Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz warned here that the greatest danger facing the Jewish community today is found in the extreme movements of the radical left and the Christian right. “Although they are all rooted in the same primitive strain, unless we recognize their key differences, we will fail to apply the proper specific remedies to counter each one,” Dershowitz declared.
Dershowitz addressed some 500 persons gathered last Sunday at the Young Israel of Boro Park, less than one block from the shopping district where 13 Jewish-owned stores were vandalized one week earlier. He described the Boro Park vandalism as “the disturbing, but not very threatening act of fringe characters who enjoy widespread support in our society.”
Instead, Dershowitz, a native of Boro Park and who attended the Young Israel synagogue there as a youth, expressed great alarm at “the newest strain of anti-Semitism which calls itself ‘anti-Zionism,’ but which employs all of the classic anti-Semitic blood libels, and which is being promoted by an insidious coalition of the exteme right and the extreme left.”
CRITICAL OF ONE-SIDED BOOK
Declaring that “Jewish human rights deserves a much higher place on the liberal agenda than they currently enjoy, especially among other Jews,” Dershowitz proceeded to criticize a recently published book on the current status of the Jewish community for telling “only the better half of the story, and failing to tell the disturbing half.”
For example, he cited recent anti-Jewish “academic” conferences at Harvard University at which he said only enemies of Israel are invited to speak. Dershowitz was referring to Charles Silberman’s book, “A Certain People.”
Dershowitz warned against the “two-step process of Christianization of the United States” as “an insidious threat to the rights of Jews and other religious minorities in this country.” He noted that the spread of “Christian prayer groups” in government circles has eliminated some Jews from the policy debates and decision making processes which go on at those meetings.
“The seductive first steps, which might seem desirable even to some revered rabbinic leaders in the Jewish community such as aid to parochial schools and the re-institution of prayer in the public schools, will hasten the day when Jewish and other minority students will be subjected to tremendous social pressures to abandon their faiths,” he declared.
“Eventually, this could even lead to the establishment of official state religions, thus relegating the Jews of the United States to official second class status tolerated but no longer accepted on an equal footing,” he said. The address was part of a year-long community education series sponsored by the National Council of Young Israel.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
