THE NEW JEWISH RIGHT

...I feel more deeply for the wretches on the rubber plantations of Puto-Mayo and for the Negroes of Africa whose bodies are footballs for E u r o p e ' s colonial e x p l o i t a t i o n ." Twenty-five years later the town of Zamoscz in which she was born was destroyed as far as the Jewish community was concerned...

...The trend is not a momentary backlash, nor can it be explained in Marxist terms...

...What is important is that for Jews his expectation was thoroughly believable...

...The Paukers and the Bermans are dying in oblivion...

...They would live with the Muzhiks, with the Russian peasants, determined to help them organize against the tyranny of the Czars...

...Poverty and suffering will always be with us...

...Have we travelled the long trek for the sake of onions, leeks and cucumbers...

...It is perfectly proper to ask " I s this good for J e w s ?" but only after we are clear — or, at least, more clear — as to what Judaism means by goodness...

...The Yids...

...Many of the same editors and writers appearing in Ideas organized the Jewish Rights Council...

...Jewish liberals, its adversaries claim, have made Jews visible targets for anti-semitism because of their involvement in causes not their own...

...This, explains Himmelfarb, is not a question of racism...

...G o o d people...

...Others are hanged in the small hours in small cellars...

...it is moved by responsive and responsible Jewish judgement...

...But that is beside the point...

...And the most credible and natural scapegoat is the Jew...

...No Nazi was excommunicated by the church...

...Can Jews be expected to stand at the vanguard of the minorities' revolution...

...UNFINISHED AGENDA I do not wish to give the impression that Jewish ethics are automatically and universally on the side of liberalism, nor that the specific issues Jews in the 70's confront are easily resolved...

...Is it politically wise to convert economic conflicts between haves and have-nots into Jewish-poor conflicts...

...The disi l l u s i o n m e n t is r e f l e c t e d in the galgen-humor of one of my teachers who sadly reported that in his experience there are two kinds of gentiles...

...Forest Hills is not the Warsaw Ghetto...

...He does not object to the other fellow's having a desirable place to live, he just doesn't want him, by moving in, to make his own neighborhood less of a home...

...He responded with frightening candor...

...It has turned non-Zionists into defenders of ethnic survival...

...If there is some theological grand overview, some theological superstructure that hovers over this conservative political ideology, it is expressed by both Petuchowski and Siegel in terms of a general caveat...

...I experience an unpleasant shock of recognition in the pronouncements of the Jewish Rights Council, and my opposition to its pronouncements does not stem from an a priori ideological commitment, but from a most natural fidelity to personal memory...

...Did Abraham's contention with God on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah (not Jewish cities) stem from the reading of John Toland...

...I am apprehensive of the shift to the kind of conservatism I have described, and I should like to explain wherein my uneasiness lies...

...Would we not — I think properly — appeal to America's larger self, to her humanitarian interests which ought to weigh heavier than her narrower interests in determining her support of Israel...

...They ask him: " A r e you Catholic or are you Protest a n t ? " The Jewish boy confidently replies: " I ' m a J e w . " " A l l right, then, but what kind of a Jew...

...How we see the Jewish self will itself help determine the character of our interest...

...The failures of Jewish radicalism cast their shadow onto the contemporary scene...

...One believes that Jesus was a historical figure...

...To survive only for the sake of survival, to survive only as another ethnic group with indigenous dances, songs, food and our own economic and political interests is not purpose enough to place life and death claims upon our people...

...it has turned Jewish theologians away from the prophetic ideal towards a new veneration of the priestly function...

...Why do we not find Episcopalian, Methodist or Catholic institutions rushing in to act as amicus curiae on behalf of the white majority...

...Affirmative action is not Bergen-Belsen...

...Jews are great healers, and the therapy of Israel promised that kindt>f healing...

...Again, a considerable number of Jews agreed that Americans were not going to tolerate the oil embargo and the long lines at the gas station, and that Israel would be blamed and Jews in America made the scapegoat...

...What, indeed, if he and Senator Fulbright were correct...

...and it is a short way Let us put aside moral arguments for a moment and play the game of political realism...

...THE NEW JEWISH REALISM tion to legislators who favor affirmative action, as Siegel proposes, is to expose Jews as identifiable enemies of the poor and the minorities...

