Friday, June 27, 2003

The Jewish Advocate, the local Jewish weekly in Boston, has printed my Op-Ed on Tikkun Olam in this week's issue. Its not avaliable online, unfortunately, so if you're in the Boston area pick it up, its only a dollar.

This week's issue also contains an article on former Dartmouth College president James Freedman, which is online here. Apparently, the Anti-Defamation League has seen fit to bestow an award on former president Freedman for fighting anti-semitism, intolerance, etc., etc. Here's the key paragraph:

Richard Glovsky of Boston, who chaired the event's organizing committee, said his longtime friend has an "unquenchable desire to not just educate, but to learn." Glovsky first met the former president at Dartmouth. While serving as class president, Glovsky was on a committee investigating whether the Dartmouth Review promoted anti-Semitism by using a quote from Hitler on its masthead.

The unaffiliated, free publication was printed in Hanover and circulated on the school's campus. Freedman was willing to take on the newspaper for its anti-Semitic leanings.


In fact, as William F. Buckley has brilliantly extrapolated in his marvelous book In Search of Anti-Semitism, president Freedman's role in the persecution of the Dartmouth Review was more shameful than honorable. In brief, quotes from Mein Kampf were inserted into the masthead of the Review on a single occasion. As Buckley has noted, the editorial staff denied they had placed them there and the most likely explanation was their claim that the quotes had been inserted by a staffer bent on playing a malicious prank. The university, however, chose to believe that the Review, despite the presence of several Jewish writers and editors, was composed entirely of Hitler-lovers and held a day-long symposium called "Dartmouth United Against Hate" in which president Freedman declared Dartmouth would not tolerate hate and intolerance - or, apparently, conservative newspapers. President Freedman organized this day in collaboration with a group of Leftwing student organizations, many of whom had had a hand in bringing such noted apostles of tolerance as Hanan Ashwari, Angela Davis, and Louis Farrakhan to campus. The hypocrisy was thick on the ground for weeks.

Needless to say, the university establishment had despised the Dartmouth Review from its origins. Unabashadly conservative and agressively politically incorrect, the paper had offended the sensibilities of the campus left for years. The Hitler quote was merely the excuse they needed to attempt to silence a publication whose ideology they found impossible to tolerate. Fortunately, they failed. The fact that the ADL has chosen to honor this man who tried so desperately to exploit the issue of anti-semitism in order to repress free speech on his campus is yet one more indication of the fact that this country's mainstream Jewish organizations cannot see the forest for the trees. They are looking for anti-semitism under every Rightwing rock while ignoring the fact that it is alive and well among the Leftists they consider their eternal allies. As a result of this willful myopia they slander those who would be their friends and, in the process, make fools of themselves.

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