Minority of Left, Right Jewish Youths Threaten to Destroy Jewish Social Fabric

Senator Jacob K. Javits tonight urged “responsible organizations and individuals ” on and off the campus, “both inside and outside the Jewish community,” to combat the “minority of American Jews on the extreme left and extreme right.” The New York Republican, in a text prepared for delivery at a community-wide rally of the Jewish Welfare Federation of San Francisco-Marin County area, warned that unless these twin dangers “are brought to reason, their passionate rhetoric and destructive ways could tear apart the heretofore indestructible fabric of American Jewish life.” Such a development, he told the rally being held in behalf of the United Jewish Appeal annual campaign at the Fairmont Hotel, “would carry perilous implications for fellow Jews in Israel, the Soviet Union and other troubled areas throughout the world.” Javits, who together with Senator Abraham Ribicoff, Connecticut Democrat, was unable to attend the world conference on Soviet Jewry in Brussels last week due to a heavy Senate schedule, told the audience that for the Soviets to permit. massive emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, “there first must be achieved the most elusive of all goals: a permanent peace in the Middle East. Worldwide protest alone is not likely to bring the ultimate relief being sought for Soviet Jews,” he stated, Referring to prospects for Mideast peace, Javits cautioned that Israel faces “a most difficult period immediately ahead” as it approaches the crucial period of hard bargaining with Egypt and other Arab states in the indirect talks under United Nations special envoy Dr. Gunnar V. Jarring.

Javits observed that “there is still the danger that the United States could become too eager and too impatient for a Mideast settlement, with the result that we could pressure Israel into making damaging security concessions.” At the same time, the Soviet Union makes no similar demands on its Arab clients and “there is still no clear sign that the Soviet Union is prepared to ease up in its military and diplomatic presence in the Middle East” Discussing the dangers the minority of Jewish Left and Right extremists pose for the Jewish community, Javits excoriated the Jewish Defense League as a “brand of extremism” from “the far right.” He said that the JDL discredits the cause that “never again” will persecutors be permitted to spill Jewish blood by its tactics of violence. “The irony is that the JDL has forsaken the real lesson of the Nazi persecutions: namely, the sanctity of nonviolence.” Directing his fire against the New left, Javits noted that its alliance with Arab propagandists leads to a campaign of vilification against Israel and Zionism, “often with clear overtones of anti-Semitism.” He noted that one of the most distressing aspects of student New Left extremism is that some of the organizers and volunteers for the Palestinian terrorist groups have been Jews. Observing that at the root of this problem “is a growing alienation among our youth from middle class society,” Javits declared: “At the community and family level, there is a special responsibility to bring Jewish youth into the mainstream of Jewish life; to teach them the lessons of the holocaust and of the precious quality of Israel.”