Aj Committee Finds Unsolved Problems in Jewish-catholic Relations; Scores New Left

Jewish-Catholic relations have improved during the five years since Vatican Council II but can stand considerably more improvement, according to Philip E. Hoffman, president of the American Jewish Committee. Addressing the AJ Committee’s national executive council meeting here, Mr. Hoffman said a half decade study of the impact of Vatican Council II’s Conciliar Statement on the Jews showed several “unsolved problems.” Mr. Hoffman noted inadequate Catholic teachings of the validity and relevance of Judaism but also blamed inadequate Jewish understanding of Christianity. He said there was inadequate treatment of each religion in the other’s textbooks. He found that there has been progress in the United States, Western Europe and Latin America but that there is still an absence of understanding by Catholics of Israel’s meaning for Jews and Judaism. Mr. Hoffman said that the AJ Committee study found that in Mexico and Central America there has been no fundamental improvement in ecumenism and that Arab-inspired anti-Semitic organizations and publications persist.

He said there has been no systematic effort to expunge prejudicial material from Catholic and other textbooks and publications. The study Mr. Hoffman referred to was conducted by the AJ Committee’s interreligious affairs commission headed by Arthur N. Greenberg and Rabbi Marc H. Tanenbaum. Mr. Hoffman and the AJ Committee’s honorary president, Morris B. Abram, both scored the New Left. Mr. Hoffman called it a “global phenomenon” which posed a “serious danger” by its use of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism “interchangeably.” He said that a further menace was that the New Left “freed the radical right” from its “inhibitions.” Mr. Hoffman criticized New Leftists for their “selective compassion” expressed in being “stonily indifferent if not heatedly inimical” to Jewish and ethnic problems. Mr. Abram, former president of Brandeis University, denounced Jews who “out of a sense of guilt or for masochistic delight, accept the abuse of the New Left radicals and try self-purification in ceremonies of self-flagellation.” He said “These people are fools who have neither dignity nor sense. They are more ignorant than those Jews who joined the Old Left which gave us Stalin and the whole sorry inheritance of Soviet anti-Semitism.”

The political tactics of Vice President Sprio Agnew were condemned at the AJ Committee meeting by Mr. Agnew’s fellow Republican, Sen. Jacob K. Javits of New York. The Senator said Agnew’s “politics of positive polarization” was self-contradictory “because a strategy to polarize seeks negatively to pull people to extremes, not to bring them together.” He urged President Nixon to assert “national moral leadership” and not “pursue partisan goals.” Jordan C. Band, chairman of the AJ Committee’s committee on the Middle East, said the organization has been seeking in many ways to promote Arab-Israeli understanding. He mentioned several projects, including informal Arab-Israeli discussion groups in private homes. He noted that Hebrew was being taught in an Arab Christian school in Jerusalem, that Haifa University has conducted a sensitivity training workshop which has brought Arab and Israeli students together and increasing use by Arabs of the AJ Committee’s specialized reading and research library in Jerusalem.