...It is wrong to deceive any person by words, even without causing him a financial l o s s . " Beyond the principle of reciprocity, Rabbi Israel Lipschutz taught that when a Jew is tempted to discriminate against a gentile, let him say with J o s e p h ' ' How can I do this great wickedness and sin against G o d " (Genesis 39:9...

...How easily the image of the suffering servant crumbled before the threats of affirmative action...

...They also knew and acted upon the wisdom that to begin and end charity in the home is to suffocate its inhabitants by provincialism...

...But again, what is important is that the expectation of recrimination was for Jews absolutely believable...

...The result of such a search for Jewish differentia yields a shrivelled Judaism in which ethics are surrendered to the public domain...

...A million Jewish children died of Jewishness...

...Nixon's escalation of the bombings in North Vietnam, his policies c a l l i n g for the i n v a s i o n of Cambodia, his opposition to the granting of a m n e s t y . They e n d o r s e d the administration's policy of the benign neglect of the minorities...

...Slansky perishes as a traitor...

...For the latter offers up a loaded option for Jewish choice: choose Judaism or choose Humanity: choose to be a Jew or choose to be a man...

...Thus, Jewish universalism, humanitarianism and passion for social j u s t i c e are attributed to nonJewish sources such as the Enlightenment, Deism, or socialism...

...The new direction is a significant sociological phenomenon that may well affect the character of Jewish behavior in socio-political affairs...

...The future of Jews "depends on the majority's good w i l l ." Writing in Midstream, Rabbi Herbert Weiner offers similar strictures and concludes that " t h e fight for civil l i b e r t i e s can get along without J u d a i s m . " Rabbis P e t u c h o w s k i, Siegel and Jakobovits are critical of the Jewish l i b e r a l ' s opposition to prayer in public schools and Federal aid to parochial schools because, among other arguments, such liberal positions create "theological antiS e m i t i s m , " and associate Jews with atheists, agnostics and secularists...

...The drift of the conservative argument tends to identify Jewish interest with middle-class interest...

...Are we to submit, accept, and even foster, a Marxist interpretation of Judaism which asserts that the religious and ethical superstructure is secondary to the economic substructure...

...Honest Ukranian people...

...In the search for the uniquely Jewish, there is a tendency to remove those elements in Judaism which are shared by others outside the Jewish circle...

...It has published articles which are highly sympathetic to Generalissimo Franco, and justify Ian Smith's racist policy in Rhodesia — the rule of 225,000 whites over four million blacks...

...They cite the shocking words of Rosa Luxembourg, who, answering a letter from a friend as to why she was so unresponsive to the plight of the Jew, asked: " W h y do you persist in pestering me with your peculiar JudenschmerzP...

...People of the Ukraine suffer, most from the Yids...

...they simply seek to protect the character of their neighborhood...

...I believe that Jewish affirmative thinking and action can well affect the quality of life in America and can help regain the lost confidence in those institutions which are meant to transmit Jewish wisdom and ethics...

...Twenty-five years ago, for example, Will Herberg debated the chosenness of Israel...

...The Jewish conservatives point to the " i d e a l i s m " of the Jewish radical whose universalism led him to repudiate his own Jewish interests...

...Liberalism is no longer, as almost surely it was, the American J e w ' s lay religion...

...What good is it to survive if you lose all reason to exist...

...They tell a story about a Jewish boy caught in Belfast, caught by Protestant and the Catholic gangs...

...The editors admire(d...

...Nixon for his emphasis on Law and Order, and found Mayor D a l e y ' s order to shoot or cripple looters in Chicago p r a i s e w o r t h y . They supported Mr...

...As far as economics is concerned, while the magazine favored Nixon's impounding of the anti-poverty funds and his total dismantling of the Office of Economic Opportunity, they were critical of his budget for retaining one hundred twenty five billion dollars for human resources, including some three billion dollars earmarked for civil rights activity...

...One must draw distinctions between the pseudo-universalism of self-hating Jews who embrace humanity in order to escape the claims of the Jewish community, and those whose concern for other submerged communities grows out of their Jewish experience and Jewish v a l u e - s y s t e m . Buber, Magnes, Kaplan, Wise, Heschel — all understood that charity begins at home...

...Is the Church more sensitive to the oppression of the minorities than from the " n o n - J e w i s h " to the "unJ e w i s h . " What rernains uniquely Jewish is ritual legislation and other concerns which immediately affect the Jewish community...

...The pendulum oscillates in response to the needs of the people...

...It so happens that Glazer was wrong...

...Such is Jewish fate...

