Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, rabbi emeritus of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, was shouted down yesterday by Quebec separatists and students during an address at McGill University. He urged Jewish students to become radical activists but was repeatedly interrupted by shouts of “fascist,” “down with the Zionism,” and “Yankee, go home.”
Visibly shaken, Rabbi Feinberg appealed to the hecklers to “respect a 70-year-old man and wait for the question period.” He was allowed to finish his speech and some of the separatists, addressing him in French as a “fascist Zionist,” demanded to know why he talked about the struggle for liberation by the Vietnamese people but not about Quebec’s “struggle for liberation.” The Ontario Province rabbi replied that “I have a simple answer to that. I don’t know enough about it.”
Earlier in his address, Rabbi Feinberg here for a series of lectures on Jewish radicalism and radical Judaism, told the crowd that “to be a Jew is to mean to be a radical. In my interpretation of Judaism, I believe there is one unmistakable command or life style — and that is to take the radical way.”
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