Time to Name Names
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, April 17, 1998
Several years ago, at one of the money-wasting general assemblies the Jewish federations fete themselves with, Malcolm Hoenlein, the major American Jew who runs the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, spotted me in a hallway and called me over for a huddle. It turned out that Mr. Hoenlein had a warning for me.
I had just written a story that appeared on the front page of this newspaper disclosing the salaries of 10 of the country’s top professional Jews. As an exercise in reporting, the story was no great shakes — it simply entailed collecting figures from a series of public IRS filings. In the secular press, a story detailing the salaries of muckety-mucks usually lands with a yawn. But in the self-righteous and hypertouchy world of Jewish officialdom, the story elicited weeks of whining about the damage the Forward was doing to the Jewish people, it being common for professional Jews to conflate their own problems with those of their people.
The only muckety-muck who enjoyed the story was one of the few who possesses what in Israel are known as “eggs” and what the current secretary of state once referred to as “cojones.” Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League chief, told a group of Jewish students that his salary (which then equaled that of the president of the United States) was proof that servants of the Jewish people could do well while doing good.
Hoenlein did not share Foxman’s mindset. Though he didn’t even make the list, he felt obligated to warn me that my future in what he referred to as “Jewish journalism” was looking dim. “You really should be careful,” he said. “You can alienate a lot of people with stories like that.” At the time, he served on the board of the UJA-Federation’s New York organ, so I assumed he was speaking officially. I thanked Mr. Hoenlein and went on my way, armed with further proof of something I have long believed: that the men and women who serve as Jewish “leaders” today are by and large incapable of grappling with unvarnished truth. Their spinelessness is reflected in their inability to deal straight-on with nearly every issue that confronts them: It is why American Zionists (an oxymoronic term) insist on rolling out the demonstrably false slogan “We Are One” to describe the Israeli-American Jewish relationship; it is why the leaders of Reform and Conservative Judaism preoccupy themselves with the immigration policies of a country they never plan to emigrate to; it is why the so-called defense organizations (Mr. Foxman’s included) try to scare money out of Jewish donors with frightful mailings detailing resurgent and deadly anti-Semitism, which is, in fact, in retreat; and it is, above all, why the Jewish leadership stands paralyzed as intermarriage and assimilation work to halve the number of identifying Jews in this country over the next two generations.
I was reminded of this myopia after writing a mild (by secular standards) column detailing the ethical and policy failings of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. I was quickly condemned by its chairman, Steven Schwarz, who stated that the JCPA would not limit its interests to core “headline grabbers” I detailed in a previous column. And what are the issues Mr. Schwarz derides as “headline grabbers”? The only two issues of overwhelming importance facing the American Jewish community, I suggested in that column, are the physical survival of Israel and the spiritual survival of American Jewry in the face of assimilation and intermarriage.
In Mr. Schwarz’s world, though, Jewish survival is a “headline grabber.”
And what is an issue of critical importance, then? Apparently, it is the formation of an International Criminal Court, which a recent JCPA resolution calls “an important step forward in securing international human rights.” Never mind that the International Criminal Court, as currently envisioned, could easily be manipulated by totalitarian regimes — as the president of Freedom House, Adrian Karatnycky, has pointed out — manipulation that could result in the spectacle of countries such as Iraq and Libya bringing America and Israel up on war crimes charges.
The reason the JCPA continues to be funded with precious Jewish dollars, even though it is an irrelevant organization that often advocates positions that are directly contrary to Jewish interests, is that it is considered impolitic in the Jewish community to note unpleasant truths about groups that no longer serve any meaningful purpose. This weakness explains why the American Jewish Congress, which is a travel agency that runs a First Amendment law practice on the side, still exists, and why the Israel Bonds organization, which is a drag on Israel’s economy, still sells bonds.
Things might be changing, however. In a recent speech before a national Hillel leadership conference, Michael Steinhardt, the philanthropist (and vice chairman of the Forward), took a step toward a candid confrontation of this problem. Mr. Steinhardt believes that the Jews in America are headed toward oblivion unless the status quo is obliterated and massive new efforts are made to keep Jews Jewish. Overturning the status quo will only happen, he said, when the Jewish community stops resisting criticism and looks unsparingly at itself and its organizations. “We need to critique the status quo, to name names of ineffective organizations,” Mr. Steinhardt said. “In turn, the community must reprioritize and move money to effective organizations.”
Though Mr. Steinhardt aimed, he never fired. He closed his speech without doing what he said should be done, naming names. So I wondered: Was he thinking of Stephen Solender, the head of UJA-Federation in New York, who, even with the Dow at 9,000, is incapable of squeezing even a few extra dollars out of the richest Jewish community in the history of the world? Or was he thinking of the JCPA’s irrelevant Lawrence Rubin? Or the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s scare-mongering Marvin Hier?
Inquiring minds want to know, so I called Mr. Steinhardt to ask. He gave me a reasonable answer — “I’m not particularly involved in the institutional world, so I don’t know who’s doing a good job and who’s lazy” — while still managing to avoid giving me names I suspect he names to himself all the time.
Only when he names them publicly — and only when he is joined by the other megaphilanthropists in whose hands the Jewish future largely rests — will the Jewish community begin to shake itself out of its stupor. Knowing Mr. Steinhardt, and several of the other philanthropic leaders, I believe that it is only a matter of time before they realize that the ruthless and public pursuit of the unvarnished truth is the only saving step to take. And I wouldn’t want to be Malcolm Hoenlein — or Larry Rubin or any of the rest — on the day when they take that first step.