Dreams Defended and Deferred: The Brooklyn Schools
Crisis of 1968 and Black Power’s Influence on Rabbi Meir
Kahane
Jacob S. Dorman
In a 1951 poem entitled “Harlem,” Langston Hughes asked “What
happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up/like a raisin in the sun?/
. . . Or does it explode?” Twenty years later, deferred dreams of racial
democracy in education and home ownership appeared to be drying
up and exploding all at once in New York City. It was in 1971, three
years after his rise to prominence as the founder of the Jewish Defense
League, that the New York Times described Rabbi Meir Kahane sitting
at his desk as “a slight, dark, handsome man in a blue suit and white
shirt open at the collar,” wearing a black wool yarmulke. He was barely
forty, “yet the soft gestures, the head-nodding, the weary, knowing air
give him the aspect of a much older man, or a man in an old tradition.” With this litany of agedness, the writer thus made a nodding
reference to the alleged antiquity of Kahane’s yeshiva-bred mannerisms,
but the contrasting counterpunch came quickly: “His accent, however,
is contemporary New York.”1 Indeed, it was contemporary New York,
with its discontented racial “minorities” and white “ethnics” that both
catalyzed and accented Kahane’s early movement of Jewish militarism,
and informed his philosophy, style, and tactics.
In these volatile times, it was Black Power politics, “Black is Beautiful”
affirmation, and Black-Jewish conflict that pushed Kahane to found the
Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968 as an answer to Jewish assimilation and victimization, and he bequeathed to the world the still-current
slogan “Never Again.” Kahane explicitly modeled his “Jewish Panthers”
on the Black Power movement, especially the Black Panthers, even as he
ironically targeted Black Power activists and organizations before turning his attention to Soviet and Palestinian Arab foes. Kahane adopted
not only the bravado and tactics of Black Power organizations, but he
also adopted the goal of instilling pride in his people. Appropriating the
slogan “Black is beautiful,” Kahane repeatedly proclaimed, “Jewish is
1. Walter Goodman, “‘I’d Love to See the J.D.L. Fold Up. But—’: Rabbi Kahane says:
. . . New York Times Magazine (Nov. 21, 1971): 32, 33, 115–119, 121, 122.
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beautiful,” and told young audiences “be proud that you’re a Jew.”2
In 1971, Kahane cited instilling pride in young Jews as his foremost
accomplishment. He recounted, “there were so many young Jews who
were very envious of black soul, brothers and sisters, who yearned for
it. So they tried to become black or they tried to become this or that.
But they’re not black; they are not this or that. They’re Jews.” 3 When
asked directly if his tactics had been influenced by the success of Black
militants, he replied: “Of course.”4
In New York City the long simmering racial tensions centering on
residential integration and desegregation of local schools in the 1960s
had a series of broad-ranging and long-lasting effects. The Ocean HillBrownsville schools controversy of 1968 launched Kahane into political
activism, first as the founder of the Jewish Defense League in Brooklyn,
and later as a rightwing ultranationalist in Israel. The racial crisis in
Brooklyn in the late 1960s fueled the Jewish settler movement in the West
Bank and Gaza Strip in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as
the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States. Kahane
even instigated the firestorm that doomed Jesse Jackson’s presidential
campaign in 1984, and provoked Louis Farrakhan into making a series
of antisemitic statements that made the leader of the Nation of Islam
nationally notorious. Hence, the racial politics of the Civil Rights and
Black Power eras in New York City’s Jewish communities had lasting
impacts for decades to come, and have lasted long after Kahane himself
was slain by an assassin’s bullets in 1990.5
There is a need for more thoughtful analysis of Kahane’s ideas and
influences. As Shaul Magid points out, Kahane admired Malcolm X,
Stokely Carmichael, and other Black Power icons, and like Malcolm
X was slain by an assassin, but he is seldom studied in Jewish Studies
programs, in contrast to Malcolm X’s popularity in African American
Studies courses.6 Always an embarrassment to most American Jews,
2. Goodman, “ ‘I’d Love to See the J.D.L. Fold Up. But—’” 33.
3. Idem., 122.
4. Idem., 116.
5. While the Civil Rights Movement burst into national consciousness with the success
of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, most scholars connect the start of the Black Power
movement to the James Meredith march across the state of Mississippi of 1966. There is
debate about both labels and their periodization. See, among others: Stokley Carmichael
and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Random
House, 1967); Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til The Midnight Hour: A Narrative History
of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 226–7; Rhonda Y. Williams,
Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (London: Routledge,
2014). On Jackson and Farrakhan, see footnote 95.
6. Shaul Magid, “Why be Jewish?: Intermarriage, Meir Kahane, and the Contemporary
Jewish Dilemma.” Lecture, New York University, New York City, May 7, 2014.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 413
Kahane became a pariah to liberals when he moved to Israel, wrote a
1981 book advocating ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs entitled They
Must Go, got his Kach party banned from the Israeli parliament in 1988
for inciting racism, and became increasingly messianic and apocalyptic.
Unlike icons like Malcolm X or Ché Guevara who were cut down in their
prime, Kahane outlived his own peak in popularity and his reputation
has suffered accordingly. With the ensuing lack of scholarly attention,
few have noticed just how important the Black Power movement was to
the formation of Kahane’s “Jewish Panthers.”7 Drawing from newspaper
accounts, archival research, and diverse secondary literatures, Kahane’s
rise was part of overlapping histories that are seldom considered together:
the rise of spatial segregation in postwar New York City; thwarted
struggles for educational integration; the Black Power movement, and
the domestic racial tensions that led to the growth of Jewish militancy
and neo-conservatism, both in the U.S. and Israel.
Integration of NYC Schools: A Dream Deferred
New York’s education crisis was part and parcel of increasing deindustrialization and racial segregation that has been chronicled so ably
by scholars such as Robert Caro, Arnold Hirsch, Jonathan Rieder, and
Jerald Podair.8 Whereas New York’s older manufacturing sector, scattered
amongst crowded tenements in midtown and downtown Manhattan, had
readily absorbed thousands of white high school dropouts and unskilled
workers each year before World War II, the new employment sectors
after the war demanded greater educational attainment. Partially in response, New York more than quadrupled its spending on schools from
250 million dollars a year in 1948 to 1.1 billion dollars a year in 1965,
even as the size of the student population remained relatively stable.9
But the racial composition of New York’s school children changed dramatically: by 1960 there were fewer than half a million white students
7. On the making of global icons, see: Jeremy Prestholdt, Icons of Dissent: The Global
Resonance of Che, Marley, Tupac, and Bin Laden (New York: Oxford University Press,
2017).
8. Robert A. Caro, The Powerbroker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New
York: Knopf, 1974); Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in
Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Jonathan Rieder,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1985); Wendell Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews,
and the Changing Face of the Ghetto (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002);
Jerald E. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean
Hill-Brownsville Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
9. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 14.
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in New York’s public schools and 600,000 Blacks and Puerto Ricans.10
The “minorities” were now in the majority.
Although New York’s laws called for educational integration, in fact
the city developed a two-tier, highly segregated school system. The schools
that serviced students of color were far more overcrowded and employed
a cohort of far less experienced teachers who typically transferred to
majority white schools at the earliest opportunity.11 The inequalities
between Black and Puerto Rican schools and their white counterparts
were stark.12 With increasing residential segregation, the separation of
the races in New York’s public schools actually increased dramatically
after the historic Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling
of 1954, with effectively segregated schools increasing from fifty-two in
1954 to two hundred and one in 1965. Yet despite such glaring inequalities, the New York school system was slow to address the problem with
effective bussing or school building programs. Integration efforts faced
stiff resistance from whites, and when the school district did announce
the construction of two hundred and ten new schools to go up between
1965 and 1971, it became clear that sixty-two percent of them would
be either all white or all Black, all Puerto Rican, or all Black and Puerto
Rican.13 White Jews were prominent among the opponents of forced
desegregation plans, but they also constituted almost all of the white
supporters of such plans.14
The leader of the fight to desegregate the New York public schools
was Brooklyn’s Reverend Milton Galamison, one of the only Black Presbyterian ministers in New York and a past head of the local NAACP,
who began his integration crusade in 1960. Galamison believed that
full integration was a necessary component of a quality education, and
thought that involuntary bussing would be necessary to achieve the goal
of having every school in New York reflect the racial demographics of
the entire city. Rev. Galamison organized a series of boycotts of the
schools, and forced the adoption of a variety of remedies, from bussing,
10. Jane Anna Gordon, Why They Couldn’t Wait: A Critique of the Black-Jewish
Conflict Over Community Control in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (1967–1971) (New York:
RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 32. See also: Glen Anthony Harris, The Ocean Hill Brownsville
Conflict: Intellectual Struggles Between Blacks and Jews at Mid-Century (New York:
Lexington Books, 2012).
11. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 16–17.
12. Gordon, Why They Couldn’t Wait, 32.
13. Idem., 34.
14. David Rogers, 110 Livingston Street (New York: Random House, 1968), 147.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 415
to redrawing district lines, to pairing white and Black schools, only to
see all of them defeated by organizations of white parents and teachers.15
On March 27, 1963, Galamison debated Malcolm X over the desirability of integration. Although they had differing views on the issue,
they gained each other’s respect, and over the course of the next year,
as Malcolm became more interested in grassroots political action, he
became more supportive of Galamison’s efforts.16 In December 1966,
Black Brooklyn parents who had been not allowed to speak at a Board
of Education meeting occupied the empty chairs of the board and
formed their own “People’s Board of Education,” with Galamison as
president.17 Reverend Galamison’s brand of grassroots mass mobilizations and boycotts around the issue of improving education for Black
New York City school students became one of the prime examples of
what Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton defined as “Black
power.” Boards of education and police departments had to be challenged “forcefully and clearly,” they wrote in their book Black Power
in 1967. “If this means the creation of parallel community institutions,
then that must be the solution. If this means that Black parents must
gain control over the operation of schools in the Black community, then
that must be the solution.”18
Ocean Hill-Brownsville: Or Does it Explode?
After more than a decade of failed efforts to desegregate New York
City’s public schools, Black parents and teachers were increasingly
frustrated at their stymied attempts to achieve integration. They blamed
Black students’ poor scholastic performances on white teachers’ cultural
insensitivity, low expectations, and sometimes, outright disrespect and
even fear of Black students. By the middle of the decade, two streams of
reform—decentralization and community control—came together to force
a change in New York’s underperforming and massively bureaucratic
15. Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door: Milton A. Galamison and the
Struggle to Integrate New York City Schools (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997); Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 24–6.
16. It was also this televised debate that brought Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam
their most prized convert: young boxer Cassius Clay, who took the name Muhammad
Ali. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til The Midnight Hour, 97.
17. Kwame Turé (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The
Politics of Liberation in America ([1967] New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 170; Podair,
The Strike That Changed New York, 72;
18. Turé and Hamilton, Black Power, 43.
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school system, which had 4,000 administrators at its headquarters at
110 Livingstone Street in downtown Brooklyn.19
With the failure of the Reverend Galamison’s boycotts and previous
efforts to achieve integration between 1960 and 1966, New York City
School Superintendent Bernard Donovan, community representatives,
teachers, and Ford Foundation personnel created a plan in 1967 for
three experimental school districts composed of parents and local leaders with broad but poorly-defined control over curriculum, budget, and
personnel. Although initially supportive, the community control plan
quickly attracted the opposition of the United Federation of Teachers,
which especially objected to its provisions for local control of personnel decisions. The local Ocean Hill-Brownsville planning council, which
was comprised exclusively of community members, all of whom were
African American, choose an administrator for the new experimental
district, Rhody McCoy, a Howard University graduate who had served
as a teacher and a principal in the New York public school system
for the previous eighteen years.20 McCoy also was associated with the
Ford foundation, which brought down the condemnation of socialists
who saw both the union and the experiment in “community control”
as working against the interests of working class parents, or as being a
“phony” tactic that diverted attention from the community’s longstanding demands for reform: more and newer schools, smaller classes, and
more Black history in the curriculum.21
McCoy and the local Ocean Hill-Brownsville board decided it was
their time to act on May 9, 1968, just a month after nationwide rebellions following the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and following protests in Harlem over Columbia University’s expansion
plans. They sent letters announcing “termination of employment” to
thirteen teachers, five assistant principals, and one principal. Many of the
transferred were UFT leaders and all of whom were known opponents
of community control.22 When the transferred teachers, all but one of
whom was white and most of whom were Jews, attempted to return to
their old jobs on May 14, they found Black community members and
teachers preventing their entry into local school JHS 271. A phalanx of
19. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 82–86, 145–7; Gordon, Why They
Couldn’t Wait, 7–24.
20. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 3–4, 85.
21. The Progressive Labor Party, “Racist NY School Walkout Aids Rulers,” Challenge 5
no. 7 (1968), 2; Debby Israel, The New York City Teacher’s Strike, 1pp. in Gordon Fellman
Papers, Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections, Brandeis University.
22. Idem., 2; Stefan M. Bradley, Harlem v. Columbia University: Black Student Power
in the Late 1960s (Champaign, Ill.: The University of Illinois Press, 2009).
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 417
police separated the two angry contingents. Superintendent Donovan
prevailed upon McCoy to bring formal charges against the dismissed
teachers, and their cases went into arbitration, while UFT President
Shanker convinced Mayor Lindsay to provide police escorts for the
teachers, who pushed their way into the schools through the human
barricade of community supporters. In protest, the local board closed all
the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools, and the UFT responded by pulling
all 350 of its members out of the experimental district on strike from
May 22 through the end of the school year.23 In the UFT’s opinion, the
experimental district had violated the union’s contract and undermined
the civil service exam system that had provided upward mobility for so
many union members. With the summer vacation, all parties had time to
restock and dig in for the battle ahead. It would not be a restful break.
Kahane and the Beginning of the JDL
At the time the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict broke out in May
1968, thirty-five year old Meir Kahane prayed at the Orthodox Young
Israel synagogue in Laurelton, Queens, one of the predominantly Jewish
neighborhoods that would became mostly-minority in the next seven
years.24 His early career had been desultory. In the 1960s, Kahane earned
a Modern Orthodox rabbinical ordination, got fired from several rabbinical jobs, covered the Yankees for a year as a reporter, abortively moved
to Israel and returned unhappily, delivered newspapers, and wrote a
column for Brooklyn’s Jewish Press. He did not hit on a consistent way
to make money until an old buddy from the militant, right wing Zionist
youth group Betar turned him on to his contacts with the FBI and the
CIA. As “Michael King,” Kahane infiltrated the John Birch society and
later served as an informer against leftist groups, while also attempting
to generate support for the Vietnam War among Orthodox Jews at the
behest of the Central Intelligence Agency.25
23. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 94-108.
24. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 91. Laurelton excluded Blacks entirely before
blockbusting in the 1960s. It was still “predominantly Jewish” in the mid 1960s, but
Blacks were already beginning to move in. See: Peter R. Eisenstadt, Rochdale Village:
Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City’s Great Experiment in Integrated Housing (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2010), 206; Roberta Kossoff and Annette Henkin
Landau, Laurelton: Images of America (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2011), 7–10.
25. Podair, The Strike the Changed New York, 4, 57–82. Some of these positions were
not covert. Kahane and his partner Joseph Churba self-published a polemic with a company
they established for the purpose called The Jewish Stake in Vietnam (New York: Crossroads
Publications, 1967). Kahane reported that the CIA had funded the book: Robert I. Friedman, The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member
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With the backdrop of the schools crisis, and with the aid of two
friends, one of whom was a fellow graduate of Betar, Kahane planned
the formation of a group he wanted to call the Jewish Defense Corps but
settled on calling the Jewish Defense League (“given the present Jewish
knee-jerk fear of anything sounding militant.”)26 These were violent,
and trying times. Just after midnight on June 5, a twenty-four-year-old
Jordanian named Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed leading Democratic
presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy as he was leaving the stage at
the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco, apparently in retaliation for
Kennedy’s support for the State of Israel. Kahane held the first meeting
of the Jewish Defense Corps/League on June 18, 1968 at the West Side
Jewish Center, 347 West 34th Street, in Manhattan.
