A MOMENT Interview with Ted Mann
A MOMENT INTERVIEW TED MAN moment: We interviewed Alex Schindler almost two years ago (February/March 1977). In that discussion we wanted to help the Jewish community learn what the Conference of...
...There is still a great wariness...
...I don't know if they yet know it as viscerally as I would like them to, but I think they know it...
...And it's important also that the chairman be not the only one who has these meetings but that others do so that you can cross check opinions and reach sensible judgments...
...It's going to be a long time before they forget that...
...I think if we act that way, it will turn out that way...
...You know these people...
...He has been relentless and persistent and for that alone one would think that the American Jewish community would be very grateful to have such a president...
...I'm not sure he can get President Carter's ear on twenty minutes notice, but he has super access...
...An absurd notion...
...The second part of your question really speaks to relations with the American Jewish community and let's take it out of the realm of Prime Minister Begin for a moment because the question really goes to previous prime ministers just as much, and perhaps more...
...And when he appointed Ed that was kind of an affirmation that in fact he had not and I think that that was an extra plus to some people who were very concerned...
...For example, I have no doubt at all that the particular incident in February with Dr...
...I just don't see it happening...
...I'd have to think about the question some more...
...Also when he took the appointment, it was at a time when you could even hear American Jews saying, this president has written us all off He thinks he can win without us...
...It is time consuming and exciting and the nature of the organization and its purpose requires that its chairman be in fairly constant touch with top administration officials in Washington and Jerusalem...
...The bottom line that all of us have is how to make the American Jewish community endure...
...If you start out with that assumption, it leads you to a lot of things that interfere with a decent relationship between two communities...
...But I've got to say that we also have ourselves to blame, probably more than the Israelis, for the nature of the relationship as it exists now...
...When they want to talk to me they want to find out what American Jews are thinking about a situation...
...M: And doesn't that end up pushing you almost instinctively into a corner where, since you don't want to fracture the Jewish community, you do end up pretty much echoing the Israeli position...
...I think it's all to the good...
...We've been abused...
...M: Now that you are exposed to the upper reaches of Jewish leadership in this country, do you have a sense that the kind of criticism that was leveled against Jewish leadership a decade ago—that they were really cut off from sources and from Jewish background, that they were in the old noblesse oblige tradition but were not themselves Jewishly informed—do you think that's beginning to change...
...For example, the other day, Ed Sanders, whose formal charge is to maintain liaison between the administration and the Jewish community, presented what one assumes are the administration's views to a very large and distinguished audience of Jewish leaders in San Francisco and was received very coolly, as opposed to the reception accorded a very thoughtful and distinguished analyst of Middle East problems who offered a learned critique of the administration, which seemed to suit people better...
...Everything else is peripheral...
...But Ed, who is a terrific guy, took the job on the working assumption that President Carter truly was a lover of Israel, and if he's right in that assumption—and, as I indicated to you, I think he is—he's going to have some rough times with the American Jewish community...
...And I consulted with others about it as NJCRAC chairman, and decided to wait and see what would happen...
...I'm trying to describe it as best I can...
...Mann: That's right...
...M: Do you think that part of it may also have to do with the Israeli reaction, with the reaction of the Israeli public...
...I'm not looking for us to dominate them...
...You try to get the feeling of American Jews generally in order to guide yourself on whether to do this or not...
...You've spent a considerable amount of time with him...
...I think it is possible for us to look at them and say, "Hey, they're only human beings with failings like all the rest of us," and for them to develop healthier attitudes toward us...
...That, I presume, has meant that as a community we really haven't had to force ourselves on the administration to ask for meetings, that we have in fact been called by them...
...It is the principal risk, I think, in the chairmanship of the Conference of Presidents...
...M: Someone once observed that if, in fact, Israel's leadership treated American Jewish leadership with contempt, it was in part because American Jewish leadership was contemptible, and your ultimate predecessor in this office, Nachum Goldmann, has observed on any number of occasions, quite to people's dismay, that that was a consequence of the apparatus being taken over by the fund raisers here...
...Brzezinski is not the enemy, the President is not a born-again fundamentalist who doesn't understand or care for Jews, Sadat is not merely an ex-Nazi," you end up losing your credibility...
