a good many of
the liquor and grocery stores in the area
were Jewish-owned, and many
of the owners did act in the way described
by the [African-American]
women [that Jacobs interviewed]. Specifically,
in addition to charging
high prices for often inferior merchandise
or standard brands, some
shopkeepers also made the women purchase
an item like a broom or
a mop before they would cash their welfare
checks. The liquor store
owners, too, often insist that a bottle
of expensive liquor be purchased
before they will cash the checks."
[JACOBS, P., 1967, p. 76]
In Watts, "Jews owned 80 percent of
the burned and looted furniture stores; 60 percent of the food markets and
54 percent of the liquor stores ... Some of them [were] cheating and unscrupulous
people." [JACOBS, P., 1967, p. 78] Common Jewish perspective to
the attacks against Jewish-owned stores was "anti-Semitism." As
Lenora Berson noted in 1971:
"Although no observers at any of the first
series of riots [in Watts] recall hearing
anti-Jewish slogans, the Jews nonetheless read
a kind of anti-Semitism into the fact
that the majority of white victims were Jews.
Until the riots, the larger Jewish community
had no doubt been ignorant of the extent of
the Jewish presence in the Negro slums.
Or perhaps they had only been subliminally aware
of the fact that ghetto shopowners
and ghetto landlords were frequently Jewish; for
some knowledge prompted them to see
the
simile of the pogroms ... As the second, third and fourth summers of violence
followed rapidly on the first, black hostility
toward Jews became more obvious.
Increasingly intermingled with the cries of
rage against whites were words of hatred
for the Jews ... Watts, unlike previous riot
sites, had never been a Jewish residential
neighborhood. It had from the first been occupied
by poor Negroes. Nonetheless
its economic life was governed by Jews, a fact
that was brought forcefully home
by the openly anti-Jewish declarations of many
of the residents." [BERSON, L.,
p. 338-341]
According to a 1970 survey of residents of two African-American
enclaves in Los Angeles (319 people interviewed in the Avalon and Crenshaw
locales), 87% of Black respondents had contact with Jewish merchants, 67%
had experience as an employee of a Jew, and 34% had experience with Jewish
landlords. "About 1 in 3 reported they have experienced some form of
mistreatment in their contacts with Jewish merchants, landlords, or employers
(33, 35 and 37 percent respectively)." [TSUKASHIMA, R., 1978, p. 39]
Slum lording is another huge story. "Antagonism
to the 'Jewish landlord,'" wrote African-American scholar Kenneth Clark
in 1946, "is so common as to become almost an integral part of
the folk culture of the Northern urban Negro." [GLAZER, NEGRO, p.]
Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish
Forward, noted that at the
turn of the century the Harlem area of New York City "usually swarmed
with Yiddish-speaking real estate speculators." [SCHACHTMAN, p. 78] In
1979, Jesse Jackson came under heated attacked by Jewish groups for drawing
public attention to "Jewish slumlords."
[STANFIELD, p. 184]
In Boston, for instance, "in 1965 Boston's
CORE chapter published and distributed a list of largely Jewish property owners
cited for state and city code violations." Seeing the list, the head of the local Anti-Defamation
League, Sol Kolack, warned his national office that slum housing "loomed
as a major cause of tension between the Boston Jewish and Negro community."
[LEVINE/HARMON, p. 185] "The
image of the Jewish slumlord was so strong," note Hillel Levine and Lawrence
Harmon,
"in fact, that it could not be even
erased by the Jewish 'checkbook
warriors' who contributed almost 75 percent
of the operating expenses
of CORE, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, and the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
The issue of the Jewish
slumlord was always close to the surface."
[LEVINE/HARMON, p.
185]
"The biggest problem" in Boston
for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee civil rights group,"
notes Jonathan Kaufman, "was that several Jews were the large landlords
in the black ghetto of Roxbury and had a reputation for rent gouging and overcharging."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 79] Such a Jewish "notorious slumlord" in the Boston area
was Maurice Gordon.
Among other prominent Jewish slumlords in
Boston were Israel, Joseph, and Raphael Mindick. They "were among the
largest property owners in the South End, where they managed 44 multifamily
buildings with eight hundred tenants, mostly black and Hispanic." The
Mindick family even named ten "shell companies" in shady business
arrangements after names found in Psalms 19 of the Torah. [HILLEL/HARMON,
p. 190] Black and Hispanic protesters planned to demonstrate
at Israel Mindick's synagogue, Beth El, where he "held a leadership role,"
[LEVINE/HARMON, p. 184] until the local rabbi promised to demonstrate with
the protesters, providing the rally was held elsewhere.
The protesters, declared Mindick, "are a bunch of anti-Semites."
[LEVINE/HARMON, p. 189]
And what of some of these Jewish real estate
wheelers and dealers, still a great proportion of inner-city slumlords to
this day? Among the most sensationally newsworthy in recent history include:
* Alexander Spitzer, of Los Angeles. In 1989 the Los Angeles
Times noted him to
be the "financier behind some of Los
Angeles' worst slums"
and a "central figure in the city's
landmark lawsuit this year
against slumlords and their lenders ...
The investors have included
prominent Jewish professors,
rabbis, and [Jewish] Soviet
émigrés. Spitzer, a Holocaust
survivor, has been a prominent
member of the city's Jewish
community for many years."
[MCMILLAN, p. B1]
* Samuel Rappoport, of Philadelphia. In 1993 a Philadelphia
Inquirer editorial urged that the "Philadelphia
government step
up efforts to rid [the]
city of slumlords like Samuel A.
Rappoport." [INF BANK,
PHL INQ, p. A22] In 1994 the
New York Times noted
that "Mr. Rappoport owned a
substantial amount of commercial
real estate in downtown
Philadelphia, becoming a
multimillionaire by acquiring decaying
center city properties when
prices were low and reselling them
at higher prices ... When
the city wanted to build the
Pennsylvania Convention
Center, it had to buy property held
by Mr. Rappoport ... The
same was true when the city made
plans for a new courthouse
and detention center ... As a result
of his generosity to Israel,
Mr. Rappoport was honored by the
Jewish National Fund for
paying to reclaim five housing sites in
the Negev desert for Jewish
immigrants." [NEW YORK
TIMES, 9-10-94, p. 26]
* Sam Israel, of Seattle. "When Sam Israel died [in 1994],"
noted
the Seattle Times,
"he owned more property in downtown
Seattle -- and had done
less with it -- than any other private
landowner in the city ...
Some of Israel's buildings housed
artists and low-income
tenants. They could afford cheap
rents, although many complained
about the crummy
conditions and called him
a slum lord." [KEENE, p. A1]
Israel owned 40 prime parcels
of downtown real estate as well
as the entire west side
of Soap Lake and 9,700 acres in Grant
County. Israel's will,
noted the Chicago Tribune, "left
instructions to keep his
empire together after his death ...
[worth $100-200 million], Israel's will leaves all
his properties
to the Samis Foundation,
which he established in 1987. The
foundation supports Jewish
education and various projects to
benefit the nation of Israel." [NOGAKI, p. 9G] "Israel
the
man," noted the Seattle
Times," loved Israel the state."
KEENE,p. A1]
* Jack, Harold and Dennis Topletz,
of Dallas. In 1999, the Dallas
Observer noted these
men to be "among the most notorious
slumlords" in the city.
Their attorney said that over the past
twenty years he had been
involved in contesting some 9,000
city code citations against their many slum properties.
"32
Topletz houses," said
the Observer, "are under police scrutiny
because drug dealers have
rented them at some time in the past
two years ... Scores of ... the Topletzes' houses ... are on the
most blighted streets of
South Dallas, West Dallas, and Oak
Cliff." In 1994 the
Dallas city attorney filed a lawsuit against the
Topletz family and "a
number of other relatives who ... own
interests in some of the
houses: Gloria Schwartz, Bennie A.
Goodman, Evelyn Lisner,
Richard Suckle, Abe Levin,
Gladys Levin, and Ivy Rabinowitz." In 1995 Jack Topletz
shot and killed a "would-be
robber" at his mansion. "Dallas
police filed a murder charge,
but a grand jury declined to
indict." The Topletz
empire also has included "mortgages
and loans to black churches"
at interest rates sometimes twice
that offered by savings and
loans organizations. "There is no
doubt that the family has
made a lot of money," noted the
Observer, "They
have donated millions to their temple,
Congregation Shearith Israel,
where an auditorium bears their
name." [KOROSEC, T.,
6-3-99]
* Vicki
Reynolds and Murray Pepper. Reynolds, the mayor of opulent
Beverly Hills in metropolitan Los Angeles, may or may not be Jewish. Her
husband, Pepper, is. In 2000, the couple was publicly embarrassed when local
news reports noted that they were part-owners of an interesting property in
Arizona:
"Phoenix's
most notorious slum property," which had just been raided by
police. Violations of housing laws, noted a police investigator, "could
run into the
hundreds."
The couple's lawyer said his clients owned "less than 51 percent"
of the 156-unit apartment complex. And it was Pepper "who gave Reynolds
a 2.89% interest in Canyon Square Apartments as a gift." Pepper had earlier
made the news in 1997 when he and another Jewish businessman set up the
first Cotsen-Pepper Master Teacher Fellowship Award: $30,000 to a teacher
to
"focus
public attention on the contributions of teachers in the Los Angeles-area
Bureau
of Jewish Education-affiliated religious schools." [VALERI, T., 7-27-97;
POOL,
B., 10-11-00, p. B1]
* Lou Wolf, of Chicago. In 1995, the Chicago Sun-Times cited
Wolf
as a "notorious slumlord
and convicted arsonist." [SMITH,
W., p. 45] Wolf, said the
same paper the next year, "has been
one of the city's most notorious
real estate owners for three
decades. He was dubbed 'Chicago's
Worst Landlord' by
Chicago Magazine in
1989." [NEUBAUER, p. 4] In 1992,
Wolf's "associates"
-- Melvin Glick and Gregory
Berkowitz -- were defenders in a civil racketeering lawsuit
against them filed by the
city. [IHERJIRIKA, p. 4]
* Charles Swibel, of Chicago. In 1990, upon his death, the Chicago
Tribune noted that
Swibel "was a favorite target of Chicago
newspaper editorials because
of his ownership of West Side
slum and Madison Street Skid
Row properties." [CHIC.
TRIB., p. 1-20-90, p. C5]
"This will be a loss to the Jewish
community," noted a
Chicago politician, "because he was a
shining example of his heritage."
[CHIC TRIB, 1-20-90, p. C5]
* Mordechai Ben-Horin, of Los Angeles. In 1989 Ben-Horin and
Dan Tepper were
"the latest in a long, tangled strand of
investors to own the Cameo,
one of the city's worst slums ...
Yet a third man, Rami Greenwald, is listed by the secretary of
state's office as [their slum
lord] firm's president." [WOOD, p.
1] The Los Angeles Times
noted also that the "late Los Angeles
philanthropist, Ben Weingart, ... made his fortune in Skid
Row real estate." [WOOD,
p. 1]
* Barry Mankowitz, of Washington DC. Mankowitz, who was
featured in a 1989 journal
for "turning good," avowed that "his
role was to 'bleed the property'
in low-income housing owned
by his employers in the inner city slums of Washington
DC and
Baltimore. 'We didn't keep
the houses fixed up,' he says. 'Being
on the profit side, it wasn't
our philosophy to do it.' The idea
was to 'sell and get out.'" [SCHRIENER, p. 32]
* Marcus Lehmann and Morris Wolfson,
of New York City.
"Their tenants live in
a dozen Manhattan tenements, mostly in
Harlem," noted New York's
Daily News in 1995, "that have
been hit with some 5,000
housing violations in recent years."
[MICHELINI, p. 2]
* Arthur Schreiber, of Cincinnati. In 1996 the Cincinnati Enquirer
reported that Schreiber
"is a slumlord who uses federal
funds to make money while
providing substandard housing
for the poor." The
slumlord was sued by the local Legal
Aid Society twice. Sue Livensparger,
an attorney for the
rights organization, noted
that Schreiber was "one of the
most difficult landlords
for us to deal with." In court
proceedings, Schreiber declared
his worth to be close to
$3 million, including Israel
bonds. [McWHIRTER, p. B1]
* Mark Glass, of Brooklyn. Glass was tried in 1997 for plotting the
murder of two of his tenants.
Assistant District Attorney
Francine James noted that
Glass was "much more than a
slumlord, but a very violent
and unconscionable man, an
individual who for years
has systematically intimidated,
threatened, and engaged
in acts of arson, illegal eviction of
tenants, and now the worst
of all crimes -- the conspiracy to
kill." [HURTADO, p.
A37] Short of murder, "prosecutors
say Glass was trying to
get rid of tenants who complained
about squalid conditions,"
noted the upstate Buffalo News,
"then take advantage
of recent changes in rent control laws to
charge a higher rent." [DUBVIK, p. 6A]
* Jeffrey Friedman, of Cleveland. Chairman and CEO of Associated
Estates Realty Corporation,
he and other members of the
Milstein family own about
15 percent of the firm. AER owns
or manages 35,000 apartments
in 15 states with $143 million in
revenue in 1998 alone. Many
are federally subsidized low-
income units. In 1999 Associated
Estates repeatedly made
headlines in Cleveland for
three of its run-down, "lead-
contaminated and pest-ridden"
apartment complexes which
housed 1,400 families. "End,"
headlined a Cleveland Plain
Dealer editorial,
"subsidized squalor." "While there are
conditions of which we are
not proud," announced AER
vice-president and general
counsel Martin Fishman, "they
are not conditions which
threaten the health of the tenants.
We took our eye off the properties for a short time and for
that suffered dramatic consequences."
[AP, Problems] At
least 67 children were contaminated
by lead. Associated
Estates also "falsely
claimed that filthy apartments were
ready to rent," [PLAIN
DEALER, End, p. 10B] The
company even charged the
U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development (from
which it had received $94
million over the years)
$73,000 for everything from "pizza
and cellular phone bills"
to fees for a public relations firm,
William Silverman & Co., and a consultant,
George
Engel, to "defend the property's
reputation and image and to
present the property in
the best light to the public and the
media." [O'MALLEY,
p. 1A]
*Abraham and Michael Slochowsky, of Brooklyn. The Village
Voice noted that
"in the mid 1980s ... Abraham Slochowsky
... made headlines for
his role in the largest arson ring in the
country -- a scheme that
burned 37 buildings in three
boroughs, injured 44 firefighters,
and netted the enterprise
more than half a million
dollars in insurance money." In
1998, 570 housing violations
still remained on their slum
holdings. "In at least seven buildings across Brooklyn,
tenants live for days without
heat, months with rotten
plumbing, and years without
locks on their front doors."
[LOBBIA, J., p. 34]
* Alan Ross, of Berkeley, California. In 1999 the San Francisco
Examiner noted that
"Alan Ross, owner of the Aldrich
Hotel Tenderloin district,
was shocked to hear his building
was on the list [of San Francisco's Ten Worst Residential
Hotels]. Ross, a Berkeley
professor, said he leased the
hotel to an operator."
[SULLIVAN, K., 1999, p. A1]
* Baruch Singer, of New York. Singer owns over 50 buildings
in poor neighborhoods in
Manhattan, north of 96th Street.
Five Harlem buildings alone
have garnered nearly 2,000
housing code violations.
In 1995, one of his slum buildings
collapsed, killing three
people. The technical landlord of the
building, Marcus Lehman, has never even seen the
building.
He has also been known
to use pit bulls "to expedite at least
one illegal eviction."
In 1999 City councilman Bill Perkins
called Singer "the
worst slumlord I have ever seen in Harlem."
Singer's former partner,
Leslie Westreich, is a disbarred
lawyer. An official from
HUD noted that the loss of his license
to practice law was "definitely
related to his conduct in real
estate." Singer has
friends in high places. New York State
Assemblyman Sheldon Silver sponsored a bill "intended
to
benefit Singer only"
in his attempts to acquire a building.
Under heavy media fire
for his help of the slumlord,
Assemblyman Silver explained that "Baruch's
father [Yitzhak
Singer] is the rabbi of
my synagogue. When your rabbi's son
asks for assistance, you
try to help." [NEWFIELD, J., 11-9-
99, p. 4; NEWFIELD/O'MAHONY, p. 6]
* Gerald Schuster, of Boston/New York. In 1999 the Village Voice
publicly wondered why Hillary
Clinton attended a $500,000
fundraiser hosted by Schuster's
wife, Elaine. "Real estate
tycoon" Schuster inherited
his Wingate Construction
Company from his father-in-law,
Bert Siegel. As early as
1977 a Boston newspaper
has called Schuster one of that
city's worst slumlords
with 1,200 housing code violations
in a two-year span. Schuster's
company took over the
management of the Beekman
Housing Project in the South
Bronx in 1996, a complex that has been since subject to “at
Least” 1,600 housing violations.