Kahane shaped the JDL into a direct continuation of the ideology and
methods of the rightwing “Revisionist” Zionist youth group Betar and
its leader, the Odessa-born Jewish militant Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky
(1880-1940).27 Kahane had been born in 1932 in Flatbush, Brooklyn to
a father who had been born in Safed, Palestine, part of a Zionist family
that had ventured there from Galicia in 1873.28 The Kahanes lost five
members of their family in an Arab attack in Palestine in 1936, and his
father Charles was a member of Jabotinsky’s militant Revisionist movement. Jabotinsky himself visited the Kahane home when Meir was four
years old, and his father helped to fund some of his activities.29 Meir
Kahane, who had undergone his first arrest at the age of fifteen while
taking part in a violent protest with his Betar youth group, thoroughly
imbibed his father’s Jabotinskian ethos that Jewish lives and turf needed
to be protected by militarism if necessary, even if those means appeared
to violate Jewish religious ethics.30 Kahane approvingly cited Jabotinsky’s
maxim that Jews had studied their religious texts for centuries, but that
they now “must learn to shoot.”31
(Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1990), 78. See also: Meir Kahane, The Story of
the Jewish Defense League (Radnor, Penn.: Chilton Book Company, 1975); Janet Dolgin,
Jewish Identity and the JDL (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Daniel
Breslauer, Meir Kahane: Ideologue, Hero, Thinker (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1986).
26. Kahane, The Story of the IDL, 91.
27. Breslauer, Meir Kahane, 34–35; Yaacov Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist
Movement, 1925–1948 (New York: Frank Cass, 1988); Benny Morris, Righteous Victims:
A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 79, 90–6,
118; Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton,
2001), 11–9, 25, 55, 103.
28. Friedman, The False Prophet, 12–3.
29. Idem., 21–25.
30. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 91; Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 21.
31. Kahane called it “one of the most brilliant and prophetic writings of modern Jewish
times,” Idem., 131; Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 208.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 419
Kahane instituted an “Affirmation” for all new members of the JDL
that evoked Jabotinskian ideals, and included the Betar song, penned by
Jabotinsky himself, as part of the JDL’s initiation ceremonies.32 “With
love of my people and pride in my heritage,” new recruits to the JDL
pledged, “I hereby affirm my readiness to sacrifice my time, my energy
and my very being for their defense. I affirm my total allegiance to the
instrument of that defense, the JEWISH DEFENSE LEAGUE.” The JDL’s
pledge reflected Kahane’s intention to create a quasi-military organization, with a hierarchical chain of command. “I affirm my allegiance to
the group, to my brothers and sisters and to my commanders,” his followers recited. “I accept total discipline to their commands with faith
in their judgment, their aims and their ability. I pledge my people to be
faithful to their survival. NEVER AGAIN!”33
The JDL also drew inspiration by opposing Black nationalists, while
imitating their rhetoric and some of their tactics. As Village Voice journalist Robert I. Friedman has put it, in its founding days “the organization
was little more than an anti-Black protest movement . . . .”34 Formed
during the start of the school strikes in May 1968, the JDL’s first action
was against a member of the African-American Teachers Association
(ATA), John Hatchett, who was fired from his teaching job for taking students to a memorial program for Malcolm X, and then became
head of NYU’s new Afro-American student center student center in July
1968. Hatchett had earned the ire of the JDL by writing an article in
the November-December issue of Forum, the official publication of the
ATA, claiming that Jews dominated the New York City school system
and, along with their deracinated “Black Anglo-Saxon” collaborators,
“educationally castrated” Black children.35 Hatchett’s self-defense that he
was not anti-Semitic because his family’s physician, dentist, and lawyer
were all Jews did little to quiet the ensuing controversy.36
Having begun demonstrating with its protests of NYU’s hiring of
Hatchett, the JDL “began to throw itself seriously and concretely into
the struggle to protect Jewish rights as the 1968 teachers’ strike dragged
32. Anon. (Meir Kahane), “The Affirmation,” p. 2, Jewish Defense League folder,
Wilcox Collection, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, The University of Kansas, Lawrence,
Kansas. Shavit, Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Movement, 100, 237–8.
33. Anon., “The Affirmation,” p. 1.
34. Friedman, The False Prophet, 269.
35. John Hatchett, “The Phenomenon of the Anti–Black Jews and the Black AngloSaxon,” Forum (New York), (November–December 1967), cited in Kahane, The Story
of the JDL, 92.
36. John Hatchett interview with Letitia Kent, Village Voice (New York), 1968, cited
in Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 93.
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New York City and the Jews through an agony of hate that in no way
ended with the formal conclusion of the strike,” as Kahane himself described it.37 With their intimidating physical presence and willingness to
be abrasive and confrontational, Kahane’s Jewish Defense League both
formed the core of the most vocal and violent opponents of the Black
community control and also began its use of vigilante violence during
the crisis to combat what it perceived as blatant anti-Semitism.38
Black Anti-Semitism & Jewish Racism
Ocean Hill-Brownsville Administrator Rhody McCoy, for his part,
vowed that none of the 350 teachers who had left their posts in solidarity with their union mates would ever work in his district again, and
re-staffed his schools with a mixture of experienced teachers, idealistic
civil rights activists, and recent graduates of elite universities. When the
classes recommenced after Labor Day, the UFT went on a series of three
strikes from September 9 to November 18 that were incredibly acrimonious and polarized many New Yorkers along racial lines. When the
first strike ended on September 11, McCoy arranged for a “orientation
session” for returning UFT teachers in the auditorium of a local school
in which about fifty community members, some wearing bandoliers
and carrying sticks, surrounded the teachers, threw bullets at them,
and threatened to carry them out “in pine boxes.” McCoy watched the
scene impassively, before ordering teachers to report to their schools.
At JHS 271, students attacked the returning UFT teachers, who had to
be locked inside a classroom and rescued by the police.39
Supporters of community control viewed the union’s actions and their
use of police power against the express wishes of the local Black community to be racist, while the union attempted to frame the issue as one
of working rights and union solidarity. It did not take long, however,
for Albert Shanker and the union to reach for a hot button issue in an
attempt to sway public opinion: the public airing of anti-Semitic views
in Black communities during the strike. In a September 16th television
interview, union president Albert Shanker claimed that “some element
of anti-Semitism was involved” in the dispute, noting that 18 of the 19
reassigned teachers and principals were Jews.40 The UFT, whose members
37. Idem., 105–6.
38. Idem., 97, 102.
39. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 117.
40. Julius Lester, Lovesong: Becoming a Jew (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 49; The
figure 18 of 19 comes from: “Anti-Semitism Held An Artificial Issue,” The New York
Times (October 22, 1968), 35.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 421
were two-thirds Jewish, got the most mileage from reproducing and
distributing two different leaflets found in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
district on the same piece of paper demanding Black control of Black
schools in incendiary and sometimes anti-Semitic terms. One leaflet
placed in mailboxes at JHS 271 referred to Jews as the “Middle East
Murderers of Colored People,” and claimed that only African Americans could raise the self-esteem of Black children. The flyer accused the
“So-Called Liberal Jewish Friend” of being responsible for the “Serious
Educational Retardation Of Our Black Children.” Jews, the anonymous
author contended, were “Unfit By Tradition And By Inclination To Do
Even An Adequate Job.”41
The UFT’s actions in circulating the flyers soon got the union accused
of demagoguery, intentionally stirring up hysteria, and McCarthyism by
Ira Glasser, the associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union,
as well as many critics on the left. “If the New York City school strike
proved anything, it proved that racism within the ranks of the UFT is the
problem, not black anti-Semitism,” wrote Black activist Julius Lester.42
By December, Shanker was admitting it was a mistake to circulate the
flyers and astute observers were noting that the flyers were attributed
to a nonexistent community council.43 “If black anti-Semitism did not
exist, it would have to be invented,” Todd Gitlin wrote in the alternative press in the middle of the controversy, “so that the strike could be
clothed as a holy crusade.”44 Whether genuine or merely agitation, the
UFT-broadcast flyers did their damage, and the experiment in Black community control of the schools was seen as anti-Semitic by many. At the
same time, critics viewed as racist the union’s opposition to community
control and Shanker’s frequent reference to his Black opponents as “the
mob” “extremists” and even as “Nazis.”45
In the wake of the flyer controversy, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
governing board issued a statement condemning and disavowing antiSemitism, and noted that approximately seventy percent of the replacement teachers it had hired were white, including forty percent who were
41. Bill Kovach, “Racist and Anti-Semite Charges Strain Old Negro-Jewish Ties” The
New York Times (Oct 23, 1968), 1, 32; Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 124.