...These people are not fools...
...When the President was quoted as having said, I would sooner lose this office than see Israel go down, or when he is described as having as abiding religious commitment to the security of the Jewish State, are we supposed to take that seriously...
...The administration knows that, I think...
...I think the administration thinks that's important...
...M: Do you want to talk about those circumstances...
...It hasn't come up in that format, even in the negotiations, although it may...
...Mann: Yes, I think that the circumstances are probably three: First of all, Alex Schindler was an outstandingly articulate spokesman for the Jewish community during the two years that he was the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents...
...Mann: That is a very major risk...
...I think it's important, first of all, that all Jewish organizational structures in the country know that it exists...
...So that he does listen to some people...
...I believe him...
...Exciting is not an adequate word...
...To take another, quite different, example, you would have to talk about the settlements on the West Bank, and the starting of new settlements on the West Bank during the course of negotiations...
...M: And it's very important for the administration to know that...
...He is making the White House even more accessible to American Jewry than it otherwise was, and it was accessible even before Ed Sanders...
...There's no question about the fact that they do and I think it's no longer so—although it may have been a year or two ago—that the masses of Jews don't know that the Conference exists...
...How does that play itself out...
...He is a man who became President through the grass roots and he wanted to deal with grass roots Jewish people...
...I told President Carter that very recently...
...Mann: It started with President Carter in March of 1977...
...Mann: I honestly don't find it heady...
...I'm sure you know the history better than I do, but I sense that by the time Ben Gurion became the first Prime Minister of Israel all of the really towering figures in American Jewish life had died or were about to...
...Who knows when the last time we relaxed was...
...They're acting partly in their political aspect...
...As a matter of fact I don't think American Jews are terribly informed about the mood in Israel right now...
...Mann: I think the mood of gloom in Israel is there, and is a much more serious phenomenon than the mood extant in the American Jewish community, but I think they both derive from the same sources...
...So what's the point of dealing with that as an issue...
...Mann: Sometimes I think that's what they're about...
...We look for reasons to feel apprehensive and are more comfortable with them...
...I'm not willing to bet that at all...
...He is not and he is not trying to be the spokesman of American Jewry...
...What do you think about that, Mr...
...Let me ask whether you think that's a problem...
...But he is the Prime Minister and he makes the decisions...
...When you read it carefully you see it's not nearly as bad as some people might want you to believe...
...It's hard to convince people that this president is doing the^right thing...
...Let me name a few that have been prominent over the past year...
...Yet you can't duck the problem because I don't think the Jewish community has ever before been involved in the kind of situation it now is, where there is a major negotiation going on and the American Jewish community has a very deep interest in that negotiation...
...I can think of a number of people in the defense agencies and all of them have pretty good Jewish backgrounds regardless of their attitudes on fundamental religious questions today...
...I was in London last month to meet with the Presidium of the world Soviet Jewry organization—the outgrowth of the Brussels Conference—and that of course dealt with Soviet Jewry, but the function of the Conference of Presidents is to deal with the security of Jews outside of the United States and right now we're predominantly dealing with the Middle East and Soviet Jews...
...M: You've been chairman for how long...
...M: Except that they don't know what you know...
...I hadn't heard the news announcements, but I knew that it was not true...
...I for one, am convinced—and we'll never know the real story—that starting in February of this year the President of the United States decided that he was going to have to spend some months publicly chastising the State of Israel and if there weren't good reasons to do so he'd have to find them...
...Mann: It's very important for the administration to know that and I think that they do know that...
...How do you know that such a thing is not true...
...Mann: I think it's easier to talk about that subject by focusing in on particular issues, and there aren't that many...
...Some of them have very fine Jewish backgrounds...
...For example, I think American Jewry and Israeli Jewry feel as one on the subject of Jerusalem, on the subject of whether there should ever conceivably be Arab sovereignty in East Jerusalem or part of East Jerusalem...
...That's my belief...
...If, after all, we're soon going to be goyim, they'll use us while we're still here, and be helpful to us— but, it's not a peer relationship, it's not a healthy non-power-permeated relationship...
