During the year 5742, the American Jewish community conducted a vigorous campaign against the Reagan Administration’s proposal to sell the AWACS arms package to Saudi Arabia. While the sale was eventually approved by the Senate, it provided an “ugly tone” of charges of “dual loyalty” and undue influence of the “Jewish lobby” in American foreign policy decisions.
Later in the year, U.S. supporters of Israel were faced with a barrage of propaganda waged by PLO apologists as Israel launched its “Peace for Galilee” operation in Lebanon. American Jews were not only called upon to provide financial support, but to develop a broader understanding of the Middle East crisis and the reasoning behind Israel’s military campaign.
Concern continued to be expressed in many quarters in regard to the number of anti-Semitic incidents. On the more positive tone, Leo Frank was absolved of the murder of Mary Phagen for which he was lynched by an angry mob in Georgia nearly 70 years ago.
THE AMERICAN SCENE:
September 1981–Sen. Barry Goldwater (R. Ariz.) asserts that he would favor opening a dialogue with the PLO if that would help reduce international terrorism.
Yeshiva University in New York, America’s oldest and largest university under Jewish auspicious, begins its 96th year with an enrollment of 7,000 men and women.
OCTOBER–President Reagan confers honorary citizenship on Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat-businessman who is credited with rescuing 100,000 Hungarian Jews during World War II.
The publisher of California Christian Yellow Pages telephone directory, which limits advertisers to “born again” Christians, signs court approved agreement to cease the discriminatory practice as a result of a suit by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
Holocaust survivors and representatives of 14 countries whose armies liberated the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II gather in Washington as part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council 5 first International Liberators Conference.
Former President Richard Nixon warns Israel and “parts of the American Jewish Community” that they will have to take the consequences if the proposed sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia is blocked in the Senate.
NOVEMBER–Sen. Howard Metzenbaum (D. Ohio) is called the “Senator from B’nai B’rith” by Sen. Ernest Hollings (D. SC) during a heated debate on the Senate floor over legislation supporting voluntary prayer in public schools.
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger describes injection of criticism of “Jewish lobby” in the debate over the AWACS sale as on “ugly tone.”
Council of Jewish Federations holds its 50th anniversary General Assembly conclave in St. Louis.
Federal appeals court in Detroit rejects the appeal by Rumanian Orthodox Archbishop Valerian Trifa of Grass Lakes, Mich, against a lower court ruling revoking Trifa’s American citizenship. He is accused of inciting a pogrom in Rumania in 1941 in which 236 Jews and Christians were killed.
DECEMBER–The Supreme Court requires the Bechtel Group, the international San Francisco-based engineering and construction firm, to honor an agreement that it not boycott firms blacklisted by Arab countries because the firms do business with Israel.
A 22-year-old Palestinian resident of the West Bank, Zian Abu-Eain, jailed in Chicago and accused with participating in a bombing which killed two boys and injured 36 other persons in Tiberias in 1979, is extradited to Israel to face trial.
The Justice Department agrees to withhold deportation proceedings against Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, a former gestapo official who has voluntarily given up his U.S. citizenship, because of the former Nazi’s health problems which impair his ability to assist in his defense.
JANUARY 1982–Citing personal reasons, President Reagan’s liaison with the Jewish community, Jacob Stein, announces his resignation.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor in the Carter Administration, says that American Jews were exercising “a legitimate and traditional” right in lobbying the Administration on foreign policy matters.
The number of anti-Semitic incidents in 1981 was more than double 1980, making it the third consecutive year that the incidents more than doubled, the ADL reports in its annual survey.
Two Ku Klux Klan member convicted of plotting to bomb a Nashville synagogue are sentenced to 15 years and five years in prison.
California State Senator John Schmitz, an ultra-conservative Republican, declares that opponents of a measure to outlaw abortion in California appear to him as “a sea of hard Jewish and (arguably) female faces” and are “murderous marauders.”
FEBRUARY–The Metropolitan Museum of Art decides not to display a proposed archaeological exhibit from Israel because some of the artifacts came from the West Bank, captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, and would therefore pose a security risk for the museum.
New York Court begins investigation into the legality of the PLO receiving the approximately $25,000 willed to it by Fred Sparkes, a journalist who died a year ago.
U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick, discloses that various delegates at the UN have expressed concern that there are too many. Jews in the U.S. Mission and also concern about Jewish influence in American foreign policy.
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.
