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New Jersey Jewish News Story
Activists plan New Jersey conference to address left-wing anti-Semitism
by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer
When community organizers, antiwar activists, and educators gather from March 25 to 27 at the DoubleTree Hotel Newark Airport in Elizabeth, the thorny issue of anti-Semitism on the Left will be topic A on their agenda.
According to conference coordinator Judy Andreas, the meeting will help Jewish and non-Jewish activists cope with an issue that many believe is dividing the progressive movement in America — and discrediting it in the eyes of mainstream Jewish and pro-Israel groups.
“We have made attempts to address the other prejudices — racism, sexism, homophobia. Confronting these things has strengthened the Left considerably,” said Andreas, director of Catalyst to Coalition, one of two groups sponsoring the conference. “This is what I believe we need to do with anti-Semitism.”
Facing a Challenge Within: A Progressive Scholars’ and Activists’ Conference on Anti-Semitism & the Left will include presenters from the New Jersey region of the Workmen’s Circle’ Arbeter Ring, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and Meretz USA.
Co-organizing the conference is Cherie Brown, executive director of the National Coalition Building Institute, an international group based in Washington, DC, that conducts conflict resolution training.
According to Brown, the Left’s “rightful commitment to Palestinian issues gets diverted into anti-Semitism. As a progressive, I believe deeply that having progressive movements understand how anti-Semitism gets used to divert the peace movement and the antiracism movement is critical.”
NCBI has worked with police departments and municipalities and has a chapter at Seton Hall University. Some, however, consider its approach controversial. Daniel Levitas, an Atlanta writer who has written and contributed to books on anti-Semitism and racism, said NCBI uses a “discredited form of psychotherapy” called re-evaluation counseling. According to the reevaluation counseling Web site, its theory is that intergroup conflict is based on individuals’ pent-up “distress experiences” — such as fear, anger, or loss — which can be resolved by helping the individuals “discharge” those emotions.
“By telling them the way to combat anti-Semitism on the Left is for all the people involved to discharge their personal hurts and psychological damages through the structure of re-evaluation counseling is not only disingenuous, it is not a solution to the problem,” said Levitas.
Brown has written that NCBI is built on the methods developed by re-evaluation counseling, but said the conference would not be a platform for those principles.
“I am part of the re-evaluation counseling movement but the conference is not that per se at all,” Brown told NJJN. She said Levitas’ critique was “an incredible way of trying to smear good work. Re-evaluation counseling is a peer counseling movement that does incredibly good work. The conference on anti-Semitism and the Left has nothing to do with re-evaluation counseling. I don’t intend to recruit people from the conference.”
Andreas, Brown’s coleader, said the conference was intended to be “an eclectic mixture of leftists to gather people who are concerned about this issue. Cherie and I are very different people. That is part of the reason we are doing it together, and we can start dealing with this issue in a more productive way.”
Martin Schwartz, director of the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring in Elizabeth, a Jewish social justice group with roots in the Yiddish labor movement, is scheduled to lead a workshop entitled “Are We a Country Club? The Left’s Litmus Test for Jews.”
According to Schwartz, the concept of the conference “is whether the progressive non-Jewish movement is letting the Jews in. There is an 800-pound gorilla in the room called Israel. ‘Can you really be progressive if you are pro-Israel?’ is a question that seems to be in the air.”
Ralph Seliger, editor of Israel Horizons, a journal published by Meretz USA, a group advocating for peace and civil rights for Israelis and Palestinians alike, will cochair a session entitled “The ‘Z’ Word” — the Z standing for Zionism.
“I am afraid it might be a very contentious session,” he said. “Something good might come out of it if enough people on the two poles” — Zionism and anti-Zionism — can maybe come to some understanding that there is a program of anti-Semitism we should all be concerned with,” he said, noting that Zionists as well as non-Zionists “have been prepared to be critical of Israel…not just down-the-line supporters.”
The conferees, Schwartz said, “are not coming into this thinking we are going to agree on our position on Israel and Palestine. The purpose is to bring communities together, and the real focus is on the domestic issues in this country. This is where there is opportunity for unity. We need to talk to each other.”
Organizer Andreas described herself as “Christian and European, from a farm in Ohio in an area where Jews and blacks were not allowed to live.”
“I care about prejudice against Jews because I’m a person who lives in a multicultural world,” she said. “I haven’t found a place on the Left where I can really get support on this issue without feeling I am being positioned against Muslims and Arabs — and I absolutely refuse to be positioned against Muslims and Arabs. I care about those groups, too. I’m a good leftist.”
Joseph L. Graves, a professor of evolutionary biology at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical University and a Westfield native, is scheduled to give the keynote speech. Its title is “Anti-Semitism and Racism: Cut from the Same Cloth To Achieve the Same Ends?”
“I’m going to look at anti-Semitism in the present context and try to distinguish between anti-Semitism and what one might consider to be legitimate criticisms of Israel’s foreign policy. They are not the same things,” Graves said.
“There are some people who claim that if you make any criticism of Israel’s foreign policy, it immediately makes you anti-Semitic. I disagree with that. There are some scholars, including some Jewish scholars, who believe that historically maybe a Jewish state wasn’t the best thing. That is very different from the knee-jerk reaction that Israel has no right to exist.”
Esther Kaplan, a leader of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York, will lead a workshop on the convergence of left- and right-wing anti-Semitism. “When you go to an antiwar march or a march for Palestinian rights, chances are you’re going to see some signs that are inappropriate,” she said: a swastika in the center of an Israeli flag, for example. “In a gathering of more than 250 people, you’re going to see some nuts in the room.”
But, Kaplan said, she was more troubled by “an emboldened and empowered Christian Right that wants to make this into a Christian nation,” creating “an important moment for Jews in this country.”
“The Jewish Left has been disengaged. It is totally silent. Why is that? Why haven’t policies that result in Jews being marginalized, fired, forcibly proselytized, popped up on our radar?” asked Kaplan. “There is something going on in there where the welfare of Jews is being neglected.”
Although the conference begins at noon on Saturday, March 25, Andreas said the planners “are making it as accessible as we can to people who are traditionally observant.” Sabbath-observant participants will be able to check in before sunset on March 24, and a dedicated “Shabbat elevator” will be programmed to stop at every floor of the hotel. There is also a Havdala service on Saturday evening prior to the opening panel.
People wishing more information about the three-day meeting may contact Andreas by calling 510-595-4634 or e-mailing her at responsibleleft@yahoo.com
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