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out and constantly rants and raves in an anti-Semitic way, and the ad–
ministration itself doesn't move on him. That's the kind of thing I'm
more concerned about, more than whether or not a David Duke or a
Louis Farrakhan arises.
Q,testiol/:
I'm a child of a Holocaust survivor, and I know too well that
apathy is not the way to go. 1 can't say that things will blow over and
feel good about it. I also can't agree with Eugene Genovese, that we
feel protected by Christianity. We have never been protected by
Christianity, and Christians themselves don't understand the Holocaust
and the nature of the Holocaust. Within their own religion, although
they are in the family of Jews and we are related, it is Jews who
branched off and began Christianity. Jesus himself, the God of the
Christians, is our most famous Jewish boy. Jews do not teach that all
men are sinners, they teach that man is good, he is born good, he is
born in the image of God. Our focus as Jews is our lives in this world at
this very time.
If we just talk about these issues, and we don't have a proposal for
action, our efforts wi ll ultimately fail. We're alive not because we have
had conferences throughout our history, we're alive because of Israel. So
I am going to suggest a proposal in the tradition of our Biblical
heroines Esther and Sarah and Miriam. The proposal is this: we have
liberated fourteen thousand black Jews from Ethiopia, and maybe we can
ask them to liberate us in this situation. We can ca ll upon them, educate
them to become ambassadors for the Jewish people here in this country,
and to go into the black communities where there are pockets of anti–
Semitism, where Jewish lives might be at stake, because we are being
scapegoated for whatever is happening within the black community. We
can ask them to go into the black community, and maybe they will be
able to communicate with our black brothers, because they happen to
be black and they also happen to be Jews; and maybe because they are
black and Jews, they can protect us.
Eugene Genovese:
Let me clear up one point. I thought I made it
clear that under no circumstances do I think that the Jewish people
would or should put themselves under the protection of Gentiles. If you
want to commit suicide, that's a good way to do it; I acknowledge
that. Beyond that, a people who don't fight for themselves first and
foremost don't deserve respect, and that's true of the blacks who have
to carryon their own fight their own way. I think very often, in
evaluating the things they do and don't do, if certain lines are crossed it
has to be opposed, but up to a point we also have to understand that
