The Arming of the Jews

When someone lifts his hand, the saying goes, "the Jew lifts his feet." Despite the centuries of Eastern Europe's pogroms and the ultimate horror of Hitler's death pits, the sad, self-deprecating humor persists. But for a small, growing number of New York Jews, the cultural heritage of flight or passivity is being angrily, even bitterly rejected. Especially among the young, the poor and the Orthodox in the marginal neighborhoods of the city, TIME Correspondent Leonard Levitt found a new theme emerging: "We are not going to turn the other cheek. We are not going to take it any more. Sitting back and being passive only leads to Auschwitz." Here is his report:

THE karate class has a special problem: the students' yarmulkes keep falling off. But the pupils persist. Thirty of them have come from all parts of the city to the gym of the Williamsburg Young Men's Hebrew Association, once a breeding ground for that special brand of New York basketball played by short, quick young men. Now the basketball players are at one end of the gym; at the other is the white-robed karate class arranged in five rows of six abreast. Black Belt Teacher Alex Sternberg stalks the rows, suddenly lashing out in instructive attempts to knock his students down. He is small and wiry; he wears sunglasses even in the gym, and they add a sinister quality to his sudden thrusts. He lunges twice, quickly: "Never forget, first to the body and then to the head." The yarmulkes fall, but the lesson goes on. It is an odd avocation for a nice Jewish boy who is studying political science at Kingsborough Community College, but stranger still is his calmly stated explanation: "I teach karate not for sport but for the street. I want my students to be able to kill, so that if a Jew is ever attacked, that attacker will never come near him again."

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Such declarations have come to be expected from the Jewish Defense League, of which Sternberg is a member. The small paramilitary group--the organizational and in some ways cultural equivalent of the Black Panthers--has long since proved it does not mean to rest at rhetoric (TIME, July 4, 1969). Recently league members battled New York City police while besieging the Soviet Union's U.N. mission. Many other Jews strongly disapprove of its activities, and indeed of its very existence. Still, the new Jewish militancy, born in the enclaves of Brooklyn and Manhattan's Lower East Side, now extends to some middle-class businessmen, rabbis in non-Orthodox synagogues, and even upper-middle-class suburbanites on Long Island. At nationally known Yeshiva University, a young doctoral candidate is training 100 students in karate so that they can go out as karate teachers themselves. A dozen karate clubs are already in existence at Jewish day schools, and even in private homes.

Eight gun clubs in the New York metropolitan area are linked in an organization known as Palmach, named after an elite corps in Israel's army in the 1948 war of independence; half of Palmach's 400 members are Jewish, and most, for the record, insist that the target shooting is "strictly for sport." But one, an Auschwitz survivor, has his own reason. "Jews have to learn to shoot a gun," says Joseph Mittelman. "We didn't know the last time, and look where it got us." Even the organization's president, Sy Alper, admits that more than sport is involved for many. "Citizen patrol groups come to us all the time, or a local merchant who has had his store broken into. The rich Jews don't understand that these people are genuinely concerned. Our group doesn't look for trouble, but if someone comes to us for help, we will never turn him away."

What explains a will to violence in contradiction to Jewish teaching, history and insight? Unhappily, it is a response to what many urban Jews are experiencing as a renewed oppression--this time, physical violence from black and Puerto Rican street toughs and verbal attacks from extremist black leaders. Repeatedly, all-Jewish neighborhoods have become partially or predominantly black or Puerto Rican. A dress-store owner has received phone calls: "Get out, you dirty Jew, or we'll burn you out."

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Forming the background of the new Jewish response is, of course, the example of Israel, tough and defiant in a hostile sea of Arabs. "Israel has changed everything," says Rabbi Sholom Ber Gorodetsky of the Lubavitcher group in Crown Heights. "The Six-Day War has given Orthodox Jews a courage they never had before." Israel, in a carefully nonofficial way, has supplied more than example. The first karate classes in Brooklyn were taught by bearded, fifth-generation Israeli Zvi Kasspi, an Israeli army veteran. Another Israeli. Hillel Oman, is listed as a teacher of Hebrew studies at the Yeshiva of East Flatbush in Brooklyn; another course, not listed, is self-defense.

Significantly, the spreading self-defense movement--though involving only a small percentage of New York's 1,800,000 Jews--is not the preoccupation of only young sectarians. One central figure has been Daniel Abraham, the middle-aged head of a drug-manufacturing firm who lives in a cooperative apartment on Fifth Avenue and worships at the prestigious Fifth Avenue Synagogue. He has been helped in adding karate to the curriculum of many Jewish day schools by Dr. Joseph Kaminetsky, director of Torah Umesorah, an organization of 422 Hebrew schools, 175 of them in the New York area.

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Men like Abraham and Kaminetsky are apt to explain their intent in terms of psychology and image. Rabbi Emanuel Rackman of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue says: "Jewish children have been taught to flee. I think it is healthier for kids to defend themselves." At the other extreme, Rabbi Mendel Greenberg of the Hasidic Satmar group sits in his Williamsburg home and displays a .38-cal. pistol and M-l rifle.

Though they publicly deplore the violent tactics of the Jewish Defense League, many Jewish leaders in private welcome the pride-inducing effect they have had--an almost exact parallel of the attitude of many blacks toward the Panthers, whose belligerency has enabled all blacks to walk a little taller. The new Jewish militancy, for all its conscious rejection of the past, contains its own inevitable version of soul.

At Yeshiva University, one karate student says that he had to argue with his mother for six months before she let him take the course. And his black-belt instructor, Doctoral Candidate Harvey Sober, has arrived at a philosophically precise rationale for his unusual activity: "It's not murder when you kick someone assaulting you," he tells his class. "It's a mitzvah [good deed] that you know how to."

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