One of the key factors in present-day anti-Semitism is “insensitivity to attacks on Jews and the Jewish identity from respectable sources,” according to Seymour Graubard, national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Declaring that domestic social issues and the Mideast conflict have triggered “new assaults on Jews,” Graubard said “the American Jewish community is becoming increasingly concerned by the lack of public outcry.”
Addressing some 400 delegates at tonight’s opening session of the League’s 58th annual meeting here, Graubard said that it is “no wonder that many Jews are beginning to show intensified concentration on their own interests and their own security.” Graubard said that in addition to Arab propaganda here and abroad and American political extremists of both the left and right. “anti-Semitism is being disseminated or ignored in otherwise respectable quarters.”
He cited as evidence the recent use of vicious anti-Semitic slurs on Israel and Jews by Soviet delegate Yakov A. Malik at a United Nations General Assembly session; a federal grant from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for a Washington, D.C. drug program run by “a man with a long history of blatant anti-Semitic activity.” The man, who calls himself Col. Hassan Jeru Ahmed, is the head of a black para-military organization.
Graubard said that despite ADL documentation of its charge against Hassan and despite protests over “the use of public money to fund a bigot,” the HEW grant is currently being hold up “not because of Hassan’s record of bigotry, but pending federal examination of his project’s financial books.”
Graubard also reported that the record industry is “dabbling in anti-Semitism,” particularly in popular recordings directed to the younger generation. He cited an album by a group called “The Last Poets” which, he said, “describes Jews in vulgar terms and prints the terms on the back of the album jacket”; a record called “S.S. Titanic” by folksinger Jamie Brocket in which “Jewish passengers are described through classical anti-Semitism,” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” which is reminscent of pre-Vatican II deicide charges against Jews.
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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.
