February/March 1996, Pages 79-81

Jews and Israel

ADL Delegates Visit Four Mideast Nations

Members of a 10-person delegation from B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League who met with leaders of four Middle East states returned to the U.S. in early December with reassuring insights about the Arab countries they visited. Their three-day visit to Saudi Arabia was a first for the ADL, and gave them an opportunity to meet with Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud bin Faisal and with the Saudi ministers of commerce and petroleum and planning and with an official of the Saudi National Guard.

ADL Washington representative Jess Hordes told the Washington Jewish Week that Prince Saud "went out of his way" to express condolences for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Hordes reported that the Saudis they met also expressed support for the Arab-Israeli peace process. He said Saudi officials predicted progress on the Israeli-Syrian track and "hinted" that if an agreement is reached they would move to improve relations with Israel.

"We got a clear sense that the Saudis would...show the Israeli public that there are collateral benefits that go beyond the agreement," Hordes said. "The Saudis' own bilateral dealings with Israel would be part of the mix."

In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak told them that prior to the Rabin assassination "many Arabs believed that Rabin used Likud as an excuse not to move ahead in certain areas," ADL national director Abraham Foxman told the Jewish Week of Queens, NY. "[Mubarak] said he knew that Rabin was sincere but that some of his Arab friends and colleagues believed that Rabin was maneuvering when he said he could not go (too) quickly."

Foxman said the group complained to Mubarak about anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish cartoons in the Egyptian press. Mubarak replied that Egypt had a free press and that the "same ones who attack Jews attack me. The only thing I can say is that I'm opposed to anti-Semitism, and you can repeat that."

In a meeting with Yasser Arafat, the ADL delegates asked him to use other words than "jihad" in his speeches, Foxman said, because Americans interpret it as a call for holy war. Arafat said he has been using the word to muster a major effort in support of infrastructure building, Foxman reported.

In conversations with Israeli officials, the ADL delegates challenged the Israel Ad Council to develop a slogan for a public service announcement that would deal with intolerance and unite the country. Foxman noted that President Bill Clinton's often-quoted parting salutation at Rabin's funeral, "Shalom, chaver," already has been appropriated as a political message by Israel's Labor party.

Foxman said he suggested to representatives of Bar-Ilan University, where Rabin's confessed assassin, Yigal Amir, had studied law, the need for programs dealing with tolerance for schoolmates. He said officials of the Israel Defense Forces said they were considering a similar program for military personnel.

Foxman said intolerance is not limited to Israel. "We have to deal with hate in our country [the U.S] that we never knew before," Foxman said. "We have to hold responsible those rabbis, teachers and principals who try to rationalize and justify the assassination. They do not belong in a position of leadership."

Although most of the delegation returned to the United States from Israel, Hordes traveled to Amman, where he met with Crown Prince Hassan.

Citing the Interparliamentary Council on Anti-Semitism, the Jordanian crown prince proposed the formation of an organization to deal with "Islamophobia" or with prejudice against Arabs, Hordes reported. Hordes said the ADL, which presently is seeking to establish a task force on anti-Semitism in Congress, is receptive to the idea.

Summarizing the delegation's visit, Hordes told the Washington Jewish Week: "The mission was useful. We opened up new lines of communication and came to a new understanding of their [the Arabs] thinking. We thought these discussions were productive and useful, and we intend to build upon them."

—Nathan Jones

Anti-Semitism in America: Do Scorekeepers Outnumber Players?

ABC "Nightline" correspondent Jeff Greenfield may have pleased his audience more than his hosts when he said in the fifth annual "State of Anti-Semitism" lecture sponsored in New York City by the Simon Wiesenthal Center that anti-Semitism has declined in America.

"In the United States today, anti-Semitism as we have understood it does not now pose a serious threat to our safety, our liberty or our prospects," Greenfield told an audience of 400 people at the November program. It is important to recognize this, he said, "because fighting the fights that have already been won can in fact weaken the efforts to fight the real dangers that remain."

Greenfield, who also serves as a media analyst for ABC, said that when he was growing up in New York after World War II, "Jews changed their names for professional reasons." By contrast, he said, he recently moderated a panel at a magazine publishers' convention composed of the creators of the entertainment conglomerate Dreamworks. Jokingly he opened the session by saying, "My name is Greenfield. My guests are Geffen, Spielberg and Katzenberg. Our topic: the myth of Jewish influence in the media." The point of the anecdote, he said, is that "everybody could see who was on that stage—and it didn't matter."

