THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

The Jewish community in the United States today numbers 5.7 million, out of a total population of more than 273 million. American Jews constitute the largest concentration of Jews in the world, currently making up approximately 2.2 percent of the American population. Jews of East European origin make up the majority of American Jewry, while the United States is also home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors outside the State of Israel.

The bulk of American Jewry live in several large cities and their environs, including New York City (1.5 million), Los Angeles (519,000), Southeast Florida (507,000), Chicago (261,000), Boston (227,000), Baltimore-Silver Spring-Washington (225,000), San Francisco (210,000), Philadelphia (206,000) and Cleveland (82,000). The intermarriage rate is high, today accounting for more than 50 percent of all unions involving a Jewish partner.

Leading national Jewish organizations include the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), American Jewish Committee, American Jewish Congress, American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Anti-Defamation League (ADL), B’nai B’rith, Hadassah, Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), Jewish War Veterans (JWV) and many other religious, fraternal and Zionist groups. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations acts as the domestic and foreign policy umbrella group for 55 member organizations. A merger between the Council of Jewish Federations, United Israel Appeal and United Jewish Appeal in 1998 created the United Jewish Communities (UJC), which represents and serves 189 Jewish community federations and 400 independent Jewish communities in North America.

There is an active Jewish press and almost every community with a large Jewish population supports its own English-language weekly newspaper.

EXTREMIST ORGANIZATIONS AND GROUPS

Among organized right-wing hate groups active in the US today, the National Alliance is the most dangerous. Led by veteran anti-Semite and racist William Pierce since 1974, this neo-Nazi organization is also the most active, with 16 cells operating from coast to coast and a growing membership of over 1,000, more than double that in 1992. The National Alliance’s current strength can be attributed to several factors: its skillful embrace of technology, especially the Internet, its willingness to cooperate with other extremists, its energetic recruitment and other promotional activities, and its vicious, but deceptively intellectualized propaganda.

In April 1999, Pierce purchased Resistance Records, the leading distributor of neo-Nazi skinhead hate-rock music in the United States. The label was founded in 1993 by George Burdi, a Canadian neo-Nazi skinhead who was active in the racist and anti-Semitic World Church of the Creator (see below). Briefly owned by Willis A. Carto, leader of the anti-Semitic propaganda group Liberty Lobby, Resistance Records is now part of Pierce’s multimedia propaganda empire, a collection of racist newsletters, magazines, websites, telephone hotlines and a weekly radio broadcast, with a combined reach far beyond the National Alliance’s official membership.

Aryan Nations, a paramilitary neo-Nazi group based in Hayden Lake, Idaho, is tied to the racist, anti-Semitic and pseudo-Christian “Identity” church movement. In 1998, Richard Butler, the octogenarian head of Aryan Nations, named Neuman Britton as his successor (see ASW 1998/9). Carl E. Story and R. Vincent Bertollini, acquaintances of Butler who became wealthy in the field of computer technology, worked to promote “Identity” theology and white supremacy through leaflet mailings and large donations. In 1999, they discontinued their support of Aryan Nations after the group was sued (see below).

On 10 August, Buford O’Neal Furrow, a 37-year-old former Aryan Nations guard, shot and wounded three young boys, a teenage girl and a receptionist at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in suburban Granada Hills, outside Los Angeles, California. Furrow, who had a history of mental illness and trouble with the law, later shot and killed a Filipino-American postal worker, Joseph Ileto. On his arrest, Furrow declared that his murderous spree was intended as “a wake-up call to America to kill Jews” and that he had killed Ileto because the man was non-white and worked for the federal government. Federal prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the trial, set to begin in November 2000.

Aryan Nations has ties to Aryan Brotherhood, a violent white supremacist prison gang which emerged in the 1960s and now has members in penitentiaries throughout the US. Exhibiting an intense hatred of blacks and Jews, the Brotherhood reportedly engages in extortion, drug operations, prostitution and violence in prisons. In November, two white Indiana teenagers, Jason Powell and Alex Witmer, were charged with murder in what prosecutors believed was the racially motivated drive-by shooting of a black teenager. It was reported that while Witmer was already a Brotherhood member, Powell was seeking to earn admission to the gang by killing a black person.

In March 1999, in Lancaster, California, two members of the Nazi Low Riders, a vicious neo-Nazi skinhead prison and street gang, whose roots may be traced to the Aryan Brotherhood, attacked an African-American Wal-Mart employee with a hammer. Shaun Broderick and Christopher Crawford were charged with attempted murder and two counts of assault. This was not the first attack in California by members of this group.

One of the fastest-growing hate groups in the 1990s, the virulently anti-Semitic and racist World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) promotes the creation of “an all-white nation and ultimately an all-white world.” After its founder and leader Ben Klassen committed suicide in 1993, the group suffered a decline, until its resurrection by Matt Hale in 1996. Hale calls himself “Pontifex Maximus” or “supreme leader” of the group. The reborn WCOTC, based in East Peoria, Illinois, has a small but growing membership of dedicated individuals who call themselves “Creators” and who are involved in an aggressive campaign to disseminate WCOTC’s “Creativity” propaganda and recruit new members.

On 2 July, the day that Hale lost his appeal for a license to practice law, which had been denied him by the bar’s Fitness and Character Committee, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith, 21, an avowed white supremacist who had been active in WCOTC, went on a shooting spree through several Illinois neighborhoods. Smith wounded six Orthodox Jewish men walking home from Sabbath services in a Chicago suburb and then killed an African-American man and a Korean-American man. He also wounded three others as police pursued him into Bloomington, Indiana, where he killed himself.

