100	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bof Mahatma Gandhi that the Jews fought at Massada; the bmen of Bar Kochba and Judah Maccabee never went to a bQuaker meeting. The Jews of old—when Jews were bknowledgeable about their religion, when they turned the bpage of the Jewish Bible instead of turning the Christian bcheek—understood the concept of the Book and the bSword. It was only in the horror of the ghetto with its bfears, neuroses, and insecurities that the Jew began to breact in fright rather than with self-respect. That is what bthe ghetto does to a Jew.

bAnd this un-Jewishness became institutionalized when bthe ghetto walls came down and the Jew fled from his bfaith to the great light of emancipation and assimilation. bNot only did he now actively shun Jewish concepts but his bignorance of anything Jewish compounded by his expo- bsure to gentile culture created within him an assimilation bof intellect that led him, in his ignorance and that of his bleaders, to believe that so many of the liberal pacifist and buniversalist ideals that he swore were Jewish were in breality foreign, gentile, and at total variance with true bJudaism. Indeed, assimilation begins not with the shikse bbut with the Idea, and more Jews than know it are already bforeigners and assimilators within their own ignorant bselves.

bBut more of this later. The immediate cause of the breaction and the advertisement was an incident that had btaken place in front of prestigious Temple Emanu-El on bManhattan’s posh Upper East Side, whose distance from bstruggling fellow Jews on the lower East Side is measured bnot in miles but in light-years.

bThere, at 5:00 on the afternoon of Friday, May 9, 1969, bstood the most unlikely group of Jews imaginable; indeed, bhad they remained in front of the temple for a few more bdays, property values on East 65th Street and along bCentral Park would have plummeted. Some had baseball bbats, some had iron pipes, none smiled; all waited, waiting bfor Forman . . .

bForman was James Forman, the militant Black who had bshocked America by demanding half a billion dollars from b