[VEST, J., 12-21-99, p. 31]
* Milton Avol, of Los Angeles. Avol (nicknamed "the Rat Lord"),
a Beverly Hills neurosurgeon, was sentenced in 1988
to serve
30 days "in one of
his own run-down, vermin-infested
buildings." [ASSOCIATED
PRESS, p. C6] Avol was once
called "the most recalcitrant
slumlord in Los Angeles" by a
city prosecutor. [AP, 8-31-88]
* Aaron Kempe, also of Beverly Hills. In 1989 a judge ordered
Kempe to spent 45 days
in his own run-down hotel. Kempe
was permitted, however,
to leave the hotel an hour a day to
"attend religious
services at a Beverly Hills synagogue."
[HARRIS, M., 1-27-89]
* Morris Grass, of Brooklyn. In 1988 Grass -- like Avol and Kempe
across the country -- was
sentenced to be "under house arrest
for 15 days in one of his
own dilapidated buildings."
[JETTER, p. 19]
* The Metz family and Harvey Vengroff,
of Long Island. These
people were noted in a
1999 Long Island newspaper article as
prominent slumlords in
their region. "Since 1988," announced
the Long Island Voice,
"the village of Hempstead, the Nassau
County district attorney's
office and the state attorney general
have sued and investigated
the Metz family numerous times
for an extremely varied
report card of violations, including
rent-gouges and harassing
tenants, renting low-income state-
assisted apartments to
ineligible tenants, defrauding co-op
buyers in Rockville Center,
mishandling security deposits and
accepting federal rehab
funds without working on the
properties." Patriarch
James Metz's daughter, Katie, is a 1998
graduate Columbia's Graduate
School of Journalism and a
practicing journalist.
Harvey Vengroff, aside from
slum lording holdings,
is the owner of the second-largest
collection agency in America.
He owns two Rolls Royces
and five boats. [FRIEDMAN/HARKAVY,
5-19-99, p. 10]
*
Sam Menlo, of Los Angeles. "Case files bulge with the bureaucratic
legacy
of Sam Menlo's life as a landlord: code violations, thousands
of
them, at rental units beset with everything from vermin and mold to
wretched
plumbing. With a real-estate empire spanning Los Angeles,
Riverside,
San Bernardino and Orange Counties, Menlo has a 30-year
track
record of skirmishes with city and state agencies, capped last fall
with
a sentence to live for a time in his own filthy Anaheim complex ...
Some
units were so moldy that mushrooms sprouted from the ceiling ...
Menlo
was no small-time landlord without the means to fix the place up.
He
was an extremely wealthy man -- and one continually in trouble with
cities
throughout the region ... Menlo, as owner and operator of the
[Nursing
homes], battled Los Angeles County and the state Department
of
Health services for eight years during the 1970s over more than 2,000
health
code violations and 78 counts of alleged criminal neglect at his
nursing
homes. Investigators found patients lying in beds full of excrement
and
urine and one patient with bedsores infested by maggots ...
.....
At synagogues and charities throughout
the
region, Menlo has an entirely different reputation: that of a Holocaust
survivor
of exceptional decency and philanthropy. In letters to the court
in
the Anaheim case asking for leniency, at least 10 rabbis or directors of
of
Southern California Jewish schools, synagogues or associations
enumerated
Menlo's generosity. 'He's a fine man. He's just a marvelous
person,"
said Rabbi Yonason Denebeim of the Chabad of Palm Springs,
where
Menlo has donated thousands of dollars over the last 15 years. "I
wish there were more folks like him." [Menlo is worth $154 million]
[YOSHINO, Y., 12-30-01]
*
Stuart Kaplow, of Columbus, Ohio. "[Judge] Pfeiffer's warning
came
after
E. 9th residents reported that Kaplow was not complying with a
a
May 29 order by the judge after the landlord pleaded guilty to four
housing-code
violations. Pfeiffer told Kaplow that he must live in one
of
his apartments until he fixes code violations in more than 20 of the
700
housing units he owns thoroughout Columbus. To comply with Pfeiffer's
order,
Kaplow was to move by midnight Monday from his $1.3 million home."
[RUTH,
R., 6-14-01]
Another version of the exploitation of American
urban areas, in this case in the Hispanic community (and the "funnel
profits to Israel theme"), is the case of Irving Moskowitz, controversial
Miami-based gambling baron in the small metropolitan Los Angeles city of Hawaiian
Gardens. Moskowitz has repeatedly made international news for his support
of right-wing Jewish groups and their projects in Israel. In 1999, the Hawaiian
Garden's city attorney, Julia Sylva, quit her position in outrage at Moskowitz's
callous exploitation of the local community. She charged that over $58 million
raised in Moskowitz's Hawaiian Gardens operations go to Israel each year "and
the city gets zero." [ASSOCIATED PRESS, 3-24-99] She also noted the disturbing
conflict of interest of Jewish attorney Beryl Weiner, who was both Moskowitz's
lawyer and the attorney for Hawaiian
Garden's redevelopment agency. Sylva contended that city development plans
would in effect subsidize new Moskowitz casino expansion with $20 million
of taxpayer money. [SHUIT, p. B1]
Moskowitz actually pays the city $200,000
a month. He owns a third of the town's commercial property. He is so powerful
in this Hispanic community (he lives in Florida and Israel), that when he
once stopped his monthly payments the city had to lay off all 21 members of
its police force. Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, who lives in a nearby city and is
critical of Moskowitz's far-right views about Israel, notes the Hawaiian Gardens
situation: "It's the kind of company town in which Moskowitz calls all
the shots." [TUGEND, T., 7-16-2000]
Another such Jewish entrepreneur, in another
ethnic community, was Paul Ziffren. "When Ziffren first came to L.A.
during World War II," notes Dennis McDougal,
"he demonstrated just how well [Jewish
politician Jacob] Arvey had
taught him the lessons of political exploitation,
by organizing a
consortium of investors who bought property
vacated by Japanese-
Americans during their wartime internment. Ziffren worked closely
with attorney David Bazelon, yet another
Arvey protégé, who had
been appointed by [President] Truman to
oversee 'alien' land sales.
Bazelon did such a good job that President
Truman rewarded him
with a federal judgeship. Ziffren did such
a good job that dozens
of shady Chicago investors, including partner
Alex Louis Greenberg,
earned tidy profits from his real estate
consortium."
[MCDOUGAL, p. 141]
"We have to understand who our true enemies are," declared
Sherry Brown, the African-American president of the Frederic Douglas Community
Improvement Council in southeast Washington DC, in 1979, "Jews have historically
profited as slumlords and merchants from the suffering of black people."
[STANFIELD, p. 184] As Leona Fulani,
head of the "black-led, women-led, multicultural, pro-gay" New Alliance
Party once observed: "I do not believe it is insignificant that a slumlord
is Jewish." [COHEN/BUDMAN, 2-21-92, p. 13] Radical left-wing SDS activist
Steven Simone Cohen explained in 1972 his personal abandonment of Zionist
and Judeocentric activism: "After a while I began looking around and
seeing that the ghetto merchants and landlords were all Jewish and were exploiting
the blacks like mad. And all those self-righteous Jewish liberals openly spout
the most incredible racism. That finally clinched it for me." [ADELSON,
A., p. 126] "In America,"
once noted Malcolm X, "the Jews sap the life-blood of the so-called Negroes
to maintain the state of Israel, its armies, and its continued aggression
against our brothers in the East. This every Black Man resents." [KAUFMAN,
J., 1988, p. 135]
Blacks even faced overwhelming Jewish hegemony
in the New York school systems. A 1964 report noted that of 1200 top-level
administrators and 800 principals in the New York City schools, five people
were black. "By 1967 approximately two-thirds of New York's teachers,
supervisors, and principals were Jewish."
[KAUFMAN, J., 1988, p. 138] "Now," said Nathan Glazer, "the
Negro teacher works under a Jewish principal, the Negro social worker under
a Jewish supervisor ... What makes this situation even worse is that part
of the blame for the poor education of Negro children can be placed on this
white (but concretely Jewish) dominance." [GLAZER, NEGRO, p. 30]
"We are witnessing today," proclaimed Brooklyn's Afro-American
Teachers' Association in the 1960s, "in New York City a phenomenon that
spells death for the minds and souls of our black children. It is the systematic
coming of age of the Jews who dominate and control the educational bureaucracy
of the New York public school system ... In short, our children are being
mentally poisoned." [GINZBURG, p. 154]
By 1990, while 80% of New York City's school
children were not "white," three-quarters of the school principals,
assistant principals, teachers, and guidance counselors were. Most of these
people remained Jewish. [ZUCKERMAN, p. 23] New York City school politics, note Hillel Levine and Lawrence
Harmon, have reflected the "largely
Jewish-led United Federation of Teachers." [HILLEL/HARMON, p. 213]
(In the broader national sphere, when Albert Shanker stepped down in
recent history, after many years (1974-1997), as the president of the American
Federation of Teachers, another Jewish official, Sandra Feldman, took his
place. Elsewhere in the union world, Andrew Stern is president of Service
Employees International Union, representing workers in casinos and hospitals.
Stern is also vice-president of the Jewish Labor Committee). [SMITH, B., 6-5-98,
p. 1]
This Black-Jewish educational wars, common to urban
areas, surfaced in Oakland, California, in 1999. As a Jewish ethnic newspaper
framed it, in terms of Black anti-Semitism:
"Oscar Wright lit the fuse in December
when he remarked that an attempt to
oust the district's superintendent was
a play for 'white and Jewish control' of
the predominantly minority district.
He has continued to make such comments
at school board meetings and to the press,
which has in turn given wide
coverage to his statements. Wright, 76,
is a community activist and the appointed
co-chair of the school district's Task
Force on African-American students. He
has a history of anti-Semitic speech
dating back to at least 1993. 'Wright should
be removed from the task force,' said
Jan Malvin, who works for Oakland's
Human Relations Commission and has been
following Wright's case for several
years. Malvin, who is Jewish, said, 'The
issue is racist rhetoric at the school
board in general. Anti-Semitism is part
of the bigger picture.' In 1993, Wright told
the board that a cadre of Jews from the
schools to the government to businesses
was responsible for some of the 'wickedest
acts of institutional racism against
black people.' Local Jews didn't want
to hear it again. 'He's the wrong person
to hold an official position,' said Barbara
Bergen, regional director of the
Anti-Defamation League ... Wright's anti-Semitic
epithets, however, are apparently
directed
at school board member Dan Siegel and Alameda County Superintendent
of Schools Sheila Jordan. Both are Jewish
... Wright has not been the only one to
denounce
Jews in the Oakland school district in recent history. Superintendent
Jordan said that when she was on the
school board from 1988 to 1992, a flurry
of anti-Semitic remarks was hurled at
Jewish board members. Some Jewish
members ended up resigning." [SCHUSTER,
J., 3-5-199, p. 12A]
In 1959, before heightened Black-Jewish
tensions, in a survey of businesses in the
same Harlem area that David Caplovitz later disingenuously analyzed in 1964,
the same author was more open in his assessments about the economic dynamics of the inner city: "Many,
if not all, of the merchants [interviewed] happen to be Jews and many of the
customers are Negroes." These merchants, says Roberta Feuerlicht, "used
all the traditional tricks to prey upon the poor: installment plans, overpricing,
and switch-and-bait tactics. [FEUERLICHT, p. 191] (Even in a study of the
Jews of Costa Rica, Lowell Gudmundson observes that "this development
of installment credit to the lower orders was by all accounts a Jewish innovation
in Costa Rican commerce." [GUDMUNDSON, p. 222] This attitude, as noted
elsewhere, is a long Jewish tradition. During the California Gold Rush, Charles
Elmer Upton noted similar kinds of hijinks from Jewish merchants he saw in
the Placerville area: "During the summer and fall of 1849, Jewish peddlers
freequently came into the foothills with merchandise to sell to the Americans
and the Indians ... A blue or red shirt would sell for at least half an ounce
of gold and the Jewish trader would invariably get the better part of the
bargain, as the settlers had no means of weighing their gold. The peddler
would put the desired article of purchase in one side of his scale and insist
upon the buyer's pouring sufficient gold dust into the other side to balance
the goods. But, while the Americans were invariably cheated in all these transactions,
it was the poor, ignorant Indians who suffered the worst in their dealings
with those rascally traffickers. Doubtless my readers can readily understand
how so many of these self-same Jews afterward became wealthy and prominent
merchants in various California towns.") [LEVINSON, R., 1978, p. 27]
The Black poor of New York would choose, said Caplovitz,
between "foregoing major purchases and thereby forfeiting whatever self-esteem
is to be derived from consumption, or being exploited." [FEUERLICHT,
p. 191] "Owners of tenements and stores," tempers Herbert Gans,
also a Jewish scholar, "exploit the slum dwellers whatever their
race or religion." [GANS, p. 6] The clinical sociological term for
such Jewish exploitation of the poor is "succession": i.e., as one
lower-economic caste group leaves the American ghetto, another takes its place.
This theory fails to explain the fact, however, that so few of the millions
of other European immigrants who came to America with the Eastern European
Jews at the turn of the twentieth century could be found so furiously exploiting
the ghettos.
With incessant currents of Jewish Judeo-centrism
and Black counter-ethnocentrism increasingly sparking serious tribal animosities
between them (in 1998 a phone poll of 999 people noted that African-Americans
are four times as likely to have "anti-Semitic" attitudes than whites
[THE RECORD, 11-25-98, p. L1], in 1996 a Jewish scholar, Mary Lefkowtiz, came
out with a much-discussed volume entitled Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism
Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History. The book is a strident attack
upon a current in modern African-American scholarship which, among other things,
claims that ancient Greek culture was really rooted in -- and owes a deep
debt to -- African civilization. In this scenario, even Socrates turns up
a Black man.
Why, one wonders, of all scholars of the
Greek classics, would it be a Jew who stand ups to defend the traditional
Greek and Roman foundations of western civilization? Lefkowitz passionately
flags the predictable platitudes of the search for truth, academic integrity,
et al, but a more likely answer is to be found (along with a Lefkowitz credit
to Simon Wiesenthal Center scholar Harold Brackman) in her passing mention
of an Afro-centric Black scholar who teaches -- aside from the Africanization
of Greek culture and the greater gravity of the Black slave "Holocaust"
over the Jewish one -- that Jews aren't really Jews. Africans are. (In this
scenario, Ashkenazi [European] Jews
are "imposters." Note for instance, the directly confrontation and
appropriative title of one of the volumes of this genre of Black scholarship:
The African Origins of Modern Judaism).
For Jews, of course, such a charge is more
than ridiculous, more than explosive; it is beyond comprehension, far beyond
even the obscenities of the accursed "Holocaust deniers." When some
Blacks dare to impugn Jewish identity itself, as merely white fakers, it is
the grounds for an ideological tribal war of the most profound proportions.
Yet Black attempts to claim the even higher loft of Jewish martyrology identity
for themselves cannot be dignified, and legitimized, by Jews in open discourse,
by expressly confronting it. (The same is true, for instance, in invitations
Jewish scholars get from "Holocaust deniers" to publicly debate
them about whether the Holocaust really happened. "To debate them would imply two sides,"
says Herschel Shanks, "with room for legitimate disagreement. [For Jewish
scholars] to appear with them ... would only give the lie wider exposure."
[SHANKS, p. 5] ) So how can Jews attack the Black "Afro-centrist"
position and claim the hallowed rung of "being Jewish" itself without
attacking Black appropriation directly and conferring legitimacy upon the
defilers of the Jews' own "myths of history?"
The Greeks.
"Africans are demanding that ordinary
historical methodology be discarded in favor of a system of their own choosing,"
complains Lefkowitz, "This system allows them to ignore chronology and
facts if they are inconvenient for their purposes. In other words, their historical
methodology allows them to alter the course of history to meet their own specific
needs ... Everyone should be aware that there are real dangers in allowing
history to be rewritten ... Writing and teaching such ethnic histories, each
with its own brand of 'ethnic truth,' sanctions the inventions of falsehood."
[LEFKOWITZ, p. 8]
It should go without saying, of course, (but
it must be noted because Jewish myth is so thoroughly "naturalized"
in the modern world) that such a condemnation can also be used with equal
academic force and moral authority about the Jewish myths of martyrology that
so many of them enforce as irrefutable "history." All Jewish misfortune
is defined by their myths of victimization at the hands of irrational anti-Semites.
