DOV TALES
by Dov Burt Levy

How far should a Jewish organization go to counter a person with whom they disagree or consider a threat? That is the question.

Several weeks ago in Washington, senior officials of the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee contacted the Polish embassy. They told the ambassador that a scheduled speech on Embassy premises by professor Tony Judt would not be in Poland's best interest because of Judt's position on Israel.

The embassy then rescinded its agreement with an outside group to use embassy space for Judt's speech that very evening.

Judt is a well-known New York University history professor, whose essays have been published in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, and in Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

Although Judt is Jewish and his parents are Holocaust survivors, he has made himself into a minor celebrity with his constant berating of Israel and his argument that Israel should become a bi-national, no longer Jewish, state.

This is not the two-state solution often discussed, but rather one large state where the high Arab birthrate, as well as new Arab residents, would leave Jews in the minority position. It's hard to find one Jew in a thousand supporting that future for Israel.

I received several calls from people in Washington alarmed that the story about Judt being denied embassy space appeared in the Washington Post.

"Jews shouldn't deny free speech to those with whom they disagree," said a person who knew that I worked with the Anti-Defamation League for two years early in my career. (Today my contact with ADL is what I read in the press and on its website.)

My response was that this was not an assault or abridgement of free speech; though, it was, in retrospect, an unwise, even dumb, thing to do.

The American legal notion of free speech (sounds easy but argued in thousands of cases and books) is that the government should not abridge speech (and expression) of its citizens. The dirty tricks and threats by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., were a clear denial and restriction of King's free speech. The Polish Embassy controversy does not fit that mold by a long shot.

Gathering information about opponents is common practice in America. Look who does it: sports teams, political candidates, and business competitors. How they collect it and what they do with that information are the important questions.

You don't steal somebody's mail. But you might send an observer to record what an opposing political candidate says and does all day long.

Similarly, you don't phone in a cancellation at your opponent's next speech venue or phone in a bomb threat during an opponent's rally.

Jewish defense organizations like ADL and the American Jewish Committee have always kept tabs on hate-mongers, anti-Semites and others who would threaten the Jewish community or ferment hate against Jews and other ethnic minorities.

What action to take with this information was always debatable and usually subject to the situation at hand. Jewish organizations found that writing and distributing fact sheets, pamphlets and books, reduced the hatemonger's ability to raise funds and give speeches under phony rubric of religious symbols or declarations of patriotism.

The enemies in the 1950s and 1960s were the likes of Lincoln Rockwell, the American Nazi Party and Rev. Gerald L.K. Smith, of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade.

These mumsers were not shy about defaming Jews, African-Americans, and sometimes Catholics; nor were they hesitant to urge death or deportation. (Similar hate groups operate today, mostly on the Internet, and are being tracked and exposed.)

Still, however objectionable is Professor Judt's position, he is not a swastika-adorned, fascist and nobody should confuse that.

Yet, I do not scorn the ADL and AJC action. It's their call. Jewish organizations do not issue death threats or burn embassies.

In the end, the Polish Embassy cancelled the event. But, a win it was not, when factoring in the negative story appearing on page three of the Washington Post.

Moreover, Professor Judt came out receiving more publicity and probably more future speaking invitations from this cancellation, than the original event would have garnered.

I have a feeling (at least a hope) that ADL and AJC will not make that mistake again.