...That doesn't mean they're not being persecuted...
...There is still a concern that the President of the United States has not necessarily changed his mind about the necessity for trying to moderate the PLO and bring them into the peace-making process...
...And I think you'd find a fairly widespread consensus on that issue among American Jews...
...M: Well, let me give you a specific...
...And third, when Prime Minister Begin was elected, we found, I think, a Prime Minister who is very sensitive to dealing with the particular structures in the diaspora community that the diaspora selects as its own...
...In a sense you can almost not blame them...
...Mann: Virtually all...
...The Jewish community, until Camp David, was very down on this president, and getting downer all the time...
...I did want to say something else on the subject of this gloom and what is sometimes close to hysteria, especially in Israel...
...In that process I've come out pretty much where you have...
...Then I sat back and said, now wait a minute...
...Mann: I don't know what motivated it...
...So we have this situation in which the President of the United States and Prime Minister Begin and a very articulate Chairman of the Conference of Presidents coalesced and today many many more Jews know about the Conference...
...Of course the problem arises in connection with my chairmanship in ways like this...
...I was at that meeting, with a lot of people, and I felt when I walked out of that meeting that we had been invited to lunch—we hadn't asked to come—and we were abused, and abused very badly, and I was so outraged for the moment (we had been invited by Vice-President Mondale, by the way, not by Dr...
...And these meetings with the administration in Washington and the administration in Jerusalem are, I think, terribly important for that purpose...
...I don't see that happening...
...We have some history in our favor if you go back far enough to compare diaspora communities to indigenous communities in Israel, and I have no confidence that it's going to be the other way this time...
...Brzezinski was particularly subject to a year ago, and the President as well, is, on the basis of your acquaintance with these people, inappropriate...
...We have about 60,000 professors on campuses throughout the United States, and doctors and lawyers and activists and theater people, and the people who write the songs—I could go on and on—we are a fantastic Jewish community...
...That's why I'm in this business...
...If the critical stories about Carter were that he really didn't care about Israel, the stories about Begin are that he does not listen...
...Mann: If you mean within the general Jewish community, I don't think that's a terrible problem...
...Every man for himself...
...M: I think that what you're saying is that in part we are incapable of relaxing because we don't know how...
...There is another structure in regard to the Soviet Jewry question in the United States, the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, so that does not take as much of the time, nor should it, of the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents...
...I know they sensed that and I know they sensed that Israeli Jews were of several minds on that subject...
...I'm just sitting here thinking of the officers in NJCRAC, which I head...
...They know, and so the Conference of Presidents would probably not even put that item on its own agenda, because the Conference of Presidents is an organization that speaks out only when there is a consensus, and a chairman of the Conference of Presidents would certainly know that on an issue like that he would never achieve a consensus...
...So in respect to that issue the problem you're describing just doesn't arise...
...I think, for example, it probably would be possible to have a consensus in the American Jewish community that Israel, regardless of anything else that happens there, ought to have a permanent or indefinite military presence on the West Bank and an ability on the ground on the West Bank to defend itself in the indefinite future with its own troops...
...But that same attitude permeates the relationship between us and Israel on Middle East questions and on everything else as well...
...I think that does follow...
...Although I think it is true that a very good Jewish background in today's young people is going to be necessary if we're to have a continuing Jewish leadership in these so-called secular organizations...
...Now you say that to a Jew, no matter what his political views, and he's going to say, "nothing doing...
...Is that because we're paranoid...
...You're nodding your head in agreement so let's stipulate to that...
...American Jews don't feel that way, and I don't feel that way merely because Israel wants me to...
...Mann...
...M: You've now had a fair amount of opportunity to interact with the highest officials in the American government...
...They needed us to believe that they were prepared to write us off, and they wanted Sadat to know that, too...
...On the other hand, the task that has been laid upon you forbids you, or at least inhibits you, from representing your own idiosyncratic views...
...It's pretty clear that there's going to be a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt...
...Second, a new President of the United States came into office bent on making peace in the Middle East and bent on involving the American Jewish community in some fashion in that process...
...The way they come at it initially is to say, "if the Jews will let us get away with it, we will lean on Israel...
