Dirty Word?

The New York Times has finally taken notice of what it says is a boycott being mounted against it by members of the Jewish community upset at its coverage of Israel. Over the weekend, it issued a long article by its columnist Frank Rich, who tries to advance the notion that a boycott is somehow inimical to Judaism’s fundamental values. Mr. Rich relies on no less an authority than the newspaper circulated to members of the UJA-Federation in New York, the Jewish Week, whose editor, Gary Rosenblatt, suggests that boycott “is a dirty word to Jews” who have suffered as a result of them.This, for the record, is poppycock. It may be that boycotts have been used against Jews. So have guns. That doesn’t mean that Jews need to lay down their arms. The record will show that some of the most heroic boycotts in history have been mounted by the Jewish community, including that called in 1936 by the Jewish Labor Committee as it seized the lead in calling attention to the crimes brewing in Europe. The JLC joined with the American Jewish Congress to form the Joint Boycott Council to curtail purchases of Nazi-made goods.According to the Wagner Labor Archives at NYU, the council’s work had some effect in the area of consumer goods, eventually enlisting Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and other major retailers in the boycott. “By the 1940s, American Jews were engaging in a near-complete boycott of Ford vehi cles,” in protest of Henry Ford’s anti-Semitism, a BusinessWeek review of a new book on Henry Ford and the Jews noted recently. The state of Israel participated in the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. As recently as 1995, the Anti-Defamation League called for a boycott of Iranian oil.By no stretch is the New York Times comparable to Nazi Germany, Henry Ford, the Soviet Union, or the Islamic Republic of Iran. But by no stretch is it the appropriateness of a boycott that has raised the Times’ dander — or surely it (or Mr. Rich) would have come out against (or at least covered) the latest antics of James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. An “action alert” from the Institute calls on people who “have a Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, or Lord & Taylor at a mall near you or a liquor store” in their neighborhood to check if the stores are carrying AHAVA skin products or Golan Heights wine. If they are, Mr. Zogby’s alert advises requesting that the products “be removed from the shelves and returned to the distributor.” He goes on to suggest that if the store does not respond, a boycott should be threatened.If boycotting were the issue, the Times would have had something to say about how the Arab Muslim American Federation is — as our Benjamin Smith reports on page one today — asking newspaper dealers not to carry the New York Post, which has been running some of the most eloquent editorials in support of Israel. If boycotts were the issue, surely the Times would have devoted more attention to how, as our Rachel Kovner reports elsewhere on page one, an effort is under way on campuses across the country to force college endowments to divest their holdings in Israeli companies and American companies that sell arms to Israel.In the event, not one of these efforts to isolate Israel and its friends economically has merited more than a peep, if that, in the New York Times. No, the only “boycott” it’s in a lather about is the protest being mounted by several distinguished leaders — among them Rabbi Haskel Lookstein and Fred Ehrman — in a Jewish community fed up with the New York Times.What’s really going on here, though, is not merely about the Times, but about the American liberal world-view, which has lost its way. It is having a hard time with the substance of the Israeli and Jewish position in the current conflict. It is uncomfortable with the Jewish people’s historic and religious claim to the land. It is unmoved that Israel’s claim has been recognized by successive American governments, beginning with the Truman administration in 1948 and more recently, in the case of Jerusalem, by a nearly unanimous United States Congress. Nor does it accept that Israel is, at bottom, fighting the same Islamic ideology that struck New York City on September 11.American liberalism today doesn’t seem to be able even to understand why the Arab boycotts and the Jewish boycotts are not the same. Or why an American boycott of Nazi products is not the same as a Nazi boycott of Jewish products. And why an American boycott of a Soviet Olympics is not the same as a Soviet boycott of an American Olympics. Or what message it sends when it suddenly starts praising, as the Times has, a Republican president for emerging as an “honest broker” in this war. The Times’ hostility to Israel’s cause in the current war seems to be clear to growing numbers, which is why enough of them have withdrawn their custom from the paper that even the paper’s eloquent columnist has started to take notice.

Dirty Word?

Dirty Word?

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