A Magazine Criticizing American Jewish Leadership

By Henry Srebrnik,  Shalom Magazine, 47, 2 (Fall 2022) 

The digital magazine White Rose is a non-partisan periodical dedicated to exposing extremism and reteaching classical liberalism. The spring 2022 issue deals with the failure of the American Jewish leadership to deal with the major problems facing America’s Jewish community today. Some of these critiques could also apply to the Canadian Jewish community.

Guest editors Avi Goldwasser and Charles Jacobs introduce the 16 essays and poems. “In what seems like a perfect storm, Jews face assaults simultaneously from four major ideological camps,” they state.

White nationalists attack them in the name of white supremacy. Radical black nationalists attack Jews in the name of black liberation and “equity.” Many progressives and segments of the Democratic Party promote the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and anti-Jewish critical race theory, in the name of “social justice” and Palestinian nationalism. Finally, radical Islamists, many from anti-Semitic cultures, preach incitement against Jews.

Yet, the editors contend, those Jewish establishment organizations whose mission is the defence and well-being of the community -- the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Jewish Federations, and the networks of Jewish Community Relations Councils (JCRCs) -- are failing to protect American Jewry.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) is the national umbrella organization of the local JCRCs. But it has become overwhelmingly aligned with the agenda of the Democratic Party, assigning Jewish and Israeli interests to secondary status.

Indeed, as Joanne Bregman, a Nashville attorney engaged in advocacy for Israel and the Jewish community asserts, JCPA’s leftward orientation is demonstrated by its membership in several leftist groups. These alliances, she writes, “leave little doubt that JCPA has chosen a self-serving interpretation of ‘Jewish values of fairness and justice’ to justify shaping the Jewish community relations field into a partisan instrument of the left.”

Rebecca Sugar, another of the contributors, asks if Jews are getting the leaders they deserve. “What most American Jews are really shocked by, but couldn’t see until it became inescapably obvious, is the fast-growing, unabashed anti-Semitism of the American political left.”

Why has this been happening? It’s because these leaders often seem more preoccupied by their social standing than demonstrating real concern for the Jewish community’s predicament. They also seem to have missed the dramatic shift in America’s cultural and political landscape, which has taken place over the last several decades.

Historian Richard Landes maintains that this blind spot also emanates from a larger world view shared by Western elites, which is best described as “utopian universalism,” a vision of a peaceful world, rid of oppression and discrimination; a world with no borders and with freedom and human rights for all.

These sentiments, he contends, have trapped many Jews, and especially most of their leaders, “in a rhetorical cage with few venues for escape because defending specifically Jewish interests now is, by definition, parochial and anti-universalist. Trying to square the circle of defending Jews and their traditions, yet being in synch with the wider, now anti-traditionalist society, is nearly impossible.”

Anti-Zionism in particular, has made Jew-hatred culturally and socially acceptable under the guise of human rights and free speech. Yet almost every major Jewish legacy organization failed to see the long-term consequences. This has especially been an issue on college and university campuses and has contributed to the fact that 50 per cent of American Jewish students now feel that “they must hide who they are out of fear,” according to an American Jewish Committee poll.

There is increasing hostility toward and marginalization of Jewish students on campus. Those interviewed related invasive experiences, such as receiving mock-eviction notices beneath dorm room doors, intimidation from fellow students or faculty and even episodes of physical violence. These are described as almost regular occurrences.

The survey was included in the Committee’s annual “State of Antisemitism in America” report, released on October 25, 2021.The report showed deep anxiety among Americans about its severity.

Given all this, in July the two editors also launched a grassroots non-profit initiative, the Jewish Leadership Project (JLP), to demand that major Jewish organizations, including
the Federations, the ADL, and the JCPA, cease subordinating the safety and welfare of the Jewish-American community to partisan ideology.

“Jewish Americans are under siege,” stated Goldwasser. “Campuses are rife with Jew-hatred. Jews have been attacked on the streets of Boston, Brooklyn and Los Angeles, and murdered in Pittsburgh, San Diego, Monsey, and Jersey City. They have been defamed by media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN, and even maligned by members of Congress,” he added.

“We need strong, proud, and courageous leaders willing to confront those who would do us harm,” Jacobs asserted. “JLP is the first Jewish organization in America that not only recognizes the state of emergency, but also is mobilizing to carry out substantive change to counter the threats we face.”

As a vulnerable minority, Jews have usually made public criticism of their leaders a near taboo. But this must change. Jewish leaders, they conclude, need fresh ideas. The American Jewish community must engage in open discussions, by encouraging broad community participation about the crisis they face. Some of this holds true in our Canadian community as well.