...I was in Israel on July 1 with Vice-President Mondale and I'll never forget how, in the middle of a big reception, news commentators came over to me and said: "We've just heard that President Carter has announced that unless Israel accepts the Egyptian peace proposal as it is written, he is going to reconvene the Geneva Conference...
...If that's so, then it's perfectly understandable That a president who undertakes for a period of three or four months to publicly chastise Israel is going to turn off a lot of American Jews and there is no way to explain to those American Jews that political necessities behind the scenes or otherwise made that course of action necessary...
...I don't know if the word is exciting...
...I think that by and large the President is entitled to the gratitude of American Jews, and has been for a long time...
...So the judgments have to be based on a high frequency of meetings, on visceral reactions arising out of many meetings and discussions that let you reach a conclusion that you think is sensible...
...But that must put a tremendous strain on Jewish leadership...
...It's a feeling that arises at the same time in all of us...
...To just pick one ofF the wall, it leads from the noshrim (Soviet Jews with exit visas to Israel who immigrate to the United States instead) issue to a very, very difficult problem, where the Israelis are actually saying that they regard the fact that so many Russian Jews are coming to the United States as a major calamity in Jewish history and the only reason they regard it as a calamity is because they're going to disappear with the rest of us, and we've lost them...
...M: Wasn't that in part a specific effort to by-pass the Conference, on the grounds that the Conference had been alleged to be a mouthpiece for the Israeli government...
...Mann: I think when you talk about secular attitudes among American Jewish leadership, the criticism might apply more to what was the case ten or twenty years ago in terms of the Council of Jewish Federations, and the fund raising apparatus...
...But I want to get back to your earlier question...
...And much the same was true yesterday, or the day before yesterday, on this business of President Carter's news announcement chastising Israel and wanting linkage...
...Mann: First of all, I don't think any leader of a nation listens to everybody and I think Prime Minister Begin clearly does listen to some people...
...And when you have these kinds of concerns and you're an American Jew feeling strongly as you do about those issues you're not going to go overboard...
...It's important that I represent to the administration from time to time what I sense to be American Jewish views in regard to negotiations in the Middle East...
...It's taken a whole generation until now, when it is possible to even up that relationship...
...I've had the opportunity of seeing the three of them interreact with each other for a period of time...
...they have no need to talk to American Jewry to find out the situation in the Middle East...
...There is always the risk that you're being coopted...
...He's not having a lot of trouble now, but he may in the future...
...That's the way everybody wanted it...
...Are American Jews taking their cues from what we're hearing, which is a mood of gloom from Israel...
...It's too bad— once in a while American Jews and Israelis ought to have a two or three month period of undiluted pleasure...
...But I think when you've left that issue, settlements on the West Bank, it's pretty hard to think of one in the current situation that fits the example you've suggested...
...I think it will all have been worthwhile because I think Ed is serving an important function keeping the administration informed on a day to day, on an hour to hour basis, of the attitudes, as he gleans them, of American Jews...
...It was necessary that it appear that Prime Minister Begin and Israel did not so quickly agree to things and that President Sadat could feel he had played every card he had, including the American card, and that President Carter had cooperated in that endeavor...
...If the Israelis really feel strongly about an issue, by God, we're not going to let them down on that issue...
...But yes, it would be a flash point...
...Begin himself aside, the Israeli government over the years has not established a very distinguished track record in taking American Jews and the American Jewish community seriously...
...When Federation became our central address it was not interested in substantive questions, and it was very easily tempted by the ego trips involved and all the rest Mann: I think that we may be coming to the end of that road...
...That's going to be a continuing problem in the years ahead...
...They're for the most part extraordinarily able people both in Jerusalem and in Washington and it's always nice to be dealing with highly intelligent people...
...And suddenly the Israelis changed their minds on that one...
...There's no other reason, really...
...You talk to him...
...Mann: Ah...
...You have been known to have views that are distinguishable from, and sometimes at odds with, Israel's views (not Israel Miller's views, the State of Israel's views...
...There was no Abba Hillel Silver, there was no Stephen Wise...