42. Julius Lester, “Nigger-Baiting Jews” San Francisco Express Times 1 no. 46 (December 4, 1968), 13, reprinted from The Guardian (New York).
43. Alan Adelson, “Allies No More?: Decades-Old Alliance Between Jews, Negroes
Is Beset by Animosity Jewish Gifts to Civil Rights Dwindle; Black Militants See Jews as
‘Oppressors’ in A ‘Combat Zone’” The Wall Street Journal (Dec 31, 1968): 10.
44. Todd Gitlin, “Will Science Support Ocean Hill-Brownsville,” The Rag (Austin,
TX) 3 no. 7 (December 1968), 5.
45. Julius Lester, “Un-Due Process,” from The Guardian, (New York) reprinted in
The Rag (Austin, TX) 3 no. 8 (December 8, 1968), 15.
422
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white Jews.46 Leaders and teachers in the experimental district disavowed
anti-Semitism and suspended classes in observation of Rosh Hashona.47
Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, followed writer
James Baldwin in arguing that Jews were not singled out for black
antipathy because they were Jews but because they were whites, whose
presence in ghetto institutions bred resentment.48 Baldwin borrowed
the title from his influential 1967 New York Times essay “Negroes Are
Anti-Semitic Because They Are Anti-White” from a study by the Anti
Defamation League, and indeed a number of studies by the ADL and the
American Jewish Congress consistently showed that blacks as a whole
were less anti-Semitic than non-Jewish whites.49 A group of recently
hired Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers published an ad in the New York
Times condemning anti-Semitism and declaiming any connection to the
anti-Semitic literature that had appeared during the strike, while a group
calling itself Jewish Teachers for Community Control called the origins
of the incendiary flyers “dubious,” and proclaimed that “community
control is not an anti-Semitic plot.”50
Yet as so often happens, cooler heads did not prevail. Some Black
protestors called striking teachers names like “Jew pig” while Black
and white teachers who crossed the UFT picket lines to teach in the
community-controlled schools during the strikes received hate mail with
messages like “Communist Traitor,” and “Nigger Lover.”51 Despite official disavowals, small amounts of anti-Semitism and racism captured
the headlines and colored perceptions of the conflict. Some Ocean HillBrownsville supporters carried signs that were clearly anti-Semitic, with
messages such as “You will all make good lampshades!” and “Jews get
out of Palistine [sic]. It’s not your home anyway! Moses was the first
traitor and Hitler was the Messiah!”52
46. Kovach, “Racist and Anti-Semite Charges Strain Old Negro-Jewish Ties,” 32;
Pritchett, Brownsville, Brooklyn, 233.
47. “Ocean Hill Students Get Holiday With a Lesson,” New York Times (Sep 21,
1968), 20.
48. Whitney Young, “To Be Equal: Myth of Black Anti-Semitism,” Cleveland Call
and Post (Sept 28, 1968), 4B. James Baldwin, “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They
Are Anti-White,” The New York Times (April 9, 1967), 137.
49. Irving Spiegel, “Jews Troubled Over Negro Ties: Long Civil Rights Support Strained
by Antagonisms,” The New York Times (July 8, 1968), 1, 20.
50. Edith Evans Asbury, “Jewish Teachers Back Ocean Hill: U.F.T. Members in New
Group See No ‘Anti-Semitic Plot’ New York Times (Nov 2, 1968), 24; “Anti-Semitism?—
A Statement by the Teachers of Ocean Hill-Brownsville to the People of New York,”
(advertisement) The New York Times (November 11, 1968), 55.
51. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 137.
52. Eric J. Sundquist, Strangers in the Land: Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 344.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 423
Outer-borough Jewish opponents of community control also shocked
the city with their own breaches of propriety. On October 15, Mayor
John Lindsay visited the East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn, a
Conservative synagogue in Flatbush, and met a furious crowd of Jews
who shouted him down when he discussed the school strike and said
that both sides were guilty of “acts of vigilantism.” The crowd was
so disrespectful—the New York Times reported that their bitterness
confronted the mayor “like a wall,”—that the rabbi, Harry Halpern,
rebuked them, saying, “Is this the exemplification of the Jewish faith?”
to which they responded, to his surprise, “Yes! Yes!”53 Photographs of
the event show the grim-faced mayor, lips pursed, staring at the ground,
with a large yarmulka tented forlornly on top of his head.
Three days after Mayor Lindsay escaped the East Midwood Jewish
Center as the angry crowd rained down blows on his car, American
sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith mounted the medal stand at the
Mexico City Olympics with fists raised in gloved Black Power salutes,
giving the world a new iconic image of the Black rebellion. In light of
the ongoing war in Vietnam, the strike in Brooklyn took on international
dimensions: a writer for the radical Berkeley Barb favorably compared
Blacks battling the UFT and the police in Brooklyn to the Viet Cong
fighting American marines in Vietnam.54
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis and disputes over public housing,
crime, and an epic garbage strike proved to be debilitating to the national political viability of one of the last liberal Republicans with an
actual shot at the presidency. New York’s Jewish voters in particular
were said to react most strongly against what they viewed as Lindsay’s
“‘soft’ attitude toward blacks,” and when Lindsay ran for the Democratic
presidential nomination in 1972, he confronted “anger and resentment,”
from transplanted northern Jewish voters in South Miami Beach. He
finished a disappointing fifth in the Democratic primary in Florida after
New Yorkers heckled him on the campaign trail in Miami.55 Although
he stayed in the race for one more primary, Lindsay’s electoral battering
in Florida doomed his candidacy.
53. Bill Kovach, “Racist and Anti-Semite Charges Strain Old Negro-Jewish Ties” The
New York Times (Oct 23, 1968), 1, 32.
54. Sgt. Pepper, “What Color is a Revolution?” Berkeley Barb 7 no. 24 (Dec. 6–12,
1968), 2.
55. Associated Press, “Lindsay Ponders a Rerun ‘on Record’” Utica Daily Press
(December 27, 1968), 5; “Democrat Procaccino seen biggest threat to Lindsay: Summer
Could Be Powder Keg,” The Saratogan, Saratoga Springs, New York (April 9, 1969), 6A;
Louise Cook, Associate Press, “Once Popular, John Lindsay Finds Friends Are Scarce,”
The Geneva Times (August 29, 1969), 3; Jack W. Germond, “Making Policies Out of
Outrages,” Gannett News Service, Niagara Falls Gazette (February 24, 1972), 4.
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The schools crisis also sparked another militant movement with
international ramifications. Two weeks after the show of defiance at
the East Midwood Jewish Center, Kahane staged what he called his
“first JDL-type action”—that is, its first use of vigilante tactics—on
the night of Halloween 1968, at the old Jewish Montefiore cemetery
in Springfield Gardens, Queens, a once heavily Jewish neighborhood
that was progressively becoming the home of more people of color. It
was there, the previous year, that a group of Black young people had
partied and vandalized a number of grave markers.56 That night a band
of JDL toughs armed with sticks and knives repelled a group of Black
youth heading towards the cemetery carrying bottles of wine. A new
era of American Jewish militancy had begun. Coincidentally, the newer
Montefiore cemetery twenty-one miles east on Long Island in the town
of West Babylon was the place that Kahane’s hero Ze’ev Jabotinsky was
interned when he passed away while visiting a Betar summer camp in
New York State in 1940. It was the very same trip when he had visited
the Kahane home in Flatbush.57 Amazingly, the cemetery where the
foremost advocate of Jewish violence was buried was the extension of
the cemetery where Kahane’s campaign of Jewish violence was born.
