by ami eden
jta
As patrons filed into Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y to catch a sold-out appearance by Larry David, the scene outside was producing a punch line straight out of his HBO sitcom “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
David and one of his “Curb” co-stars, Susie Essman, were the main event on that recent evening. But protesters had gathered outside to jeer the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, who was slated to speak — in another packed, albeit smaller, room — about anti-Semitism and his new book, “The Deadliest Lies: the Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control.”
The demonstrators were outraged over Foxman’s initial unwillingness to use the g-word when characterizing the World War I-era Turkish massacres of Armenians.
“Larry David is in favor of genocide?” one confused visitor asked.
The mix-up could have served as the basis for a good “Curb” plot, to be sure, but in real life Foxman is the one who’s been taking it from all sides of late. And while he certainly has suffered some self-inflicted public-relations wounds, he’s also taken plenty of heat for things that he never said or did.
Legitimate or not, the barrage of criticism has had an impact: Foxman, who has worked at the ADL since 1965 and run the organization for the past 20 years, has become an increasingly polarizing figure for Jews and non-Jews on both sides of the political spectrum. He has become a walking flash point, the media’s top go-to guy on Jewish affairs — a status further cemented by his high-profile national book tour.
Foxman insists he has no second thoughts about taking the lead role in the Jewish community’s fight against a growing list of vocal and respectable critics of Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, most notably former President Jimmy Carter and the academic duo of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
“I’m not nervous. No hesitation whatsoever,” Foxman said during an interview last month in his ADL office. Still, he conceded, “The one thing that haunts me is my credibility, because that’s all we got.”
As it turns out, Foxman has written a reasoned, measured response to Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” and the articles that evolved into Mearsheimer and Walt’s “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Foxman’s book breaks little new ground in its bid to debunk the most objectionable claims put forth by Carter, Mearsheimer and Walt, et al. But for those seeking a quick and accessible road map for understanding the weakest points in the attack on Israel and the pro-Israel lobby, “The Deadliest Lies” does the trick .
The question is, will it be read by anyone who isn’t already settled on the issue? Does Foxman still command the respect to make headway beyond his base, to reach, as he describes them, “the fair-minded people who may be wondering whether there is any truth in the claims promoted in ‘The Israel Lobby’ and are willing to hear the other side of the story?”
Foxman essentially touches on the issue in his book during his recounting of the outrage triggered last year by an inaccurate claim that he had pushed the Polish Consulate in New York to pull the plug on a lecture by New York University professor Tony Judt.
The ADL had inquired about the event, which was being sponsored by an outside group that was renting space at the consulate, but it turned out to be David Harris, the executive director of the American Jewish Committee, who had asked for the event to be canceled. Still, the furor eventually triggered a lengthy profile of Foxman in the New York Times Magazine last January.
Written by James Traub, the piece used the flap over Judt — who caused an uproar with a 2003 essay arguing that the idea of a Jewish state was and is a mistake — as a vehicle for examining claims that the Jewish community is guilty of trying to shut down debate over Israel.
Among other things, Traub’s piece played into the left-wing’s negative — and often unfair — attacks on Foxman by ignoring his efforts to line up American Jewish support for peace moves approved by the Israeli government. Traub also incorrectly lumped Foxman in with those who argue that the Jewish community should steer clear of criticizing Christian conservatives on domestic policy because of their support for Israel.
In fact, one of the biggest complaints of Foxman’s right-wing critics — Jewish and non-Jewish — is his continued willingness to confront the religious right. For example, they point to his speaking out against the Mel Gibson film “The Passion of the Christ” and a 2005 speech Foxman gave in an attempt to rally the Jewish community against efforts to “Christianize America.”
And of course they steam over his support for the Oslo process and the Gaza disengagement, which he framed as an issue of Israel’s democratically elected government deserving deference on issues of peace and security.
In “The Deadliest Lies,” Foxman argued that given the “preconceived notions” of his critics, it would be “almost impossible” for them “not to assume the worst about me.”
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California