In the ghetto situation, Black wrath
against Jewish (and others') exploitation of them and other injustices have
sometimes exploded into riots in America's inner cities. Such violence is
typically understood by Jews involved in the exploitation of the Black community
as an assault upon Jewish innocence. It is an old, recurring Jewish theme.
Jews act negatively towards others, Gentiles react negatively back. And thus
arises the paradigm for Jewish comprehension of the world: "anti-Semitism."
"Jews are not like others in their reaction to crime," says Stephen
Isaacs, "In their reactions to the threat of neighborhood disruption.
There is a sense of deja vu, for disruption of neighborhoods was part of the pogroms in
Eastern Europe. Jews had a very special reaction to the black rioters in the
'60s for the same reason." [ISAACS, p. 178]
Afrocentric ideology in fact borrows heavily
from deconstructive engines within European-centric culture that are largely
Jewish. Black scholar Molefi Kete Asante, in his volume entitled The Afrocentric
Idea, argues that "the critical theorists, particularly those of
the Frankfurt School, are engaged in a somewhat similar enterprise [as Afrocentrists]
in re-orienting thinking. The difference, however, is profound. Jurgen Habermas,
Herbert Marcuse, Thedor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer are essentially embroiled
in a Eurocentric family debate over the nature of ideology." [ASANTE,
1987, p. 4] The Marxist-Freudian Frankfort school, as noted elsewhere, was
overwhelming a Jewish intellectual
enterprise (both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud were also Jewish) -- all those
cited here by Asante, as those embroiled in a "Eurocentric" reorienting
of ideology, are Jewish. Asante even quotes Raymond Geuss who wrote that the
Marxist and Freudian view "exhibit such strong similarities in their
essential epistemic structure that from a philosophical point of view they
don't represent two different kinds of theory, but merely two instances of
a single new type." [ASANTE, p. 4]
Meanwhile, in the face of inner city riots
and throughout the civil rights era, in the face of a virtual stasis of poverty
in the African-American community, the editor of Harper's magazine,
Willie Morris, a non-Jew who was part of the New York Jewish publishing clique,
observed that
"It was disconcerting to discover that
political liberals and radicals,
whose warmth and spirit I admired, all had
summer homes, as I myself
would one day." [KOSTELANETZ, p. 76]
Morris was referring to the likes of Lionel
Trilling, Jason Epstein, and Robert Silvers, literary powerbrokers of the
1960's and 1970's Jewish liberal intellectual establishment, each who was
a member of The Century, Manhattan's most prestigious private club.
[KOSTELANETZ, p. 76] Epstein -- public
champion of the New Left's ideological struggles for the impoverished and
the oppressed -- had a "cabin cruiser ... at Manhattan's seventy ninth
street basin ... European wardrobes,
the proper private schools for the kids, the English boot maker ... [all]
classed, in radical parlance anyway, with the problem [of modern materialist
culture] and not the solution." [NOBILE, p. 95] Even Jewish communists
tended to come from petite bourgeois origins and had difficulty connecting
to common working people. [LIEBMAN, A. p. 499]
Many 1960s Jewish "liberals" and
"radicals" functioned within a status paradox. As members of the
bourgeoisie, they attacked the bourgeoisie, vicariously, expressing their
"radical" side through identification with the Black civil rights
movement. "The most popular negative
figure in current Negro writing," noted Arthur Hertzberg in 1964, "is
no longer the white oppressor or the Negro Uncle Tom, it is the white (often
Jewish) amateur Negro .... [HERTZBERG, p. 295] .... [These] alienated Jews
have, in essence agreed with the gentile attack on middle class culture; they
have even quite openly accepted the identification of this unlovely world
with the Jewish bourgeoisie." [HERTZBERG, p. 295]
"Contemporary
Jewish radical youth are often the offspring of affluent, successful parents,"
wrote Milton Plesur in 1982, "but those same parents did not allow prosperity
or a move to the suburbs destroy their idealism. And as a matter of fact,
many of them were considered the radicals of an earlier day." [PLESUR,
M., 1982, p. 137]
Even in the 1920s Maurice Hindus argued
that the Jewish tendency towards political "radicalism" or "liberalism"
was not motivated by universalist altruism but, rather, its use as a guise
for a particularist self-fulfillment:
"Basking in affluence, [the Jews]
may find radicalism -- or its milder
brother, liberalism -- intriguing, but
usually as a diversion, as a means
of intellectual escape, rather than
a method of social change or a code
of social behavior." [PORTER, p.
12]
Irving Howe, in reviewing his life among
fellow Jewish political radicals, observes that widespread Jewish dedication
to left wing universalism was illusory; at root there was always a particularist
Jewish current:
"Together with what intellectuals
(or Socialists) wrote and thought
there was also what we felt, and what we
felt was rarely in accord
with what we wrote or thought. In the daily
course of our lives --
the lives of, say, young Socialists born
to Jewish parents -- the
fact of Jewishness figured much more strongly
than we acknowledged
in public. We still didn't 'identify' with
a Jewish tradition, yet in practice
we grew increasingly concerned with Jewish
themes. [HOWE, 1982, p.
251]
"In short," adds Jack Porter,
also Jewish, "it is the material condition of life that will propel the
Jew into radicalism, and when such conditions improve [for him], the Jew will
tend to leave radical movements, except for certain vestigial aspects."
[PORTER, p. 12]
Resultant recognition of, and responsibility
for, Jewish exploitation -- at every level -- of the Black community is completely
lost to mainstream Jewry. "Jews are furious with the African-American
community," wrote Joshua Halberstam in 1997, "This anger is but
one emotion in a throng of others that includes fear, frustration, alienation,
a sense of betrayal, disdain, and utter bewilderment. Especially bewilderment.
'Where,' Jews wonder, 'did all the [Black] venom come from?' ... [HALBERSTAM,
p. 240] .... More and more Jews are becoming indifferent to the protests and
complaints of African-Americans." [HALBERSTAM, p. 242]
What about the Hispanic community, other
Jewish brothers and sisters in early civil rights wars? The exploitation of
impoverished Mexican-Americans in Jewry's bid to scale the American socio-economic
ladder parallels that of Jewish-African-American history. In Los Angeles,
a Jewish politician, Ed Roybal, rose to power in 1949 via a coalition of "Eastside
Jews and Latinos." "Out of 40 invited guests [to a fundraiser for
Royal]," notes the Los Angeles Times, "15 showed up -- all
Jews ... The money went to established Community Service Organization (CSO),
which promptly set about mobilizing the largely dominant Mexican American
community ... Jewish support for CSO had even broader ramifications as the
organization went on to become a powerful force both in Los Angeles and throughout
the state." [FEINGOLD, D., 10-21-98, p. E1]
When UFW leader Cesar Chavez "organized
his first field worker strike in Oxnard in 1958, the funds came from Los Angeles-based
Jewish labor leader Ralph Helstein's United Packing House Workers of America."
Other major Jewish supporters of the UFW's early grape boycott were Sigmund
Arywitz and Max Mont. Politician Howard Berman, "friend" of Chavez
and "now a Congressman representing a largely Latino division in the
Valley," authored California's Agricultural Labor Relations Act. "The
ties," says Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the UFW, "was very, very
strong with the Jewish community and have continued through the years."
"The Jewish community," notes Julian Nava, the first Mexican American
to be elected to the Los Angeles school board, "was fundamental not only
in fund-raising but in lending the support of many community groups."
[FEINGOLD, D., 10-21-98, p. E1]
This Jewish assistance all seems noble, but
the pattern over time exactly mirrors the situation between Jews and Blacks
during the civil rights era: Latinos have been merely stepping stones for
collective Jewish advancement. When the Jewish community secured their enormous
socio-economic and political power, for years incongruously mixed in the ranks
of impoverished Hispanics and African-Americans, they then abandoned their
non-Jewish colleagues in the civil rights struggle. As the Los Angeles
Times noted in 1998,
"The income levels of Jews rose dramatically
in the decades following
World War II, creating a class divide between
the two groups ... The
communities literally grew more distant
... Some Latinos felt that the
Jewish community has retreated from the
cause of social justice."
[FEINGOLD, D., 10-21-98, p. E1]
As Danny Feingold adds about today's looming
Jewish economic oppression of poor Mexican Americans,
"While a sizeable Latino middle class
has emerged in Los Angeles,
there is still a formidable class division
between the two communities
-- illustrated most vividly, perhaps, by
the city's garment industry,
where Jews account for a significant percentage
of ownership and
Latinos make up the majority of the work
force." [FEINGOLD, D.,
10-21-98, p. E1]
This is the traditional clothing "sweat
shop" milieu, where workers -- many from Mexico who are in America illegally
-- have few rights and are freely exploited at very low pay. In Jewish history,
even a dominantly oppressive grape grower like Lionel Steinberg (who "at
one time was one of the [Coachella] desert's largest [grape] growers, producing
10 percent of the desert's total acreage") is rendered a friend of the
exploited farm worker. Steinberg's claim to humaneness was that he was the
first grower to sign a table grape contract with the UFW, in 1970. "Immersed
in Democratic politics," as "a Jew," notes a local Coachella
Valley newspaper, "he contributed time and money to Israeli causes."
[HENRY, M., 3-9-99, p. B1]
y.
As Jewish scholar Joel Koktkin notes about traditional
Jewish/Hispanic relations: " Unlike Jews and Gentiles, or African Americans,
Jews and Latinos share little history or mythology. For the most part, their
contacts have been opportunistic. Jews have employed Latinos in garment factories,
as maids and gardeners and serviced them as customers in a host of enterprises
from Whittier Boulevard to Santee Alley and Pico-Union." [KOTKIN, J.,
3-25-01, p. M, p. 1]
Members of the Hispanic community these days
have even taken hits as 'anti-Semites." In San Francisco, in a situation
paralleling Jewish hegemony in New York City schools over the African-American
community, Latina activist Pilar Mejia, principal of Cesar Chavez Elementary
School, was transferred from her position after complaints by Jewish teachers
and the intervention of the strident American Jewish Congress lobbying organization.
Her crime? "One of the most outspoken defenders of immigrant children,"
noted the San Francisco Examiner in 1999, "[Mejia] apologized
today for having openly lamented that 'three white Jewish women' were teaching
Spanish-speaking kids." Mejia's gripe rested on the fact that that 65%
of the children in her school "spoke little if any English." Frank
Duhl, a Jewish ex-husband, came to Mejia's defense against the charge that
she was anti-Semitic. "I've known Pilar for 30 years," he said.
"We have two sons. She is not anti-Jewish. The superintendent removed
her because she was accused of intolerance. This is a woman who has been fighting
intolerance and injustice all her life." [GUTHRIE, J., 2-10-99, p. A1]
Growing Jewish-Hispanic balkanization is
even reflected in the politics of a street name change. In 1995, in metropolitan
Los Angeles, city managers in the San Fernando Valley decided to rename a
street in honor of Cesar Chavez. The obscure street to be changed was called
Kalisher. Kalisher is a Jewish surname, and soon enough a local Jewish actress,
Bonnie Kalisher, came forward with a petition of 500 signatures requesting
that the street keep its original name. Kalisher had discovered that the street
was named in 1874 after a Jewish immigrant named Wolf Kalisher (no direct
relation), a man who, she said, had helped local Native Americans. [LOS ANGELES
TIMES, 5-28-95, p. B18]
Jewish activism has been sharply expanding
recently into forging pragmatic political bonds with the Hispanic community,
largely because the Mexican-American community of the southwestern United
States has been enormously growing and stands to wield political influence
by virtue of their population numbers. Although Jews and Latinos have little
in common (for example: enormous gaps in wealth and social status, enormous
gaps in religious concerns, and an an enormous gap in support for bilingual
education), "Top organizations and leaders met here this week,"
noted the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2001,
"at the first national Jewish Latino summit
to discuss the development of a common agenda
and ways to strengthen the alliance between the two groups ... The Jewish
community -- organized, wealthy and politically
savvy -- and the Latino community, the fastest-growing
minority group in America, need each other to help push their common legislative
priorities, leaders say ... A joint declaration of principles discussed at
the
summit is being circulated among Jewish and
Latino groups, according to Diana
Siegel Vann, Latin American Affairs director
for B'nai B'rith International, which
co-sponsored the summit. The declaration calls
for fair portrayals of Jews and
Latinos in the media, strengthening of public
education, support for Israel [emphasis
added], increased aid to Latin America
and economic empowerment for minority
communities
... New America Alliance and B'nai B'rith International have
started a Latino Jewish Fund that will help
support the growing relationships
between the two communities at the national,
state and local levels." [SAMBER, S.,
4-2001, p. 29, 34]
The Jewish community is already trying to guilt-trip
and sensitize the Latino community to its own absurdly remote role [per Spain,
and per European Catholicism] in the history of anti-Semitism. "Half
of the Latinos in a Jewish-sponsored survey," noted the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency, "said they were unaware of how Jews were treated during the
Spanish Inquisition." [SAMBER, S., 4-2001, p. 34] Here's a lack of concern
where propagandizing Jewish organizations, of course, seek remedy.
In 2001, the same year as
the above bonding, the Chicano/Hispanic online magazine La Voz de Aztlan,
looking into traditional Jewish self-interest in bonds with minority communties,
voiced harsh condemnations of Jewish political exploitation and manipulation
of the Los Angeles Mexican-American community. [See
Article
one]
When a prominent Hispanic Los Angeles mayoral candidate,
Antonio Villaraigosa, was challenged by a reporter about his past anti-assimilationist
(pseudo-Zionist)
Latino ideology, he did not respond directly
to the question, but shielded himself with platitudes about his strong Jewish
connections:
MOTTEK: "It has been reported Mr. Villaraigosa
that when you were at UCLA
you were active in a Latino rights group which
among other things says in its constitution
that
it is in favor of forming a separate republic in the Southwest United States.
Do
you hold the beliefs of that organization as
your own and do you still support the
group and what do you tell kids that see
this kind of stuff on the Internet?"
VILLARAIGOSA: "I say that we have
to do everything to combat hate and ignorance.
I say that we need to do what the [Simon Wiesenthal]
Museum of Tolerance has done.
I know, because later in June I'm going to
be honored by the Museum of Tolerance.
I put together over the last six years more
than 18 million dollars for this museum. I put
money
for this museum. That amount of money is unprecedented in the history of this
state. I put money together for this museum
because I agree with the Rabbis who work
here.
Rabbi May, Rabbi Cooper. I supported this museum because they have the tools
for tolerance program in our schools and
in our police department. I'd like to get the
person that worked on that Website in one of
those programs so that we can teach
them the need to come together and not vilify
one another. I'm proud of the fact that
this is a great country. This is a country
of opportunity and this is also a country
of free speech. So I honor his right to free
speech, I just hope that he works on the
tolerance."
[MOTTEK, F., 5-31-01]
*****************************************
The Jewish brotherhood's "behind the
scenes pressures and backstairs diplomacy" [IVERS, p. 36] was the strategy
of the civil rights era, as it has been in the Jewish community for centuries.
In 1913 Marshall even arranged for fellow American Jewish Committee member
Adolph Ochs -- owner and publisher
of the New York Times -- to highlight and criticize the murder trial
of an accused Jew, Leo Frank, in Marietta (near Atlanta), Georgia. Marshall
persuaded Ochs to embark on a campaign to emphasize Frank's innocence, and
keep the fact that he was Jewish hidden. [IVERS, p. 41] (Similarly, in 1892
a group of prominent Jews even convinced the New York Times (pre-Ochs
ownership) to send a reporter to Russia -- at the Jews' expense -- expressly
to do an expose of the Jewish condition in Czarist Russia and help temper
American public opinion to increased Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe).
[GOLDBERG, p. 102] Och's activism at his newspaper for the Brooklyn-born
Frank caused "hate mail ... to pour into the Times office, much of it
addressed to Ochs, who had a guard posted outside his office." [LEITER,
R., 4-15-99, p. 4]
Frank, a prominent member of the Atlanta
Jewish community (he was the president of the local B'nai B'rith lodge), was accused of sexually molesting and murdering
a 14-year old girl, Mary Phagan, in his employ at his pencil factory. "There
was a lot of sweatshops that at ten cents an hour employed young teenagers,"
says Marvin Schwartz, "and a lot of them were owned by Jewish people
-- Jews from up north, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, places like that."
