I" 6 A \ ^ i OO V How It Is the Same, How It Is Different, and How to Fight It CD =3 CD OO (•» CD Kenneth S. Stern AJC AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE The American Jewish Committee protects the rights and freedoms of Jews the world over; combats bigotry and anti-Semitism and promotes human rights for all; works for the security of Israel and deepened understanding between Americans and Israelis; advocates public policy positions rooted in American democratic values and the perspectives of the Jewish heritage; and enhances the cre- ative vitality of the Jewish people. Founded in 1906, it is the pioneer human-relations agency in the United States. ANTISEM TISM How It Is the Same, How It Is Different, and How to Fight It Kenneth S. Stern AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE To Margie, Daniel, and Emily In memory of James O. Freedman (1935-2006) A wonderful human being. Kenneth S. Stern has been the American Jewish Com- mittee's expert on antisemitism since 1989. Mr. Stern, an attorney, has testified before Congress, argued before the United States Supreme Court, and was an invited pre- senter at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes. Other books by Kenneth S. Stern: Holocaust Denial (1993) Loud Hawk: The United States vs. The American Indian Movement (1994) A Force Upon the Plain: The American Militia Movement and the Politics of Hate (1996) ISBN 0-87495-140-2 Copyright © 2006 American Jewish Committee All Rights Reserved December 2006 Contents Foreword v Introduction 1 Chapter One: What Is Antisemitism? 7 Chapter Two: An Old Hatred in New Circumstances 15 Chapter Three: Durban— Antisemitism as Anti-Racism 23 Chapter Four: 9/11 43 Chapter Five: Antisemitism in the Arab and Muslim Worlds 55 Chapter Six: Antisemitism in Europe 70 Chapter Seven: Denial of the Holocaust 78 Chapter Eight: Crafting a AntisemitisWorking Definitiom for Todayn of Contemporars Monitors y 96 Chapter Nine: Combating Antisemitism— The Importance of Strategic, Venue-Specific Thinking 107 Chapter Ten: United States Campuses 118 iii / iv Contents Chapter Eleven: The Danger of Relying on Old, Unproven Gauges and Answers 136 Chapter Twelve: Looking Ahead in the United States 149 Chapter Thirteen: Conclusion 163 Acknowledgments 170 Notes 172 Index 203 Foreword In February of 1906, in the aftermath of a series of pogroms in Europe, a group of prominent American Jews met in New York and discussed what they could do about rising antisemitism. From this meeting emerged the American Jewish Committee, Americas oldest human-relations organization. While AJC s mission has broadened in its 100 years to include combating all forms of bigotry and promoting democratic values glob- ally, antisemitism has remained one of its core concerns, and I have been honored to be its expert on this subject since 1989. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in New York, where anti- semitism was not a major problem that I encountered personally. There were minor irritants, such as the teacher at my private middle school who chastised me for not saying the Lord's Prayer or singing Christian hymns during chapel. But these were years when the evening news showed blacks in the South being doused with fire hoses, beaten, even killed. That was true hatred and bigotry. By comparison, my teacher was merely an annoyance. I first experienced antisemitism in the late 1970s and 1980s. I was living in Portland, Oregon, working as a trial and appellate attor- ney. A right-wing group called the Posse Comitatus was particularly active, distributing antisemitic literature (with fraudulent quotations purporting to be from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington) in Portland's Multnomah County Courthouse. While these people seemed like buffoons, they were no laughing matter, as various Posse members from different parts of the country were soon charged with criminal and violent activities. V vi Antisemitism Today One April a local neo-Nazi group identified every Jewish family in an Oregon college town and mailed each of them a hateful card on Hitler's birthday. I offered whatever help—legal or otherwise—I could, but I wondered: How should the community respond to such hatred? Ignore it? Program against it? I did not know, but I was certain that the answer from a professional in the Jewish community—telling the people in the small town not to worry because there were fewer card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan that year than in the year before—was not sufficient. More troubling was the antisemitism among my friends in "pro- gressive" circles. After Israel invaded Lebanon in the early 1980s, there were protests by the same people with whom I had worked on a wide range of issues, from combating police brutality and homelessness to promoting tenants' rights and