–Letter from Zev Krengel, National Chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies
–Letter from Russell Gaddin, former National Chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies
–Letter from Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Associate Editor at Foreign Affairs

Human Rights Makes a Bid at the Global University
Jon Cioschi, Summer 2008

–Letter by J. Paul Martin, Director of Human Rights Studies at Barnard College and former Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University

The Beloved Country: Minority Politics and South African Jewry
Daniel Greenberg, Summer 2008

To the Editor:

In his essay “The Beloved Country,” Daniel Greenberg makes many insightful comments regarding the challenges and dilemmas facing the Jewish community and its leadership in our evolving democratic society. Aside from one or two factual errors (Helen Suzman was not the founder of the Progressive Party, for example, and the process of return to religious Orthodoxy was well underway by the late 1960s and not from the mid–1980s, as asserted), his analysis is generally a sound one. However, he does a considerable disservice to the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) in his assessment of how it is carrying out its mandate in the contemporary era.

Greenberg adopts the view that the SAJBD, intent on remaining in the South African government’s good books, shies away from confronting it on South Africa’s manifest anti–Israel bias, as well as on broader national issues such as HIV/AIDS and the Zimbabwe situation. He even compares this to the SAJBD’s political quiescence during the Apartheid era, when it failed to challenge the ruling National Party’s unjust racial policies for fear of negative repercussions against the Jewish community.

My first objection to this view is the strong inference that the National Party of the Apartheid era and today’s African National Congress led government are somehow comparable. As a South African, I find such a suggestion to be both absurd and frankly insulting. How can one compare a racially based minority regime, appointed through the political exclusion of 80% of the population, with a democratically elected, fully nonracial government operating under one of the most liberal constitutions in the world? Under Apartheid, a myriad human rights abuses took place, and there was little or no recourse against this. Today, a comprehensive Bill of Rights guarantees the basic freedoms, dignity and safety of every South African citizen.

Greenberg also does the SAJBD a profound injustice by simplistically caricaturizing its members as knee–jerk “yes men” for the South African government. In reality, the SAJBD has on frequent occasions strenuously criticized government, both publicly and privately. Earlier this year, for example, the SAJBD spoke out strongly against an especially onesided statement on the Middle East conflict issued by the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Our letter to the Deputy Minister, published in one of the leading daily newspapers, slammed the government for its failure to condemn acts of Palestinian aggression while attacking Israel’s acts of retaliation in a thoroughly unfair and disproportionate manner, accusing it of “creating the extremely damaging perception that the South African government regards the ongoing threats to innocent Jewish life as being preferable to causing any kind of hardship to the Palestinians.”

These, and many other statements regularly issued by the SAJBD since the beginning of the decade, clearly debunk the notion that we indiscriminately seek to “ingratiate” ourselves with the government of the day. Representing the Jewish community, which comprises a very small minority within the greater society, means constantly having to choose between alternative strategies, whether quiet diplomacy, open confrontation or simply to let sleeping dogs lie. The challenge the SAJBD must face is to decide which strategy is appropriate at the time.

It is also not true that the SAJBD does not take a stand on broader national issues, for example the HIV/AIDS crisis. Particularly in the Western Cape, it has joined with the Treatment Action Campaign in public protests against the government’s policy on this question, even though the Campaign is well known for its opposition to the ANC’s HIV/AIDS policies.

The SAJBD is not just an organization of statements, but of action as well. South Africa is a developing country and faces short and long–term problems and challenges common to all other developing countries. Leading the Jewish community in helping meet and overcome those challenges is something the SAJBD is committed to, and we are justifiably proud of what we have managed to achieve in this regard.

In times of national crisis, we have continually come to the fore, enabling our small Jewish community to make a contribution far out of proportion to its small numbers, whether to assist victims of flooding in the northeast provinces and Mozambique in 2000, to assist South African victims of the South–East Asia tsunami disaster in December 2004, or to coordinate a major series of Jewish relief initiatives over the past few weeks to assist victims of xenophobic violence that has been sweeping the country. Finally, concluding that “the South African Jewish experience has been characterized by fear,” apart from being unnecessarily melodramatic, is simply untrue. Jews are certainly not blind to the local and regional problems facing their country, and the unacceptably high crime levels are indeed a matter of deep concern. However, “concern” is not the same thing as “fear.” Taken as a whole, South African Jewry, while reduced in numbers, is better organized, united and Jewishly committed than at any other time in its history. Whatever the future holds—and no Jewish community anywhere can be certain in this regard—the SAJBD will always be there to represent its best interests.

Zev Krengel is the National Chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies.