[SIMONS] A Jewish millionaire in Chicago, Albert Laskey, joined in the national
campaign to free Frank, raising funds for legal fees ($160,000 from his own
pocket alone; the murdered teenager made 12 cents an hour in Frank's factory),
and to network with important American newspaper editors to defend the accused
Jew. William Randolph Hearst's Atlanta paper, the Georgian, was especially
singled out for Jewish pressure until it too called for a new trial. [LINDEMANN,
p. 247] Even Jewish socialist newspapers
(reflecting the many leftist Jews working in New York's garment district)
abandoned their usual ideological base in highlighting Frank's identity as
a Jew above all else. "Leo Frank was a capitalist," notes Hasia
Diner, "but the newspapers never noted this. They reacted to Frank not
as socialists, but as Jews." [DINER, p. 228]
Tom Watson, a Populist politician in the
South, took an active public role against Frank and, notes Albert Lindemann,
"repeatedly observed that a non-Jewish convicted murderer, no matter
how flagrantly unjust his trial, would never have benefited from such a massive
infusion of money, nor would a non-Jew have benefited from such a network
of men who had privileged access to those who form public opinion in the United
States." [LINDEMANN, p. 266] Watson's image today is painted by Jewish
commentators to be singularly anti-Semitic and racist. But "the Populist
movement," notes Arthur Liebman, "... was essentially a mass democratic
movement intent upon democratizing an inequitable political economic system
... Populism at its peak was one of the largest progressive political and
economic reform movements ever to appear in America. It was primarily made
up of farmers ... " [LIEBMAN, A, p. 335] In 1896 the Populist Party platform
included the charge that "the influence of European money changers has
been more potent in shaping legislation than the voice of the American people."
[LIPSET/RAAB, p. 83]
Jewish-Black relations became strained
over the Frank case. "It briefly threatened Afro-American-Jewish goodwill,"
notes David Levering Lewis, "when the Jewish-owned New York Times
demanded that Georgian authorities try the Afro-American janitor, sole witness
to the crime, as the guilty party." [LEWIS, p. 547] For Jews, it was
"alarming that Frank was the first white in the postbellum South to be
convicted of a capital offense on the testimony of an African-American, that
an established Jewish merchant could be more vulnerable than a Black janitor."
[LEWIS, p. 547]
Despite the fact that there were five Jews
on the grand jury that indicted Frank [LINDEMANN, p. 251], that the Atlanta
Constitution under a Jewish editor was among Frank's most vehement accusers
[LINDEMANN, p. 247], and that Frank was far more resented as a rich northerner
than a Jew, the 1913 trial is popularly known today in the American Jewish
community as one of the most famous 'anti-Semitic' incidents in American history.
Modern Jewish scholarship has decided the girl was really murdered by an African-American.
(The key bit of evidence for this scenario is the testimony of Alonzo Mann,
who in 1982 announced that 63 years earlier he had men worked for Frank. Conley's
testimony in 1913 had been that he had helped Frank dispose of the body).
Of the rare non-Jews who have cared in recent years to scrutinize the old
case, the niece of the murdered girl still argues that Frank was indeed guilty
of murder. In either event, in 1913, waiting in jail through numerous rejected
appeals for a new trial, and now the governor's impending pardon, Frank was
dragged from jail and lynched by a mob.
Even if Frank was completely innocent, continued
Jewish fervor about one of its few (are there any others?) American martyrs,
many decades after the incident, is intriguing. The factory owner's murder
is still the subject of bitter outrage in many volumes and articles by Jewish
writers in our own day. This enduring Jewish agitation and outrage is especially
odd given the fact, and perspective, that between 1889 and 1919 only two Jews,
2,522 Blacks, and 677 others were lynched in America, [LINCOLN, p. 176] including
eleven Italians hung at one time in New Orleans in the largest single vigilante
incident.) [FEUERLICHT, p. 187]
The Frank case was influential in forming
today's foremost Jewish "defense agency," the Anti-Defamation League
in 1913. On March 12, 1986, enduring Jewish lobbying efforts succeeded in
getting Frank a formal pardon by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles
to clear his name, and swept this old taint from the Atlanta Jewish community.
Still, in 2000, Jews were focusing on the Frank case as a symbol of anti-Semitic
injustice; a play entitled "The Lynching of Leo Frank," by Ron Myers,
was headlined at the Marietta Theatre (not far from where Frank was killed).
Tom Watson Brown, the great grandson of Tom Watson, and also a lawyer, maintains
that Frank was murdered by a mob "because Jews bribed the sitting governor
to commute Frank's sentence." At least one news report declared there
to be still anti-Semitism in the area in 2000, and that the play agitated
animosity towards "Philip Goldstein, a Jewish City Councilman and businessman,
who has angered some Mariettans with his plans to build a condo/high rise
near the [town] square ... [Goldstein's family] owns much of the real estate
around the square ... Most buildings in the square are owned by Jews, especially
the Goldsteins." [HENDRICKS, B., 8-22-2000]
In 2001, a Jewish professor from Washington
DC, Jonathan Turley, embarked on a campaign to get an old statue of Tom Watson
removed from the Geogia State Capitol. One Georgia Jewish legislator,
Mitchell Kaye, agreed with him, declaring: "It appears inappropriate
to have a statue of a hate-monger."
[POLLAK, S., 9-22-00]
While some agitated that the city and the
mob's descendents should formally apologize for the lynching, Watson's great-grandson
declared that "maybe the Frank people should apologize for bribing the
governor." There is even a plaque to Frank at the site of his murder.
Clearly reflecting modern Holocaust theology and the Jewish eternal victimhood
cosmology, local rabbi Steve Lebow told a reporter that "Memory is the
key to redemption, as one of the great rabbis said. It's a religious obligation
to remember."
The age-old Jewish policy of disguising
their hand behind legal and political challenges was also evidenced in the
decades old Jewish struggles against "religion in the schools,"
a steady series of lawsuits that were popularly perceived in America (during
the Cold War against atheistic communism) as assaults upon Christianity and
the heart of traditional Americanism. In a steady stream of lawsuits against
school systems across America, wealthy Jewish organizations and their lawyers
hid behind non-Jewish fronts in assailing everything from voluntary leave
time for prayers to government subsidies to parochial schools. "The Jewish
defense agencies," says J.J. Goldberg, "avoid high profile test
cases with Jewish plaintiffs, so as to minimize anti-Jewish hostility."
[GOLDBERG, p. 123]
"The major Jewish agencies,"
notes Greg Ivers, "were well aware that mass public opinion would regard
a Supreme Court ruling that such well established practices as school prayer
and Bible reading were unconstitutional as the moral equivalent of a dagger
in the heart of the traditional Christian values so long embodied in the American
civic and religious cultural milieu." [IVERS, p. 114] "No group," notes Edward Shapiro,
"has been more active than Jews in insuring that the wall between church
and state not be breached." [SHAPIRO, E., 1998] "The most prominent
and powerful of American Jewish organizations," noted Nathaniel Weyl,
"have been energetic and uncompromising instigators of measures to bring
about total separation of Church and State. The suits are frequently initiated
and financed by the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League."
[WEYL, N., 1968, p. 305] (Meanwhile, American Jews zealouisly and overwhelmingly
support their Israeli "homeland" that is antithetical to the foundations
of American tolerance and multiculturalism. As American-born Israeli Diaspora
Affairs minister, Bobby Brown, has stated: "In America, it would be abhorrent
for the government to build a church. Here, when we start a new community,
we have to put in offices, and we have to put in a shopping center, and we
also put in a synagogue. We put two synagogues. One for the Spehardic and
one for the Ashkenazi. We are a Jewish state, so there is a government involvement
in religion. Even the Christian right in America -- it would be abhorrent
for them to start a Christian Right Party! America as a society would find
that abhorrent. In Israel, we have now twenty-three Knesset members representing
religious parties.") [HYMAN, M., 1998, p. 96]
Meanwhile, in an early American "separation
between church and state" case,Zorach versus Clausen, as part
of the negotiation by Jewish interest groups behind the case, it was deemed
that "the principal litigants be non-Jewish as well as 'a non-Jewish
organization' ... serve as lead counsel. ... Although the Jewish organizations
would build the case, write the briefs, and, in consultation with whoever
'represents' Zorach, direct the litigation, their names would not go in the
public record." [IVERS, p. 87] This methodology was the norm for the
following decades. The non-Jewish lawyer selected to "lead" the
case was Kenneth Greenawalt and the organization to sponsor it was the American
Civil Liberties Union (a group that is in theory non-partisan, but had, for example, in
the early 1980s a 40% Jewish membership. [KREFETZ, p. 263]
In Indianapolis, Gerald Houseman notes the
stealth with which the Jewish Community Relations Council and the Indiana
Civil Liberties Union sought to pressure the city to remove Christmas nativity
scenes from a park:
"[They] realized the explosive potential
of the issues and from
the beginning it was understood that the
only practical approach
to the Parks Department, or to officials
generally, would be one
in which compliance with the separation
clause would be sought
in a quiet atmosphere, one which would be
well-guarded from the
glare of publicity." [HOUSEMAN, p.
23-24]
J.J. Goldberg notes the same secretive
strategies evidenced today in Jewish efforts to lobby for Israel:
"Pro-Israel PACS [political action committees] are particularly
mysterious because their names do not
reflect their goals. A list
of seventy-four pro-Israel PACS published
.... include names like
Americans for Better Citizenship, Citizens'
Organized PAC, Flatbush
Midwood Political Action Committee, and
the largest pro-Israel PAC
pack, National PAC. Not one name refers
to Israel." [GOLDBERG, p.
273]
Richard Curtiss notes with concern the
same thing:
"Normally a PAC is established to
serve the purposes of a company ...
or a cause ... Its purpose is defined
by its title. [Edward Roeder, who
publishes an annual directory of political
action committees, came]
across
well-heeled, vaguely-defined PACs with non-descriptive titles
such as National Political Action Committee,
Joint Action Committee for
Political Affairs, Citizens Organized
Political Action Committee,
Roundtable PAC, Desert Caucus, Florida
Congressional Committee, or
San Franciscans for Good Government. At
the same time he was struck
by an omission. Suddenly, after 1983,
there were no PACs that
mentioned Israel, Judaism, Zionism, or
the Middle East in their title."
[CURTISS, p. 345]
"I don't know that it's necessary for
outsiders to know who we are," one official of such a PAC told Roeder,
"It's a small group of Jewish fund-raisers raising money from mostly
Jewish contributors and we can explain who we are to them." [CURTISS,
p. 346] (In 1992, pro-Israel PACs
donated to about two-thirds of that year's Senate races). [GOLDBERG, JJ, p.
269] Today there are about 75 such pro-Israel PACS; an all-women organization
-- JAC-PAC -- is one of the wealthiest. [BRETTSCHNEIDER, p. 24]
A similar sort of deceit has often played
a role in even Jewish personal histories; in the 1940s and 1950s, especially,
personal name changing was particularly high in the United States: "Some
50,000 Americans filed petitions with state courts each year seeking permission
to change their family names; 80% of them were Jewish." [SILBERMAN, p.
59] "What prompted the changes?" asks A. A. Roback, "Commercialism,
social aspirations, confirmation, escapism?" Roback
noted that new Jewish names included the likes of Clark, Warren, Perry, Hargrove,
Grant, Ross, Forrest, McKinley, Knight, Ford, Webster, Williams, Pearson,
Spencer, and Sherry. [ROBACK, p. 126] Given the incessant nature of Jewish
particularism, the question then must be asked: Is this more usually a manifestation
of disingenuous assimilation, or -- as the old Marrano tradition set firm
precedent -- merely disguise?
As George Gilbert notes about Jews in the
world of photography: "Names were changed for whimsy, for theatricality,
for self-aggrandizement but for most Jews in the twentieth century a protective
camouflage." Of particular note was the "female Jewish photographer"
who "sought to attach to herself a German [Jewish] name that would add
prestige to her image. She changed her named to Lisa Rothschild. Her agency
won some sales for her but she sought acceptance at Life [magazine].
With sly intent, she again changed her name, this time to Lisa Larsson after
noting that Roy Larsson was Life's chief executive. Editors believing her
to be kin to their top boss began to request her services." [GILBERT,
G., 1996, p. 323-324]
"Within the New York Times,"
says J. J. Goldberg, "the efforts of the [Jewish] Sulzberger family to
avoid letting theirs be seen as a Jewish newspaper is legend. The most discussed
was the practice of forcing reporters with obviously Jewish names to use their
initials ... A. M. Rosenthal became the Times' first Jewish executive
editor in 1976. Every executive editor since has been Jewish as well."
[GOLDBERG, p. 302, 1996] "Although
[New York] Times bylines gradually came to include names like
Weiler, Raskin, and Rosenthal, these writers were somehow all persuaded [by
the Sulzbergers] to render their first names as A. instead of Abraham."
[FRANKEL, M., 1999, p. 399]
In the early 1900s, with Jews massing into
"night law schools," Jerold Auerbach notes that a "senior partner
in the prestigious New York firm of Evarts Choate and Sherman was deeply incensed
that so many Polish and Russian immigrants --whose names were Abraham, David,
Hyman, Israel, Isidore, Isaac, and Morris -- had legally changed their names
to 'Sherman.'" [AUERBACH, p. 255] Likewise, in similar such cases, four New York
attorneys named Ferris filed suit against Adolph Finkelstein who wanted to
change his name to Arthur Ferris; the Chicago meat packing firm Libby, McNeil,
and Libby also filed suit against Samuel Lipsky and his son (in a similar
business) who sought to change their names to Libby. [FRIEDMAN, L. p. 211-212]
Popular syndicated advice columnists "Dear
Abby" (Abigail Von Buren) and "Ann Landers" -- the Friedman
twins -- both adapted WASP names in print. Werner Erhard, the founder of the
"est" personal growth groups, was born Jack Rosenberg. In
the early decades of American professional baseball, "of eight Cohens
in the big leagues seven took non-Jewish names." [JAHER, F., 10-31-01,
p. 61]
"In the 1920s," notes Pawel Sudoplatov,
a former Russian KGB official, "Jewish cheka [secret police] officers adapted Russian names so as to not
attract attention to their Jewish origins." [SUDOPLATOV, p. 31] In Russia
during anti-Zionist purges, notes Yehoshua Gilboa, "the Soviet press
would add in brackets the original Jewish names of persons charged with cosmopolitanism,
alongside the names they were known by, if the latter had a misleading Russian
or Ukrainian sound. Thus, persons who used pseudonyms in various fields of
activity were identified: Yefim Markovich Stebun was shown to be Chaim Mordkovich
Katznelson (added after his name in brackets); Alexander Isbakh (Isak Bakhrakh);
Zhadanov (Lifshits); Martich (Finkelstein); Yakovlev (Holtsman); Melnikov
(Melman); Yasny (Finkelstein); Kholodov (Meirovich); Vicktorov (Zlochevsky);
Sanov (Smulson); Volin (Katz); Gan (Kagan); Burlachensko (Berdichevsky); Svvetlov
(Sheidlin)." [GILBOA, p. 159]
Alan Wald notes reasons cited by Jews for
name-changing in the American socialist and communist movements:
"The fact that many radical Jews assumed
non-Jewish names for party
or professional reasons is cited as further
evidence of a bias against
Jewish ethnicity in the movement, and perhaps
even a manifestation
of Jewish self-hatred: Irving Horenstein
became Irving Howe; Joseph
Friedman became Joe Carter; Albert Glotzer
became Albert Gates;
Emanuel Geltman became Emanuel Garrett;
Felix Mayerowitz became
Felix Morrow; and so on." [WALD, p.
15]
"The most famous of American changed
names," notes James Yaffe, "is Belmont -- nothing but a French translation
of the solid old German Jewish name Schoenberg. Gallicizing, in fact, has
been almost as popular among Jews as Anglicizing. The name Levine has lent
itself particularly well to this. The New York telephone book is full of Le
Viens and La Vines and, most imaginative variation of all, La Vignes. No matter
how you slice them, they're all Levine." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 70] Today,
the third most common Jewish surname in America, after Cohen and Levy, is
Miller. [AVOTAYNU]
In Hollywood, where Jews have always predominated,
for decades name changes were mandatory to hide ethnic backgrounds. Joseph
Levitch became Jerry Lewis, Issure Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Emmanual
Goldberg became Edward G. Robinson, Julius Garfinkel became John Garfield,
Theodosia Goodman became silent screen star Theda Bara (an anagram for "Arab
Death"), to begin a very long list. Actor Tony Randall, alluding to the
famous non-Jewish journalist Upton Sinclair, notes the case of Leonard Spiegelglass:
"When Leonard Spiegelglass, who was
already established in New York
as a writer, came to Hollywood he changed
his name for a short while
to Leonard Sinclair. Leonard, who became
a very good friend of mine,
changed it back when his friends began calling
him Upton Spiegelglass."