...M o r e o v e r , the c o o l n e s s of the churches of Christendom during the two and a half decades of Israel's existence indicates that no great moral lessons were learned from the conspiracy of silence during the Nazi era...

...Catholic or Protestant...

...Jews are suspicious and after Auschwitz it is difficult to convince them that they should not be...

...it has transformed theologians who once spoke the language of the suffering servant and Jewish chosenness into proponents for the shaping of Israel in the image of the other nations of the world...

...Distinctions need to be drawn...

...No Jew could rent or buy a house, or find lodging in its one hotel...

...while those whose theology once insisted on transcending native and cultural boundaries should now defend the coziness of neighborhoods...

...In the spring of 1965 I was in Germany, and among other meetings, I had an interview with the Bishop of BerlinBrandenberg, D. Otto Dibelius, a former president of the World Council of Churches...

...The people who are attracted to its " r e d i s m " have not sold their birthright for a mess of potage or for a pot of message...

...If we accept the premise that Jews as members of a major religious civilization have a responsibility towards the community, we will struggle against the xenophobia which leads us down the path of privatism and irrelevance...

...Damned by the right and damned by the left...

...We are not " s e c o n d - c l a s s" citizens, devoid of rights and powers, and even the responsibility, to affect the larger society in which we live...

...The issue is not whether Jews should act out of self-interest...

...Leon Trotsky has his skull split by the ax of a Stalinist agent...

...What the Italian is opposing is the incursion of the elements which disturb the "family coziness of the n e i g h b o r h o o d . " Analogously, Jews in Forest Hills are not racists...

...p e o p l e generally from lower socioeconomic strata than the residents of Forest Hills...

...Seymour Siegel concludes from this that Jews ought to defend free enterprise, capitalism, and those institutions which sustain and support the middle class...

...Years after, we experience its aftershocks...

...The Yids, the dirty Jews and J e w e s s e s rob you...

...The God of Israel is concerned with the idolators of Nineveh...

...Nothing will turn our people away from lasting identification with the Jewish community more than its tribalization and trivialization...

...Is it politically wise to interpret every Black-white conflict which happens to involve Jewish whites into a JewishBlack confrontation...

...Pulpits and pews in the 7 0 ' s reso n a t e to messages different from those of the 5 0 ' s and 6 0 ' s . The voice of the liberal is muted...

...it does not become more acceptable because it is articulated by Jews against " i n c o m p a t i b l e " elem e n t s who seek entrance into predominantly Jewish neighborhoods...

...No respectable gentile would admit to such a canard...

...sia, and Lord Balfour...

...Support is drawn from Nathan Glazer, the Harvard sociologist, who cites the case of the Castro Revolution in which the J e w i s h m i d d l e - c l a s s , the J e w i sh businessmen, doctors and lawyers, w e r e ousted from their prerevolutionary economic advantage...

...My plea, however, is that the Jewish community not content itself with pointing out the flaws of liberal proposals...

...Jewish participants in the civil rights movement, he argued in 1965, should be sensitive to such problems...

...I cannot, for example, believe that we cannot appeal to Jewish doctors, lawyers and businessmen in our midst so to help prepare the disadvantaged segments of the minorities that they may find easier and fairer entrance into jobs, businesses and colleges...

...SOME REACTIONS TO THE NADIR OF JEWISH LIBERALISM The call to Jewish conservatism, to Jewish self-interest and hard-nosed realism has its roots in the Holocaust...

...These would include black and white elements...

...Nathan Glazer, in 1971, warned that Jews would be the scapegoats of Vietnam...

...He argued convincingly that Americans suffered the loss of three hundred thousand Americans killed or maimed in Vietnam...

...Jews were betrayed, Jews are being betrayed, Jews will be betrayed again...

...A mood of suspicion hangs over Jews and extends over three tenses...

...That modesty is echoed by a professor of philosophy at City College, Michael Wyschogrod, who in explaining the Orthodox silence on the moral issue of Vietnam, responds in Rosenzweigian fashion that the role of the Jew is to witness, to wait rather than to transform...

...B. The Need for Distinctions It is misleading to lump liberalism and r a d i c a l i sm t o g e t h e r . Jewish liberalism, as Judd Teller, Jacob Talmon and Werner Cohn have argued, was and is opposed to the violence and anarchy associated with radicalism...

...Jews are not done with the H o l o c a u s t . An e a r t h q u a k e , as we Californians quite well know, doesn't happen and then go away...