To the Editor:

There are a few issues that need comment in Daniel Greenberg’s article. I was fortunate to be the National Chairman of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies for much of Nelson Mandela’s Presidency. In this role, I had the pleasure of accompanying him on his only trip to Israel, as well as interacting with him on many occasions, both on an official level and a personal one. While the ANC’s supportive and close relationship with Yasser Arafat was not a happy one for South African Jewry, Mandela himself knew and acknowledged that Jews in South Africa were his main supporters and friends within the white community during his early career, subsequent trials, and eventual incarceration. Mandela very much wanted to bring about a peaceful solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and tried through his warm relationship with the Jews to do so. Some of the comments attributed to Mandela in Greenberg’s article might convey a different but incorrect relationship between him and the Jews.

The role of the Jewish community during the Apartheid era is usually misrepresented by commentators who do not understand the background and harsh influence of those awful times. The Nationalist Party came to power in 1948, only three years after the Holocaust. At the same time, the state of Israel came into being and was fighting the War of Independence for its very survival. South African Jews, who are mostly of European, especially Lithuanian, descent, were extremely nervous of the new government which, during the war, had been anti–British and pro–German. They were fearful of the new rulers and did not want to draw attention to themselves. Nor could the main opposition, the United Party, have been accused of being kindly disposed to Jews—they boasted a fair number of anti–Semites within their ranks, too.

It would take volumes to discuss the pros and cons of the Jewish mindset of those times. The world had stood by while six million Jews perished. There wasn’t the international Jewish support system that exists today, and there was as yet no strong Israel. There was a bullying government that dealt harshly with its critics in South Africa. The SAJBD made a decision, supported by the views of the majority of the community, to remain silent and not confront the government or draw attention to themselves. The white activists were mostly young, locally born Jews whose actions, for similar reasons, were not publicly supported by mainstream South African Jewry.

That was a far cry from the current situation. Jews today, together with all South Africans, can speak out freely—they walk tall, knowing that a strong Israel protects Jews wherever the need arises. International Jewish leadership is mostly powerful, and outside of the Muslim world, anti– Semitism on an official basis is not tolerated. Despite this, the SAJBD today has adopted a policy of appeasement, or silent diplomacy.

This silence is not supported by the community at large. The ANC Government of Thabo Mbeki has largely failed in its leadership of the country. The silent diplomacy has not influenced the South African Government to take a fair stance in its handling of Israel and Middle Eastern affairs. It has not added to Jewish security, nor to the devastation caused by crime. Emigration is peaking again, and efforts have failed to secure Jewish Studies as a nationally recognized high school subject and to ensure that university exams are not scheduled on Jewish holidays.

The Mbeki era will soon belong to history. (President Mbeki was deposed after the writing of this letter, in September 2008). It will be interesting to see how the Jewish leadership reacts to the new ANC leadership whose numbers include many with tainted and questionable pasts. The political game in South Africa has never been an easy one, and there is no indication that this situation will improve soon.

To the Editor:

Daniel Greenberg will no doubt take some heat back home in Johannesburg for confronting the sacred cows of the South African Jewish community. I commend him for daring to do so. The community is notoriously touchy and remains extremely insular. Since the demise of Apartheid, communal leaders who once denounced their fellow Jews in the anti–Apartheid movement now seek to claim that heritage of resistance as their own. When Nelson Mandela’s ANC comrades Arthur Goldreich and Harold Wolpe escaped from prison in 1963, the Jewish Board of Deputies took great pains to denounce them, distance themselves, and assure the pro–government press that, “except at his circumcision, [Goldreich] has never again been in a synagogue.” When American Jewish organizations, outraged by the Apartheid regime’s violence, passed a tame resolution in 1983 calling merely for “the granting of freedom, justice and equal rights,” the Board’s leaders blew up and told their American brethren to stay out of South Africa’s business. Then, in 1987, when the Israeli government—under pressure from the left wing of the Labor Party—finally took action to dismantle its intimate and lucrative military and trade ties with South Africa, the Jewish community fought the Israeli sanctions tooth and nail. Harry Schwarz, a child refugee from Nazi Germany who rose to become an opposition member of parliament during the Apartheid years and then ambassador to the United States, believes that the community behaved like the “Court Jews” of the Middle Ages, currying favor with the country’s leaders.

Greenberg’s astute observation that “the current Board attempts to ingratiate itself with the ANC, hoping to curry political patronage,” will draw the ire of community leaders in South Africa, but he is largely correct. Tony Leon, a Jew, led the parliamentary opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, until recently. Despite his conservative positions, the Board often distanced itself from him for fear of alienating the governing ANC. Even former Board President Boomie Abramowitz lends support to Greenberg’s argument, claiming “There’s a parallel... Whether you like it or not there are almost echoes of the past. We must not say anything that will upset the status quo.”