[RANDALL, 1989, p. 119]
Jewish theatre mogul Joseph Papp (Papirofsky)
even convinced two of his "wives and several close associates [that]
he had been born a Polish Catholic." [EPSTEIN, H., 1994, p. 53]
Jewish science fiction writer Isaac Asimov recalls
an incident that struck him about Jewish name-changing:
"I am tired
of being told, periodically, by Jews, that I am not Jewish enough.
Let me give you an example, I once agred
to give a talk on a day that happened
to be the Jewish New Year. I didn't know
it was the Jewish New Year, but if
I had it would have made no difference.
I don't celebrate holidays, not the Jewish
New
Year, not Christmas, not Independence Day. Every day is a workday for
me, and holidays are particularly useful
because there is no mail and no telephone
calls
to distract me. But I received a call from a Jewish gentleman soon afterward.
He had noted in the paper that I
had spoken on the holy day and he berated
me for it rather harshly. I kept my temper
and explained that I didn't observe
holidays,
that if I hadn't given the talk I certainly would not have attended
synagogue services. 'That doesn't matter,'
he said. 'You should serve as a role
model
to Jewish youth. Instead, you are simply trying to hide the fact that you
are
Jewish.' This
was too much for me. I said, Pardon me, sir, you have and
advantage over me. You know my name,
but I don't know yours.' I was taking
a chance, of course, but I won. I won't
use his real name, but it was completely
equivilant
to the following. 'My name,' he said, 'is Jefferson Scanlon.' 'I see,'
I said. 'Well, if I were trying to conceal
the fact that I was Jewish, the first
thing I would do, the very FIRST thing,
would be to change my name from
Isaac Asimov to Jefferson Scanlon.' He
hung up the phone with a bang and
I never heard from him again." [ASIMOV,
I., 1994, p. 18]
"Even Bob Dylan, born Robert Zimmerman,"
notes Joseph Morella and Patricia Barey, "had masked his Jewish identity
by adopting the name of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. [MORELLA, p. 34] Trying to
make it big in New York City's Grenwich Village folk song world, Dylan
"was telling everyone in New York
that he was from New Mexico,
an orphan who had been on the road for
years. But, as in Minneapolis,
he was rather ingenuous and let little
things slip out that made friends
suspect he was middle class, Jewish, and
no orphan. Shortly before
Dylan hit the Village for the first time
the folkies had discovered that
Jack Elliott [another prominent folk singer
also known as 'Ramblin' Jack
Elliott] was actually Elliott Adnopoz,
son of a Brooklyn doctor. Then
Elliott became seriously ill and relatives
from Brooklyn with names
like Goldstein had come calling, and his
secret was out." [SCADUTO,
p. 66]
When the Jewish singing duo Simon and Garfunkel
started out their careers, they didn't go by their real names. Paul Simon
recorded as Tico, "true Taylor," Jerry Landis, and Paul Kane. Art
Garfunkel went by Artie Kane. "Art and Paul feared anti-Semitism would
hurt their chances for success," notes Morella and Barey, "This
self-protective attitude outraged [their] black producer: 'What the hell is
your music anyway? You want to be the black man's brother, but you don't want
to take any heat!' He pointed out that Paul and Art were trying to capitalize
on the social and political movements of the day. They wanted to deal with
injustice and prejudice -- but only in their songs." [MORELLA, p. 35]
The times have, of course, changed. In
our own day of multicultural celebration, "being Jewish," so much
celebrated in the mass media, has become a desirable quality. "Columbia's
decision to be honest about the duo's ethnicity put Simon and Garfunkel in
the forefront of making 'Jewishness' not only acceptable but desirable in
the popular culture of the late sixties," note Morella and Barey, "The
subsequent success of Dustin Hoffman, Richard Benjamin, Barbara Streisand,
and George Siegel confirming this trend." [MORELLA, p. 35] Even in politics,
in some places today a Jewish name is a giant bonus (especially where there
are large numbers of Jewish voters) and its advantages are jealously guarded.
Jewish chauvinism can even be nakedly exploited. In 1988, for instance, a
New York Republican, Richard Libowitz (whose father was Jewish, but whose
mother wasn't) was a challenger for the seat of a Jewish judge, Joan Lefkowitz.
A serious campaign issue for Jewish voters and the Jewish press was whether
or not Libowitz considered himself to be Jewish.
"I'm convinced he was selected [to
run in the election] because of the similarity of the name [to Lefkowitz]
and the conclusion that Jewish voters would draw -- that he is Jewish,"
complained the Jewish chairman of the Westchester Democratic Party, Richard
Weingarten. The Jewish Week reported Jewish attitudes about the issue:
"Asked if his name indeed might
confuse some voters into believing
he's Jewish, Liebowitz replied: 'I'm
not responsible for what people
believe ... I don't think there is any
attempt to fool the public.' Asked
to set the record straight [by the Jewish
Week] about his religious
beliefs Liebowitz declined: 'I refuse
to bring religious affiliation into this
race.'" AIN, p.
This is the emphasis focused upon in the
Jewish community, such avid separators -- as it benefits them -- of "Church
and state." The incumbent judge, Joan Lefkowitz, is then puffed by the
Jewish Week for one thing, her Jewishness:
"In contrast [to Libowitz], Lefkowitz's
campaign materials says she is a
director of the Anti-Defamation League
of B'nai B'rith and of the Young
Israel of Scarsdale. Lefkowitz, who is
Orthodox, was also not shy
about telling an interviewer for a Westchester
newspaper that her
daughter attends the local Soloman Schechter
school, a Conservative
[Judaism] institution." [AIN, p.]
Whether a political candidate is a Jew or
not is apparently an important issue for many Jewish voters. In 1990, for instance, a Jewish Minnesota Republican senator, Rudy Boschwitz, even made a campaign issue of the alleged fact that his Democratic
rival, Paul Wellstone (also born Jewish), was not as Jewish as Boschwitz was,
i.e., that Wellstone had "no connection whatsoever" to the Jewish
community. [ATL CONST, 11-12-9, p. A10] In 1996, Leon Albin's Congressional campaign in Maryland included
two separate pamphlets to be distributed to voters, one for Jews and one for
non-Jews. The material for Jews listed his involvement in the Talmudic Academy,
the Jewish National Fund, and the Ner-Tamid Greenspring synagogue. Conversely,
non-Jews were not even informed that he was Jewish. [GOLDBERG, L, DOUBLE,
p.]
In another case, in 1998 rumors that Brooklyn/Queens
congressional candidate Anthony Weiner's mother wasn't Jewish made the New
York Post and threatened to undermine his campaign among Jewish voters.
The Jewish Week noted, "Asked if this was a legitimate campaign
issue, Councilman Noach Dear of Borough Park, one of Weiner's four Jewish
rivals, said, 'Let the people decide.'" [DICKTER, p. 22] In 2000, Stephen
Shaiken, a Jewish recipient of a mailer by California state legislature candidate
Barbara Heller, was outraged at the particular Jewish focus of the piece.
Heller noted that she and her husband "are longtime AIPAC [American Israel
Public Affairs Committee] members, have traveled to Israel with the San-Francisco-based
Jewish Community Federations, have twice participated in Volunteers for Israel
and are members of Congregation Rodef Sholam in San Rafael."
"The thinking seems to be," complained Shaiken, "that I should
vote for her because I'm Jewish. There was nothing about living-wage issues,
or issues about environmental degradation. It was all ethnocentric issues."
[BRANDT, J., 2-18-2000, p. 33A]
While it is considered an anti-Semitic act
for non-Jews to systematically document who around them is Jewish, in the
Jewish community such identification is integral to Jewish belief and solidarity:
to search out and make connections to others of the clan. Some even make millions
of dollars doing it. Bruce Arbit and Jerry Benjamin of the A.B. Data company,
for instance, run a computer company in suburban Milwaukee that employs 225
people; their business is solely to make lists of Jewish names and addresses
to sell to Jewish groups looking for their own kind and pro-Israel politicians.
(A.B. Data claims to have been responsible for raising $4 million for pro-Israel
California senator Alan Cranston by canvassing the Jewish community for $20
checks.) [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 53]
Both Arbit and Benjamin are self-avowed Zionists and by the mid-1980s
they claimed to hold the names and addresses of two-thirds of the Jewish households
in America. How? By tabulating synagogue rosters and merely scanning Jewish-sounding
names in phone books, looking for what they describe as the 80,000 common
Jewish names. "Take the name Gordon," says Arbit, "It's a borderline
name. Sheldon Gordon from Long Island is likely to be a Jew. Bubba Gordon
from Tennessee, probably not. It's a matter of probability and common sense."
[CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 51] Since only about half of all Jews still sport their
original Jewish last names in America, it takes some creative detective work
to track down the others. "We look [also] for Yiddish or Hebrew first
names," notes Arbit. "It's interesting that Jewish yuppies like
Hebrew names for their children." [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 51]
*****************************
In 1962 the Jewish-sponsored landmark United
States Supreme Court case that banned prayer in public schools -- Engels
v. Vitales -- was opposed by 80% of all Americans. [WHITFIELD, p. 69] (Prominent "petitioners" for the
banning of prayer included "several Jewish organizations, including the
American Jewish Congress, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and
the Central Conference of American Rabbis." [UROFSKY, M., 1978, p. 327]
Public opposition came from everywhere, including former United States Presidents
Dwight D. Eisenhower and Herbert Hoover, as well as Church leaders as diverse
as liberal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr
and evangelist Billy Graham. While Jews were essentially targeting the perceived
threat of Christianity as a socializing force upon Jewish children in public
schools, the subsequent Jewish-inspired erasure of all religious and
spiritual advocacy in the American educational system has inevitably accelerated
modern America's many problems of moral decay. Stripped of any kind of spiritual
nurturing in the public sphere, modern Americans are deluged with the exploitive
ethics of purely secular materialism and opportunism, in the schools or otherwise,
values that have in fact been a survivalist subset of classical Judaism, as
we have seen, for centuries. "Most Catholics," says Naomi Cohen,
"followed Cardinal Spellman, McIntyre, and Cushing and condemned what
they called a frightening trend towards secularism, materialism, and atheism."
[COHEN, p. 172]
An earlier, 1951 non-denominational prayer in New York schools was legally (and successfully)
attacked by the American Jewish Congress, the Jewish War Veterans, the Jewish
Labor Committee, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and the rabbinical
associations of Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism. [WEYL, N., 1968,
p. 314]
In 1988 while non-Jews in democratic America
supported a constitutional amendment to permit prayer in public schools, 71%
to 18%, Jews were against
the amendment by a 74% to 18% margin. And while 81% of white non-Jews supported
the right for Jews to display a menorah for Hanukah on public property, only
37% of Jews supported the idea. [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 107] "Jews have a special reason to feel threatened
by religion in public life," suggests Jewish scholar Barry Rubin, "since
its manifestation would be overwhelmingly Christian and implicitly anti-Jewish."
[RUBIN, p. 242]
The strong Jewish motivation in taking up
such cases to rid public schools of religious taint was their traditional
fears of assimilation that could hinder Jewish collectivism. Many of the cases
they litigated addressed the unconstitutionality of "voluntary"
religious time or prayers at public schools which, at least in theory, could
be expressed by any religious persuasion, or not at all. Jewish concerns were
that "pressure (put upon) students to attend the on-campus religious
classes ... encouraged students to attend classes outside their true faith
or being harassed or ridiculed, a situation that was most prevalent among
Jewish students." [IVERS, p. 80] In this vein, Jewish organizations fought
for "the elimination of religion in the public schools with special reference
to the observance of Christmas." [DOBKOWSKI, p. 38]
Yet Jewish lobbying groups can be completely
two-faced, as necessary, when it comes to supporting Jewish religious desires, quite
literally demanding that all other people bend to Jewish religious dictates.
In 1987, for example, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation
League joined forces in a lawsuit against North Babylon High School on Long
Island, New York, to shift an entire school graduation ceremony from Saturday
to another day to accommodate a Jewish student, David Smith, who "observes
the Sabbath [Saturday] and therefore could not attend." The Jews were
victorious: a court order directed the whole school to adopt to David Smith's
religious worldview. The school district was troubled by the ruling and formally
noted in an appeal that
"In a society as pluralistic and diverse
as the one we all share, everyone
must be prepared to accept inconveniences
and sacrifices in order to
preserve religious freedom for all."
[AIN, JW, 12-18-87, p. 5]
A similar legal attack took shape in 1997
when five Jewish Orthodox Yale undergraduate students sought to subvert the
university's policies that enhanced intercultural tolerance. Fully understanding
that admission to Yale included the condition that underclassmen must live
in dormitories with all kinds of other students to expand their cultural horizons,
the five Orthodox Jews banded together, complaining about sexual promiscuity
and alcohol in the dorms and demanded the privilege (denied all others) to
move off the campus. The students hired a lawyer, Nathan Lewis who, noted
the New York Times, "is well known in part for a series
of cases he has argued -- some before the Supreme Court -- that tried to establish
the rights of Orthodox Jews to follow the strictures of their religion in
American institutions like the military." [GLABERSON, p. 1, 45] Richard Brodhead, the dean of Yale, defending
the university's housing policy, arguing that, "If you allow all groups
based on affiliation or conviction to separate themselves from the whole university
community, you open the door to all kinds of self-segregation that this place
has worked very hard against." [GLABERSON, p. 49]
In 1982 Jewish efforts to bend the world
to Jewish religious wishes took the form of the American Jewish Congress "ask[ing]
the Supreme Court to review a prohibition against the wearing of yarmulkes
[traditional knitted skullcaps for Jewish males, fastened to the hair with
bobby pins or clips] by Jewish high school basketball players." [JEWISH
WEEK, 12-10-82] The Illinois High School Association, the defendant
in the case, had a policy forbidding anything on a player's head except a
sweatband, for fear of creating physical hazards.
Elsewhere, while Jews spearheaded the tearing
down of public financing for Christian schools, J. J. Goldberg noted in 1996
the case of New York State Assembly
member Dov Hiskind,
"an Orthodox Jew, militant Zionist,
and one time lieutenant to Rabbi
Kahane of the far-right Jewish Defense League.
Nominally a Democrat,
Hiskind's principal connections are not to his fellow Democrats, nor
even to other Orthodox Jewish Democrats
around Brooklyn but to a
network of Talmudic academies and rabbinical
associations peppered
throughout the district and across New York
city. Over the years,
Hiskind's office has funneled hundreds of
thousands of dollars in
state discretionary funds to these institutions,
much of it through
the Hasidic-led Council of Jewish Organizations."
[GOLDBERG, p. 259]
In Canada, notes Erna Paris:
"In 1966 the Jewish community happily
elected Dr. Victor Goldbloom
to the Quebec legislature ... In 1968 Montreal
Jews were delighted
when Goldbloom negotiated provincial recognition
for the network
of private Jewish day schools and public
funding was finally provided
on a percentage basis." [PARIS, E.,
p. 102-103]
In 1988 the American Civil Liberties Union
(not the Anti-Defamation League, not the American Jewish Congress, et al)
sued the United States government for funding not only religious organizations,
but those in other countries. Bad
press helped rescind an $8 million gift to the New York City-based Jewish
Orthodox group, Ozar Hatorah, to build a yeshivot
(religious school) in France. For years discrete Jewish activists manipulated
the United States government into sending millions of dollars to religious
groups through the Agency for International Development. Between 1983 and
1988, for example, the American government gave $2 million to Ohr Somayach
(a Jewish Orthodox school in Jerusalem), $400,000 to the Shaalam Teachers'
College in Israel, $500,000 to a chassidic teachers' college in Jerusalem
(the American College of Belz), and $750,000 to the Beth Rivka girl's school.
