ADL'S FOXMAN UNDER ATTACK

The prestige of Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, has never been lower. A recent biting article by J. J. Goldberg in the Jewish Forward reveals that criticism of Foxman continues to expand, especially from leaders of the American Jewish community. Increasingly, American Jewish intellectuals fear that Foxman, while decrying the anti-Obama “paranoia” of the religious right, may be a victim of his own paranoid obsession with anti-Semitism where it doesn’t exist. (See Goldberg article Foxman Fever Doesn’t Discriminate)

Goldberg: “Foxman is the country’s most prolific anti-Semitism spotter, the gestalt guy who sees Jew-haters under every bed and invents them if he can’t find them.” He writes of respected journalist James Traub’s 2007 New York Times Magazine profile:

In his telling, Foxman is “the hanging-judge of anti-Semitism,” an “anachronism” who continues to “harp on Jewish insecurity” in a world where Jews have become “the most widely admired religious group in America, as well as the most successful.” Portraying him as a blustering alarmist, Traub seemed bemused by Foxman’s warnings about “jihadist” anti-Semitism as a serious threat in today’s world and troubled by Foxman’s focus on “good for the Jews, bad for the Jews” to the exclusion of broader goals of “promoting tolerance and diversity.”

Goldberg says this critique is abounding. Recently,

Republicans have been savaging Foxman for … attacking right-wing extremists even when they support Israel. Last November, for example, Commentary editor Jonathan Tobin wrote that the ADL had “stepped over the line” and was trying to stifle criticism of the Obama administration with the publication of a report, “Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies,” which warned of anti-democratic tendencies and intolerance in far-right movements like the Tea Parties and in the rhetoric of media figures like Glenn Beck.

Goldberg relates how in January, Foxman again faced angry conservatives over his accusation that Rush Limbaugh committed “borderline anti-Semitic stereotyping” because he said many Wall Street bankers are Jewish. Normon Podhoretz scoffed, saying Foxman “has a long history of seeing an anti-Semite under every conservative bed” and should “apologize for the defamatory accusation of anti-Semitism that he himself has hurled against so loyal a friend of Israel as Rush Limbaugh.” More