"Since the last great wave," says Woocher, "of social activism in America in the 1960's, the rhetoric of Jewish pursuit o

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,

"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,

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,

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,

(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., 12-2-99, 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,

(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,

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.

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."

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,

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.

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

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."

"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.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

* 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."

* 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."

* 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."

* 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."

"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?"

"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.

"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.,

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, and then a followup: Article two]

    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.

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."

"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 Indepedence 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,

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

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.

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."

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.

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,

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]