That was at the start of another administration. Now Rabbi Yoffie says simply that it is one thing to be skeptical about the prospects for peace (he still is) and another to countenance actions, like building settlements, that preclude peace. Which seems to be the logic of the peace camp – and the administration – as we approach the 80th anniversary of August 1929, when the Jews were driven out of Hebron.
The one leader in the Conference of Presidents who might have been counted on to speak up for the Jews who have returned to Hebron and other settlements, Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, wasn’t at the meeting with President Obama.
When I asked Rabbi Yoffie about that, I didn’t detect a lot of regret. There was a time, though, when a leading figure in Reform Judaism, Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, was head of the ZOA. It is something to read from this remove Silver’s speech at Madison Square Garden, where, in 1955, he thundered about the folly of what we now call land for peace. As his rage grew over the next two years, Silver dressed down the American administration mercilessly for pressuring Israel – going so far as to say at one point that some of its members had become afflicted with “the same blindness which formerly afflicted the Mandatory Power in its dealings with the Arabs and Jews.”
So what, in fact, have we learned? I telephoned Klein and asked him why he wasn’t at the meeting. He said he’d been told by his friends in Washington that one can’t criticize a president with the harshness Klein has used with respect to Obama and expect to get invited to the president’s house.
Fair enough. Bergson never got in to see the president, either, though the treasury secretary, Henry Morgenthau, did step up. Bergson ended up organizing a protest of 400 Orthodox rabbis outside the White House, which helped throw the situation into sharp relief. It’s a reminder that, from the long perspective of history, there are times when it’s not the worst thing in the world to be on the outside looking in.