...After Auschwitz, we cannot emulate those who sought escape from responsibility through the safety-hatch of insular " s e l f - i n t e r e s t . " After Auschwitz, we must live beyond despair...

...It is equally misleading to trace the self-betrayal of the Jew to his commitment to universaiism by pointing to Rosa Luxemborg or Pavel Axelrod...

...What do we as Jews propose to do with the society in which we live...

...The other believes that Jesus never existed...

...The Enlightenment vision of a constantly progressing universal society calling for Jews to involve themselves in the battle for social justice is now interpreted as suicidal...

...Hermann Goering died a Lutheran, and at the Nuremberg trials, Goering explained that he regarded himself as a Christian, and so did the church which performed the marriages, christenings and burials of his family...

...A. A Shock of Recognition It is, I think, not a m a t t e r o f kneejerk liberalism that causes me to reject the rationalizations of the new conservatives...

...It simply expressed the right of communities to define their own character...

...Generalizing from the articles I have read, I conclude that the new Jewish conservatives, in contrast to Jewish liberals, appear to favor private philanthropy over government welfare, favor an explanation of human behavior in terms of heredity and will, as opposed to environment, favor prayer in the public school systems and federal aid to parochial schools in opposition to the liberal's traditional insistence on separation of state and church...

...Who has seized the land, the wood mills and taverns...

...I sense at the bottom-line of t h e i r arguments for self-interest a shameless double standard...

...Jews live with an expectation of the undelivered punch...

...There are dangers, of course, in pseudo-universalism, but such dangers ought not blind Jews to the peril of pseudo-particularism...

...Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans slip into the old variables occupied by the Muzhiks...

...The Ideas endorsement of Nixon extended far beyond his benevolent posture towards the State of Israel...

...The myth of Roosevelt's humanitarianism was punctured by revelation of the ugly fact that while these shores were open to English children because of the threat of the bombings of England, they remained closed to Jewish children threatened by the crematoria...

...Melvin Tumin, the Princeton sociologist, back in 1964, sensed the embourgeoisement of the American Jews, but I think his explanations were too facile...

...And why, indeed, did the rabbis not employ the principle of reciprocity to their relationship with the n o n - J e w ? Later r a b b i n i c aut h o r i t i e s such as S h e r i r a Gaon, Maimonides, Judah He-Hasid and Joseph Karo repudiated the double standard which treated gentiles in one fashion and Jews in the other because they would not polarize the world between " t h e m " and " u s . " " J ew and non-Jew are to be treated a l i k e ," Maimonides wrote in his Hilchot Mechirah...

...Such choices present false and ultimately self-defeating disjunctions...

...Is the rabbinic formulation of the classic benediction which affirms the sovereignty of God over all the universe derived from 18th century Enlightenment...

...But if Judaism is de facto equated with middle-classism, what interest does it hold for Jews of lower economic interests who may find in liberal or radical social reform greater self-interest...

...I asked him why he, who had held such a respected position with the Church, had done nothing on behalf of the oppressed Jewish community...

...Was the exclusion of Jews a symptom of anti-semitism...

...It is wrong then to cite Trotsky, Z i n o v i e v and Kamenev as biographical illustrations of the failures of Jewish liberalism...

...Once again the prediction failed...

...Milton Himmelfarb suggests in a Commentary article that to understand Jewish antagonism to low-income housing we ought to consider the posture of other ethnic g r o u p s . Take, for e x a m p l e , the I t a l i a n - A m e r i c a n s . The ItalianAmerican considers his neighborhood as his village...

...But can we demand altruism from the other, while asserting self-interest for ourselves...

...Eliezer Berkovitz, a distinguished Orthodox Jewish theologian, will have nothing to do with talk of "dialogue" (a term rarely heard since the 1960's...

...The Y i d s . " Talmon sums up the self-betrayal of Jewish radicalism as a sort of Shakespearian tragedy with bodies strewn all over the stage...

...The repeatedly traumatized conscience of the Jewish psyche is not simply traceable to the genocidal intention of our enemies...

...Jews ought not supply our enemies with added ammunition...

...Jacob Talmon and Judd Teller offer countless illustrations of such selfbetrayal...

...Who sacrifices for Jews...

...Jews must be rid of the guilt foisted upon them by liberals who make them feel consciencestricken for "making i t . " It so happens that most Jews are middle class...