The New York City teachers’ strikes of the fall of 1968 came to an
end on November 17 after thirty-seven days, when a New York Appellate court affirmed a lower court’s ruling that the demonstration principal appointments were indeed illegal.58 At Albert Shanker’s insistence,
Mayor Lindsay gave in and the school system suspended four of the
eight Ocean Hill-Brownsville demonstration principals, along with the
local board, whose members were banned from even visiting any of the
local schools. Throughout the negotiations, neither the union nor the
municipal or state officials treated the local board members as equals,
and the local board lost on every issue. The Mayor’s office “was now
prepared to endure a race riot rather than another teachers’ strike,” one
observer noted. “Ocean Hill’s last leverage was gone.”59 Even though
the crisis was over, the wounds it opened would only deepen.
56. Kahane, The Story of the JDL,
567. The sixty-year-old militant left strict instructions not to return his body to
Palestine except at the order of a Jewish government, which is what came to pass when
the state of Israel reburied him with honors in 1964. Joseph B. Schechtman, “Jabotinsky,
Vladimir” Encyclopaedia Judaica ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, Vol. 11. 2nd
ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007): 14.
58. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 137–8.
59. Martin Mayer, “The Full and Sometimes Very Surprising Story of Ocean Hill,
the Teachers’ Union, and the Teachers’ Strike of 1968” New York Times Magazine (Feb
2, 1969): 38.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 425
On the day after Christmas at the end of one of the most tumultuous
years in U.S. history, leaders of the African American Teachers Association appeared on the local radio program of Black activist Julius Lester.
At Lester’s insistence, one of the ATA leaders read a poem called “AntiSemitism” written by a student, Thea Behran, which was dedicated to
Albert Shanker:
Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head
You pale-faced Jew boy—I wish you were dead.
I can see you Jew boy—no you can’t hide.
I got a scoop on you—yeah, you gonna die.60
The poem was adolescent, yet expressive of pure fury, both knowledgeable and contemptuous of Jewish sensitivities. The poet may have been
an eighth grader, but she was acutely aware of Jewish fears. Only two
decades after the Holocaust, at a time when the American Jewish community was still learning how to deal with its psychological horrors, and
legacies of the Holocaust, the poet announced, “I’m sick of your stuff.”
Every time I turn ‘round—you pushin’ my ear into the ground
I’m sick of hearing about your suffering in Germany
I’m sick about your escape from tyranny.61
Hitler’s reign had lasted only fifteen years, the poet noted, whereas African
slavery in the Americas lasted four hundred. The poet claimed that Jewish
Israelis “hated the Black Arabs with all their might,” and that Jews had
come to America, “land of the free/ And took over the school system
to perpetuate white supremacy.”62 The only reason European-descended
Jews had “made it” in America was that they were white, according
to Behran. All of this would have been infuriating to most white Jews,
but there was more. According to the author of the infamous “AntiSemitism” poem, white Jews had stolen their religion just like they had
stolen the land of Israel. “Jew boy, you took my religion and adopted it
for you/ But you know that Black people were the original Hebrews.”63
In the heated atmosphere of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike,
60. Thea Behran, “Anti-Semitism” in Fred Ferretti, “New York’s Black Anti-Semitism
Scare,” in Bracey and Meir, Strangers and Neighbors, 657. Reprinted from Columbia Journalism Review 8, no. 3 (Fall 1969): 18–29. The transcript makes it appear that it was ATA
president Albert Vann, and not Leslie Campbell, who read the poem on the air, although
all other accounts credit Campbell with having done so. See also: Pritchett, Brownsville,
Brooklyn, 234; “FCC Gives WBAI OK,” New York Amsterdam News (April 12, 1969), 23.
61. Behran, “Anti-Semitism,” 18–29.
62. Idem.
623. Idem.
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the assertion that white Jews had usurped original Black Hebrews was
part of the most powerful, and most notorious, anti-Jewish statement
to be produced during the crisis. One did not have to be a Black Jew to
believe this basic Black Israelite teaching.64
Black Power’s Influence on Kahane
Kahane admired the Black Panthers above all other Black militant
groups. After the first successful use of vigilantes to repel African
Americans who were encroaching upon the Jewish Montefiore cemetery
during the schools controversy, the JDL instituted regular patrols of
older formerly majority Jewish neighborhoods, in direct imitation of the
style, outfits, and tactics of Oakland, California’s Black Panther Party,
which began tailing police officers in 1966. Like the Panthers, the JDL
wore black leather jackets and black berets, with round white buttons
on their lapels and on their berets with the black line drawing of their
organization—in their case, a Jewish star with a clenched first rather
than a coiled Black panther, but the fist itself had become emblematic
of Black Power.65
The JDL leader shared the most philosophically with Malcolm X.
Kahane claimed that nonviolence came from Gandhi, Christianity, and
Quakerism, and was therefore culturally alien to a pre-exilic Jewish
identity, which he associated with ancient Israelite military feats of
Massada, the Bar Kochba revolt, and Judah Maccabee—a litany of
past glory that Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his followers had used to inspire
contemporary Zionist militarism.66 “I believe there is an obligation on
our part to those poor Jews, to those oppressed Jews, to go and help
them in whatever manner is necessary,” Kahane stated in a television
interview, clearly referencing Malcolm X’s famous maxim that Blacks
ought to achieve freedom “by any means necessary.”67
64. See: Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
65. On the panther uniform, see: Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics
And African American Identity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004),
118–9; Joseph, Waiting “Til the Midnight Hour, 209; on the JDL uniform, see: Dolgin,
Jewish Identity and the JDL, 116.
66. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 100; see also: Shaul Magid, “Anti-Semitism as
Colonialism: Meir Kahane’s “Ethics of Violence,’” paper delivered at “The Jewish 1968
and its Legacies Conference,” Stanford University, February 16, 2015.
67. Meir Kahane, television interview, c. 1969. The same clip shows JDL members
on patrol wearing uniforms: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVKsVzrN3_c, accessed
on December 8, 2009.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 427
On more than one occasion, Kahane connected the use of violence to
the JDL’s “mystique.” “We’ve got the boys. And we’ve got the honor and
the pride,” Kahane said. “We have in effect got the mystique which tells
the anti-Semite that if he wants to start with me or with other people or
with JDL, he’s really starting up with the wrong Jew.”68 Like Malcolm X
and other Black Power militants, Kahane rejected the path of nonviolence
as a symptom of historic oppression. “To turn the other cheek is of course
in the Bible,” he said wryly, “but you’ve been reading the wrong Bible.
Jewish sources have a very definite place in the use of force. Violence
is always bad, but many times necessary, and therefore I believe has a
place.”69 Much as Malcolm X rejected nonviolence as part of the passive
docility of the contemporary equivalent of the “House Negroes” who
allegedly were slavish in their imitation of their white masters, Kahane
rejected nonviolence as derived from “the horror of the ghetto with its
fears, neuroses, and insecurities.”70 Just as Malcolm X spoke derisively
of Uncle Toms, Kahane called Jews who wished to assimilate “Uncle
Irvings” or “Uncle Jakes” or “the American Occasional Jew.”71
The JDL emulated Black Power cultural consciousness, not only Black
Power militancy. Kahane believed that it was essential to give young
Jews pride in their heritage, and formulated a list of five principles with
Hebrew names not unlike those of his inspiration, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, or
those of the Black consciousness movement formulated by Amiri Baraka
and Maulana Karenga, two advocates of Black cultural nationalism and
leaders of the Black Power movement. Kahane’s principals were: Ahavat
Yisroel, love of Jewry, Hadar, dignity and pride, Barzel, iron, toughness,
Mishmaat Yisroel, Jewish discipline and unity, and Bitachon, faith in the
indestructibility of the Jewish people.72 It was a list that overlapped, in
content and spirit, with the principles that Karenga and Baraka articulated
for their own movement, using Swahili rather than Hebrew concepts:
Kujichagulia, self-determination, Ujima, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, Nia, purpose, Kuumba, creativity, and Imani,
68. Idem.
69. Idem.
70. Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1973), 261; Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” in Malcolm X
Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Brietman (New York: Grove Press,
1990), 10–12; Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 99–100.
71. Kahane, Never Again! (New York: Pyramid Books, 1971): 52–71; Magid, “AntiSemitism as Colonialism,” 21.
72. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 75–90. Kahane quoted Jabotinsky several times in
expressing these principles, and indeed, Jabotinsky had used some of the very same language.
