Jewry Without Democracy

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

It hasn’t made as many headlines as the Bush-Kerry campaign, but the World Jewish Congress – a mainly New York-based organization, founded in 1936, that bills itself as “an international federation of Jewish communities and organizations [that] attempts to build consensus between different Jewish groups of varying political and religious orientations” – is having a donnybrook of its own. In one corner is the WJC’s president, the Canadian-Jewish tycoon Edgar Bronfman; in the other, its senior vice-president, the retired Australian businessman and community leader Isi Leibler, now living in Jerusalem.


Messrs. Leibler and Bronfman initially clashed a year ago, when the former was harshly critical of the latter for writing a letter to President Bush attacking Prime Minister Sharon’s hard-line policies toward the Palestinians. Mr. Leibler, who is as hawkish on Israel as Mr. Bronfman is dovish, blamed the WJC president for publicly blaming Israel for intransigence without having first obtained his own organization’s approval.


Now, the quarrel between the two men has grown uglier. In a long memo, originally intended for internal WJC circulation but leaked by unidentified sources to the press, Mr. Leibler has raised serious questions of financial irregularities in the WJC, including unaudited budgets, unauthorized pensions, and unreported bank accounts. Mr. Bronfman and the circle around him, he writes in this memo, have been running the WJC as their own fief rather than as a public organization accountable to its estimated 435,000 donors. The memo also accused Mr. Bronfman of appointing an old business associate to be the WJC’s top administrator without consulting the organization, and of offering its secretary-generalship to left-wing Israeli politician Abraham Burg in a similarly peremptory fashion.


On the face of it, the Leibler-Bronfman fracas is a parochial affair. The World Jewish Congress, whose total annual operating budget barely exceeds $10 million, is not a powerful force. And yet the issues raised by Mr. Leibler are far from trivial.


This is because of a peculiar paradox. The Jews of the world, and America in particular, are heavily invested in democracy. Jews have always done best under democratic regimes and worst under authoritarian or totalitarian ones, and they tend to be more concerned than most other ethnic or religious groups with questions of human rights, civil liberties, and democratic procedure. They also tend to vote in national and local elections in higher percentages than other groups and to give much more money to political causes.


And yet the same American Jewish community that is so committed to democratic norms utterly fails to practice them in its own internal life. Although the affairs of American Jewry are run by dozens of organizations with various political, religious, cultural, and educational agendas, some representing hundreds of thousands and even millions of people, none of these has a membership that elects its leaders or a leadership that is directly responsible to those it represents.


Major organizations like the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith, Hadassah, the Zionist Organization of America, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee, and so on, are administered by functionaries, appointed by boards of directors or executive committees, who often have no designated term of office or need to have their tenure reconfirmed, much less to get rank-and-file approval for specific policies or orientations. Nor do such religious bodies as the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, the United Synagogue of America (Conservative) and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (Reform), while often voting on matters of ritual and Jewish practice on a rabbi-to-rabbi basis, give any real representation to the laymen who belong to them.


What is true of its parts is even truer of the whole. The 52-body roof organization of American Jewry, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has no clear procedures for arriving at decisions on major issues, which are resolved by informally negotiated agreements rather than by any proportional system of voting. Mr. Bronfman may have been more of a one-man organization than most other American Jewish groups, but its lack of transparency and accountability are far from unique. Indeed, apart from Israel there is no Jewish community in the world today whose members have a say in determining their leaders’ actions.


This has not always been the case in the modern Jewish world. In many Eastern European countries between World War I and II, for example, the communal leadership was chosen in fiercely contested elections in which religious and anti-religious, Zionist and anti-Zionist, and left-wing and right-wing parties all fought for the votes of the Jew in the street. The result was often great divisiveness, but also great vibrancy and participatory involvement.


Obviously, interwar Poland or Lithuania are not models for American Jewry. Roughly half of America’s Jews do not identify with the Jewish community at all, and much of the half that does, does so only marginally. There is much to be said for continuing to avoid the internal factionalism of electoral politics in a large religious and ethnic group that, though split in many ways, has on the whole been characterized by a live-and-let-live attitude. And yet it is also anomalous, as I have said, that so politically aware a community should let its leaders go their own way with no need to report back or justify themselves to their ostensible constituencies. Some kind of democratization of American Jewish life is long overdue.



Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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