...There is a convergence of diverse interests rallying around the flag of " J e w i s h selfi n t e r e s t , " from lower middle class Jews, blue-collar, working class Jews, disillusioned ex-Marxists, Lubavitchers, J D L ' e r s , and celebrators of ethnic particularism...

...For, as Delmore Schwartz sadly rep o r t s , " E v e n paranoids have real e n e m i e s ." THE SELF BETRAYAL OF THE RADICAL JEW History alters its face in accordance with the fortunes of the present...

...The Queens Jewish Community Council opposed the project with unparalled rage and threat...

...The groundshaking of the Holocaust has caused a new look backwards...

...And perhaps — no, surely — with justice...

...The issue, it is r e p e a t e d l y exp l a i n e d , is not r a c i s t but socioeconomic...

...What is it that Jews have been doing for thousands of years, reading on their most sacred day the book of Jonah, which affirms, insists upon, God's interest in creation...

...Are Jews fated to corporate masochism...

...Forest Hills was judenrein...

...Is this the lot of Jewish involvement in universal causes...

...Their actions were greeted with this statement by the executive committee of the Narodnaya Volna, dated August 30, 1881...

...Thus, viewing the path taken by Mendelssohn and S p i n o z a , one might surmise that reason and ethics, since they are not exclusively Jewish, somehow belong more to the non-Jewish realm than to the Jewish...

...THE NEW JEWISH RIGHT HAROLD SCHULWEIS Harold Schulweis is rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California...

...One single event colors their perception of reality: the Holocaust...

...He cites the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 28, " H e who tilleth his land shall have plenty of bread, but who followeth after vain things shall have poverty e n o u g h . " Jews have no obligation to take an active part in bringing economic change, " t o sacrifice ourselves for the sake of o t h e r s" (Jewish Rights Council pamphlet...

...For they so trivialize Jewish ethics, and so shrivel the horizon of Jewish vision that they make meaningless Jewish suffering and striving...

...But since the Muzhiks didn't accept them because they were Jewish, a number of them converted to Christianity, not out of faith but so that they be credible in the eyes of the peasants...

...choose Jewish interest or choose the interest of humanity...

...For in the end what I fear most in the new Jewish political conservatism is its conseq u e n c e : not "mah yomru hagoyim," what will the gentiles say, but "mah yomru hay'hudim," what will our own say, what will we ourselves say, and think...

...Is a Jewish moral isolationism that is grounded in the rationale of exclusive self-interest — moreover, in political circumstances far less sinister than those of Nazi Germany — excusable...

...Is the interpretation of Leviticus 19:18 to include more than Jewish neighbors alien to the rabbinic world view...

...The J ew is a metahistorical witness whose destiny is beyond history...

...But both believe that the Jews killed him...

...Or do we so despair of meaning that we are afraid to pursue it, to make more ambitious claims on our past, on our selves...

...Damned if you do and damned if you d o n ' t . The Jew demonized by the world is caught upon the horns of his own dilemma...

...A glance at the newspaper is sufficient to confirm Israel's and the J e w ' s sense of abandonment and isolation...

...Left alone, I suspect that even this wound could have healed...

...To urge Jews to oppose Castro's and, in his time, Allende's radical reforms because they threaten the interest of the middle class to which many Jews belong, is to make Jews vulnerable and visible targets of the " o p p r e s s e d . " In terms of political shrewdness, is it any wiser for Jews to become visible on behalf of conservative causes than it was for us to become conspicuous for liberal ends...

...And who does the peasant beg with tears in his eyes to let him near to his land...

...Generals don't lose wars, they find scapegoats...

...and for Jews of the middle class, the values of capitalism, free enterprise, private property, happen to coincide with Jewish self-interest...

...Are we as Jews content to withdraw, to turn inwards and deny our responsibilities to the larger comm u n i t y ? Such J e w i s h e x h a u s t i on would be tragic for our society, still more tragic for its distortion of ourselves...

...Those o t h e r s " refers to those who " d e n y our r i g h t s " and who " d e mand to be placed at the top of the l a d d e r " without struggling, as did our recent ancestors, to get there...

...Not all problems are solvable...

...Am I to respond differently to the justification for Jewish corporate selfishness...

...There are, for example, genuine ethical dilemmas in the theory and practice of affirmative action...

...There are no villains and no saints behind the rightward swing of the Jewish pendulum...

...But did Judaism discover the ethic associated with liberalism from Locke or Voltaire, from Lessing or Kant...