428
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faith.73 In this and other ways, Kahane looked to the Black consciousness
movement as an inspiration for Jewish consciousness raising.
We [the JDL] believe, after six million dead Jews, that before you can have
love you must have respect. And one does not get respect unless one has selfrespect. And that means that just as other ethnic groups say ‘this or that is
beautiful,’ well, that’s beautiful—Black is beautiful for Blacks. That’s great.
Well, Jewish is beautiful, and primary, for Jews.74
Opponents even called the JDL “Jewish Panthers” and “Jewish
Weathermen,” (which was ironic, given that Mark Rudd, founder of the
terroristic Weathermen, was Jewish).75 They were comparisons, in any
case, that Kahane disputed but encouraged for public consumption in
order to build the “mystique” of his organization. There was more than
a little coyness in Kahane’s performance in an interview with the New
York Times when he claimed that it was Black militants who bestowed
the title “Jewish Panthers” on the JDL. “So we have a mystique—Jewish Panthers,” Kahane said. “We never deny that, even though it’s not
true. We don’t want to deny that. If the Panthers think we’re Panthers,
so, beautiful. It helps Jews.”76 In an era of Jewish concern over Black
militarism, the name actually hurt them with fundraising among the Jewish middle class, according to Kahane. Jewish nationalists like Kahane
and the JDL shared much of the worldviews and tactics of the Black
Power advocates whom they opposed; theirs was not a conflict born of
miscommunication or misunderstanding.
For Kahane there was admiration as well as appropriation behind his
borrowing of Black Power and Black is Beautiful philosophies and tactics.
Kahane disavowed racism even though his actions were condemned by
many as racist, and he counted racists among his supporters. Kahane
defended Blacks’ right to move into white neighborhoods, condemned
Jewish racism, believed that Jews and Blacks had a common enemy among
white anti-Semites, and sought to temper anti-Semitism and anti-Black
racism. “The danger to the Jew in this country does not come from
blacks,” he bluntly declared in 1971. “That’s nonsense. It comes from
the whites. . . . I think the man who complains about blacks moving
into his neighborhood is wrong.”77 When he recounted the confrontation
73. Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black
Cultural Nationalism (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 70, 140, 163.
74. Television program, c. 1970, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ouMg3YrnP0,
accessed on December 17, 2009.
75. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 120; Mark Rudd, Underground: My Life with
SDS and the Weathermen (New York: William Morrow, 2009).
76. Goodman, “‘I’d Love to See the JDL Fold Up. But—’,” 117.
77. Idem., 115.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 429
between the JDL and CORE leader Sonny Carson, he switched over to
Black slang, saying “Sonny, baby, you gonna get out? Or do we have to
cut you up?” It was tough talk, backed by fifteen JDL members ready
for violence, to which Sonny, allegedly, immediately responded, “Now
man, now sit down, let’s talk.”78 Kahane proudly portrayed himself as
a jive-talking Jew.
Although it moved on to targeting Soviet diplomats and ArabAmerican agencies in New York, at its start the Jewish Defense League’s
primary opponents were Black Power activists. On January 22, 1969,
Rabbi Kahane and the JDL successfully requested a Brooklyn State
Supreme Court judge order the Board of Education to show why ATA
leaders Albert Vann and Leslie Campbell should not be dismissed.79
Soon thereafter, Julius Lester had another radio program to discuss
the controversy surrounding the previous month’s airing of the poem
“Anti-Semitism,” and Tyrone Woods, representing a group called “Concerned Parents and Students of Bedford-Stuyvesant” used the airwaves to
declare that Jewish claims to identify with Blacks were bogus, because
“what Hitler did to six million Jews isn’t nothing, in terms of what has
been done to Black folks over hundreds of years,” citing the millions of
Africans killed in King Leopold’s Belgian Congo or in the course of the
slave trade. With a kind of flourish, he added: “As far as I’m concerned,
more power to Hitler. Hitler didn’t make enough lampshades out of
them. He didn’t make enough belts out of them.”80
Jew vs. Jew
The ensuing controversy demonstrated the divide between liberal Jews
and rightwing Jews. The Jewish Defense League responded to the WBAI
controversy with legal maneuvers and angry and violent protests. JDL
toughs chased ATA representative Leslie Campbell and his bodyguard off
the stage at an appearance at Rochdale Village, Queens, where Kahane
worked as a rabbi. Like Laurelton and several other Queens neighbor78. Goodman, “‘I’d Love to See the J.D.L. Fold Up, But—’”117.
79. Leonard Buder, “2 Teachers’ Cases Sent To Donovan,” New York Times (Jan 23,
1969): 1, 51.
80. In re Complaint of UNITED FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, NEW YORK, N.Y.
Concerning Station WBAI-FM, New York, N.Y., Fairness Doctrine, FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION, 17 F.C.C.2d 204 (1969), RELEASE-NUMBER: FCC
69–302, MARCH 26, 1969, http://myweb.uiowa.edu/johnson/FCCOps/1969/17F2–204.
htm, accessed on September 18, 2015; Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s
Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York: Free Press, 1998), 219; “Schoolgirl’s
Poem Defended by Youths On WBAI Program,” The New York Times (Jan 24, 1969), 94.
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hoods where the JDL found support, Rochdale Village was an integrated
neighborhood that was rapidly shifting from being majority white to
majority Black.81 On January 26, fifty JDL protestors picketed WBAI
while Kahane held a meeting with the station manager demanding that
the station cancel Lester’s show.82 On the other hand, the president of
WBAI was none other than attorney Robert Goodman, the father of the
murdered civil rights worker Andrew Goodman who became, in death,
one of the most famous martyrs of the Southern phase of the civil rights
movement and a symbol of Jewish involvement in that cause. Even in
the face of Woods’ and the ATA’s airing of explicitly anti-Semitic views,
Goodman kept faith with his family’s liberal principles and asserted
that rather than silencing such views, WBAI’s position was “that the
practice of freedom of expression, the process of full discussion, open
to all, involves some risks to the society that practices it. But the stakes
are high and the risks must be run.”83
The opposition between leftist Jews and the JDL was never clearer
than when the two groups faced off in noisy protests and counter-protests
outside the WBAI studios the next time that Julius Lester broadcast, on
January 30, 1969, hurling insults at each. As hundreds of protestors made
a noisy commotion outside the WBAI studios on the night of January 30,
1969, Lester explained Black anti-Jewish speech without endorsing it by
stating that there was a categorical difference between Middle Eastern
or European anti-Semitism and “Black anti-Semitism, if it can be called
that.” That difference was based on Black powerlessness: “if black people
had the capability of organizing and carrying out a program against the
Jews, then there would be quite a bit to fear,” he said. “Black people do
not have that capability. Not only do blacks not have the capability, I
doubt very seriously if blacks even have the desire.”84 Lester then stated,
portentously, that, “in America, it is we who are the Jews. It is we who
are surrounded by a hostile majority. It is we who are constantly under
attack. There is no need for Black people to wear yellow Stars of David
on their sleeves; that Star of David is all over us.”85 Fittingly, perhaps,
Lester himself would go on to convert to Judaism.
81. Eisenstadt, Rochdale Village.
82. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 109–10; Dolgin, Jewish Identity and the JDL, 29.
83. UFT FCC complaint.
84. Julius Lester, “The Julius Lester Show,” WBAI, New York, January 30, 1969, in
UFT FCC complaint.
