Rangel Offers Olive Branch to ADL’s Foxman
Edits Statement on Kean College Diatribe by Nation of Islam Spokesman
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, April 1, 1994
NEW YORK — Charles Rangel, the Harlem congressman whose fence-sitting in the Rev. Louis Farrakhan imbroglio upset many in the Jewish community — including some of his backers — is expressing regret for making statements critical of the Anti-Defamation League.
Mr. Rangel had a public falling out with Abraham Foxman, the national director of the ADL, after the ADL set off a national controversy by printing in a New York Times advertisement vitriolic anti-Jewish remarks made by a Nation of Islam spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad. Mr. Rangel publicly excoriated the Jewish group and accused Mr. Foxman of placing the advertisement to scare up donations. Mr. Rangel could not be reached for comment this week; Mr. Foxman said in an interview only that “it takes a big man to accept that he may have made a mistake and then to move forward from there.”
Though Mr. Rangel’s backtracking may assuage Jewish fears, it could provoke the more radical elements of the black community to lash out, just as they did when Mr. Rangel’s congressional colleague, Major Owens of Brooklyn, lambasted the Nation of Islam. Throughout his long career, Mr. Rangel has been a favorite of prominent Jewish Democrats, raising money from them and speaking out on issues of importance to the Jewish community — his district, after all, extends from Harlem to the heavily Jewish Upper West Side.
Red Flags
But in the Nation of Islam episode, as in a previous incident during last year’s mayoral race here, Mr. Rangel made statements that raised red flags in some Jewish quarters. Political observers see Mr. Rangel’s statements then and his apparent act of contrition now as proof of the difficult line many black politicians walk between their more radical black constituents and the broader society they serve. “There is a significant portion of the black community that, if it doesn’t agree with Khalid Muhammad or Louis Farrakhan, finds inspiration from them, and there are…black officials who choose not to alienate that portion of their constituency,” said Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran political consultant with ties to both New York’s black and Jewish communities. “All high visibility black politicians are being tugged in both directions.”
It was in the early days of the Dinkins campaign when Mr. Rangel issued a veiled warning to the city’s Chasidic community, suggesting that they would be blamed by angry blacks if Mr. Dinkins were to lose the election. During the recent storm surrounding Mr. Muhammad, Mr. Rangel surprised supporters by focusing his criticism not on the Nation of Islam, but on the Anti-Defamation League, which simply reprinted some of Mr. Muhammad’s more colorful language.
In a letter sent earlier this month to Mr. Foxman and Melvin Salberg, the ADL’s chairman, Mr. Rangel made a readily apparent effort to edit his previous remarks. Instead of taking the ADL to task for placing the newspaper advertisement, he wrote that “because of its mission to seek and expose anti-Semitism, the ADL published a full-page ad in The New York Times containing portions of the unmitigated bile spewed by Khalid Muhammad.
“His vicious comments were disturbing not to Jews alone, but to the other groups who were targeted by his diatribe as well as to all decent Americans,” Mr. Rangel wrote.
In an interview, Mr. Foxman called Mr. Rangel “a veteran politician and ally in black-Jewish relations who, when he realized that he may have overstepped in his criticism, did reach out, and more power to him.”
Mr. Rangel also announced earlier this month that he was exploring the possibility of establishing a foundation supported by Jews and blacks that would explore ways to “stem the tide of unemployment, drug addiction, crime and hopelessness that has forced many young people to be attracted to demagoguery.”