...I think that it has attained some prominence as a result of some circumstances in the last several years, and so a great many more Jews do know that it exists than was the case before...
...But what struck me was that the Israeli press and Israelis were so ready to believe something so patently outrageous, as though it was just what we expected would happen, and that's very disturbing...
...I must tell you that on the basis of what I then knew about the personalities involved, I would not have expected it, but it was as though there were three peers with a great deal of respect for each other and each other's views, who disagreed with each other on some very fundamental questions, and were able to relate on a peer to peer basis in what I thought was a very healthy way...
...I'm struck by the fact— perhaps it's simply that the negotiations haven't yet been concluded— that despite Begin's most florid compliments to the President, there is little change in the Jewish feelings about President Carter...
...Mann: Yes, which alone was enough to overawe us...
...It's a mixed feeling of thankfulness and fear and concern all at the same time...
...At the same time, what you're saying is that the kind of overreaction that, for example, Mr...
...Mann: I think there's been a change, but I think you're right...
...Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, the President himself, the Vice-President...
...In his early meetings in 1977, that was his attempt...
...You're seen as an apologist Mann: I think we're still seeing, and will for a long time continue to see, the aftereffects of the purposeful provocation of Israel and the American Jewish community in the spring of 1978, when we were exposed to criticism by the administration at its very highest level...
...Ed Sanders, for all of his distinguished record of Jewish communal service, is seen as a sell-out Mann: I guess he was received coolly compared to Professor Spiegel, but I didn't think he was received coolly...
...Mann: Yes, it is exciting...
...Maybe even paranoid...
...He worked through Federation leadership in various communities and he brought them in...
...Again, we've never had a discussion on that...
...And in trying to come to a conclusion on that you have to ask yourself: Well, wait a minute, are we going to have another big confrontation three months afterwards, in which case it's kind of foolish to go overboard in dealing with the President at this time...
...I think there is a new concern, that the administration might be willing to abide Arab sovereignty in some part of East Jerusalem...
...Somehow, you have to so handle yourself that neither Washington nor Jerusalem feels that by calling you to important meetings they will be able to coopt you...
...I think that's very good...
...It was a fascinating opportunity...
...I don't think one is gaining strength from the other...
...What he quickly learned was that Jewish organizational life is such that if he called a meeting, no matter who it was that he invited, it would still be organized by the Conference of Presidents...
...I think it was just his style...
...And he hasn't...
...M: And one presumes that a man of that background only takes that kind of job having informed the administration that there are circumstances under which he would be forced to quit, and therefore that it's a very large risk for the administration to appoint him, because he in fact becomes our flash point...
...that he bores easily and that certainly he does not like to be lectured to, and Mr...
...That's a surfacing concern...
...When you think about the respective communities, I'm not ready to bet that a hundred years from now, of the two communities, Israel is going to be far and away in front of the American Jewish community as a Jewish community...
...It's very evident to me that he listens very carefully, for example, to his two top negotiators, Dayan and Weitzmann...
...You're not going to permit the administration to use you...
...Mann: I know, and that's the difficulty...
...I think the administration sensed that American Jews were of several minds on that subject...
...Two months ago or three, whatever the riming, a great deal of Jewish communal energy was being invested insisting on the absolute necessity for Israel's security of its maintenance of the air bases in Sinai...
...Does he care...
...I don't think there could have been, for the reasons I indicated earlier...
...And I feel essentially that I'm doing a pretty good job and that gives me a pretty good feeling...
...Even before Camp David, he was the first president who, when he became president, immediately said, "Peace in the Middle East is my number one foreign policy goal and I don't intend to leave it until I achieve it...
...And what there was was a tendency among American Jews generally and the leadership to be overawed by these people who made the desert bloom and fought a war and risked their lives while we were making money over here...
...I don't remember which Secretary of State it was who is alleged to have said, "Why do I have to talk to Izzy Miller (Alex Schindler's predecessor as Chairman of the Conference) because all he tells me, second-hand, is what Simcha Dinitz can tell me firsthand...
...M: Does he have the kind of access the President promised he would have...
...And if that assumption is correct then I think it's worth the trouble he is going to have...