...He writes in anger, "All we want of Christians is that they keep their hands off us and off our ^child r e n . " The Jewish philosopher and theologian Emil Fackenheim can not contain his anger and despair over the fact that the original design of the int e r n a t i o n a l monument e r e c t e d at Bergen-Belsen contained inscriptions in all sorts of languages except Yiddish and Hebrew...

...The tendancy to exploit the agony of the Holocaust, to " c r y Auschwitz" for any and every cause of alleged Jewish self-interest, only cheapens our mart y r d o m . Like " c r y i n g wolf," the abuse of the survivor's cry "never a g a i n " will destroy the urgency and sanctity of our major concerns...

...His interests are larger than Jonah's narrow concern for his gourd...

...After Auschwitz, what is required of us is moral s t a t e s m a n s h i p , even, perhaps especially, when the moral going gets rough...

...Kurt Eisner and George Landauer fall victim to assassin's bullets...

...Were there no Jews destroyed at Bergen-Belsen...

...Pavel Axelrod, along with other radical Jews, joined the Narodnaya Volna in the 1870's and 1880's...

...THE COALESCENCE OF " J E W I S H INTEREST" FORCES These thinkers reflect a serious swing of the Jewish pendulum to the right...

...Does the change in accent justify a double standard...

...It is a matter of group selfdetermination...

...Did the Talmud Gittin 61 not call upon Jews to feed the hungry gentile, visit the gentile sick, comfort the gentile bereaved, together with the hungry, sick and bereaved Jew...

...A good number of the new Jewish c o n s e r v a t i v e s are u n h a p p y with " w e l f a r i s m . " In a Commentary symposium (August, 1966) Professor Jacob J. Petuchowski flatly declared that Judaism " o p p o s e s preferential treatment, even if the recipient of such preferential treatment is one of the underprivileged...

...Will the conservative non-Jew embrace us more genuinely in our new ideological clothing than the liberal non-Jew welcomed the we are, or is the Church wiser in refusing to be associated with the ' ' suppress o r s " of equality...

...But surely the sword cuts both ways...

...Rosa Luxembourg's torn, battered body is dragged out of the river...

...He remained adamant, convinced that Christian s e l f - i n t e r e s t could not be compromised...

...For Judaic support Petuchowski calls upon the rabbinic principle of reciprocity, and cites the following as illustration: The Bible teaches that while you may not lend money on interest to your brother, you may certainly do so to a foreign trader, to a non-Jew on grounds of reciprocity...

...When I grew up as a boy in the East Bronx, the borough of Queens was popularly acknowledged to be off-limits to Jews...

...How ironic that those who struggled against the chosen-people claims and a g a i n s t the imposition of the suffering-servant idea in the name of Jewish " n o r m a l c y " should call for greater Jewish responsibility towards the disenfranchised of the non-Jews...

...it includes the callous inattention of our friends...

...I never for a moment bought that argument, and I do not buy it today...

...The Shoah, which swallowed up one out of every three Jews in the world, left a huge gaping hole in the Jewish psyche...

...Opposition to this incursion of low-income housing into Forest Hills has been variously defended, disavowing racism...

...Symptomatic of this Jewish resentment are new post-Holocaust soundings...

...Surely, affirmative action affects non-Jewish whites in unions, industries and colleges...

...Was it, after all, a " l i b e r a ! " who said, "What is hateful to thee do not do to thy fellow m a n ?" Personal memories are more powerful than abstract ideologies...

...It may well be that for m i d d l e - c l a s s Jews capitalism, private property and parsimony in social welfare are to their advantage...

...The damned police beat you...

...Is it politically wise to allow trade-union conflicts with Blacks to turn into Jewish-Black enmities...

...The short and narrow view of self-interest tends to vitiate the long-range and larger interests of a community...

...They cannot be thrown together with the positions of L a s k e r , Rathenau, Cremieux and Leon Blum...

...Jews, he wrote, were "chosen for a mission and for sufferi n g , " to be a light unto the nations and bring "moral law to the people of the w o r l d . " Chosenness means Jews must be willing to "undergo persecution, h u m i l i a t i o n , agonies of pain and d e a t h . " Chosenness places a claim upon Jews for "greater obligation, heavier responsibility, harder destiny " What has happened to that altruistic passion...

...The innocent c o n c e i t s of Enlightenment appear more sinister...

