152	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bing, real. Jewish. It did not matter if the appearance was a bturbulent, screaming, one as leftists and Arabs tried to dis- brupt it—at the University of Buffalo, for example, in March b1971, two hundred massed leftists, mostly Jewish and all banti-Israel and anti-JDL, shrieked themselves hoarse as I bstood on the platform and told them that I would remain bthere all night but they would never get me to cancel the bspeech—or if it was to a quiet, sympathetic group. The bresults were invariably the same: the kindling of a spark of bJewish identity and self-worth; the growth of the knowledge bthat Jewish is Beautiful.

bCharles Raddock, author of Portrait of a People put it bthus: “Say what you will about the tactics of the activist Rabbi bKahane, no objective observer of the American Jewish scene bdenies now that the 38-year-old Orthodox Brooklyn mili- btant and one-time Betari ignited a spark in otherwise indif- bferent hearts of Jewish campus kids from 1968, when he got bstarted on his “militancy.” Almost overnight it would seem, btoo, that spark has blown into a global blaze for Jews, bJudaism, and for Soviet Jewry, too, from New York to bAmsterdam, Holland.”

bWithout a doubt, the most difficult thing I had to face bafter every JDL demonstration or activity that involved the barrest of young members, was the inevitable visit or call bfrom a parent of an arrested youth. Many would be furious bover my “corrupting” of their child, although sometimes the bparent would say how much he (or she) agreed with the bleague and its activities and then ask: “But why must it be my bchild?”

bThe answer to that question was, and will always be: bBecause you, the parent, have so lost his way of life that he no blonger remembers what it calls upon him to do, we must bhave his child who is so much a better Jew than he. Who will bretain the glow of idealism and still feel the Jewish words bthat decree “Not by bread alone shall man live . . .”

bAnd the reason why it must be that specific child is that the bmarket in dedicated children is not that glutted, and to find ba youngster who is ready to feel the pain of someone else band to do something about it, is to find a pearl. To find a b