Louis Farrakhan, the militant Black Muslim leader, is in the midst of one of his periodic efforts to convince Jews that he is not as bad as they think he is.
Every few years Farrakhan makes a spate of overtures to individual Jews who he feels can carry a message back to their constituents.
In the past few weeks, he has played the music of Felix Mendelssohn to try to impress the Jewish community with his good will, and has entertained a Jewish gossip columnist at his home for dinner.
Over the past several months, he has tried to initiate meetings with Jews in several cities, some of whom are religious leaders and some of whom are representatives of Jewish organizations.
Over the years that he has been extending similar offers, a handful of those invited have met with him over dinner at the Farrakhan home in Chicago, although most have turned down these opportunities as well as invitations to appear with him on stage.
Those who have spurned his invitations say that his magnanimous rhetoric about wanting reconciliation with the Jews has not been matched by any changes in practices that many consider to be overtly and profoundly anti-Semitic.
According to Alberto Mizrahi, a Conservative cantor in Chicago, who was invited to join Farrakhan in a performance for the Nation of Islam leader’s 60th birthday on May 17, “this is a classic example of someone who cries wolf once too many times.
“Every spring there’s an outreach to the Jews and then he says ‘they don’t like me, they don’t want me’ If he proves, even over a short time, that he changes his verbiage, then perhaps we can participate,” said Mizrahi.
Last month, Farrakhan made a splash in The New York Times by performing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at a conference on classical music and the black musician, which took place in Winston-Salem. N.C.
His choice of Mendelssohn was apparently supposed to be symbolic of his desire to reconcile with American Jews, although Mendelssohn’s family converted to Christianity.
‘SINGING QUITE A DIFFERENT TUNE’
But only days before, Nation of Islam representatives had disrupted an exhibit on black-Jewish history in Roxbury, Mass., wanting to include their own panels on Jewish responsibility for the slave trade and Jewish spying on blacks.
The mixed message was typical of Farrakhan, said Kenneth Stern, program specialist on anti-Semitism at the American Jewish Committee.
“On the one hand he’s playing music and on the other, he’s singing quite a different tune in promoting anti-Semitism,” Stern said.
One Chicago Jew who accepted a recent Farrakhan invitation is the popular society columnist Irv Kupcinet, known to readers of the Chicago Sun-Times as “Kup.”
Kupcinet joined Farrakhan and his aides at the Farrakhan home for dinner in early May.
Kupcinet, whose column has appeared in the pages of the Chicago Sun Times five times a week for the past half-century, was impressed by what the Black Muslim leader had to say.
Since the dinner, Kupcinet has mentioned Farrakhan’s desire to better relations with the Jews several times in his column.
“He was saying he is evolving and changing, as we all are. He emphasized that he no longer says the white man is the devil, and he says ‘we hope to keep evolving and have rapprochement with the Jewish community,’ ” Kupcinet told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Kupcinet said he hopes to arrange a meeting for Farrakhan with area rabbis and Jewish leaders within the next several weeks.
If he does, one Chicago resident who plans to attend is Reform Rabbi Robert Marx.
Marx had dinner with Farrakhan twice, once in 1989 and once the following year.
The “dinners were friendly, cordial, tended to ramble at the end, and ended with our feeling that we ought to quietly explore opportunities of rapprochement,” Marx said.
“He was respected by a significant segment of the black community,” said Marx, and “we hoped to change his attitudes about Jews.”
Soon after that, Marx extended two written invitations to Farrakhan, to come meet with Jews next on “Jewish turf,” to “look for some concrete results from our dialogue.”
There was “no response whatsoever,” said Marx. “Silence.”
Requests to interview Minister Farrakhan for this article were not answered.
HAS NOT ‘CLEANED UP HIS ACT’
Sherry Frank, who runs the Atlanta office of the American Jewish Committee, was one of those approached by the Nation of Islam to meet with Farrakhan in early October, shortly before tens of thousands of Atlantans filled the city’s Dome arena to hear Farrakhan.
She and the other invited Atlanta Jewish leaders turned him down.
“When he comes to town, he sells ‘The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews’ and ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ “said Frank, referring to two tracts widely regarded as anti-Semitic. “There’s nothing that tells me he’s cleaned up his act.”
“The Secret Relationship,” published in 1991 by the historical research department of the Nation of Islam, purports to reveal the central involvement of Jews in the black slave trade.
According to AJCommittee’s Stern, “The Secret Relationship” is “one of the top 10 anti-Semitic writings of this century.
“There is no greater slander to create in the black community than that Jews are responsible for slavery.”
In his recently published book, “Holocaust Denial,” Stern writes that the Nation of Islam’s weekly newspaper, The Final Call, “regularly features anti-Semitic tirades.”
Said Stern in an interview, “From time to time over the years, Farrakhan has said he wants to talk or have dialogue with the Jews, so it’s not entirely new,” said Stern. “But it has always has been disingenous and continues to be.”
According to Michael Kotzin, director of the Chicago Jewish Community Relations Council, before Jewish leaders meet with Farrakhan, he should “pull back” from publishing “The Secret Relationship” and “tell his people so.”
Added Kotzin, “Until that happens it would be inappropriate for a representative of the Jewish community to meet with him, because it could be seen as playing into his hands without any prospect of doing good.”
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.
