Synagogue Council Assails President of Nyu for Defense of Hatchett

The president of New York University was assailed today by the representative body of six national synagogue and rabbinic organizations for defending the controversial director of the university’s Afro-American Student Center, John F. Hatchett, against charges that he is an anti-Semite. The controversy grew out of an article by Mr. Hatchett in a Negro teachers’ periodical last year in which he accused Jewish teachers who, he alleged, dominate the New York public school system; of “mentally poisoning” Negro pupils. NYU president Dr. James M. Hester, said in an interview published recently in the New York Times, that while he did not subscribe to Mr. Hatchett’s views he could understand how they might have been expressed in the context of his article without the author being anti-Semitic “in the classical sense.” The Synagogue Council of America, comprised of the lay and rabbinical bodies of Conservative, Reform and Orthodox Judaism in the United States, denounced Dr. Hester’s comments as an “apologia” for a “scurrilous anti-Semitic article.”

Mr. Hatchett’s appointment to the NYU post, made apparently without knowledge of the contents of his article which had appeared months earlier, aroused a storm of protest in Jewish and non-Jewish circles and demands for his ouster. Mr. Hatchett replied that his article was not anti-Semitic in intent, but he defended his right to identify by name the ethnic group that he charged, in effect, was responsible for the lack of progress by Negro pupils. Dr. Hester accepted his disclaimer. The Synagogue Council’s statement said “it would have been possible and sufficient for Dr. Hester to attempt to justify the engagement of Mr. Hatchett with the assertion that the article did not truly reflect what NYU believes to be Mr. Hatchett’s true convictions. Instead, Dr. Hester chose to defend Hatchett’s article and state ‘I can understand’ the reference to the religion of the teachers under attack. This statement by Dr. Hester constitutes an apologia for Mr. Hatchett’s scurrilous anti-Semitic article that is in no way mitigated by the condescending qualification, ‘personally I wouldn’t do it.’…Surely he cannot be ignorant of the long, sordid history of anti-Semitism in which the classical defense of the anti-Semite always was that the Jews was singled out not for his Jewishness but for ‘objective’ sins attributed to him.” Dr. Hester’s remarks were defended in a letter to him by Dr. M.T. Mehdi, secretary-general of the Action Committee on American-Arab Relations, who said that “Jewish organizations believe that the Jews can do no wrong and any criticism of any Jew, ipso facto is anti-Semitism.”