July 8, 2005
Give Proper Credit on Civil Rights Movement
A reply to the June 24 editorial on the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen is in order (“What They Did”).
I write as a 50-year veteran of the civil rights struggle, having first joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and helped found its first Stanford college chapter in 1949. I have been actively involved with the NAACP ever since, including having 30 years as director of its national fund raising and public relations efforts. My last title was director of program development.
I also happen to be a Brooklyn-born and bar mitzvahed Jew, but my religion is not the issue except to underscore that I am not coming from an anti-Jewish position. Furthermore, I have authored a recently published history of the NAACPs first 60 years, titled “Freedom’s Sword,” which among other things deals with the NAACP’s struggle with some trade unionists, including the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which strenuously resisted efforts to open up the workplace and promotional opportunities to black workers.
In recent decades, many whites, including Jews, have tried to take credit for the achievements of the civil rights movement. In fact, most of the achievements — more than 95% — were the product of the efforts, courage and commitment of hundreds of thousands of African Americans who picketed, protested and marched in the face of extreme danger and hardship. The basic strategies were crafted by the leaders of the NAACP and its sister organizations. That includes the NAACP’s legal assaults on school and other forms of desegregation, its persevered efforts to effect civil-rights and voting-rights legislation, and its unparalleled campaigns to register black voters.
Furthermore, no formal alliance of any kind between blacks and Jews was ever negotiated or even suggested.
Among the NAACP’s original founders were several notable Jews, including Joel and Arthur Spingarn, as well as several non-Jews, such as Oswald Garrison Villard, Morefield Storey, Mary White Ovington and William Lloyd Garrison. Individual Jews have worked with and for the NAACP over the past 96 years in a much higher proportion than other whites, but they still are a very small number of the total — less than 1%. And to my knowledge, none participated as representatives of Judaism.
As American Jews became more like other whites in our nation, especially after World War II, they became increasingly less supportive of the civil rights struggle, although their involvement and financial support was no doubt proportionately greater than that of the rest of white society. The indisputable fact, however, is that Jewish philanthropy is and has been almost exclusively in support of Jews — and, for the most part, it has made the choice to ignore the neediest among us who are not Jewish.
Just as significantly, when the goals of blacks, especially in important litigation, appeared to conflict with the possible interests of Jews, Jewish support of NAACP suits disappeared. The infamous Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case was the turning point, after Jewish organizations and lawyers had determined that goals and timetables, much less quotas — which the NAACP never proposed — would somehow diminish the opportunities of Jewish college students to enter Ivy League and graduate schools.
Let me be clear: The contributions of such men as Joseph Rauh, Kivie Kaplan, Armand Derfner and Arnold Aronson were important and valuable to the struggle. Without these men and other Jews, it might have been more difficult and taken somewhat longer to reach the point where we are today — and those who are familiar with the struggle and who lead today know this well.
But they also know that the struggle for African-American liberation since the end of slavery has rested largely on the backs of black men, women and children who knowingly placed themselves at risk to earn their rightful places as first-class citizens of the United States. It is unseemly for any group — right or left, religious or secular — to claim otherwise.
Gilbert Jonas
New York, N.Y.
Recognizing Limits Not Part of Chabad Belief
The July 1 article on a Chabad gathering against Israel’s plan to dismantle settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank was quite an eye opener for me, even though I was familiar with the event (“Hasidim Rally Against Disengagement”). I was one of the organizers, and despite the fact that I was called out of town at the last minute, I was able to watch the event over the Internet.
What was surprising for me were the statements made to the Forward by Rabbi David Eliezrie, someone who is considered by many to be a spokesperson for Chabad. He is quoted as saying that the challenge of Chabad is “to recognize limits of what Chabad can do as a religious organization.” In Hasidic philosophy, the biblical name for Egypt, Mizraim, means limits. And Hasidim are always encouraged to leave Mizraim, to go beyond our limits — not to honor them with recognition.
One favorite Chabad teaching says, “from the onset, one is to rise above limitations.” In the Forward article, Eliezrie is effectively saying, at the onset, focus on your limitations.
The Chabad Rebbe clearly said that a plan such as the disengagement plan would put lives in danger. Although the rebbe’s words of 38 years ago could be considered prophetic, today there is hard evidence that the greater the concessions, the greater the terrorism. Opposing the disengagement plan is a matter of saving lives.
Therefore, it cannot be considered a political issue that requires a measured response by a religious organization. It is the mitzvah of pikuach nefesh, of saving lives, and must be dealt with in the Hasidic way: from the onset, rising above the obstacles.
Aliza Karp
Crown Heights, N.Y.
ADL Acts Hypocritically In Honoring Turkish PM
Although a June 17 article on the Anti-Defamation League’s award to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan covers complexities about Jewish attitudes toward Turkey, there is no mention of the Turkish government’s continuing denial of the Armenian genocide as a matter of controversy among Jews (“Turkey Pressed on Antisemitism as ADL Fetes Its Prime Minister”).
Numerous Jewish scholars and activists in Israel and the United States document both the Armenian genocide and the Turkish denial. However, so egregious is the ADL award to a head of a state that denies responsibility for the annihilation of 1.5 million of its own Armenian citizens that I believe the ADL is contributing to antisemitism.
What could be more hypocritical and useful to anti-Jewish bigotry than honoring a denier of genocide? The ADL is not making the world safe for Jews; rather it is contributing to our insecurity and to the discontinuity of our moral tradition.
I wish that the ADL would take seriously the words of Hillel: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary.
In the case of the award to Erdogan, the ADL is actually denying a cornerstone of rabbinic law as it dishonors its neighbors, the Armenians. By rewarding Erdogan, it is doing something it never would countenance to be done to Jews.
Molly Freeman
Berkeley, Calif.
Farrakhan’s Views on Jews, in His Own Words
Is there such a thing as being more Catholic than the pope? Well, a June 24 letter writer — who happens to be the Nation of Islam’s self-appointed, one-man public relations department — is more pro-Farrakhan than the Rev. Louis Farrakhan himself (“Nation of Islam Ignored”).
No, Farrakhan did not call Judaism a “gutter religion.” As the letter writer well knows, he characterized it as a “dirty religion” in his speech on Chicago’s WBEE-FM radio June 24, 1984, saying that Israel will “never have… peace because there can be no peace structured on injustice, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your dirty religion under his holy and righteous name.”
Was this acceptable criticism? The letter writer may think so. But in a 1993 interview with Arthur Magida, Farrakhan belatedly apologized for using the phrase “dirty religion” because it was “not appropriate…. It was my mistake.” His real target, claimed Farrakhan, was not Judaism but “specific actions of the Israeli government against children.” His half-hearted amends — though better than the letter writer’s stonewalling — were too little, too late.
What has Farrakhan said more recently? On February 27, in Chicago, he unloaded with this tirade: “Listen, Jewish people don’t have no hands that are free of the blood of us. They owned slave ships, they bought and sold us. They raped and robbed us. If you can’t face that, why you gonna condemn me for showing you your past? How then can you atone and repent if somebody don’t open the book with courage? You don’t have that, but, I’ll be damned, I got it.”
The letter writer ought to use the $1,000 he offers to anyone who can prove Farrakhan called Judaism a “gutter religion” to make available to all of us the tapes of these great conversations. With friends like these, we don’t need enemies.
Harold Brackman
San Diego, Calif.
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