In 1999, Gidone Busch, an Orthodox Jew, was shot by the NYPD 12 times after he allegedly lunged at officers with a hammer. Police were not prosecuted and the killing was deemed justified by the authorities. Busch’s parents sued the city, but a jury in Brooklyn Federal Court found the city not liable for his death. Sterling Johnson, an African American Federal judge and former member of the NYPD, overturned the jury verdict and found that the police exaggerated or overstated testimony and stated that he doubted the credibility of the police officers. How many of us uttered a word of protest about Busch’s death?
In October 2004, Duke University hosted a conference sponsored by the Palestinian Solidarity Movement. One week later, Philip Kurian, a Duke senior, wrote an op-ed piece for the Duke newspaper in which he called Jews “the most privileged minority in this country” and referred to the “shocking over-representation” of Jewish students at U.S. universities. As I write this, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has begun an investigation into allegations of anti-Semitic harassment at the University of California at Irvine, a publicly funded school.
When I read about Duke University and Mr. Kurian, I was not entirely surprised. You can see such drivel being written in some of the student newspapers published at the City University of New York. Two years ago, when my wife took a course at City College, I was appalled at the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic tone of one of the alternative school newspapers, paid for with the tax dollars of New Yorkers. I had my wife obtain a number of copies of one particular issue and forwarded them to various Jewish politicians and organizations. I received no response.
In a recent column, George Will noted that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had warned that the end of the Cold War would be a mixed blessing “because passions – ethnic and religious – that were long frozen would come to a boil.”
Historically, when religious and ethnic passions “boil” it is the Jews whose goose gets cooked. My concern is that we have not – despite all the movies, all the museums, all the videos, all the Yom HaShoah programs – really learned the lessons of our past.
I believe that we must develop a mechanism to respond with protests wherever and whenever anti-Semites are given a forum. We must mobilize our high school and college students, as we did in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. We must speak out whenever we can and we must insist that our leaders do the same.
God forbid, if we do nothing, another generation in another country will shout “Never Again” – but this time they won’t be referring to the Holocaust.
