The United Nations General Assembly resolution equating Zionism with racism was denounced by the executive board of the United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO, as an “affront to the Jewish people who have been history’s primary victims of racism,” the Board of Rabbis of Southern California reported yesterday.
Cesar Chavez, president of the union, disclosed the union’s stand in a Nov, 17 letter from the union’s headquarters at La Paz, Calif, to Rabbi Sidney J, Jacobs, chairman of the social action committee of the rabbinical board.
The union’s executive board said that the farm workers “are proud to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters in America in affirming Israel’s right to live in peace with her neighbors.” The board described the farm workers as “an embattled minority who have suffered the humiliation and degradation of racial and economic discrimination in this country,” and “know first hand the ravages brought by intolerance and prejudice.”
The board added that the Assembly resolution would “encourage the latent anti-Semitism that has been a blot on world history and which continues to stain the conscience of mankind.” The UFW statement affirmed the union’s view that “a national home for the Jewish people is a natural and legitimate aspiration of one of history’s most oppressed minorities,”
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