December 5, 2007
Who’s afraid of Abraham Foxman?
Bradford R. Pilcher sure isn’t.
In a scathing essay published in this month’s edition of American Jewish Life, Pilcher takes Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League to task for their hypocritical treatment of the genocide committed by the Turks against the Armenian people. Pilcher, who formerly ran the Jewish book blog, TribeWrite, does a pretty thorough job of attacking the moral authority Foxman might of had in writing a book like “The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”
Confronting the bias in “The Israel Lobby” is certainly a noble calling, but Pilcher wonders how Foxman can manage to take a rightfully moral stand on the Holocaust and Israel while taking such a blatantly political position when it comes to the Turks. It just doesn’t add up.
In case you haven’t been keeping score at home, the ADL experienced a small crisis this summer when its New England regional director, Andrew Tarsy, criticized his bosses at the national office for their refusal to recognize the Armenian genocide of 1915-1918. Tarsy was promptly fired from his job but the public backlash caused Foxman to rehire him a little more than a week later.
That would have been bad enough but Foxman quickly sent a letter to the Turkish prime minister to express his sorrow over what he and the ADL “caused for the leadership and people of Turkey in the past few days.”
Here’s how Pilcher described his reaction to the letter:
I was eating lunch when I read that one. My reaction involved an attempt to curse through a mouthful of very hot soup. What exactly was Foxman apologizing for? I wondered if he’d ever thought to express deep sorrow to the leadership and people of Germany. “We had no intention of putting you in the difficult position of having to answer for mass murder,” I imagined he might say, “but you did kind of kill several million of us. We would like to express our deep sorrow over the embarrassment we’ve caused you.”
This is an organization created to fight bigotry generally and anti-Semitism in particular, to make our world better by exposing hatred and holding racism, genocidal or otherwise, to account. Where exactly do they get off apologizing to genocide deniers? In two sentences, Foxman had broken the camel’s back, letting a deluge of missteps and hyperbolic statements turn into the absolute shredding of his organization’s moral authority.
The only hero I see in all this is Andrew Tarsy. His outspokenness forced not only the ADL but also the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish groups to re-examine their thinking and realign their priorities.
Those same groups ought to read Pilcher’s essay if they ever hope to understand the antipathy many Gen X Jews feel toward the alphabet soup Jewish organizations.
As for this Gen X Jew, I became very cynical many years ago about the way some of these organizations adopted the Holocaust as a fundraising vehicle and turned its memory into the focus of American Jewish life. That phenomenon is part of the reason I applauded Tova Reich and her book, “My Holocaust.”
Don’t get me wrong. I care a lot about the Holocaust and I continue to read books about its history even though it’s been covered so extensively. Part of my obsession has to do with my own family’s history. My grandfather and most of his immediate family fled from Nazi Germany before the start of the war and I have an aunt who survived Auschwitz and an uncle who was on the St. Louis.
So, I feel a certain obligation to study the Holocaust and support the efforts of people like Deborah Lipstadt who work to ensure that the accuracy of history does not fall prey to anti-Semites.
But, what concerns me is the way many of my fellow American Jews have replaced Judaism and Torah study with a secular obsession with the Holocaust and ‘combating anti-Semitism.’ It’s a shame because the former has so much more to offer and the latter will never be enough to sustain a Jewish identity.
Since Bradford actually makes this point better than me, I’ll let him have the last word:
I’m not hopeless about this. Abe Foxman and his ilk can’t occupy the stage forever. At the very least, perhaps he could get laryngitis. But I’m not particularly hopeful either. We’ve made a civic religion, eagerly adopted by plenty of Jews who can’t be bothered to meander into a synagogue more than a couple times a year, out of Holocaust remembrance. We’ve replaced a wandering Diaspora of Torah scholars with an affluent American populace of Jews holding up the flame for the Holocaust without bothering to ask ourselves what moral imperatives that memory requires of us.
If we’re not going to ask those questions, and listen to the difficult answers, then we’re probably better off not remembering at all. After all, a false veneer of moral authority in the absence of moral action may be the most immoral thing of all.
This is an informative post, and thank you for the post and the links.
I totally agree with you. Judaism, the culture, traditions and the study of Torah are prime forces in my own life, and the lives of my children and grandchildren.
I read books on the Holocaust all of the time, from memoirs of Survivors to family accounts of those who perished, to the Holocaust in its entirety. I feel that reading the memoirs and stories of the Survivors or their families keeps the memories of those who perished, and those who won’t be with us much longer due to age, alive and not forgotten.
