Allen Rothenberg believes that it is “ridiculous” for Jews not to sit down with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
The Philadelphia attorney had decided to accept the call for dialogue Farrakhan issued at last month’s Million Man March.
“He is the de facto leader of the African American community today,” said Rothenberg, president of the Commission on Law and Public Affairs – also known as COLPA – a national organization that represents the interests of observant Jews in courts and legislatures.
“What he has said has been obnoxious, repulsive and unconscionable, but he is the leader.”
While Rothenberg awaits a response from Farrakhan, his initiative has been sharply criticized by Jewish organizational leaders.
However, Rothenberg is not the only Jew suggesting a need for dialogue with Farrakhan.
In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, J.J. Goldberg, a Jewish author and journalist, made a case for dialogue.
“Talking with an enemy is not surrender; it is a way to begin solving problems,” Goldberg wrote. “It took years of informal dialogue between the Palestine Liberation Organization and individual Jews before Yasser Arafat renounced terror and recognized Israel.
“Mr. Farrakhan can do considerable damage to Jews – and he is doing it. It is time to sit down with him and find out what it will take to make him stop.”
But the call for dialogue continues to be rejected by most mainstream Jewish organizations, who say they will not meet him until he publicly renounces anti- Semitism and atones for his litany of bigoted rhetoric.
New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal made a similar argument in a piece last week, as did the American Jewish Committee in a newspaper ad on Sunday, and Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, in a letter to the Times on Monday.
Phil Baum, executive director of the American Jewish Congress, said Rothenberg’s outreach to Farrakhan was “outrageous.” Sitting down with Farrakhan “implies that he’s a credible partner and represents a segment of the African American community that is amenable to some sort of rational and civil discourse, and I don’t think he is,” Baum said, adding, “To lend him legitimacy is a terrible mistake.”
Farrakhan’s rise to prominence presents the opportunity to do either “great evil or great good,” Rothenberg said.
Rothenberg, who said he wants to meet with Farrakhan as an individual, not as a representative of COLPA or a spokesman for the Jewish community, said he would not seek an apology for Farrakhan’s past remarks.
“I would prefer to start with a clean slate,” he said. “We both came out of slavery, we both have similar problems, we both sustain similar prejudices. Leg’s forgive. Let’s try to forget.”
But for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as for many Jews, forgetting is not an option.
“It would be a terrible state of affairs for American Jewry if that’s the way we have to appear before Louis Farrakhan and his Nation of Islam,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Meanwhile, a Jewish delegation traveled to London last week to urge the British government to bar several of Farrakhan’s aides from promoting their ideas in England.
Representatives of the Wiesenthal Center appealed to British officials to extend a 1986 ban on Farrakhan to five of his aides who participated in “The Black Holocaust Nationhood Conference” prior to the Million Man March.
The conference featured rapidly anti-Semitic speeches by Nation of Islam officials Khalid Muhammad and Quanell X and others who reportedly said, among other things, that the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust “can go straight to hell.”
Laws in Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe outlaw speeches that incite racial hatred. The Wiesenthal Center intends to make similar appeals in France and Germany to ban Farrakhan and his aides from speaking.
Hier warned of the danger of Farrakhan and his aides traveling around Europe to speak at universities, tapping into strains of discord and discontent and “suggesting it’s all the fault of the Jews.”
“Louis Farrakhan is a charismatic person,” Hier said. “Whatever we may think of him, he’s a great orator. He can affect people.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