[ROSENBERG, H, JW, 3-18-88, p. 28] Still
ongoing, in 1993, with widespread
charges of fraud surrounding Orthodox recipients of United States Department
of Education "Pell grants" (up to $300 million), the Baltimore
Jewish Times noted that 'Jewish activists in Washington are concerned
that the investigation [into the fraud] will focus on the large number of
government grants to religious schools in Israel. This could also address
the broader questions of whether such indirect aid by the government to religious
institutions in another country is appropriate." [BESSER, WASHINGTON,
p. 40]
Among the exposed Orthodox scams for government
money was that of the Skverer Hasidim of New Square, New York where "hundreds
of the village's young men were paid a total of $10 million dollars of federal
government tuition and housing assistance for doing something they would have
done anyway -- studying Talmud in the beis midrash (house of study). Four men,
the masterminds of the scheme, were sentenced last October [1999] to prison terms." [BERGER, J., 2-28-2000,
p. 50]
On the other hand, in a decades-old process,
as noted by Rabbi Albert Gordon in 1959, Jewish American parents who seek
"to counteract the influence of the Christmas season upon their children
... [act] through their national and local Jewish agencies, as well as through
their congregational leaders, ... [to] carry on a consistent campaign to root
out purely religious sectarian festivals from tax-supported [American] public
schools." [GORDON, A., p. 189] In
an incident in 1957 that became the norm in America years later, Rabbi Gordon
noted that "a Christmas play to be presented by children in the sixth
grade of a public school was banned after heated debate and charges that Jewish
pressure groups had interfered with school. Christian parents, aroused by
the action of the district superintendent, were bitter." [GORDON, A.,
p. 191]
During Jewish efforts to remove a Christmas
manger scene from a park in Indianapolis, an angry observer wrote to the Indianapolis
Star:
"So many of us are growing exceedingly
tired of having a vocal
minority tell us that we may not display
the scene of the Nativity
in our public parks. Wasn't our revered
and treasured Constitution
written on the premise of majority rule?"
[HOUSEMAN, p. 31]
On the other hand, Orthodox Jews have freely
set up religious spatial boundaries (called eruv) with poles, wires, and other devices throughout parts of most
major -- and some minor -- American cities (the White House is even framed
within one). The conceptual demarcations are ways for pious Jews to circumvent religious laws against carrying objects
out of the realm of the "home" on Saturdays. The eruv conceptually appropriates the entire area within its limits,
where Orthodox may carry things about with no religious worry. As an obvious
target for "the separation of Church and religion" issue (public
grounds appropriated for expressly religious artifacts and purposes), in the
1980s the American Civil Liberties Union sued the city of Long Beach, New
Jersey, for permitting Orthodox Jews to construct an eruv in the city. In
United States District Court, the Orthodox Jews won the case. [NEWTIMES, 1996]
In Brooklyn, notes Jewish scholar Jonathan Reider:
"In the late 1980s the Italians' resentment
of the growing presence of Orthodox
Jews in one corner of Carnarsie [a section of
Brooklyn] gave birth to a new
form of reactive ethnicity virtually overnight. The
Orthodox had constructed
a ritual fence of wire, which was coiled around
the telephone poles. When the
fence was unrolled on the Sabbath, certain religious
prescriptions could be
lifted ... That visible ethnic presence bothered
an Italian man ... [He said]
'Now the Jews and Italians are battling, and
the Christians want to put
crucifixes on their door and on the telephone
poles for their identity purposes.
But the rabbi said that anyone with that idea
is an anti-Semite. I say, don't
use that one on me. As soon as things don't
go their way, they pull that
thing about anti-Semitism.'" [REIDER, J.,
1985, p. 196]
Conversely to Jewish favoritism in such
eruv cases, in Hawaii in 1988, Jewish groups successfully sued for the removal
of an illuminated cross at a marine corps base near Pearl Harbor. The cross
was a local landmark for over twenty years and its removal sparked an "outcry
from people living near the base." [CARROLL, p. 12]
Meanwhile, taking the Jewish double standard
as far as it could be employed for a decade, in the wealthy enclave of Beverly
Hills, California, (where 62% of the population is Jewish, including the mayor,
MeraLee Goldman), in 1999, after a
"6-year-long battle," the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared
that the city had "violated the First Amendment by allowing the Orthodox
Jewish religious group Chabad to erect a 27-foot tall electric menorah"
in a local park "for the past 10 years." The Court noted that Beverly
Hills had followed "an ad hoc policy that allowed for religious favoritism."
[DUNN, M.K., 1999]
In 1984, in another separation of Church
and state issue, the ACLU sued New
York City for its long-standing program that provides funding to local religiously-based
foster care agencies. William Donohue notes that the eventual agreement about
the matter actually had "one exception: the terms apply to everyone but
Orthodox Jews. According to the stipulation, an exemption to the agreement
may be granted to those children whose religious beliefs 'pervade and determine
the entire mode of their lives' and 'whose parents, for sincere religious
reasons, believe it is imperative that their children continue to practice
the extensive religious customs and rituals that have been part of the child's
life.' The sole group designated for exemption were Orthodox Jewish children."
[DONOHUE, 1994, p. 110]
"It would be an interesting study,"
noted Jewish sociologist Natan Glazer, "to determine just how the United
States evolves in the popular mind from a 'Christian' nation into a nation
made of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews ... [and] how the Jewish group, which
through most of the history of the United States has formed an insignificant
percentage of the American people, has come to be granted the status of most
favored religion." [EISEN, p. 129]
In upholding the constitutional separation
of Church and State, in a disturbing 1989 Supreme Court decision, a 5-4 ruling
held that a nativity scene sponsored by a Catholic Church on courtyard grounds
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was illegal. A Christmas tree nearby on the same
public property was acceptable. In the same city plaza was also located a
Jewish menorah sponsored by the local Lubavitch movement (a strand of Orthodox
Judaism). Because, as one Supreme Court Justice noted, the Jewish Chanukhah
period can be understood as a "cultural as well as religious holiday,"
the menorah was ruled to be "constitutionally permissible."
The Supreme Court logic was that, in allowing a religion-free Christmas
tree as a secular symbol to be displayed on public grounds, Orthodox Jewry's
religious sponsorship of its Chanukhah symbol had to be permissible too. As
Justice Blackmun put it:
"It would be a form of discrimination
against Jews to allow Pittsburgh to
celebrate Christmas as a cultural tradition
while simultaneously
disallowing the city's acknowledgement
of Chanukhah as a
contemporaneous cultural tradition."
[DERSHOWITZ, p. 332-334]
This "contemporaneous cultural tradition,"
very much part of the Jewish religious tradition, celebrates a guerilla war
in 165 BCE by Judah Macabee and his sons which established a dynasty known
as the Hasmonean. "Bear in mind what this holiday is really about,"
says Adam Garfinkle, "a military victory, the regaining of [Jewish] independence,
and principled resistance to assimilation ...." [ GARFINKLE, p. 23-24]
Later, "the policy of [land] conquest carried out by the Hasmoneans,"
notes Jewish scholar Peter Schafer, "led to a major expansion of Jewish
territory, achieved by expulsion and dispossession of non-Jewish population
groups." [SCHAFER, p. 66]
The net result of all this in Pittsburgh?
The Lubavitch religious group gets their religio-nationalist symbol
of anti-assimilation and Jewish land expansion on public property, and the
Catholic group gets an areligious Xmas tree, which symbolizes what? Gift giving?
In contradistinction between the eager Jewish
separation between "Church and state," three years earlier, in 1986,
the Los Angeles Times ran an article about that city's free provision
of palm fronds for local Jews (sort of like giving out free Christmas trees?)
The fronds were used for the traditional building of a makeshift shelter for
the Jewish Sukkot holiday. No one was complaining. "The city," noted
the Times,
"has been supplying palm fronds from
palm trees it has trimmed at
no charge for years ... The distribution
is not widely publicized
and depends on word of mouth in the Jewish
community ... Synagogue
representatives bearing official letters
from the street tree division ...
have first pick, up to a maximum of 100
fronds, while others individuals
were limited to 15 each."
32,000 fronds that year were taken at Los
Angeles area distribution sites. Jewish struggles with each other to get fronds
included "pushing, shoving, screaming matches and occasional fisticuffs."
[CHAZANOV, M., 10-19-86, pt. 9, p. 1]
How far the double standard for mainstream
Jewry? In 1985 the Jewish Community
Relations Council of New York sent a memo to 400 churches and synagogues urging
them not to rent meeting space to the "Jews for Jesus" organization.
The Jews for Jesus group sued the JCRC for discrimination; they lost the case.
(What, one wonders, would have been the result had a Christian organization
circulated such a memo warning others not to rent space to Jews?) The burning
issue here, of course, is that mainstream Jewry conceives itself as still
fighting wars with a Christian enemy. And Jewish betrayers to it are especially
intolerable. "While American Jews," notes Edward Shapiro, "have
accepted the presence within their ranks of homosexual Jews, Buddhist Jews,
communist Jews, and humanistic (i.e,. atheistic) Jews, they have drawn the
line at 'Messianic Jews' or 'Jews for Jesus.'" [SHAPIRO, E., 1998]
Over the years the mainstream Jewish community,
adamant defender of minority rights, has been ruthlessly hypocritical in its
harassment of the Jews for Jesus movement. Facing repeated pickets at their
Philadelphia synagogue by Jewish groups, Yohanna Chernoff notes what she faced
as a Jew who believed in Jesus:
"Vicious flyers were delivered to homes
of believers; harassing calls
were made in the middle of the night; parents
of Messianic Jews
were coming under persecution; rocks were
thrown; threats were made
... As we broke through the [picket] lines
[to the temple], one man on
the street snarled at me, 'I will lie, cheat,
burn and even kill, if I have to,
to keep one more Jew from walking into that
building." [CHERNOFF, p.
212]
In 1985, Jewish groups mounted a national
protest of the pro-Christ Jewish defectors. "This new opposition was
very serious," wrote Chernoff,
"There were constant bomb threats and
death threats; our tires were
punctured, our children spit on, and items
were stolen from around the
synagogue. The antagonists wood take down
the license plate numbers
of those attending our services, call their
place of business and try to
get them fired. For more than nine months,
we seemed to be featured
on local television or some other media
at least once a week. We never
got good press in the secular newspapers
because the articles were
written mostly by Jewish people." [CHERNOFF,
p. 215]
For the major protest demonstration against
the Jews for Jesus synagogue, billboard space next to the building was purchased,
saying THERE IS A CULT IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD! GUARD YOUR CHILDREN! About a
thousand demonstrators marched to the Messianic synagogue from the Jewish
Community Center two blocks away. The disturbing result, for mainstream Jewry,
was that the Jews for Jesus group garnered massive publicity. [CHERNOFF, p.
216]
Having ennobled themselves as defenders
of Black and areligious rights to the letter of the law in the U.S. Constitution,
some Jewish scholars argue that traditional Jewish liberalism has served its
purpose and that there are strong signs of a Jewish drift towards conservatism:
a protective approach to Jewish upper class economic status and the state
of Israel. This drift is evidenced,
on the one hand by a renewed religious interest in Jewish religious Orthodoxy,
and, in the secular sphere, growing number of Jewish "neo-conservatives"
and the shift of some Jewish magazines, like Commentary, (as epitomized
by its editor of many years, Norman Podharetz) away from liberalism and towards
unbending support to the considerably less than liberal Jewish state of Israel.
Many liberal Jews have likewise dropped former support for "Third World
liberation struggles" against oppressive regimes and dictatorships,
especially since the Palestinian struggle for human and national rights
itself boils in the heart of Jewry's sacred albatross, Israel. "The American
Jewish intelligentsia," says W. D. Rubenstein, "straddles the entire
political spectrum. Yet for the first time in American Jewish history, it
can no longer be assumed that Jews will inevitably position themselves on
the left, as had been the case throughout this century." [RUBENSTEIN,
p. 126]
"The inward turn on the part of much of American
Jewish leadeship," notes Peter Novick,
"-- their insistance that 'Is it good for
the Jews?' be the first, if not the only,
question that Jews ask themselves -- inevitably
mandated a rightward turn as
well. By the 1970s Jews were preeminent among
the 'haves' in American society,
and the gap between Jews and non-Jew, in income
as well as in representation
in all elite positions, widened over subsequent
decades. Jews had everything to
lose and nothing to gain from the more equal
distribution of ewards which had
been the aim of liberal social policies ...
The political movement called
neo-conservatism was almost exclusively a Jeish
affair; Commentary, published
by the American Jewish Committee, became America's
best-known conservative
magzine." [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 183]
"In 1972 alone," noted one study
of American conservatism, "[Nathan] Glazer, Sidney Hook, Lewis Feuer,
and Seymour Martin Lipset appeared in the [conservative] National Review.
What did these men have in common? None had been previously known as a conservative.
All were Jewish. Three (Glazer, Feuer, and Lipset) had been at Berkeley (birthplace
of the student revolution) early in the 1960s ... Perhaps most interesting
was the fact that all had at one time been 'radical.'" [JACOBY, p. 87]
"If Jewish intellectuals gravitated
toward radicalism in large numbers," notes Russell Jacoby, "they
also hastily beat a retreat ... Not simply Glazer, Hook, Feuer, and Lipset
but Irving Kristol, Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Leslie Fiedler, and scores
of others traded in their red [socialist-communist] pasts for blue chip careers
... [JACOBY, p. 87] ... The long view suggests not how many, but, compared
to the non-Jews, how few Jewish intellectuals remained radicals and dissenters."
[JACOBY, p. 88] By 1997, noted Murray
Friedman, "conservative Jews occupy high posts at conservative think
tanks and foundations, such as Bradley, Heritage, Hudson and the American
Enterprise Institute." [FRIEDMAN, p. 51]
What of
all of the Jewish associates
of William F. Buckley's politically conservative journal, the National
Review in its early years? As George Nash notes:
"These premature Jewish conservatives
had something else in common;
each in his youth had been a student radical."
[NASH, G., 2000, p. 130]
Frank Chodorov had been an anarchist, Morrie
Ryskind once joined the Intercollegiate Society of Socialists. William Schlamm
"joined the Communist Youth Movement" and was once the "editor-in-chief
of the Austrian Communist Party's periodical Die Rote Fahne (Red Flag)." Eugene
Lyons "worked in the New York office of the Soviet agency Tass for four
years" and later was UPI's correspondent in Moscow. "Although [Lyons]
was never a formal member of the Communist Party," says Nash, "he
was enthusiastic nonetheless, determined to use his new journalistic post
'in the furtherment of the cause.'"
Frank Meyer joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and became
"the national secretary of the Party's student bureau and overseer of
several hundred disciplined Party members in British universities." Marvin
Liebman "joined the Young Communist League in New York City." Ralph
de Toledano, and editor at Newsweek, never formally joined the communist
movement, but was, as he wrote, on the Communist Party's "cozy periphery."
[NASH, G., 2000, p. 130-132] Will Herberg, religion editor for the National
Review had also been a communist in his youth. "Until nine or ten
years ago," he wrote in 1970, "I was a thoroughgoing Marxist ...
I had spent most of my life int he radical movement ... Marxism was to me,
and to others like me, a religion, and ethic, and a theology ..." [HERBERG,
W., 1970, p. 101]
(Among these men, Liebman was also an activist
in the Zionist American League for a Free Palestine, Chodorov became an "ardent
supporter of Israel," and Toledano was an "Israeli sympathizer,"
telling a rabbi that his "trip [to Israel] in 1969 was one of the most
moving travel experiences of his life.") [NASH, G., 2000, p. 146-147]
In 1975, Jewish historian Daniel Boorstin
was appointed to be the Librarian of Congress by Republican President Gerald
Ford. Boorstin had once been a communist activist as a Harvard student, but
by the 1970s he was "an active Republican and outspoken foe of the antiwar
and civil rights movements." [WIENER, J., 1991, p. 55, 59] Even
the Christian evangelical World newsweekly (which has over 100,000
subscribers, reasonably comparable in size to the "premier magazine for
evangelical Christians," Billy Graham's Christianity Today, which
has a circulation of 150,000) is edited by Marvin Olasky. Olasky is a "Jew
turned Marxist turned born-again Christian ... [He] oversees the magazine
from his custom-built home in the posh hills of Austin, Texas ... He declared
himself an atheist at 14, and became a committed Marxist at Yale -- even joining
the Communist Party and touring the Soviet Union." [PERINA, K., JUNE
2000]
"The Left is concerned with the oppression
of workers, Third World people, including the Palestinians, people of colour,
homosexuals, and so on ...," wrote Philip Mendes in 1996, "Jews
in turn have moved away from the Left and socio-economic margins of western
society into more established economic and social circles." [MENDES,
p. 108]
Jews starting out as youthful "socialist"
radicals who end up making complete ideological U-turns, with the same fervor
into its capitalist opposite are legion: expeditious sell-outs to economic
self-interest, pushing to the fore whatever the social milieu. The corrupt
socialist activist Bernie Cornfeld [see later chapter] who eventually swindled
people around the world out of tens of millions of dollars was a sensational
example, as was Martin Frankel [see elsewhere], multi-million dollar scamster
of the Vatican. Frankel was described by a former professor who knew him in
earlier years as having "political views [that] were left-wing and unconventional."
