* Here’s one to file under “It’s Always 1963!”: yesterday’s Morning Edition thumbsucker “Anti-Defamation League Chief Faces Challenge Trying To Renew Civil Rights Activism.
Earnest Minnesota boomer Tom Gjelten is flummoxed by his discovery of emerging tensions between two natural allies within the Coalition of the Virtuous: Black civil-rights crusaders and well-to-do liberal Jews.
The report begins,
The Jews who immigrated to America in the early 20th century brought with them their history as a persecuted people. Many were fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, and those experiences bonded them to other groups that also faced discrimination.
Fair-use excerpt to give a sense of Gjelten’s anxiety:
[In the years subsequent to 1964, the Anti-Defamation] League was focused primarily on fighting anti-Semitism, but the League’s new president, Jonathan Greenblatt, wants the ADL to renew its old civil rights activism and move the work forward.
“There’s questions like mass incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, economic opportunity,” Greenblatt told NPR in a recent interview. “We need to integrate what’s happening with the Latino community [and] the LGBT community, because when we fight for the rights of others, it strengthens America. It makes America a better place.”
There is just one complication. For many current civil rights activists, solidarity with Palestinians is taking precedence over the old solidarity with American Jews.
Uh-oh!
“Many of our experiences of police repression and brutality seem to mirror that of many international peoples, including [people in] Palestine,” says the Rev. Mike McBride, a prominent African-American pastor from Berkeley, Calif., who became involved with the Black Lives Matter movement after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
“When we were in Ferguson, and we were being terrorized by the law enforcement and military apparatus,” McBride says, “it was Palestinian young people who started to tweet us on how to survive and deal with the terror we were experiencing.”
Fortunately, Gjelten wraps with an inspiring call for meeting the increased pig-iron production quotas of the new Five Year Plan:
… But given the disagreements on issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even greater efforts may be necessary to make the Anti-Defamation League a consistently valued civil rights partner in a time of divided loyalties.
This being NPR, merriment ensues in the Readers’ Comments section. Progressives have no need to recognize “virtue signalling” when they can employ it with such elegance and expertise.
As icing, Mr. Gjelten’s “new book, A Nation of Nations: A Great American Immigration Story (Simon & Schuster), recounts the impact on America of the 1965 Immigration Act, which officially opened the country’s doors to immigrants of color.”