To reinforce his point, he said that there now are nine Jewish senators among the 100 members of the U.S. Senate, some of them from states with very small Jewish populations. Nor, Greenfield said, do controversial Jews now face anti-Semitism from the American public. "Even when it comes to the obstreperous behavior of prominent American Jews, the response has been what Martin Luther King Jr. hoped for: Folks like Howard Stern, Alan Dershowitz, Roseanne are being judged not on their ethnic origin but on the content of their character," Greenfield said.

In reporting Greenfield's talk in the Dec. 1 Jewish Week of Queens, NY, however, staff writer Eric Greenberg pointed out that Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz delivered last year's lecture in the same series. In his presentation, Dershowitz exhibited anti-Semitic letters he had received after making controversial statements on television. Similarly, on his radio show, the Jewish Week reporter noted, Howard Stern frequently reads letters he receives that contain anti-Semitic phrases in taking issue with Stern's controversial opinions and scatological language.

A recently published book, Anti-Semitism in America Today: Outspoken Experts Explode the Myths, for the most part takes positions similar to Greenfield's. The editor, Jerome A. Chanes, co-director for domestic concerns for the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, writes in his introduction to the book that a wide range of studies indicate that anti-Semitism has declined since the 1940s. Yet, within the Jewish community there are perceptions of "an anti-Semitism ascendant," Chanes writes. "If things are so good out there, why do so many Jews think that things are so bad?...Why can't Jews take yes for an answer?"

Within the book, individual authors take contrasting views of the issue, exemplified by Anti-Defamation League national director Abraham Foxman's "Anti-Semitism in America: A View from the Defense Agencies" and Arthur Hertzberg's essay entitled "How Jews Use Anti-Semitism."

On the other side of the question is Beth Gilinsky, who heads the right-wing Jewish Action Alliance, which encourages volunteers to tape radio shows looking for anti-Semitic rhetoric. Her four-year-old group distributes the tapes to law enforcement agencies and news organizations. The JAA enjoyed a publicity windfall when, after the torching of a Jewish-operated clothing store in Harlem by an African-American gunman, with the loss of nine lives, Gilinsky released tapes in which New York Black activist and agitator Al Sharpton complained about "white interlopers" and charged the Jewish owner of the store "was trying to drive a Black man out of business."

Gilinsky, who told the Jewish Week that her organization monitors two Black radio stations, WLIB and WWRL, "pretty much around the clock," said the JAA also has people listening to two WABC talk show hosts, Bob Grant and Jay Diamond, who have been called racists by African-American critics. The tapes demonstrate, Gilinsky says, that major Jewish organizations in New York have been "asleep at the wheel" while anti-Semitic language is filling the airwaves.

Commenting on her attacks on establishment Jewish organizations and what some critics call her politics of confrontation with the African-American community, mainstream Jewish leaders are critical. "I always had difficulty in understanding her need to attack other Jewish organizations," ADL national director Foxman told the Jewish Week. "They do their thing their way."

—Nathan Jones

Former AIPAC Official Takes Democratic Party Liaison Role

Former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) official Ira Forman became executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, the Democratic party's principal outreach to organized American Jewry, on Jan. 8. Forman replaced Elizabeth Schrayer, also a former AIPAC official, who had been NJDC acting director since July. Forman was AIPAC political director and legislative liaison from 1977 to 1981. He also has served as New York director of National PAC, the largest pro-Israel political action committee, and as a fellow with the progressive Center for National Policy. In 1985 he established his own consulting firm, Washington Corporate Strategies, Inc., and represented the Jewish Democratic Study Group, predecessor to the NJDC. In 1993 President Bill Clinton appointed Forman director of the office of congressional relations for the Office of Personnel Management, a U.S. government position Forman has vacated to assume his NJDC job.

"Today the political choices presented to Americans by the Democratic party and its opposition are real and dramatic," Forman told the Washington Jewish Week. "I am elated to become the executive director of the NJDC at a time when the American Jewish community can make a real difference in helping this country decide which path to follow." He said one of his major tasks will be to help block the "radical right" agenda and support traditional Jewish values on issues like church-state relations, school prayer, abortion rights and gun control.

—Nathan Jones