One of “the three major crises confronting world Jewry” and “the one least discussed” is domestic “extremism” expressed on the left in “vilification” of Israel and on the right in “anarchy,” Sen. Jacob K. Javits told a meeting of the Jewish Community Council of Essex County. The New York Republican described the first trend as “an active alliance between extreme elements in the American New Left and radical Arab propagandists in a campaign of vilification against Israel and Zionism, often with clear overtones of anti-Semitism,” a campaign “felt not only in the United States but in Europe as well.”
He said “some campuses have even seen active recruiting of volunteers for the Palestinian terrorist organizations–and tragically, some of the organizers and volunteers have been Jews,” He added that “the intensity of anti-Israel feeling among supposedly liberal student leaders” was hard to understand and that “it smacks of the intolerance and outright racism that their idealism is supposed to reject,” This position, he added, “adheres blindly to a policy line, encouraged by radical Arab groups, which portrays 2,000,000 Israelis as the aggressor and 100 million Arabs as the victims and which equates United States policy in the Middle East with United States policy in Southeast Asia.”
On the right, Sen, Javits said, the “extreme militancy” and “violence” of the Jewish Defense League leads chiefly to newspaper headlines and TV news coverage, “rather than to an advancement of the cause espoused” –freedom for Soviet Jews. The New York legislator said the other two “crises confronting world Jewry” were the “threat” to Soviet Jewry and the “uneasy” situation in the Mideast. If the Soviet Jewish community, the world’s second largest, is not aided, he stressed, it “runs the risk of becoming a modern lost tribe of Israel, disappearing forever into the quicksands of history” under the “slow, sophisticated strangulation of a faith and a culture that flourished for centuries.”
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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.