85. UFT FCC complaint 1969. Lester’s memoir, Lovesong, led to his acrimonious
departure from the Department of Afro-American Studies for the Department of Judaic
Studies. See: W.E.B. DuBois Dept. of Afro-American Studies Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst, “Don’t Believe the Hype: Chronicle of a Mugging by the Media” The Black Scholar
19, no. 6, (November/December 1988): 27–43.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 431
As Lester was broadcasting these words, the police made their first
arrest of a JDL member.86 It would be the first of many to come. In
coming years, the JDL’s membership topped 10,000, although it declined
when Kahane emigrated to Israel in 1971, taking his violent rhetoric and
tactics with him, and the organization had less than 1,000 members by
1985.87 Kahane and other lower-middle class white Jews did not concede their place as oppressed, let alone Jews, and took issue both with
the idea that Blacks were powerless to systematically harm Jews or that
white Jews ought to expend their energies in trying to support Black
civil rights. Kahane referred to the relatively well off Jews of places like
Forest Hills, Queens, whom he referred to contemptuously as “those
sleek and contented ones who had turned a deaf ear to the cries of the
South Bronx and Brownsville while fighting for Black rights in South
Mississippi . . . ”88
On February 25, 1969, Kahane and JDL members seized control of
the Board of Education’s meeting room, using the exact same tactic that
Reverend Galamison and Black Brooklyn parents had used in forming
a “People’s Board of Education” two years before.89 On May 9, 1969,
the JDL linked itself to Black militants once again by forming a bat
and pipe-wielding gauntlet outside Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan and
threatening to break the legs of Black activist James Forman, who was
scheduled to appear to state his case for reparations from churches and
synagogues to atone for Black slavery and oppression.90 Taking another
page from the rhyming militant mottos of Black Power advocates, Kahane’s new slogan in 1971 was, “every Jew a .22.” Reprising his hero
Jabotinsky’s maxim that it was time for Jews to learn to shoot, Kahane
wrote that if Jewish neighborhoods were considered easy targets for
criminals because Jews were thought not to own weapons, it was time
for Jews to arm themselves.91
The schools crisis demonstrated that not only liberal, reform-minded
Jews and Jewish institutions now found themselves opposing Black
causes; there was also a significant Jewish backlash by more religiouslyobservant and more politically-conservative lower middle class white
Jews—exactly the populations of Jews that lived in closest proximity to
African Americans and felt themselves most economically imperiled by
86. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 110.
87. Robert I. Friedman, “Nice Jewish Boys with Bombs: The Return of the JDL” The
Village Voice (May 6, 1986): 21–26.
88. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 123.
89. Idem., 112.
90. Idem., 100–104; Diner, The Jews of the United States, 341.
91. Kahane, The Story of the JDL, 133–4.
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community control’s challenge to union jobs. When liberal Reform Jews
such as Rabbi Eisendrath of one of the wealthiest synagogues in New
York, Temple Emanu-El, condemned the JDL’s use of “goon squads” and
compared its tactics to those of the KKK, Kahane replied that Eisendrath
did not speak for “the Jew of the troubled neighborhoods where he
did not live and which he had not seen in years.”92 Those who had to
endure crime and the fear of crime in neighborhoods like Williamsburg,
Brownsville, and Crown Heights welcomed the JDL, Kahane claimed.
Eisendrath “certainly did not speak for the threatened Jewish teachers,
students, and civil servants, for the little Jew, the lower-and middle-class
Jews,” in Kahane’s phrase.93 Instead, affluent liberal Jews lived in their
own secure “gilded ghettos,” Kahane alleged, insulated from the suffering
of poorer communities and what he called the “nightmare of Brooklyn
Jewish neighborhoods,” chasing what he believed to be the vainglorious
dream of assimilation with wealthy white gentiles.94
Kahane’s perception of the classed nature of the Jewish backlash
against Black Power was widely shared: Dr. Marvin Schick, a young
Orthodox leader, reported that poorer Jews who still lived in or near
majority Black ghettos had had personal experience with “Negro crime
and juvenile delinquency.” “They may be wrong, but they fear for their
own safety,” he concluded.95 Class resentments permeated New York’s
outer borough Jewish communities, after decades of watching Black and
Puerto Rican communities spread in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens,
and concerted efforts on the part of many middle class Jews to avoid
integration with Black and Puerto Rican students in schools. As one
politician remarked of wealthier Jews in Riverdale, “they can afford their
liberalism. They are so far away from all the problems.”96 Such mainstream and even left wing organizations as the American Jewish Congress
opposed school desegregation in the years before the decentralization
battle, and the Anti-Defamation League had determined that many civil
rights leaders were irresponsible “extremists” by the early 1960s: both
Kahane and Shanker’s rhetoric and opposition to community control
had wide support in New York’s Jewish communities.97
Tellingly, the author of the infamous “Hey, Jew boy, with that yarmulke on your head” poem had targeted not the radical Jews who had
92. Idem., 105.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Spiegel, “Jews Troubled Over Negro Ties,” 20.
96. Rogers, 110 Livingston Street Revisited, 53.
97. Idem., 153.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 433
registered voters in the South and accepted positions in the communitycontrolled schools, but rather the poet singled out religiously-observant
Jews, Jewish supporters of the State of Israel, and the Jewish narrative of
suffering during the Holocaust. Black radicals’ use of anti-Jewish rhetoric
had semiotic and psychological rewards for Black radicals. Those who
used such rhetoric wished to assert their militancy and independence
from what they viewed as the paternalistic relationship between Blacks
and Jews in prior years. Yet Black expressions of anti-Jewish beliefs
had even greater impact for their opponents in the teachers’ union and
the JDL. Shanker and the UFT leveraged fears of Black anti-Semitism
against the local board and rode the ensuing strike victory to local and
national prominence.98
From the Outer Boroughs to the West Bank
The territorial struggles between African Americans, Puerto Ricans,
and white Jews in Brooklyn neighborhoods in the sixties had an unlikely
impact half the world away by strengthening the Israeli settler movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories with settlers, smuggled
arms, terrorist strikes, theological justifications, and a potent narrative
of victimization. Many local Brooklyn Orthodox rabbis considered
Israel’s victory in the 1967 war to have been divinely ordained, and
considered the idea of returning any of the seized Palestinian territory
to be blasphemous, referring to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip by
their Biblical names, Judea and Samaria.99
Brooklyn Jews who experienced their displacement from neighborhoods such as Brownsville, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights as
dispossession and victimization vowed that they would never again be
displaced from territory they considered to be theirs. Some even compared the still-white neighborhoods along the south shore of Brooklyn
to be geographically, racially, and strategically imperiled, as was the
state of Israel, hugging the coast of the Mediterranean and surrounded
by hostile neighbors. “We’re finished here in Brooklyn, I tell you,” one
man stated. “It’s like we’re the Israelis. They are surrounded by fifty
million Arabs, they have to fight, but there’s no place to retreat. Their
back is against the wall. Well the white middle class in Canarsie is up
against the same wall.”100
98. Podair, The Strike That Changed New York, 149.
99. Samuel G. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 201.
100. Rieder, Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, 79.
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Orthodox Brooklyn Jews formed the backbone of the Jewish settlement movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; by one estimate,
one quarter of all the American Jews immigrating to Israel in the early
1990s were Orthodox Jews from Brooklyn; many more American Jews
studied in yeshivas located in the Palestinian territories seized in 1967.101
Brooklyn Jews applied lessons in violence that they learned in New
York City street fights to the exotic locales of Israel and the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. Hundreds of young Jews received training in
martial arts and weaponry in JDL summer camps, and applied those
skills first on the streets of Brooklyn, and later, in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Kahane’s antagonistic attraction to African American radicals continued in Israel as in Brooklyn. Some of his first political actions in Israel
were actually directed at opposing the Black Hebrews. By far the most
influential of all the sixties’ Black Israelite sects, the Black Hebrews, or
the Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation, had grown out of the ABeta Center on Chicago’s South Side, and migrated to Liberia in 1967
before emigrating to Israel in 1969.102 The group’s leader Ben Ammi
claimed that the land of Israel belonged to his group, and made incendiary statements such as, “we will push all white Jews in the lake.”103
Such intentionally provocative statements led to protests against the
Black Hebrews organized by none other than Meir Kahane, who had
immigrated to Israeli in 1971. Once again, in Israel as in Brooklyn, it
was Black-Jewish conflict that helped to launch Kahane’s activist career.104
Meir Kahane brought with him to Israel the confrontational style and
advocacy of violence born in the pressure-cooker atmosphere and BlackJewish tensions of the Brooklyn schools strike. He quickly founded the
Kach party, which gained a reputation for advocating extreme solutions
to Israel’s problems, including, most notoriously, the forcible “transfer,”
or ethnic cleansing, of all Arabs from Israel as well as the Occupied
Palestinian Territories. In 1974 Kahane called for creation of a “worldwide, Jewish anti-terror group” that would “spread fear and shatter the
