| The Jewish Establishment |
67 |
btrapped by their poverty and inability to leave. Brownsville
bin Brooklyn, and Mattapan in Boston and the Southeast in
bWashington were symbols of destroyed Jewish neighbor-
bhoods and dreams and the American Jewish Committee was
btoo busy publishing pamphlets on ecumenism and inter-
bfaith to notice.
bThe blindness and negligence of the Jewish Establish-
bment was criminal. All the attacks on the Jewish position in
bAmerica were accompanied by a determined drive to do
baway with the merit system under which Jews, in the years of
bthe Depression, had obtained the only jobs open to them in
bthe face of anti-Semitism—civil service positions. The large
bnumber of Jews in teaching positions and other government
bservice could be explained by the fact that so many of them
bcould not become the other things they would have wanted
bto. Merit was the only yardstick that guaranteed hundreds
bof thousands of lower-middle-class Jews the opportunity to
bmake a living. Now Blacks (and following them, other ethnic
bgroups) were demanding an end to the system and calling
bfor reverse discrimination and quotas, a return to the
bnumerous clausus of Europe that had seen Jewish oppor-
btunity limited to their percentage in the general population.
bIt hardly took deep thinking to understand what that would
bmean to the American Jew, who made up just 3 percent of
bthe American population.
bThe New York City school system had become a battle-
bground for quotas and vicious anti-Semitism long before the
bJDL came into existence and the assault on Jewish rights was
bobvious to every Jewish organization. In September 1966 at
bdemonstrations at Harlem’s I.S. 201, Principal Stanley Lis-
bser became the target of shouts of “We’ve got too many
bteachers and principals named Ginsberg and Rosenberg,”
band “Let him go to Israel.” Lisser resigned under a constant
bbarrage of Jew-hatred. In Brooklyn, the local CORE chap-
bter headed by a thug named Sonny Carson had as early as
bApril 1967 demanded to see how many of the staff of P.S.
b246 were Jewish, and on the same day teachers found in
btheir mailboxes notes reading, “You lousy Jew bastard, get
bout of the school.” On September 13,1967, CORE members
b