[KAHN, J., 6-25-99, p. A1] Jerry Rubin, the co-founder of the anarchist 1960's
"Yippie" party who ended up in a suit on Wall Street, is another
example of this trend, the plugging into whatever ideology that could propel
self-interest. "Politics and rebellion distinguished the 60s," Rubin
wrote in 1980, "Money ... will capture the passion of the 80s."
American-born Rubin "picked up an interest in the New Left while
studying sociology in Israel." [COLLINS/SPEACE, 1995, p. 615-616]
Seth Glickenhaus also started out as idealist
socialist, grew into "a cross between an anarchist and a libertarian,"
and eventually settled on being a fabulously wealthy financier. Between 1987-97
his Wall Street investment firm, Glickenhaus and Co., "topped the
ratings in estimates gains." [GIZPENC, p. 8] In Poland, the complete ideological change of Jewish communist propagandist
Jerzy Urban to the winds around him is breathtaking. "Jerzy Urban reigned
as Poland's prince of propaganda for almost 10 year. The acid-tongued spokesman
for the former communist government enjoyed international notoriety as he
clearly and sarcastically orchestrated the news during the dark years of the
Solidarity trade union. Now, too, years after the fall of communism, Urban
is still in the news business, but with a strange and lucrative twist. Urban
is a crusading capitalist -- editing his own newspaper and writing books."
[VANCOUVER SUN, p. B10] (In Russia, with the demise of communism, most
of top capitalist entrepreneurs are Jews.) [See mass media chapter, section
2]
Crain's Chicago Business journal noted
the case of another Jewish business mogul, this one in computer software,
in 1988: "One of the highest paid CEOs in the United States, Mitchell
Kapor of Lotus Development Corporation ... is a former disc jockey who played
the Byrds and the Dead and supported radical political groups." [HENDERSON,
A., 76-13-88, p. T14] Then there is the case of Jewish entrepreneur Gilbert
Trigano, who headed the decadent luxury resort world of "Club Med,"
international playground of the rich, and built it to power. Trigano "was
a grocer's son and former member of the French communist party." [REGULY,
E., 3-25-88, p. 24]
Then there is the case of Jewish politician
Norm Coleman:
"Coleman was a radical college protester
in the 1970s. He was a moderate
DFLer [Democrat] when elected mayor of St.
Paul [in 1993]. He defected
to the Republican Party less than two years
ago, and in June he told
conservative activists at the state party
convention that their agenda was
his." [SMITH, D., 10-21-98, p. 1A]
How about Marxist homosexual, "radical
historian," and "oracle for the New Left" Harvey Goldberg?
"In his seven years at the University of Wisconsin [leading up to a 1970
bombing on the campus],
"he had created a virtual cult. Thousands
of students who, as a result of the
Cold War had reached college age knowing
nothing of the socialist tradition,
had been introduced to that forbidden
fruit by
Harvey Goldberg. His classes
had become like convenings of a revolutionary
republic ... [BATES, T., 1992,
p. 52, 53] ... After a bout with liver
cancer, Harvey Goldberg passed away in
in 1987. His executors discovered a stock
portfolio that the secretive professor
had managed himself. He had died a millionaire."
[BATES, T., 1992, p. 445]
Former Jewish leftist Ronald Rodash notes that
"A few months ago, an obituary appeared
of the last living survivor of the
Triangle Fire, a Jewish woman who went on in
life to lecture throughout the
nation to college students about the fire and
the cause of labor, which eventually
unionized the garment grades. The obituary ended
with the amazing note
that her granddaughter was one of the top executives
in Hollywood of a
major motion picture company! One can be assured
that in the recent
negotiations with the writers who were threatening
to strike, we know which
side of the issue her granddaughter was."
[RADOSH, R., 6-5-01]
Journalist Ross Wetzsteon, married to a Jewish woman,
notes in an article championing Jewish identity that "through my marriage
I came to know another Jewish 'type,' the Communist as stockbroker, perusing
with equal fervor The Daily Worker and the Wall Street Journal."
[WETZSTEON, R., SEPT 6-12, 1998] David Horowitz, former communist, even once
raised money to buy the Black Panthers a building in Oakland, California.
Today he's a conservative activist and ardent Zionist, at every occasion condemning
the leftist principles of his past life. A. M. Rosenthal, chief editor of
the New York Times, notes Edwin Diamond, "was raised in a socialist
household ... [His sister Ruth was] a member of the Young Communist League
... None of Rosenthal's red-diaper background was surprising, given the secularist
ideals of the time among many immigrant Jews." [DIAMOND, E., 1993, p.
170-171]
Billionaire capitalist (and Jewish) oil
tycoon Armand Hammer started out as a secret courier for the Soviets, "delivering
money [from Russia] to communist leaders in the United States." [EPSTEIN,
E., 1996, p. 64, 67] Among his American-based family's early holdings in Russia
during early years of the communist revolution was an asbestos mine. ("The
conditions under which the miners worked were horrendous even by Russia's
low standards.") [EPSTEIN, A., p. 92] Later Hammer profited from the
sale of Russian art in New York City. He also became involved, through his
firm United Distillers, in the
mob-linked liquor business. [EPSTEIN, p. 147] "Hammer celebrated his
fifty-fifth birthday cruising around Manhattan on his yacht." [EPSTEIN,
p. 162] Lifelong atheist, in later life Hammer reverted back to his Jewish
roots, choosing the bar mitzvah name Avraham Ben Yehuda Maccabee. [EPSTEIN,
p. 21]
Wealthy British Jewish media mogul Robert
Maxwell was in some ways a Hammer clone. Maxwell also was once a courier and
money launderer for Soviet Russia, [DAVIES,
p. 7] later becoming a fabulously rich and particularly corrupt capitalist.
[See elsewhere]
Yet another such (American) ideological
chameleon is Harvey Wasserman -- former hippie, socialist, SDS member, co-founder
of Liberation News Service, and
author of the popular anti-establishment Harvey Wasserman's History of
the United States. By the late 1980s Wasserman was president of his family's
Wasserman Uniform and Shoe Company,
selling Mace and other equipment to police departments. [CHAFETS, p. 185-187]
Wasserman too -- the former universalist activist
and radical for a common humanity -- has, in later life,
made the familiar pilgrimage back to Jewish tribalism, saying:
"I'll admit something that's a little
strange -- I feel more comfortable
around Jews. I know that's strange, considering
the life I've led, but it's
the truth. I feel more comfortable. I
was amazed to discover that I
wanted to have children with a Jewish
woman. It's completely
inconsistent but that's how I feel."
[CHAFETS, p. 189]
Wasserman's common-law wife is even more
chauvinist, raising the familiar shield of the Holocaust to deflect direct
exposure of her naked racism, remarking that the father of her children
"had to be a Jew. Harry's great, I
love him. But even more important, I
could trace his family all the way back
to his great-grandparents, and all
of them were Jews ... I could never have
a child with a gentile, or
someone with gentile blood. You see, somewhere
in his genetic history
there could be someone who put my family
into the gas chambers."
[CHAFETS, p. 191]
What about the sleazy television talk-show
host Jerry Springer, son of Holocaust survivors? "I've never changed
my politics," he says today. A journalist adds that "Mr. Springer
likes to say [this] about his transformation from '60s anti-establishment
idealist to talk-show high sleazio ... He sees the media criticism of his
show as the ultimate bias of elitism and racism." [LIPPERT, B., 5-3-98,
p. D6] This is a man who "lives in a 91st floor penthouse apartment overlooking
Lake Michigan in Chicago's ritziest neighborhood and is ferried to and fro
in a chauffeur-driven limo." [CAREY/WITHERIDGE, 11-2-98] Wealthy
New York theatre mogul Joseph Papp? "From the age of fifteen till he
was in his early thirties, Joe had been a Communist." [EPSTEIN, H., 1994,
p. 16]
And what are we to make of the strange leftist
universalism of prominent Jewish author Arthur Koestler and the psychological
currents behind it? The (Jewish) Forward notes that a professor of
Jewish studies in England, David Cesarani,
"makes the claim, based on allegations
by the author's former
friends, that Koestler was a 'serial rapist.'
The assertion that one
of this century's renowned anti-totalitarian
thinkers was a violent
dictator in her personal relationships
with women ignited debate
in the British press about whether Koestler's
private life overshadows
his public contributions ... [Cesarani]
seems to see Koestler's
Jewishness as an all-encompassing force
that had an impact on
everything from his sexual promiscuity
to his ideas about
communism." [BRAHMS, p. 11]
Like many Jews, Village Voice writer
Paul Cowan is a "fugitive from radicalism who has converted to [Jewish]
Orthodoxy." [BRENNER, p. 337] As a wealthy student at elite WASP prep
school Choate, he and other Jews refused to recite Christian-oriented school
prayers: "I remember holding my head high those nights, feeling an incrediby
strong surge of tribal loyalty that I'd never before experienced ... After
the four years at Choate ... once I'd been thorugh that experience, my mother's
message about the six million [Holocaust victims] became, perhaps, the single
most important fact of my life." [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 12, 15] But the
consummate symbol of the exploitation of anti-materialist themes for profit
is probably Jewish pop star Bob Dylan who made a very lucrative career singing
social conscience "moral" ballads about dignity and righteousness
in the 1960s. Meanwhile, Dylan led a reclusively elitist and affluent life
from limousines. Apparently not rich enough, in 1996 one of his most famous
songs, "The Times They-Are-A-Changin'" was sold to a bank in Montreal,
Canada, for use in an ad campaign. As one London newspaper noted, many former
Dylan followers were "furious" about the new use of the song that
was once "an anthem for the sixties generation that waged war on materialism
and philosophized on the evils of pin-striped suits." [MILNER, C., p.
4]
"Now Jewish interests and welfare,"
notes Stephen Whitfield, "without which Jewish moral values cannot be
perpetuated, are dependent upon a secure and thriving Israel, whose enemies
in the world arena are usually emanated from the left." [WHITFIELD, p.
120, American] "Scratch an American
Jew," notes longtime Jewish activist Earl Raab, "and you find a
democratic voter, but if you scratch deeper, you will not find a liberal."
[FRIEDMAN, M., p. 48] "Most Jews in New York," says New York University professor
Mitchell Moss, "are concerned with safety, quality of life and taxes,
not public schools and social services, the two largest areas of public expenditure.
Almost half of the Jews in New York send their children to independent and
religious schools." [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 50]
This compartmentalized American Jewish identity
-- one which Ze'ev Chafets sees as containing both "a political
liberal and a Jewish conservative," [CHAFETS, MEMBERS, p. 53] an identity
that, first and foremost, celebrates the deconstruction of the surrounding
non-Jewish order -- is a common one. In 1996, Jewish "universalist"
Paul Lauter bemoaned the political direction the Jewish community has taken
in America in the past three decades:
"For many [Jews] what defined the
difference [between Jews and non-
Jews] seemed not to be the kind of doubleness
on which I agonized
and thrived. Rather, it had to do with
Shabbat candles, yarmulkes, and
mikvahs -- with the triumph of ritual
over reason and, more darkly
sometimes, of born-again fanaticism
over what it is that links us [all] as
humans .... I want to be offensive here,
otherwise why write in a book
about Jewishness when it no longer means
'progress' ... A few years
ago I heard chuckles at Tammy Bakker's
hairdo, at Jimmy Swaggart's
sex life, at Marilyn Quayle's literalist
theory. But I had to wonder at the
silence before the born-again Jewish
pieties that, as surely as other
fundamentalisms, have helped underwrite [Jewish] ayatollahs across
the
face of the earth." [LAUTER, p.
45]
In the 1993 Los Angeles mayoral election,
Republican millionaire Richard Riordan won with 50% of the Jewish vote over
a liberal alliance against him. 71% of Jewish voters supported his reelection.
In New York City, two-thirds of the Jewish voters have supported Republican
Rudolph Giuliani. Jewish voters there include 300,000 Orthodox Jews (a quarter
of the New York Jewish population) and a large Russian Jewish immigrant population
(200,000, about 20% of the local Jewish population) who tend to vote
conservatively. A 1996 survey by the Indianapolis Jewish Federation even found
that only 29% of the local Jewish respondents in a survey described themselves
as liberal; less than half called themselves Democrats. [FRIEDMAN, M, p. 50]
As politically organized American Jewry
slowly drifts right, over the last couple of decades or so, some social activists
in the Catholic Church have formed an informal political wing often termed
"liberation theology," a religious perspective that focuses on human
rights, particularly in Central America where a number of military juntas
(many with Israeli aid, both weapons and training) have persecuted peasant
populaces. Some Jews see in such universalist Catholic social activism a threat
to Jewry and, ultimately, Israel, which has
important political relationships with a wide-range of military juntas and
dictatorships around the globe.
"In the old days," says Milton
Himmelfarb, "the Catholic church was in the right. Now the Catholic Church,
or many eminent Catholics, are way out on the Left. Maryknoll sisters, nuns,
are cheering for Marxist-Leninists in Nicaragua. Nuns! .. Though they do not
single out Jews as Jews, they do single out Israel as an enemy and the bourgeois
system as well." [STALLSWORTH, p. 101] "The leadership of the left-of-center
Christendum today," says Rabbi Ronald Sobel of Temple Emanu-El in New
York City, "is for us anathema and frightening." [STALLSWORTH, p.
103]
In 1985, Joel Carmichael, the editor of
a prominent Zionist magazine, Midstream, published his own article
about the Catholic Pope, described by the Jewish Week as an accusation
that "the Pope was a virtual Marxist whose attempted assassination may
have been engineered as 'camouflage' [of close links between the Russian communists
and the Vatican]." An Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera,
noted the piece, calling it an "insane attack upon the Pope." [BOROSON,
5-29-87] Even a trustee of Midstream, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, felt
obliged to resign in protest of the Pope article.
On the other end of the political spectrum,
the Christian religious right is likewise suspect by Jews. While many evangelical
Christians are ardent supporters of Israel (former Israeli prime minister
Menachem Begin even made courtesy phone
calls to Jerry Falwell, thanking him for his support), Jews are wary of the
evangelical belief that the Jewish return to Israel is a precondition for
the return of the Messiah and everyone becoming Christian. Yet, "using
extensive TV and radio spots throughout the United States, particularly in
Bible Belt communities," a Chicago rabbi pulled in $5 million in 1997
from Christian evangelists for the United Jewish Appeal. The UJA's international
link organization is the Jewish Agency. Although the Agency is happy to accept
the $5 million, that department's chairman has refused to meet anyone from
the rabbi's Christian-soliciting fund-raising group. "Since taking office,"
notes the Jerusalem Post, "[Jewish Agency head Avraham] Burg has
told people that he aims to deal only with matters that concern the Jewish
people, because it is their agency. He does not plan to deal with groups whose
[Christian] fundamentalist agenda contradicts his world view." [COHEN,
A., CLOSE, p. 11]
It is ironic that when the American Jewish
Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Reform Central Conference of
American Rabbis, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the National
Council of Jewish Women, and other Jewish agencies united in the 1970's to
successfully eliminate government aid to parochial schools, (which did not
endear them to the Catholic school system, and others) even the Jewish Orthodox
community (who stood to lose aid to their own schools) opposed the
secular Jewish agencies. (Meanwhile,
in "democratic" Israel, in 1996 the Ministry of Education ran ads
announcing that "We spend 26 million shekels [$8.5 million], among other
things, implementing the Shenhar Commission Report [on beefing up Judaism
in state schools]. [HALEVI,
p. 17]
In 1999, an extremely rare rabbinical voice rose in defense against the avalanche
of Jewish attack upon Christianity. Orthodox rabbi Daniel Lapin wrote that
"Because it is so unusual these days
for a rabbi to say nice things
about Christians, I consider it necessary
to explain that I am not
now, nor have I ever been, Christian ...
[But] it is ... my great concern
that all Americans -- including Jews --
are endangered by a weakening
of Christianity in our society today ...
Jews should stop speaking and
acting as if Christian America is their
enemy ... I am perfectly at ease
recognizing that America is primarily a
Christian nation. In fact, I am
grateful for the country's Christian foundation,
because it that religious
foundation that has made it possible for
Jews to live in safety in this
country for over 200 years." [LAPIN,
p. 70]
Lapin also criticized the Anti-Defamation
League for forcing "a cancellation of Navy support for a [Christian]
Promise Keepers rally in Norfolk [Virginia] ... Lapin condemned the ADL for
'anti-Christian bigotry.'" [Gold, P., 10-27-97]
Lapin is an anomaly, however. Protestants
too (as well as Muslims, for that matter) have been assailed by Jewish lobbying
organizations. "Spokesmen for Jewish organizations," says Yaakov
Ariel, "have characterized the anti-Israel criticism and involvement
of liberal Protestants as part of the process -- at times unconscious -- by
which traditional anti-Semitism has been transformed into anti-Israel sentiments."