101. Freedman, Jew vs. Jew, 201.
102. On the Original African Hebrew Israelites of Dimona, Israel, see, among others:
Israel J. Gerber, The Heritage Seekers: Black Jews in Search of Identity (Middle Village,
NY: Jonathan David, 1977); John L. Jackson, Jr., Thin Description: Ethnography and
the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
103. James Benjamin to Rabbi Levy Benjamin Levy, 13 December 1971, Hatzaad Harishon MSS, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library,
Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
104. Pedahzur, Israeli Response to Jewish Extremism and Violence, 35.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 435
souls” of Israel’s Arabs, forcing them to flee for their lives.105 According
to Israeli police, the following year he began to do just that, founding an
underground anti-Arab terrorist network called the TNT, which staged
dozens of bloody raids against West Bank Arabs in the next few years.106
He also founded an organization in the seventies called Save Our Israel
Land (SOIL), to oppose the return of any of the territory Israel seized
during the Six Day War. JDL member Michael Fitzpatrick bombed a
Chelsea, New York City bookstore that sold Communist literature in
1976, then became an FBI informant and infiltrated SOIL. He wore a
wire and helped to make a case against SOIL and JDL member Victor
Vancier, who was convicted of plotting to bomb the Egyptian Tourist
Office in Manhattan and later confessed to eleven other bombings of
Egyptian targets along the East Coast of the U.S.107
Kahane and other nationalist Brooklyn Jews continued to be involved
in American politics in both overt and covert fashions. In 1979, Kahane
called for the creation of another underground terrorist organization in
America that would “quietly and professionally eliminate those modern
day Hitlers . . . that threaten our very existence.”108 In 1984, after the
Anti Defamation League attacked civil rights advocate and presidential
candidate Jesse Jackson as an anti-Semite, Kahane set up a front group
called “Jews Against Jackson” to harass the candidate during the remainder of his campaign. In a Manhattan press conference, Kahane called
Jackson “a vicious fraud” and a “Jew hater” and held noisy demonstrations outside of his campaign events, while his followers made over
a hundred threats on Jackson’s life.109 On January 25, 1984, Jackson
called New York “Hymietown” in an off-the-record conversation that
an African American Washington Post reporter publicized. Provoked
by JDL threats on Jackson’s life, Minister Louis Farrakhan, who re-
105. Robert I. Friedman, “Nice Jewish Boys with Bombs: The Return of the JDL”
The Village Voice (May 6, 1986): 23. See also: Raphael Mergui & Philippe Simonnot,
Israel’s Ayatollahs: Meir Kahane and the Far Right in Israel (London, Atlantic Highlands,
NJ: Saqi Books, 1987); Breslauer, Meir Kahane, 131–145.
106. Friedman, “Nice Jewish Boys with Bombs.”
107. Robert I. Friedman, “Snitch Trouble: The FBI’s Case Against Qubilah Shabazz
Has Only Two Major Problems: The Bureau’s Informant Can’t Be Trusted, And Neither
Can the Bureau,” New York Magazine (February 13, 1995), 24–5.
108. Idem., 23–4.
109. Robert I. Friedman, “Did This Man Kill Alex Odeah?” Village Voice (July 12,
1988): 19–20; Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and
the Nation of Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 250; The Nation of Islam,
“Nation of Islam Condemns Politically–Motivated Charges of Racism,” October 7, 2000,
http://www.noi.org/statements/rift/default.htm, accessed December 10, 2009.
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constituted the Nation of Islam in 1978, made a variety of provocative
statements that Jews of European descent almost universally saw as
anti-Semitic. The ensuing controversy effectively torpedoed Jackson’s
presidential campaign, and Farrakhan became one of the most divisive
figures in America.110 Meanwhile, Fitzgerald, the JDL and SOIL member
turned FBI informant, spent many years in the FBI’s witness protection
program before emerging in 1995 as the former lover and lead witness
against Qubilah Shabazz, estranged daughter of Malcolm X’s and Betty
Shabazz, whom a Federal jury convicted in a plot to kill Farrakhan in
retaliation for the death of her father.111 First with Farrakhan and then
with Shabazz, Kahane and his JDL followers proved adept at ensnaring
the associates of the very Black militant who had most inspired them:
Malcolm X.
In Israel, Kahane became the most prominent advocate of religious
extremist violence, and was elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset,
in 1984, although his advocacy of forcibly expelling Arab residents got
his Kach party banned from the Israeli parliament for advocating racism
in 1988.112 In 1990, on a visit back to New York, Kahane himself was
assassinated by an Egyptian militant who was later connected to the first
World Trade Center bombing plot in 1993 organized by Sheikh Omar
Abdul Rahman. The following year, Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born
former JDL member who had become a physician, a West Bank settler,
a Kach party member, and a major in the Israeli Defense Force’s active
reserve, killed between twenty-nine and fifty-two Muslim worshippers
at prayer in the town of Hebron, a massacre that resulted in both Israel
and the United States deeming Kach a terrorist group.113
110. Ninety-three percent of Jewish delegates at the 1984 Democratic Party convention
held negative opinions of Farrakhan: Gardell, In The Name of Elijah Muhammad, 251–5.
111. Robert I. Friedman, “Snitch Trouble,” 24–5.
112. On Kahane in Israel, see: Aviezer Ravitzky, The Roots of Kahanism: Consciousness and Political Reality (Jerusalem, Israel: The Institute of Contemporary Jewry, 1986);
Gerald Cromer, The Debate about Kahanism in Israeli Society 1984–1988 (New York:
Guggenheim Foundation, 1988); Ami Pedahzur, Jewish Terrorism in Israel (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009).
113. The numbers killed vary widely in Israeli and Palestinian accounts. See, for
example: George J. Church, Lisa Beyer, Jamil Hamad, Dean Fischer, J.F.O. McAllister
“When Fury Rules,” TIME Magazine (March 7, 1994), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,980291–1,00.html, accessed on December 10, 2009. In the first eight
days after the attacks, the IDF killed another thirty-three Palestinians, with “no danger to
soldiers’ lives” in twelve of the killings, according to the Israeli human rights organization
B’Tselem. Noam Chomsky, World Orders, Old and New (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1996), 255. On the terrorist designation for Kach: Marc Perelman, “Secret FBI Files
Reveal Hoover’s Obsession With Militant Rabbi,” The Jewish Daily Forward (February
26, 2006), http://www.forward.com/articles/1100/ accessed on December 10, 2009.
J.S. Dorman: Dreams Defended and Deferred 437
Dreams Defended and Deferred
The squelched aspirations for racial integration of the New York City
Public schools begat a schools crisis with vitriol directed at all parties
from all sides. As such, the deferred dreams of African American students and parents for racial integration of public schools led to other
dreams defended and deferred, as Rabbi Meir Kahane joined some of
the style, rhetoric, philosophy, and tactics of Black Power militants to
the militancy of Revisionist Zionism. It is highly significant that the
foremost proponent of Jewish ultra-nationalist anti-Arab violence began
his political movement with the backdrop of Black-Jewish neighborhood
conflict and the Brooklyn schools crisis of 1968, and indeed modeled
himself on the very Black Power radicals whom he saw as his opponents. In addition to suggesting the depths of fear and militancy of the
Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, it also provides an object lesson in how
conflicts can travel unexpected paths and have surprising ramifications.
The New York schools controversies of the 1960s helped transform the
most popular athlete in the world from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali,
gave Stokely Carmichael a concrete illustration of his neologism “Black
Power,” birthed the Jewish Defense League and its popular slogan “Never
Again!”, helped marginalize the liberal wing of the Republican party, and
helped produce Jewish neoconservatives and the rightward tilt of U.S.
politics since.114 It also inspired many of the rabbis and foot soldiers in
the Jewish settler movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a key
sticking point in peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians
to this day. As such, the conflicts, the admiration, the enmity, and the
appropriation between African Americans and Jews in 1968 Brooklyn
had local, national, and global impacts that were both unforeseeable and
immense, leading to dreams both defended and deferred.
114. Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Free
Press, 1995), 3; Irwin M Stelzer, The Neocon Reader (New York: Grove Press, 2005).