...And if he's wrong, we're all in trouble anyhow, and Ed Sanders is particularly in trouble, and it's a terrible risk that he took...
...It certainly does not apply to NJCRAC (The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council) today, or to the national agencies...
...I just throw that out...
...On the other hand it's not easy to be President of the United States...
...Now, today, there is still some legitimate concern that President Carter has been pulled kicking and screaming into endorsing a separate peace between Israel and Egypt, because that was never his goal...
...M: Let's go back to the political side, if we may...
...Brzezinski, and Vice-President Mondale wasn't there) that I was going to sit down and write a letter to Vice-President Mondale about it...
...M: Let's switch for a moment from Carter to Begin...
...But these are judgments you have to make...
...There is not this sense of overwhelming gratitude for the President...
...perhaps not the change he would have anticipated...
...You know a man over a period of time...
...I would see no point in them talking to the Chairman of the Conference for that reason...
...The concern is that in the weeks and months ahead, rather than working very hard and bending every effort to make the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty work better, he will go immediately to the core issue of the Palestinians and how to resolve that one, and I think that most of us feel that that issue can better be resolved if not pushed too hard in the next year and if the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty is the great success that we all hope it will be...
...not the change one might have anticipated...
...Mann: Well, I must tell you, I don't think that the Conference of Presidents or Alex Schindler or I as its chairman ever tried to convince the administration that to the American Jewish community settlements in the Sinai or air fields in the Sinai were absolutely essential...
...Mann: Well, I don't know about the reference to Israel Miller you just made...
...Brzezinski was part of that...
...Why should I give it to them...
...What's your sense...
...I don't think there was ever any such efTort...
...It is enjoyable because of the high quality of people that you're dealing with...
...It's simply unnatural to think that these two communities alongside each other will continue into the indefinite future to have an Israeli dominant, American Jewish subservient relationship...
...Not that he can't win without us...
...And so I wouldn't dream of trying to get the administration to agree totally with Prime Minister Begin's view on settlements on the West Bank, because I don't think I would be speaking for the totality of the American Jewish community...
...Whatever the reasons may have been, and I'm comfortable with the reasons—other people may just think he hated Israel and was just criticizing—but whatever the reasons may have been, even if there was a rationale for having done it, I think, as I said before, there's no way American Jews can know all the facts...
...I would lay off, and in that kind of situation, varying Jewish organizations that make up the Conference of Presidents have the right to speak and do speak to whomever they wish...
...By definition a negotiation means that neither the negotiators nor the mediator is ever going to tell anyone, including the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents, what their respective bottom lines are...
...In that discussion we wanted to help the Jewish community learn what the Conference of Presidents is, because it is clear that most American Jews are not aware of its existence at all, and those who are aware of it have a very imperfect notion of what it's about and why...
...These people are not idiots...
...It's an absurd notion that any politician ever writes anybody off that way...
...If you have that attitude, that we're going to be here in three generations, we're going to be even stronger than ever, then you say to yourself, what's so terrible about a Jew living in an anti-Semitic society choosing to come to this fantastic American Jewish community and thereby strengthen it...
...Are we supposed to...
...You know the situation and you say, that simply falls outside the realm of possible things he might do or say...
...And there are some real reasons to be somewhat apprehensive...
...I'm trying to think of the right word...
...I think a lot of our relationship problems have to do with the idea of shlilat hagolah, the theory that many of the Israeli leaders hold, if not all of them: that us guys here in the United States, we're going to be here for two or three generations, and we're going to acculturate and assimilate and disappear...
...M: All right But let me press on that point...
...Mann: From my own personal observation I think he has as total access-as any man can have to the White House and the State Department...
...But American Jewish leaders don't become leaders because they intend for the American Jewish community to disappear...
...I don't sense that...
...Now you're in somewhat a different position from Israel Miller...
...for four months and eleven days—since July 1. M: Is it exciting...
...I shall try to be evenhanded...
...Well, he was close to President Carter as a candidate...
...They've chosen to abuse us...
...When there is, should the Conference of the Presidents or American Jewry in some fashion give a tangible expression of their gratitude to the United States or to the President of the United States on account of these fantastic results...
