One of the privileges and pleasures of my work at The Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle over the years has been interviewing and covering the activities of five executive directors of Milwaukee’s primary Jewish community relations organization. And that group includes most of its directors, since there were only eight in the organization’s three-quarters-of-a-century history.
This organization has had different names over the years. Starting as the Milwaukee Jewish Council at its founding in 1938, it became the Milwaukee Jewish Council for Community Relations, and is now the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
As the organization plans to celebrate its 75th anniversary this month, I recall the directors I knew — Saul Sorrin, Judy Mann, Mordecai Lee, Paula Simon, Elana Kahn-Oren. (The three before my time were George Gratz, Ben Goldman, and Sidney H. Sayles.) All of them were or are intelligent and dedicated people who taught me much about Jewish life and its issues.
All of them were or are nice people — but that should be no surprise. They constitute what one could call the Milwaukee Jewish community’s diplomatic corps.
They represent the community to local press and politicians, build alliances and coalitions with other religious and ethnic groups in the general community, and when necessary face down local anti-Semites and Israel-bashers. To be patient, thoughtful, articulate and personable are practically requirements for their job. (Be it said that these traits characterize others active in Jewish community relations work here as well, like Harriet Schachter McKinney of the Milwaukee Area Jewish Committee and Michael H. Blumenfeld of the Wisconsin Jewish Conference.)
I do have to say in all honesty that over the years there has been some — tension is the wrong word, perhaps awkwardness is the right one — in the relationship between the Jewish community’s primary CRC and its newspaper. This has not been because of personalities but because of the inherent nature of the two professions, community relations and journalism.
Contrary to some beliefs, journalism does not seek to create or stoke conflicts. Despite some famous historical lapses (like publisher William Randolph Hearst doing all he could to spark the Spanish-American War), such actions today are considered breaches of professional ethics. But it is the job of journalism to uncover and present conflicts, not least because conflicts make for good stories, in journalism and history as much as in movies or novels.
The task of a community relations organization, however, is to reduce, minimize and avert conflicts through promoting cooperation. As such, its relationship to the press has to be ambivalent, wanting to use it at some times and push it away at others. Often, such organizations do important, relationship-building work “behind the scenes,” and can only do that successfully if that work stays out of the news media.
They also have to avoid being manipulated by those who would promote conflict for their own ends. I well remember one instance of this. The U.S. Orthodox Jewish fascist and demagogue Rabbi Meir Kahane during one of his visits to Milwaukee came to the MJC offices, with local news media people (including me) in tow, to provoke a confrontation with then-director Judy Mann. She left the building before he arrived to make sure he would not succeed.
But the philosophy of such organizations goes beyond that, I think. It has long appeared to me that, as a minority group seeking to survive among majorities containing people both hostile and indifferent to our existence, parts of the Jewish community have tended to follow one of two strategies: To emphasize to non-Jews what we have in common with them, and so build relationships; or to emphasize what makes us different from them and demand acceptance on our own terms. Either, “We are just like you, and you can identify with us, and we can be mutually supportive friends” or “We are different from you, proud of it, and have the right to be that way, whether you like it or not.”
Throughout the country, I think JCRCs most of the time tend to follow the first strategy. This can make them look soft or weak to people in our community who prefer the second.
And those who prefer the second are not just demagogues like Kahane. To this day, many U.S. Jews are haunted by a sense that fear of going public and being confrontational and demanding prevented our community from doing as much as it could have to help European Jewry during World War II. And so community members have expressed to me frustration about the JCRC not publicly and forcefully confronting the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel over every critical-of-Israel opinion article or the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee administration over the student-run “Israel Apartheid Week” activities, and so forth.
But these local items, while troubling and annoying, are not at the level of the Holocaust, or even on a “slippery slope” leading to something like it. Yes, U.S. philosopher and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) correctly wrote in his “Journals,” “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis” — but most of the time, it isn’t. In fact, screaming too much most likely alienates people and can make them unwilling to listen when something happens that really is worth screaming about.
Most of the time, the advice of the Bible’s book of Proverbs is wiser: “A gentle response allays wrath; a hard word provokes anger” (15:1), and “A hot-tempered man provokes a quarrel; a patient man calms strife” (15:18).
Milwaukee’s JCRC leaders have been willing to go public when necessary — for example, in helping organize in March 1994 a counter-rally in response to anti-Semite Khalid Abdul Muhammad’s speech at UWM. But such responses have been few precisely because they seldom have been needed.
And they seldom have been needed to a great extent because of the mostly gentle and patient work the MJC/JCRC and its leaders have done over the past 75 years. They have made great contributions to our community and are well worth celebrating and honoring.
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