When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (25 page)

The battle lines had already been drawn. In 1967, two-thirds of New York's teachers, supervisors, and principals were Jewish. To the disgruntled, it seemed like they had a monopoly. The main teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, was almost exclusively Jewish. It was even run by a Jew, Albert Shanker. But the teachers were not rich by any means—most couldn't survive on the $10,000-a-year salary and had to take second jobs. And they had a strong liberal ethos. Shanker himself had raised money for the 1964 Freedom Summer and had joined King in the march from Selma to Montgomery. Jewish organizations and teachers were largely supportive of the community control program when it was inaugurated in 1967.

The problems began when the school board named as superintendent Rhody McCoy, a pipe-smoking black nationalist who used to frequent Malcolm X's militant Mosque Number Seven in Harlem. McCoy held a particular grudge against Jewish liberals. Influenced by Harold Cruse's 1967 book
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,
McCoy thought Jews had usurped control of the civil rights movement from black intellectuals and thereby stunted the growth of the black community. He came to Ocean Hill-Brownsville with a clear mission: to build a completely self-sustaining black environment. But his resentment at the Jewish educators soon overshadowed any good he might have done. One activist teacher, Les Campbell, started what he called the African-American Student Organization, an angry, aggressive student group that encouraged its members to taunt and harass the Jewish teachers. In February, the revolutionary atmosphere caused the popular Jewish principal of Junior High School 271 to transfer out of the district, taking with him thirty teachers. When Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in April 1968, the district became a raging bonfire of hate and aggression. A school assembly was held at JHS 271 in which Campbell ordered the white teachers to leave the auditorium and then explained to the students that violence was justified.

At the end of the first school year, May 1968, McCoy tried to forcibly transfer a handful of Jewish teachers and administrators that he felt were antagonistic to the experiment, and the conflict came to a head. Three hundred and fifty other teachers in the district threatened to strike at the end of the summer if their colleagues were not reinstated. Shanker, the head of the union, raised the stakes by saying he would put all fifty-seven thousand teachers in New York City on strike, effectively shutting down the system.

Three successive strikes ensued, keeping the schools closed for almost two months. A local dispute between the union and community board soon turned into a citywide debate over the extent of black anti-Semitism. In mid-September, in the middle of the second strike, a few teachers brought Shanker fliers they had found distributed throughout the schools.
THE IDEA BEHIND THIS PROGRAM
is
BEAUTIFUL, BUT WHEN THE MONEY CHANGERS HEARD ABOUT IT, THEY TOOK OVER, AS IS THEIR CUSTOM IN THE BLACK COMMUNITY,
the fliers declared. Shanker printed five hundred thousand copies of the flier in order to bolster his argument. Soon all of New York was talking about the recriminations and hate volleying between the two sides; Black Panthers in berets paraded down Herkimer Street holding shotguns, and the threat of riots hung like a noose over the whole city.

By the time the strike ended, on November 17, 1968, with the Board of Education suspending community control and installing its own superintendent in a clear victory for Shanker and the union (though Shanker still had to serve fifteen days in prison), irreparable damage had been done. The black community felt betrayed by Jews who hadn't supported their struggle for self-determination; Jews felt betrayed by blacks who had misdirected their rage; and the poor Jews who still lived in communities close to Ocean Hill-Brownsville felt abandoned by rich Jewish liberals who lived on the Upper East Side and continued to host fancy fundraisers for the Black Panthers.

One month after the strike ended, on the evening of December 26, something happened that destroyed any future chance of reconciliation. Les Campbell, the militant teacher in the dashiki, was invited to speak on a WBAI radio show. On the air, Campbell began reading a poem he said had been composed by a fifteen-year-old student of his. Titled "Anti-Semitism" and "dedicated" to Shanker, the poem's opening words would be repeated many times in the closing days of 1968: "Hey, Jew boy with that yarmulke on your head / You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead / I can see you Jew boy,—no you can't hide / I gotta scoop on you—yeh, you gonna die. I'm sick of your stuff. Every time I turn 'round—you pushin' my head into the Ground. I'm sick of hearing about your suffering in Germany."

