JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Gates, Crowley and the Jews

By Ami Eden · July 30, 2009

Thursday is B-Day at the White House, with President Obama expected to share a brewski with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge police officer who arrested him, Jim Crowley.

Much has been made over the fact that friends of both Gates and Crowley say they are the last people you'd expect to find in the middle of such an incident. And now The Wall Street Journal's SpeakEasy blog provides some Jewish-themed evidence:

In 2007,  Crowley attended a three-day program for police officers on racial profiling at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. He so impressed the staff there that he was invited back a year later for an advanced seminar, museum officials say.

Crowley’s attendance at the Jewish civil-rights organization’s programs hasn’t been previously reported, though it is widely known that he taught his own course on the subject at a local police department.

Sunny Lee-Goodman, director of the “Tools for Tolerance” law enforcement program at the Museum of Tolerance, says attendees of the “Perspectives on Profiling” program explore the perils of racial profiling. Using interactive exhibits at the museum, officers study both the Holocaust and the civil-rights movement in America. Officers also engage in soul-searching about their own prejudices.

She says of  Crowley:  “He stands out to me. He was one of those people who really engaged in sessions, who really showed a high level of understanding of the issue.”

As it turns out, according to the WSJ, Gates is also "prominently featured" at the center's law enforcement training programs:

At the center’s New York tolerance center, etched on a wall near inspirational words from Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., is a quotation from Gates:  “There is no tolerance without respect. There is no respect without knowledge.”

Of course, a two-sentence quote on a plaque is unlikely to impress those seeking to unfairly tar Gates as a first-class race-baiter. But for those of you whose minds may have been warped by the likes of WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein -- Gates has associated with Marxists! He thinks racisms has existed in America! -- take a few minutes to read Gates' seminal New York Times opinion piece (reprinted here by the SWC) criticizing black anti-Semitism and some of its main purveyors at the time, including Louis Farrakhan and Leonard Jeffries. In particular, Gates took aim at the scholarship and underlying racist world view behind the Nation of Islam's "The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews," a discredited but popular tract asserting that Jews played a disproportionate role in the slave trade.

However shoddy the scholarship of works like "The Secret Relationship," underlying it is something even more troubling: the tacit conviction that culpability is heritable. For it suggests a doctrine of racial continuity, in which the racial evil of a people is merely manifest (rather than constituted) by their historical misdeeds. The reported misdeeds are thus the signs of an essential nature that is evil.

How does this theology of guilt surface in our everyday moral discourse? In New York, earlier this spring, a forum was held at the Church of St. Paul and Andrew to provide an occasion for blacks and Jews to engage in dialogue on such issues as slavery and social injustice. Both Jewish and black panelists found common ground and common causes. But a tone-setting contingent of blacks in the audience took strong issue with the proceedings. Outraged, they demanded to know why the Jews, those historic malefactors, had not apologized to the "descendants of African kings and queens."

And so the organizer of the event, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, did. Her voice quavering with emotion, she said: "I think I speak for a lot of people in this room when I say 'I'm sorry.' We're ashamed of it, we hate it, and that's why we organized this event." Should the Melanie Kantrowitzes of the world, whose ancestors survived Czarist pogroms and, latterly, the Nazi Holocaust, be the primary object of our wrath? And what is yielded by this hateful sport of victimology, save the conversion of a tragic past into a game of recrimination? ...

Many Jews are puzzled by the recrudescence of black anti-Semitism in view of the historic alliance. The brutal truth has escaped them: that the new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish alliance but because of it. For precisely such transracial cooperation - epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews -- is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist movement.

In short, for the tacticians of the new anti-Semitism, the original sin of American Jews was their involvement - truly "inordinate," truly "disproportionate" - not in slavery, but in the front ranks of the civil rights struggle.

And if you only have a minute ... here's the blurb Gates wrote for Alan Dershowitz's "The Case for Israel":

"The Case for Israel" is indispensable reading for those of us who are deeply disturbed by the rise of anti-Semitism in American society, even on college campuses.

I can see the Klein/WND headline now: "Gates endorsed book by professor who praised Israel-bashing Obama."