68	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bentered P.S. 9 in Brooklyn and shouted, “Why don’t you Jew bteachers get out of this school and teach the nice, white bJewish boys in the yeshiva?”

bAt an April meeting in the office of the school superin- btendent of Brooklyn’s District 13, CORE’s Isaiah Lewis said, b“We want the Jews out of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area!” In bMay 1967 at P.S. 40 in Queens, Jewish principal Harold bBaron was the target of a demonstration led by his assistant, bBlack extremist Herman Ferguson (later convicted of plot- bting the murder of moderate Negro Roy Wilkins). White bteachers entered the building and were the targets of bshouts: “Why don’t you white Jews go back to Great Neck?” bIn September 1967, principal Luis Fuentes, newly appointed bto head Brooklyn’s P.S. 155, in a discussion concerning the bend of the merit system told a Jewish assistant principal: b“Why don’t you change your name to Gonzales? Your peo- bple have always done that.”

bThus the school crisis that erupted in Brooklyn’s Ocean bHill-Brownsville district when eighteen Jewish teachers bwere summarily fired from their positions by the new local bboard (the term was “transferred” out of the district; to bwhere, the militants could not have cared less) was not the bfirst or the hundredth shot in the war against Jewish rights. bIt would take many, many pages to detail all the cases of bdocumented Jew-hatred that emerged from the school bcrisis. Suffice it to say that open, subjective Jew-hatred and bthreats to Jewish lives and property had existed for months band years before JDL came into being and, worse, the bobjective destruction of the Jewish political, social, and beconomic position was underway as merit was attacked and bquotas demanded, as Jewish neighborhoods were destroyed band as Jewish merchants were under assault. And during all bthis time, the Jewish Establishment stood criminally by, bfighting everyone else’s battles except those of the poor and blittle Jew.

bConsider the following. In 1968, as the lower-middle- bclass Jewish civil servant was being pushed out by demands bby Blacks and other minorities for quotas, the B’nai B’rith bConvention, meeting at the Borsht Belt luxury resort the b