The Jewish community was incensed. Shanker and the union filed a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission to fine the radio station. Efforts were made to kick Campbell out of the school system. Most disturbing, though, was how differently blacks and Jews read the incident. Where one community heard a legitimate expression of anger, the other heard blatant and disgusting anti-Semitism. The two groups had once shared a common language, marching together the way Heschel and King had only a few years earlier, but now they could barely shake hands.

Black militants weren't the only ones goose-stepping up and down the streets of Ocean Hill-Brownsville in 1968. Dressed in a distorted mirror image of the Black Panthers, Jews wearing blue berets, army fatigues, and dark sunglasses wielded baseball bats and threw clenched fists into the air. They called themselves the Jewish Defense League—a collection of mostly young, tough-looking local men, the children of those poor Jews who still lived on the urban frontier of Brooklyn. This was a new demographic that had lost trust in the Jewish establishment across the East River. Where once they had accepted their leaders without question, now they felt abandoned and threatened by the changing face of the city around them. This schism was represented in a July 1969 Harris poll that showed that twice as many Manhattan Jews as Brooklyn Jews were sympathetic to the black cause. Meir Kahane, a charismatic and restless rabbi from Brooklyn, had tapped into this newly alienated population—a group that felt a paradoxical mixture of powerlessness and resentment combined with a newfound post-Six-Day War explosion of pride—and he gave it its most primitively tribal and violent expression yet.

In May of 1968, following the firing of the Jewish teachers, Kahane began imagining the formation of a Jewish militia. Then thirty-seven and cobbling a living as a columnist for the Orthodox newspaper the
Jewish Press
while also working as a rabbi at various Queens congregations, Kahane thought poor and old Jews in the outer boroughs were suffering from black street crime. They needed defending. His model, his hero, was Jabotinsky. A fervent revisionist himself, Kahane knew the stories of Jabotinsky's efforts to build a Jewish army during World War I, and the work of his disciples to bring attention to the Holocaust during World War II. In the tense atmosphere that was building in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Kahane decided one Saturday morning to broach the subject with two friends, both of whom, like Kahane, had come out of the Betar youth movement. A few days later, he took out a small ad in the
Jewish Press
looking for more Jews who were concerned with upholding "Jewish Pride."

What drove Kahane was the same disgust with the exigencies of the New Left that former liberals were beginning to express in the pages of
Commentary
(what was beginning to be called neoconservatism). Except in Kahane's case, this anger was not a backlash. It had always been a part of his political thinking. As early as 1962, with the decade's cultural revolution not yet at full throttle, Kahane wrote with reactionary anxiety in one of his
Jewish Press
columns about the loss of Jewish souls: "The age we live in is not one of faith. It is an age of reason, of doctrinal skepticism, of pragmatism, of agnosticism. It is an age of science that questions all. It is an age of Marxism that preaches materialism, not spirit. It is an age of cynicism and fraud.... It is an age that threatens the values we hold dear. Torah and its pillar—faith—face a life and death struggle with this new age and its flashing rapiers, doubt and materialism. Day by day the struggle continues. In every hamlet, in the soul of every Jew, the battle rages."

On June 18, 1968, Kahane held the first meeting of what was initially called the Jewish Defense Corps (one person had suggested the group be called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ironically appropriating the name of the notorious and fake czarist document that "proved" Jewish world domination). This was the army with which he would fight the battle. Gathering the group at the West Side Jewish Center, where his cousin was rabbi, Kahane addressed an audience made up mostly of professional middle-aged men. Wearing gray slacks and a white shirt open at the neck, clean-shaven and with dark eyebrows and thick black hair, Kahane went on a tirade about the Jewish establishment, how it had abandoned Jews and slavishly supported black civil rights. He denounced Mayor John Lindsay for caving in to black militants. He painted a picture of the Panthers as the successors of Nazis, with a second holocaust in the works. Kahane had just returned from a visit to Israel, which was still flush with victory. He saw Jerusalem and the newly acquired territories and failed to understand how Jewish youth in America could be so disconnected. They fight for blacks, for the Vietnamese, for Cubans—for lettuce!—but not for themselves, Kahane told the group.

