In this halcyon period, Jewish organizations maintained a clear focus on specifically Jewish issues: in addition to Israel, they concentrated on battling anti-Semitism and its residue, the institutional impediments to the flourishing of Jewish talent. There used to be a joke that a Jew could sooner become president of the United States than president of the DuPont corporation. In 1974, Irving Shapiro became president of DuPont, one of hundreds of Jews who have become heads of major corporations,universities, and scientific and cultural institutions. Interfaith relations flourished as Jews engaged in extensive dialogue with both Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, all of which changed their teaching on Jewish responsibility for the death of Jesus. The Jewish community's philanthropy and political adhesion, its intelligent and focused exercise of political influence, especially on behalf of Israel but also on issues such as Soviet Jewry, became the envy of non-Jewish communal activists.

What went wrong? In a nutshell, Jewish organizations lost their focus, augmented their issues to include many that had nothing to do with Jews or Israel, and in fact wound up pursuing policies deeply antithetical to Jewish self-interest.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a substantial proportion of Jews, idealistic college students especially prominent among them, threw themselves into the civil rights movement. This seemed a natural extension of the battle against anti-Semitism. While American blacks were the chief beneficiaries, Jewish interests were also directly involved in the struggle against discrimination and tearing down barriers to equal opportunity. But many young Jews, like the blacks in the movement, became progressively more radical, becoming stalwarts of the 1960s counter-culture and the most militant "Amerika-the-evil" segment of the anti-Vietnam war movement. Many young Jewish women, feeling exploited in the "male-dominated" movements of the left, helped to create the radical wing of the feminist movement.

While most Jews who became involved in these movements probably remained permanently alienated from their Jewish roots, in a certain proportion there was an awakening interest in the Jewish community. For some Jews the decisive experience was being pushed out of the civil rights movement, accused by resentful blacks of usurping power in a movement that rightfully belonged to blacks. This encouraged some to reaffirm the ethnic identity they had discarded in deference to universalist concerns.

Some Jewish feminists discovered their "roots" thanks to encountering blatant anti-Semitism in the women's movement. At the 1975 United Nations International Women's Decade Conference in Mexico City, the anti-Israel rhetoric was so sharp that a number of Jewish feminists heard what Letty Pogrebin, an American delegate, described as the "click" which navigated them back to Judaism. The second United Nations Conference convened in Copenhagen five years later was, in Pogrebin's words, "even worse, with Jewish women of every nationality...isolated, excoriated and tyrannized."

But if Jews with backgrounds in radical movements turned to the Jewish community, it was not in order to pursue its traditional concerns of fighting anti-Semitism and supporting Israel but to reshape it according to their values. Some saw the organized Jewish community as a source of money and manpower through which they could work to reshape what they saw as oppressive American institutions. A few sought to reshape Jewish religious institutions: for example, Arthur Waskow, once a leader in the radical segment of the anti-war movement, has had a major impact on the Reconstructionist movement. Virtually all of these new recruits to the organized Jewish community had absorbed at least part of the bitter New Left critique of Israel and were eager to "solve" the Arab-Israel conflict by meeting what they saw as "legitimate" Palestinian demands for self-determination.

The new recruits, many of whom went into professional Jewish communal work, had a huge impact, the more so because they encountered a welcoming liberal Jewish community receptive to anything identified as a "progressive" cause. There was a proliferation of political and social action groups which became powerful advocates of affirmative action, gay rights, environmentalism, "diversity," and the most rigid separation of church and state. These groups defined a growing array of trendy issues as "commanded" by Jewish religious tradition. Soon a variety of Jewish women's organizations were pursuing abortion as their chief goal. So politically involved did these once apolitical groups become that Hadassah became a prominent member of the coalition opposed to the nomination of Judge Bork and engaged in demonstrations in support of abortion rights at national political conventions. Letty Pogrebin became president of Americans for Peace Now, at first considered a fringe group by the Jewish community, later a full member in the Presidents' Conference, as Peace Now's "solution"--a Palestinian state under Arafat--become Israeli government policy.

The end result was both to dissipate the energy of the organized Jewish community on a host of issues unrelated and often actually opposed to Jewish interests (for all practical purposes it simply became a branch of the left-wing of the Democratic party) and to turn many Jewish organizations into vociferous critics of this or that aspect of Israeli policy (everything from insufficient "peace efforts" to religious "coercion" to inadequate "sensitivity" to Israeli Arabs). Eventually it was impossible

[(Continued on p.11)]

Outpost               - 10 -               March 2001