American Indian sovereignty. I too was critical of the Israeli government's actions, but some of the Israel- related literature I saw at the rallies was eerily reminiscent of the mate- rial the Posse had been distributing about Jews, with assertions of Jew- ish power, Jewish conspiracy, and ingrained Jewish venom toward non-Jews. Yet while the Posse would not take offense if someone said they were antisemitic, my friends on the left did not even want to dis- cuss the matter. To do so, they alleged, would be a distraction from the "real" work and would harm the progressive agenda. This reaction bothered me for a number of reasons. First, this refusal to discuss a serious issue came from friends and allies who were eager to discuss just about everything else. Second, it showed that many on the left had a politically driven, as opposed to an analytical, understanding of how bigotry worked. And, third, it proved that combating anti- semitism was not easily done. When I joined the AJC staff a few years later, it was not to bean- count swastikas or dissect the ramblings of the hateful fringe, but rather to focus on how key institutions react to, and can be empow- ered to counteract, bigotry in general and antisemitism in particular. I had been a lay member of the American Jewish Committee chapter in Foreword vii Portland and was impressed that AJC was not driven by hysteria about antisemitism or any other issue, but was committed to careful research and honest and respectful debate. I published booklets about and con- ducted programs on how to combat bigotry on campus, in the media, and in politics. I also wrote in-depth background pieces about the antisemites who were getting some level of traction—people such as David Duke, Louis Farrakhan, and Pat Buchanan, and movements such as skinheads, the militias, and Holocaust deniers. In the summer of 2000, I decided that it was time to begin a book about contemporary antisemitism. Some well-respected col- leagues and pundits had been arguing in the late 1990s that anti- semitism was "dead." They asserted that Jews had unprecedented acceptance in American society, with Jews welcomed on boards of major corporations and serving as presidents of Ivy League universities that had, not too many decades ago, used quotas to restrict the num- ber of Jewish students. Further, they pointed to the high rate of Jew- ish-gentile intermarriage. If Americans were willing to have Jews in their families, so much so that Jews worried about the basics of Jewish continuity, how bad could antisemitism be? I agreed with their view that we American Jews were in a "golden age," but I thought it dangerous to declare that antisemitism was a thing of the past. It was, rather, a very well-established hatred, and there were new lies—such as Holocaust denial—and recurrent politi- cal needs, especially in and related to the Middle East, that were likely to breathe new life into antisemitism in the years ahead. At the least, I thought it only responsible to take advantage of these good times to plan how to counteract antisemitism in the future, rather than to declare victory and ignore a problem with a 2,000-year history. The collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the fall of 2000, sure enough, was followed by increased antisemitism in Europe and an escalation in anti-Israel activity that frequently smelled of anti- semitism. There has been much written describing a renewed (some say "new") antisemitism in the last few years, but little about how we viii Antisemitism Today must evaluate what should be done about it, and the logical and nec- essary prior step: whether we need to reevaluate how we think about it. It is hard to imagine what the group of American Jews, meeting in 1906, would make of the great acceptance of Jews in American society today and the established role of Jewish organizations working to combat antisemitism and bigotry. But the questions they raised 100 years ago—how to gauge the problems, how to respond effectively, how to find allies and really change things for the better—are at least as pressing today as they were then. This book is an effort, not necessarily to provide the right answers, but more urgently to help ensure that those who care about combating antisemitism are asking intelligent and relevant questions, and not defaulting into comfortable but too often unproved and per- haps ineffective answers. Kenneth S. Stern New York, NY July 19, 2006 The increasing frequency and severity of anti-Semitic incidents since the start of the twenty-first century, particularly in Europe, has compelled the international community to focus on anti-Semitism with renewed vigor. " Report on Global Anti-Semitism," U.S. State Department, January 5, 2005 Introduction Despite resistance from some in the United States Department of State, President George W.