[ARIEL, p. 339]
A local Anti-Defamation League member in
the South even wanted to sue a city that had the word "Christianity"
on a city seal on its garbage trucks. The national ADL deemed it too minor
to be worth the expense to hassle it, but the American Jewish Congress got
involved because it thought the garbage truck seal "was a major constitutional
issue." [IVERS, p. 199] In 1978
an article in the New York Times Magazine by Jewish novelist Ann Roiphe
evoked a famous response: a flood of outrage vented in protest letters by
Jewish readers who were offended by what they regarded as betrayal in writing
warmly about a Christian holiday; her piece was entitled "Christmas Comes
to a Jewish Home." [LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 47]
In April 2000, a Jewish judge, Avern Cohn,
noted why he was part of a 2-1 ruling by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
(in a case argued by the American Civil Liberties Union) that declared Ohio's
motto, "With God, all things are possible," to be unconstitutional:
"When Jesus spoke to his disciples,
he was explaining to them what
was needed of them to enter Heaven and achieve
salvation, a
uniquely Christian thought not shared by Jews and Muslims."
[ASSOCIATED PRESS 4-26-00]
One would imagine that to any religion, including
Judaism and Islam, the notion that "With God, all things are possible"
makes sense (and according to recent surveys in America, most people still
do believe in the presence of a "God"); the point of condemnation was that the phrase is noted
in the Christian New Testament (Matthew
19:26). Meanwhile, in 1999, Florida's Department of Agriculture went ahead
with governmental sponsorship in "labeling kosher foods [foods expressly
created to meet Jewish dietary laws], a position some warn will push it over
the line separating temple and state." The label says "Kosher from
Florida." [DATE, S., 6-10-99, p. 1A]
In 1998, in Australia, full in the face
of federal anti-discrimination laws and its Equal Opportunity Act, a Jewish
dating agency appealed an earlier court ruling and was allowed to discriminate
against all Gentiles in its advertisements exclusively aimed at fellow Jews.
Jewish organizations are so often two-faced in their legal arguments against discrimination -- as evidenced here, as discrimination benefits
them, they sometimes argue for it.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry provided affidavits to the court
requesting the right for the dating agency in the name of Jewish separatism.
The court ruled that
"the dating service was on the borderline
of the scope of the Act,
but the decision [in the Jewish favor]
was necessary to assist Jews
who were disadvantaged in finding a life
partner ... [The judge] said
the decision should not be viewed by other
racial groups as a precedent
for segregating activities." [COURIER-MAIL,
8-29-98]
In Canada, in 1998, after a Swissair jet
crash, a Calgary newspaper editorial complained about the religious double
standards that had taken hold in that country: "Someone ordered Christian
references in the United Church and Catholic parts of the [common memorial
service for killed passengers] to be deleted while Jewish, Muslim, and other
references were left untouched ... The muzzling of the Christian parts of
the service is disturbing because it smacks of the mindset which dictates
that since Christianity is the predominant religion in Canada, it is offensive
to minorities and therefore must be stifled when members of those minorities
are present." [CALGARY HERALD, p. A12]
Meanwhile, in Israel, by 1997, writes Yossi
Halevi in the Jerusalem Report:
"Aryeh Deri, head of the ultra-Orthodox
Sephardi-Shas Party
recently demanded that the military
suspend soldiers' visits
to churches as part of army-organized
historical tours of
Jerusalem, because Orthodox Jews
believe it sacrilege to enter a
church; Chief of Staff Amhon Lipkin-Shahak
promptly complied.
And some Orthodox officials in the
Ministry of Religious Affairs,
acknowledged a senior official there,
'deliberately sabotage
anything to do with Christians, whom
they hate.'" [HALEVI, Y. p.
16]
Jewish dissimulation to their non-Jewish
neighbors is endemic to their survival strategy in America. There is, to this
very day, a Jewish enforcement of communal silence around Gentiles when it
comes to Jewish attitudes about themselves as Chosen People and its meaning.
"The real test facing both Israeli and diaspora Jews," argues Israel
Shahak, "is the test of their self-criticism which must include the critique
of the Jewish past. The most important part of such a critique must be detailed
and honest confrontation of the Jewish attitude towards non-Jews. This is
what many Jews justly demand from non-Jews." [SHAHAK, p. 103]
Yet, as Shahak knows, it is culturally institutionalized
that such Jewish "self-criticism" from the Jewish community can
not happen. It is epitomized in the common Yiddish phrase, "A shanda fur the Goyim," which means
"It's a shame for the non-Jews to know." [GILLER, p. 103] Ann Roiphe notes that there are two self-inflicted
taboos all Jews function under to remain in the tribe. The first is the guilt-trip
pressures instilled to never leave the Jewish community, and the second "major
taboo for the Jewish nation is against speaking out, informing the goyim,
airing dirty linen. This taboo had its legitimate base in the desire not to
deliver ammunition into the hands of the anti-Semitic enemy." [ROIPHE,
1981, p. 198] "Not only must Jews keep their own sins out of the gentile
gaze," notes James Yaffe, "they must be careful not to expose the
sins of their fellow Jews." [YAFFE, J., 1968, p. 62] "I seem to
detect," said the Jewish author Philip Rahv, "[in some of the passages
of Jewish author Leslie Fiedler] the tone of an informer to the goyim,
and the less said about that the better." [In CUDDIHY, p. x] This defensive
and secretive attitude finds expression in the political realm too, especially
per Israel, where American Jewish leaders exercise a "self-imposed policy
of refraining from public criticism of Israel." [BOOKBINDER, p. 131]
Yehoshafat Harkabi, a former Chief of Israeli
Military Intelligence, wrote a book (1989), Israel's Fateful Hour,
that, among other things, outlined
the fascist-like movement growing
in the Jewish community, largely based upon a revival of traditional messianic
and racist Judaism. "A case can be made against me," he wrote, "that
by revealing these tendencies of the Jews and Israel I am providing ammunition
to enemies. I find myself in a painful conflict ... A conspiracy of silence
about these beliefs and this use of the tradition allows them to go unchallenged
and encouraged those who propagate them. There can be no remedy without first
identifying the problem. By hiding our shame from outsiders we hide it from
ourselves as well ... Religious extremists [in the Jewish community] are not
a negligible element." [HARKABI, p. 182]
Jewish reluctance to address -- and their
tendency to dodge -- such issues (those
that swirl around Jewish self-concepts of specialness as the Chosen People
and their presumed destiny in that regard) are long standing. In 1937, Clayton
Morrisson, editor of the liberal Protestant journal The Christian Century,
complained that Jewish secretiveness is evidenced "in all the conferences
between Jews and Christians, where 'tolerance' and 'mutual appreciation' are
the major notes. The Jews do not bring in to the conferences a fully candid
expression of their own aspirations. The essential problem is not stated;
it therefore cannot be confronted." [MORRISON, p. 734]
In the same era, Ben Halpern, editor of
the Jewish Frontier, complained to his community that "Judaism
has become 'the public facade that Jews present to America' and the criterion
of selection was simply what would please [Gentiles].'" [EISEN, p. 134] "For Halpern," notes Arnold Eisen,
"the core of galut [exile] was the Jewish conviction that 'the real history
of the world is, after all, the history the Jews as a people have known, while
the history of other peoples is essentially irrelevant.'" [EISEN, p.
134]
In 1949 the editor of Commentary,
Elliot Cohen, noted that Jewish intellectuals were facing a "self-imposed
censorship" in their own community "for fear that the goyim [non-Jews]
hear and use it against us." [EISEN, p. 131] In later years the Jewish
editor of Midstream observed, "that many, too many, feel that
for reasons of 'public relations' it is inadvisable to discuss this subject
[Chosen People] -- that it is a theme to be avoided if not suppressed."
[EISEN, p. 137]
In 1958, Jewish sociologist Herbert Gans
wrote that
"the Jews form a strong in-group,
with well-verbalized attitudes to the
non-Jewish out-group. The Jewish cohesion,
the in-group attitudes and
the anti-outgroup feeling that accompanies
it, are expressed frequently
at the informal parties and gatherings
where the friendly atmosphere
and the absence of non-Jews creates a
suitable environment. These
feelings are verbalized through the Jewish
joke, which expresses aspects
of the Jews' attitudes toward themselves
as well as toward the out
group, or through direct remarks about
the out group. At parties which
are predominately Jewish, it is necessary
to find out if everyone is
Jewish before such attitudes can be expressed
overtly. When someone
in the gathering who is assumed to be
Jewish turns out to be otherwise,
the atmosphere becomes tense and the non-Jewish
person may be
avoided thereafter." [SKLARE, p. 228]
In reference to Jewish authors more safely
publishing articles out of non-Jewish earshot, in Hebrew, and in Israel, David
Biale notes in 1996 that "certain things might be said (in North America)
in what Sander Gilman has called the 'secret language' of the Jews, but not
in the lingua franca of the scholarly
world. As free and unapologetic as Jewish studies may seem in North America,
anti-Semitism (may not) have really been vanquished from our imaginations."
[BIALE, BETWEEN, p. 177]
Charles Liebman and Steven Cohen note
that in Israel in 1988 what they described as a "blatantly racist"
advertising campaign caused Arab politicians to remind their Jewish neighbors
that many Israeli Arabs understood Hebrew too:
"Even when speaking to general audiences
(which in theory includes
non-Jews as well as Jews) Israelis speak
as though what they say will be
heard only by other Jews." [LIEBMAN/COHEN,
p. 167]
An empowered majority, the Jews of Israel
feel they have nothing to politically worry about. "By contrast,"
note Liebman and Cohen, "American Jews and the Anglo-Jewish Press are
aware that what they say to Jews can be heard and read by non-Jews."
[LIEBMAN/COHEN, p. 167]
On the subject of Jewish chosenness expressed
as overt racism in seminal Jewish religious texts, an Israeli rabbi, Tzvi
Marx, wrote recently in a public letter to his son:
"Don't let anyone persuade you that
one should not realize this issue
[of Jewish racism in religious texts]
in print, that it's like washing the
dirty linen of the Jewish people in public,
an act of disloyalty." [MARX,
p. 46]
In a 1983 book expressly about the Chosen
People concept in America, Arnold Eisen notes that
"[Jewish public discourse about
their idea of chosenness] may be
dishonest to the extent that it masks
sentiments deemed too dangerous
for expression. If the presentation
of Judaism and Jews has ... been
greatly influenced by the need for successful
'public relations,'
nowhere would this be more true than
in the case of the single
subject most likely to arouse gentile
indignation -- Jewish
chosenness." [EISEN, p. 146]
It seems plausible that those attitudes of twenty years ago have
not
vanished entirely and that the continuing
Jewish silence on such
matters reflects a lingering sense of
moral superiority ... The desire to
maintain some distance from gentiles
-- even as one seeks their
approval -- has probably not disappeared,
if only so that one might
enjoy some private space in which to
discuss Jewish concerns with
other Jews without worrying about being
overheard." [EISEN, p. 146]
If one is ethnocentric one does not need
to appear to be so ... [The
Jewish tradition is to] be a human being
in the streets and a Jew in
your home. The division can only work,
of course, if those who one
meets in the street are not visitors
in one's home, and the opinions
which one voices in the home are not
heard outside it." [EISEN, p. 145]
In the context of the modern Jewish polity
and its civil religion, the essences of Jewish communal identity and its ultimate
aims are not publicly articulated; they are, in fact, disguised, avoided,
or dissimulated.
"Civil Judaism," says Jonathan
Woocher, "does not often speak at length about why Jewish survival is
important; the validity of (that) goal is a given." [WOOCHER, p. 75] "It is almost as if Jews have become fixated
on survival for its own sake," says Leonard Fein, "without ever
having been very eloquent about why it is that such survival matters. That,
in fact, is why I use the term instinct."
[FEIN, New, p. 144] "American
Jews," says Jacob Neusner, "although many continue to affirm their
Jewishness, have no clear notion of how they are Jewish, or what their Jewish
heritage demands of them." [NEUSNER, Holo, p. 978] "Jews
continue to feel an emotional allegiance to their coreligionists," agrees
Gordon Lafar, "But with no philosophical justification for particularism,
these bonds take on the form of crude commitments ... that can be asserted
but not explained." [LAFAR, p. 180] "The insistence by some that the Holocaust
must be the core of Jewish self-reflection today," says Peter Berger,
"has the function of freezing the presence of anti-Semitism in the consciousness
of Jews -- and thus covering up the question why one should be a Jew."
[CUDDIHY, Holo, p. 73] "We
have not yet formulated," wrote Jewish author Gary Tobin in 1999, "a
set of beliefs, behaviors, and institutional structures that define what it
means to be a Jew in the pluralistic society that we ourselves have helped
to build." [TOBIN, G., 1999, p. 6]
"We have rarely had to ask ourselves
truly deep existential questions," says Egon Mayer, "the answers
to which mark the autonomous moral agent: what do we believe? Why do we want
to be apart from others as a culturally distinct entity?" [MAYER, NYT,
p. 4, 17] The great crisis of the
[Jewish] nation," says Yeshayahu Leibowitz, "'the hurt of my people'
(Jer. 8:21), is that today we cannot tell what it is that makes them
Jews." [LEIBOWITZ, p. 84] "Ultimately
... the assertion of Jewish unity leads to the assertion of a special Jewish
destiny," says Woocher, " ... what the destiny is, is often left
vague or unstated by civil religion spokespersons." [WOOCHER, p. 71]
"Obfuscation, hidden agenda, double-talk and, commonest of all,
double think," noted David Vital in 1990 about Jewish common discourse
about Israel, "are still very much the order of the day." [SACKS,
J., p. 9] "Critical observers of the American Jewish civic religion,
including some of its thoughtful adherents, have at times expressed concern
that Jewish survival has become an end in itself in the Jewish polity."
[WOOCHER, p. 76]
"Jews have not stopped being Jews,"
notes Nathan Glazer, "... It is not that most Jews in this country submit
themselves to Jewish law. They do not. Nor can they tell you what the Jewish
heritage is." [NEUSNER, J., 1972, p. 9-10] "If the anti-Semites have indeed been
beaten back," says Fein, "what is left to connect us (as Jews)?
If Jewish survival is assured, what is left for us to be concerned about?
More precisely, if the threat to Jewish survival does not come from without,
we who profess to care for that survival must turn inward. And that is something
we prefer not to do." [SHAPIRO, AN., p. 8]
What does all this vagueness mean? Why don't
Jews want to face themselves and the essences of their communal identity?
How can the motivating reason and goal for such incessant Jewish self-obsession
be left unstated unless the millions of members of the variant expressions
of the modern Chosen People club are uncomfortable with what the real reason
might be? Or, are they merely reluctant to reveal it and its implications?
Can it be that the honest core of historical Judaism, Zionism, and Jewish
"peoplehood" cannot be honestly faced, that its traditional core
of elitism, chauvinism, ethnocentrism, racism, and other anathemas to modern
pan-human thinking can not, in good conscience (nor safely), be overtly championed?
Gerald Blidstein, a professor of Jewish
Law at Ben Gurion University in Israel, has, in 1994, faced the ominous implications
of what lies always unstated:
"I sense ... in both the educational
apparatus, as well as in synagogues
and social gatherings in both Israel
and the U. S. .... a growing
infatuation with power and violence, perhaps as a backlash of the
Holocaust ... For it seems that only
the particularist is legitimate in our
community, not the universal ... Democracy
is an alien value, to be
tolerated and indeed exploited around
the world, but it does not really
oblige us in our deepest being ...
I find the current intolerance not
merely impoverished but sinister."
[BLIDSTEIN, p. ]
"Many American Jews," says
Norman Birnbaum,
"...
cannot tell whether they are supremely secure in the United States,
or menaced by countless (internal as well
as external) enemies. Their
attachment to Jewish moral substance has
become increasingly ritualized:
after all, many would be hard put to say
what precisely it is. The official
leaders of the Jewish community are brilliant
tacticians. They are adept
at playing upon the community's fears and
manipulative in their approach
to the rest of American society. Their
narrow conception of Jewish
interests is designed for the short run,
and entails dangers for the
Jewish community which will become increasingly
evident in the
next decades." [BIRNBAUM, p. 112]