...But the unrelieved assaults upon the body of Israel have over and over again ripped off the healing scab, exposing the raw nerve of Jewish genocidal fears...

...But the oscillation is not automatic...

...The stated p u r p o s e s of the o r g a n i z a t i o n are threefold: to raise the level of political and social consciousness of Jews in A m e r i c a ; to protect and preserve Jewish communities...

...The protesting Jewish college student and faculty member and the rabbis make v u l n e r a b l e and identifiable targets for American rage...

...I cannot believe that Jewish institutions of learning and action, including seminaries and rabbinic associations, cannot mobilize their scholars and laity to contribute to the solution of national problems...

...Did Abraham Joshua Heschel betray his Jewishness by marching with Martin Luther King, J r . , and by protesting a cruel and immoral war in Vietnam...

...Can they be called upon to throw themselves into the battle knowing that they will be exploited, then rejected and spat upon — and, ultimately, worse — by those who once spoke of the kinship of suffering...

...The sound of German " o b - rigkeit" echoed in the Church...

...Professor Abraham Duker of Brooklyn College warned Jewish liberals that the Black revolution might turn into an anti-Jewish pogromist drive...

...Adolf Hitler died a Roman Catholic, and an annual mass is still recited for him in Spain...

...Therefore, the Jew ought to learn to accept the limitations and the realities of history...

...Notable exceptions to the Council's position were Rabbi BenZion Bokser and Rabbi Usher Kirshblum...

...In the wake of the Czarist pogroms of the 1880's, however, Ukranian peasants organized pogroms of their own against the Jews...

...What do we as Jews say beyond our negations...

...The critical question is over the perception of the Jewish self in whose interest we are bound to act...

...To the consternation of pollsters and political scientists, Jews did not vote their pockets...

...While the motivations for Jewish self-interest are varied, one event haunts them all...

...For Jews as a corporate body to oppose scatter-site, low-income housing, as the Jewish Rights Council does, or for Jews to organize opposiJewish liberal in our old...

...LIBERALISM, CONSERVATISM —OR JUDAISM Discussions of the traditionally c l o s e r e l a t i o n s h i p of J u d a i sm to liberalism frequently end in a peculiar form of pseudo-particularism...

...Based on the principle of reciprocity, Petuchowski concludes that it makes no sense for Jews to fight for others who d o n ' t or won't fight for us...

...Liberalism, Universalism, Progress, Enlightenment have turned sour in the agony of post-Holocaust reflection...

...I was revolted by the smugness of his posture...

...Senator James McClure of Idaho argues American s e l f - i n t e r e s t , in terms of geo-political, economic and military considerations, and thus advocates altering United States foreign policy in favor of the Arab States...

...Where, for example, did 1 first hear the argument for protecting the character of neighborhoods...

...Misguided or not, they did not accommodate what they understood to be Jewish values (e.g., Tz'dakah, Rachmanut, Yosher) to their economic class advantage...

...Unlike other ethnic groups and other religious groups, Jews did not respond to political candidates with knee-jerk ethnicism or vote unqualifiedly for their co-religionists, a fact to which Robert Morgenthau, Arthur Levitt and Louis Lefkowitz in New York can give painful testimony...

...Unquestionably, the cause celebre that triggered the formation of this organization was the Forest Hills affair, which grew out of the decision of New York City to build low-income housing in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens for elderly people and others...

...I asked him where was Christian conscience, the figure of the suffering Christ, the defense of one*s brother...

...Could she spare no tears for Jews...

...to cooperate with other groups who are dedicated to similar aims...

...W h a t e v e r the limits of Jewish liberalism, its ideology and political practice transcended economic selfinterest...

...Elsewhere he argues that social welfare, "welfare hando u t s , " penalizes success and rewards indolence...

...As Pastor he had a responsibility to protect the well-being of the Church, the interests of the baptised, the " g e t a u f t . " To become embroiled with the Nazis over the Jewish issue was to endanger the Church...

...It is not enough to say " n o " to affirmative action...

...i . e . , since the foreign trader also charges you interest, you have no obligation to lend to h im without interest...

...Was Jacob Emden caught up in the web of " f o r e i g n " universalism when, in his commentary to the Passover Haggadah, he insisted that the call to feed the hungry is addressed to non-Jews and has priority over the invitation to other Jews to celebrate the Passover at our tables...

...Was the rabbinic principle of mipnei darkei shalom (in the interest of promoting peace) a sign of Jewish assimilation to liberalism...