...It was inevitable that people should have ambivalent feelings during this process...
...And so you find that in a sense you're being used...
...Sometimes I think it is because the American Jewish community does not want to know...
...I'm not saying that he intended to involve the Conference of Presidents in that process, but, because American Jewish organizations know the central role of the Conference of Presidents, inevitably the Conference got very deeply involved with the administration in those efforts...
...How do you define the job...
...And yet you have to make judgments as an American Jewish community and those judgments have to be well-informed and nobody gives you the answers...
...But I think it's going to work out...
...I'm not sure it's good for Ed Sanders but it's good for us...
...M: Doesn't that mean when they talk to you they want to find out how hard they can lean on Israel on a particular issue without getting into trouble with American Jews...
...It's very difficult to convince somebody that a president of the United States who I really believe does believe in the State of Israel, religiously and otherwise, who is not going to let Israel down, also believes that in the negotiating process he has to do things that none of us is going to like...
...There were such efforts, but not by the Conference of Presidents...
...Although my personal experience has been with Prime Minister Begin, I think there is much to be improved in the relationship between American Jewry and its leaders on the one hand and Israel's leaders on the other...
...Mann: I take that seriously...
...M: It comes back, doesn't it, to that damnable instinct we have—we don't know how to live without a sense of the imminence of doom, and if you come and say, "Hey, it's not quite that bad...
...I know I've been deeply active in Jewish life for 25 years now...
...But I'm inclined to agree with his basic assumption...
...There is some good leadership around in the fund raising apparatus as well as elsewhere, and, you know, it's so unnatural that it can't last anyhow...
...It's going to take a long time for the American Jewish community to forget that, at what it regarded as a very sensitive time, when Israel might have achieved peace with Egypt, President Carter acted in a way that caused Israel to have its image diminished in the eyes of other Americans and caused great consternation and concern in Israel that he was going to ruin all chances for peace and everything else...
...No reaction at all...
...M: Is it heady...
...He talks to you...
...They expected a reaction from us, therefore...
...They always knew that...
...It's very time consuming...
...There is no way to hide it from them even if you wanted to...
...It's not an easy thing to do, and as you indicated, when the calls come from Washington, and you don't have to call them, it makes it all the more dangerous...
...That is what he felt was necessary in order to produce a peace agreement with Egypt...
...There is no way that any of us can know all the facts...
...You observed that one of the changes with the advent of President Carter is that unlike his predecessors he chose somehow to involve the Jewish community in his Middle East planning...
...If we're only going to be here for a while then why take us seriously, beyond the question of how much we can help while we're still here...
...It's wearing and there is a substantial responsibility involved...
...Presumably you don't see yourself as representing Israel's views when you speak in Washington...
...Except that some people think it is...
...I'm hopeful that in this world it is possible for two groups like these two Jewish communities to have a peer relationship where power is not the central element and where they don't worry about who's on top, where they simply love each other easily.* Ted Mann, a Philadelphia lawyer, and President of National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council, is currently Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations...
...I think it's absolutely right that when the State Department or the President of the United States wants Israel's views they can get them with no difficulty at all, by picking up the phone and talking to Simcha Dinitz or other people...
...I don't think you'll get future Jewish leadership from people who are bereft of any Jewish education...
...When I look at the American Jewish community, we have enormous problems of assimilation obviously, but just in terms of the people, it is a phenomenal community...
...Camp David was a magnificent performance by the President of the United States...
...On the other hand it's kind of inevitable that in that process, he would make some mistakes, which he has, and he would rub a lot of people the wrong way, because they're scared to death, which they are...
...M: But in some sense that is because the American Jewish community is not privy to certain kinds of information...
...M: The risk of cooptation...
...We were really mobilized on that issue...
...There weren't any of these people...
...So that I think he knew that he was walking into a period of time when American Jews would become very, very critical of him and he did it nevertheless, and American Jews did become very critical of him...
...M: Has it been only the Middle East question that you're dealing with...
...M: And who could provide our leadership with access to Prime Ministers and to generals...
...It does not necessarily follow that if one has a good Jewish background that he is not a secularist...
Vol. 4 • December 1978 • No. 2
