The New York Times reports Feb. 10, 2014:
Abraham H. Foxman, a Holocaust survivor whose 50-year tenure battling anti-Semitism made him one of the visible and influential leaders of the American Jewish community, announced on Monday that he will retire next year as national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
Mr. Foxman, who has headed the organization since 1987, played a central role in most of the major controversies involving Israel and the Jewish community in recent years, and has stirred up a few of his own. He was frequently lionized as a forceful defender of Jews and Israel, but periodically criticized as too quick to call criticism of Israel anti-Semitic and too hesitant to label the early 20th-century killings of Armenians in Turkey as genocide…
Mr. Foxman said that he is pleased anti-Semitic acts and attitudes have drastically decreased in the United States over the last half-century, but that he is concerned about rising anti-Semitism elsewhere. “Globally, it’s the worst that it has been since World War II,” he said.
“He’s been a somewhat controversial figure, and there were moments when he has been perceived by some to be out of touch, and yet, when serious issues of anti-Semitism arose, everybody would go back to Abe Foxman,” said Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “He would be on anybody’s short list of the most significant American Jewish leaders of the postwar period.”
I ask Dr. Sarna via email:
Dear Jonathan,
I read your comments about Abe Foxman in the New York Times. I’m working on a blog post about the ADL’s legacy and it touches on our previous email exchange about Jewish influence.
Do you think the ADL has been the model for fighting racism in America? In other words, the ADL’s encouraging of the tape recording of alleged bigotry, the bullying of those who say negative things about Jews to intimidate the wider society, infiltrating and exposing alleged bigotry, turning in your neighbors for saying nasty things about groups, stigmatizing it, yelling if anyone in the media says anything remotely offensive or critical of a protected ethnic group such as Jews or blacks, rallying the media and politicians to condemn it so that we have an America today where you are not allowed to publicly make critical remarks about any ethnic group in the news media? Have Jews been at the forefront of this stigmatizing, perceiving it as in their group interest as well as in America’s to forbid public discussion of negative patterns of behavior in groups (such as high violent crime rates among blacks, low literacy rates among American latinos, the Jewish ethnicity of the billionaires who looted Russia under Yeltsin (aka the Russian Mafia being overwhelmingly a Jewish mafia), all the Jews getting caught for insider trading and white collar crime on Wall Street, etc)? So today you can’t make negative comments about gays, or blacks or Jews without getting fired if you work in the media (eg, Gregg Easterbook fired [from ESPN] in 2003, Rick Sanchez fired by CNN in 2010 for denying that Jews were underdogs, Marlon Brando‘s 1996 remarks, the perhaps misplaced hysteria about The Passion of The Christ)? While Jews in the media certainly disagree about many issues, but by composing about half of the leading pundits (according to an article in The Atlantic in 2007), do Jews such as Abe Foxman largely get to set the parameters of what is acceptable public discussion (with disproportionate Jewish influence in the media, finance and politics being one of those topics you can’t talk about publicly)? Have Jews like Foxman and the ADL often been hysterical and misplaced in their work?
In short, do you believe that Jews are well-served by the current climate in America where you are not allowed to say anything critical about Jews as a group and keep your job in public life? If I am not seeing reality, can you think of examples of prominent Americans criticizing Jews and not getting hurt for it? Do Jews largely get to set the agenda of public discourse in America, and if so, is that good for the Jews and for America?
There are certain weaknesses that Jewish intellectuals are prone to and should this sort of thing be allowed to be discussed in the news media? For example, non-Jew Steve Sailer wrote: “Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.”
He replies:
You are asking me whether I agree with you. The answer is no. Since World War II, we Americans have agreed to limit our freedom in some respects in order to create a better society. We gave up the freedom to discriminate (in employment, in housing, in recreation, and in some respects in public speech). I think we made a great decision, but I understand perfectly well that others disagree.
In the 1995 book Jews and the New American Scene, Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University, wrote:
“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26% of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.” [pp 26-27]
