Rabbi Warns Ethnic Politics Could Lead to Confrontation Politics

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, warned last night that “ethnic politics could lead to confrontation politics–and danger to the American Jewish community.” Speaking at the AJCongress’ annual Awards Dinner, Rabbi Hertzberg said, “A society within which every component unit concentrates on defending its own rights without regard to its neighbors is playing with fire. A racial or ethnic group that seeks to protect its own ‘turf’ by erecting walls around it jeopardizes not only its own future but the very social compact of which America is composed.”

Rabbi Hertzberg presented Dr. Stephen S. Wise Awards to Leonard Woodcock, president of the United Automobile Workers Union, Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek, New York State Comptroller Arthur Levitt, and Will Maslow, retired executive director of the AJCongress.

Calling on Jewish community groups to reject the “current and pernicious trend to ethnic isolationism,” Rabbi Hertzberg said there were many neglected areas of Jewish life, such as the plight of the Jewish poor and the “catastrophic situation of Jewish education,” but that it was “both short-sighted and dangerous to abandon our broader concerns as Americans in meeting our particular needs as Jews.”

Jewish self-interest, he said, must be an enlightened self-interest that recognizes that other groups have equally legitimate rights and needs that demand satisfaction, adding that the task was to find and identify areas of common concern to create a common cause which will lead to mutual benefit for Blacks, Puerto Ricans and other minority groups.

Kollek described Jerusalem as a microcosm, crystallizing not only all of Israel’s problems, “but all the problems of mixed cities everywhere–from Belfast to Capetown, from the Levant to the United States.” He said success in Jerusalem would mean something for city life all over the world.