But, like I said, first and foremost, Judaism, study of Torah, traditions and celebrations are the forces that illuminate my waking hours and my life. I don’t cut corners in the least.
Thanks, JewWishes.
I think a lot of folks feel the same way but it is just starting to be expressed out loud.
What does Abraham Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League have in common with Iran’s Ahmadinnajad?
Both are genocide deniers.
Genocide denial is the worst type of hate crime. Not only does it murder the historical memories of the victims but it also murders the victims a second time by erasing them from the pages of history.
Although no one called the slaughter of Armenians (1915-23) as genocide because the word was not coined until twenty years later, the word “holocaust” has been widely used since the 17th century. Before World War II the word “holocaust” was used by Winston Churchill and others to describe the Armenian genocide.
Raphael Lemkin, a lawyer of Polish-Jewish descent and Holocaust survivor, created the word “GENOCIDE” in 1933 to describe what had happened to the Armenians. Lemkin explained that the Turks committed genocide with intent to annihilate.
The Anti-Defamation League’s recent alleged acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide, describing it as “consequence” of WWI, and “tantamount to genocide”, imply that Turkey did not intend to kill Armenians. The ADL knowingly contravened the UN’s official 1948 definition of genocide which uses the word “intent” not “consequence.”
The world doesn’t take seriously what American Jewish leaders have to say about the 6 million, not when it sees that the same Jewish leaders lobby the US congress against genocide affirmation, and silence everyone over the murders of 1.6 million other innocents.
To deny the Armenian genocide “is like Holocaust denial,” said human rights professor Gregory Stanton, vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and president of Genocide Watch.
Rabbi Hillel said it best: “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?”
The ADL is corrupt and morally bankrupt and has lost its authority to lecture on human rights. For the past 15 years the ADL has continually traded its human rights agenda with that of a bizarre foreign policy agenda. It has been exposed for what it truly is and can no longer maintain the facade of a human rights organization.
a Letter to Shimon Peres, who ls deying the Armenian Genocide
Dear Mr President Peres:
Not only are the victims – Armenians- killed, they “never existed.” The Republic of Turkey has denied the Armenian Genocide for the past 84 years, and politicians in Israel and a vast majority of officials of Jewish Diaspora are aboard their boat now.
Remembrance requires support. And it is the support of the deported and murdered Armenians that we speak of here and now.
These were “national interests” in the time of First World War – a time when the German Chancellor of the Reich Bethmann-Hollweg (shares co-responsibility for this genocide) chose to ignore the actions of the allied Turkey due to war-based strategic reasons; the resulting dearth of any and all humane thought and/or intervention is what, in the end, permitted the unconstrained execution of a race by the Young Turkish Regime.
Today, “national interests” are used as an additional argument for denying the fact of the Armenian Genocide. Anyone that justifies denial (according to Elie Wiesel: a second killing) and/or runs to support the perpetrators of a crime on the basis of “national interests” only lends credence to the concept that a crime is both legitimate and permissible if one gets an advantage out of it. Anyone that uses the concept of “national interests” as an argument reduces human rights and existence of nations/communities to an arbitrary plaything to be tossed aside as the powers-that-be see fit.
“National interests” that deny human rights; truth and justice are unjustifiable, as they are based on ruthlessness and discrimination and serve little other than to justify denial. But how can this even be allowed? Can a crime against humanity ever be justified? The logical consequence of this policy are the theories of Carl Schmitt – the legal National Socialist political scientist who justified the Night of Long Knives as the “highest form of administrative justice” in the Deutsche Juristen-Zeitung (“German Jurists’ Newspaper”) in 1934 – which maintain that only the strong deserve a place in the world. But to believe this exposes one’s own nation, people or community – as well as moral principles – to the continual threat of destruction.
Those who fall in line with this argumentation legitimize past injustices committed and pave the way for future crimes – in the spirit of Carl Schmitt.
In the end, the question remains: where do the sorely tested people of Israel stand on this?
Shalom,
Edward P.
Well said! I applaud Pilcher’s work and have written a letter to AJL Magazine to let them know as much.
thanks, hineini.
I think party line has recently changed, hasn’t it? The people of Turkey are no longer a working asset for Am Y’isroel.
Word has definitely gotten to Foxman. I haven’t heard him pledge undying Jewish affection for the Turkish people for many, many moons.
It won’t change anything, however. Even if Am Y’isroel blames the Turks for the Armenian genocide there will be some other genocide that the goyim will lift up above that of the Holocaust.