Kahane wasted no time getting the league on its feet. The morning after the inaugural meeting, he set up an office at 156 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, which he rented for two hundred dollars a month. He installed his doting mother, Sonia, as the first secretary. That very same day he took the train to Washington, D.C., and in his first act as head of the Jewish Defense League, he testified as one of two rabbis before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The subject: the plight of Soviet Jewry. Kahane introduced himself as the "founder of a group called the Jewish Defense League, which is currently being organized to defend Jewish people against anti-Semitism and to defend this country against various extremist groups, such as the Communists and the Black nationalists, functioning at the present time." The next morning, Kahane's name made its first appearance in the
New York Times.
"Jews in the Soviet Union are afraid to speak out," he told the committee. "It is our responsibility to protest openly, to cry out and await public opinion."

But Soviet Jewry was only a peripheral concern of his at the time, more a function of his broad anti-Communism. Kahane saw the JDL's role as primarily a local street defender. He would counter every instance of black anti-Semitism and use any means necessary, to borrow Malcolm X's rhetoric (as Kahane frequently did), to retaliate. In those early days, Kahane was more bluster than action. His following was fairly small and the threat of violence more a posture. The first real JDL activity was on August 5 and consisted of Kahane and fifteen young followers from Brooklyn gathering at noon at Washington Square Park, the de facto campus center of New York University. He demanded that the director of the school's new Martin Luther King Jr. Afro-American Student Center be removed because he'd written an article that accused Jewish educators of "mentally poisoning" black pupils. In an intimation of Kahane's media savvy, the signs the group carried read
NO NAZIS AT NYU
and
BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL; NAZISM IS UGLY
. It was a noisy but otherwise uneventful affair.

The community control struggle, which gave the group its declared raison d'être, offered Kahane many opportunities to make his presence felt. Jewish teachers began to rely on the young thugs that he was cultivating, his
chayas
("animals" in Hebrew), as he called them, to escort them in and out of schools. Kahane would stand outside community board meetings yelling at the black picketers on the other side of the street. And even after the crisis ended, when Les Campbell read the infamous "Jew boy" poem on WBAI in December, Kahane organized pickets of the station and filed charges in a Brooklyn court demanding Campbell be banned from teaching. Kahane's idea was to make up for his small numbers by being pervasive, giving the impression that the group was everywhere. In January 1969, the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented an exhibition called "Harlem on My Mind," about the history of the black neighborhood, and Kahane got word that an introduction in the show's catalog contained anti-Semitic remarks. One of the writers, a black woman, said that the black community's "contempt for the Jews makes us feel more completely American in sharing a national prejudice." For days, the same group of twenty high school students marched with Kahane up and down the steps of the Met until the catalog was pulled.

All this time, through the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969, he looked for any opportunity to provoke conflict and generate publicity. The young men who were attracted to him rode in trucks around black Brooklyn neighborhoods swinging chains out their windows and yelling through megaphones about the
schvartzes
(the Yiddish word for "black," which when spit out of hateful mouths meant "nigger"). Kahane, though never gifted at speaking one-on-one—he had a slight stutter that became more pronounced when he was nervous—orated at more and more synagogues, becoming more and more belligerent and developing a unique charisma when he was in front of crowds.

It was only in the spring of 1969, however, that the group really began to command attention, thanks to the provocative actions of James Forman, a black radical and one-time member of SNCC who had become disenchanted with its gradualist approach (he once said that "if we can't sit at the table of democracy, we'll knock the fuckin' legs off!"). That May, he interrupted services at Riverside Church in Manhattan to demand five hundred million dollars in reparations for slavery. He then announced that his next stop would be Temple Emanu-El, the Fifth Avenue synagogue started by wealthy German Jews in the nineteenth century and in 1969 an institution of Reform Judaism. Upon hearing Forman's demand, the temple's rabbi offered to give him some time to address the congregation after the services. Kahane had other ideas. He used the press to fan the rivalry between himself and Forman, telling one journalist, "Most Jews came here in galleys long after the Blacks were freed. Blacks deserve nothing from us and that is what they will get."