B’nai B’rith Young Adult Convention Discusses Role of Jewish Clubs

Delegates to the 17th annual convention of B’nai B’rith Young Adults here were told today that “American Jews should feel sufficiently secure in their religion and culture not to need the crutch of Jewish city and country clubs to preserve their identity.”

The statement was made by Harold Braverman, of New York, director of the national discriminations department of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League. He added that American Jewry is apparently far from unanimously agreed on this issue. One of the “biggest questions” American Jewry faces, he said, is “whether presentation of Judaism and Jewish identity requires that we sanction separatism in social clubs.”

Mr. Braverman said that the result of this difference of opinion is that there is no clear direction regarding religious discrimination of this type which he described as “the most extensive currently facing American Jewry.” He said religious requirement for membership in social clubs was responsible for a vicious cycle, with Jews rejected for membership in certain clubs — turning to their own exclusively Jewish clubs.

He said the practice “not only indicates a serious failure on the part of the American community, at least at the social level, to accept individuals on the basis of individual merit and worth, but it represents a contradiction of the goal of good inter-group relations for which we are striving.”

Mr. Braverman said that social club discrimination typifies the extent to which anti-Semitism in the U.S.A. has now become “covert and institutionalized,” noting that “the American community now rejects overt anti-Semitism of the crude and violent type manifested by professional anti-Semites, acts of violence against synagogues and the like, but is apparently not yet moved to reject anti-Jewish attitudes with respect to social life.”