There are, however, two areas where Greenberg is too trusting of the existing scholarship on South African Jews. He accepts at face value Gideon Shimoni’s claim that the Board’s handsoff attitude towards Apartheid was a “characteristic minority–group phenomenon, better understood in sociological terms as a function of self–preservation.” While this was certainly true in the 1940s and 1950s, the Board’s own archives as well as those in the South African Foreign Ministry demonstrate that the threat of a state–sanctioned backlash against Jews had largely disappeared by the early 1960s. While many gentiles no doubt nurtured private anti– Semitic feelings, the National Party government, facing international condemnation for its oppression of blacks, could not afford to take on the Jews. When Israel condemned Apartheid, South Africa’s retaliation was limited to ending special transfer privileges for South African Zionist organizations that raised money on behalf of Israel. And by the 1970s, Israel had become one of South Africa’s most reliable allies and leading arms suppliers; it was not a relationship Pretoria was willing to jeopardize by turning the power of the state against the Jewish community.

Secondly, Greenberg claims that the Board made a “striking change” in its policy in 1976 when it held a banquet honoring South African Prime Minister (and former Nazi sympathizer) B.J. Vorster upon his return from a state visit to Israel, during which he concluded a massive arms deal. Many South African Jewish leaders point to the banquet as a turning point because the Board’s Chairman, David Mann, gave a speech directly in front of Vorster, in which he said: “we must move away as quickly and effectively as is practicable from discrimination based on race or color.” In fact, the speech was a mere blip on Vorster’s radar that had absolutely no impact on government policy or on the official positions taken by Jewish community leaders. Just one month later, Vorster ordered the army into Soweto and the world watched in horror as South African troops fired on unarmed schoolchildren, killing dozens. It was not until 1985 that the Board issued a statement formally “rejecting Apartheid.” But by that time, even the government’s spin doctors had “rejected Apartheid” and South African Zionist Federation Leader Marcus Arkin called it “an exercise in innocuous rhetoric” and argued that the Board had “done nothing more daring than if it had affirmed its faith in motherhood.”

It is heartening to see that the Board’s current leaders are owning up to the organization’s shameful past. It is bizarre, however, that they choose to attack Greenberg for asserting “the South African Jewish experience has been characterized by fear.” A cursory glance at the Board’s history during the Apartheid era makes this point abundantly clear. One need only drive through the wealthy Jewish neighborhoods of Johannesburg or try to penetrate the Board’s own compound—with tighter security than many Israeli government offices in Jerusalem— to realize that it is still true.

Human Rights Makes its Bid at the Global University
Jon Cioschi, Summer 2008

To the Editor:

Jon Cioschi’s article provides a fair overview of human rights studies at Barnard and Columbia Colleges. In the process he raises the question: what is a good human rights program in a liberal arts curriculum? Here, as in most other universities, human rights studies were nurtured in the Law School, especially in the field of international law. However, it soon became obvious that both the analysis of, and the remedies for, human rights abuses called for the insights of the social sciences and the humanities. Legal scholars began using the latter and scholars outside the legal field began to draw on law and other normative frameworks. It was also apparent that the principles enunciated in the various human rights treaties had broad applicability, reaching into almost every aspect of human relations. Thus the language of human rights soon permeated international diplomacy and popular discourse. The net result is tangled webs of norms, facts, analysis, disciplines, and remedial propositions and actions, with a basic tension between norms and practice.

To provide a better frame of reference, I have proposed dividing the field into four main fields of intellectual endeavor, although in practice both scholars and activists may draw on all four. The fields are interdependent. Each field is defined by its radically different methodology that might or might not coincide with that of an academic discipline. The four fields are:

The Normative: This is the defining, unique characteristic of human rights studies. Fundamentally, it is the idea that there are certain legal norms, agreed upon by a given society or community of states and accepted as governing the treatment of human beings. The normative field of inquiry also examines other philosophical, cultural and religious norms. Law, especially international law, philosophy, cultural and religious studies, but also other humanities such as literature and media studies, play major roles in this field.

The Empirical: Accurate fact–finding and reporting has been the dominant and defining characteristic of the modern human rights movement. Equally necessary is an understanding of the numerous domestic and international institutions that are concerned with or impinge on human rights. The social sciences, statistics, and data management are major disciplinary resources in this field.

The Analytical: In the search for solutions, human rights scholars and advocates need to understand the underlying causes and interpretative frameworks and theories associated with complex social problems. We need to know the causes of abuses before we can hope to solve them. The social sciences have a big role to play here.

Implementation: Remedial and other activities, such as advocating, litigating, mobilizing, educating, and policy making, are designed to remedy human rights abuses, all of which will draw on the resources of the previous three competencies. Many disciplines and professions come into play here. This is the field of major and minor social engineering.

Each of these fields raises theoretical and practical problems and thus challenging debates. Human rights studies aims to develop the basic language and intellectual tools needed to participate in the whole range of normative and empirical debates and in the formulation of the policies and strategies designed to alleviate human rights abuses and violations.

Unfortunately, both scholars and practitioners often conflate the identification of problems, cause–effect postulates, and the identification of the best remedies. Equally dangerous are arguments based on unexamined normative, cultural, and historical assumptions. Human rights studies in the liberal arts curriculum draw on the resources of the social sciences and the humanities, as well as law, seeking to bring clarity and depth to both the intellectual debates and ongoing social interventions.