In January 1999, Hale had named Smith “Creator of the Year” because “he brought more media attention to the Church than any other Creator,” with his massive distribution of Facts That the Government and the Media Don’t Want You to Know, WCOTC’s 32-page anti-Semitic and anti-black propaganda booklet.

Founded by Willis A. Carto in 1955, Liberty Lobby remains the most influential and active anti-Semitic propaganda organization in the United States. Liberty Lobby has had considerable influence on the growth of American militia groups, such as those that inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, through three media vehicles: The Spotlight, a weekly newspaper which publishes anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-government conspiracy theories, with a circulation of 85-100,000; Liberty Lobby’s national radio programs, “Radio Free America” and “Editor’s Roundtable,” which frequently broadcast intervwith hate group leaders and conspiracy theorists; and The Barnes Review, a monthly magazine focusing on historical revisionism and Holocaust denial, with a claimed circulation of 11,000. Carto started this publication after he broke with the Institute for Historical Review, which publishes the Journal of Historical Review.

The Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, led by Jeff Berry of Butler, Indiana, is the most active Klan (KKK) organization in America. Berry established the American Knights of the KKK in 1995. (Its current name was adopted in 1999.) While most other Klans across the country have declined, the American Knights have been active, propagandizing and attempting to hold rallies across the country.

After weeks of legal battling, the American Knights of the KKK were permitted to rally in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, on 21 August. The 40 Klan members who paraded in hooded robes and delivered racist speeches were outnumbered by roughly 300 counter-demonstrators. On 24 October, the New York Police Department denied Berry and his group a permit to hold a “white pride” rally in front of the Criminal Courts Building in Manhattan. Berry’s group successfully appealed the decision and eventually held the rally, but were barred from wearing their traditional masks. The dozen or so Klan members who attended were vastly outnumbered by an estimated 6,000 anti-Klan counter-demonstrators.

Minister Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black separatist Nation of Islam (NOI), kept a low profile for most of 1999. NOI claimed Farrakhan was on a “sabbatical,” undergoing radiation therapy to treat prostate cancer. Late in the year Farrakhan invited Jews of the extremist, anti-Zionist Neteurei Karta and members of some mainstream Muslim organizations to the NOI’s annual Saviour’s Day convention in February 2000. Despite Farrakhan’s toned-down rhetoric, Jewish organizations saw his outreach to Neturei Karta as an indication that his views had not truly changed.

Other black extremists formerly linked to Farrakhan continued to make anti-Semitic accusations publicly. In September, Khalid Muhammad and Malik Zulu Shabazz, both of whom have records of virulent anti-Semitism and racism (anti-white and anti-Catholic), organized another Million Youth March (MYM) in New York City. Although MYM organizers tried to emphasize that the purpose of the march was to empower and improve the lives of black youths, anti-Semitism and racism were a prominent part of their message. The march attracted only 2,000 people, compared with 6,000 in 1998; both figures were lower than the organizers had hoped.

ANTI-SEMITIC ACTIVITIES

Organized hate groups such as the various neo-Nazi organizations, KKK factions and “Identity” churches remain unremitting sources of anti-Jewish hostility. Smaller extremist and white supremacist groups operating Internet sites have succeeded in reaching an audience that is disproportionate to their size. While most anti-Semitic activity in the US is limited to hate propaganda, members of extremist organizations and their associates sometimes engage in threats, violence and vandalism. In 1999, there were several incidents of major anti-Semitic violence in which the alleged perpetrators had ties to organized hate groups.

Despite several incidents of extreme anti-Semitic violence, the total number of anti-Semitic incidents in 1999 fell. Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia reported 1,547 anti-Semitic incidents, marking a decrease of 64 incidents below the 1998 total. This represents a 4 percent decline in anti-Jewish activity, resuming the downward trend prior to 1998, which saw a 2.4 percent rise.

Anti-Semitic activity reported in 1999 consisted of acts of harassment (intimidation, threats and assaults) and vandalism (light property damage as well as arson, bombings and cemetery desecrations). As in the past, anti-Semitic acts of harassment, threats or assaults against Jewish individuals or institutions made up more than half of all anti-Jewish activity reported (56 percent), with a total of 868 incidents, down from 896 in 1998. Eighty-five percent of these incidents were directed against individuals, while Jewish institutions were the targets of the remainder. The most striking cases were the shootings during the summer by individuals in Chicago and Los Angeles, who targeted Jews, along with blacks and other minorities.

Acts of anti-Semitic vandalism showed a slight decline in 1999 after an increase in 1998. A total of 679 incidents of vandalism were recorded, compared with 715 in 1998 -- a decrease of 5 percent. Most incidents of anti-Jewish vandalism were directed against private property (40 percent) and public property (44 percent), while Jewish institutions were targets in the remaining 16 percent of acts of vandalism. The most disturbing example of the latter occurred in June, when arsonists with ties to white supremacist groups attacked three synagogues in the Sacramento, California area. The pre-dawn attacks on Congregation B’nai Israel, Congregation Beth Shalom and the Knesset Israel Torah Center caused more than $1 million in damages. A few days later, some 4,000 community activists, including the heads of leading Jewish organizations, gathered at a “Sacramento United Against Hate” rally to dedicate themselves to the fight against bigotry.

New York, the state with the largest Jewish population, once again recorded the highest number of anti-Semitic acts of any state. There were 352 such incidents in 1999, an increase of 8 percent over the previous year. California registered the second-highest rate of anti-Semitic activity with 275, a 19 percent increase over the year before. New Jersey was third, with 226 cases, a 1.3 percent decrease from the previous year. Ohio reported 22, a 37 percent decrease from 1998; Florida recorded 88 incidents, a 14 percent drop.

Residents of several communities around the country found the WCOTC propaganda pamphlet, Facts That the Government and the Media Don’t Want You to Know, also known as “The Facts,” on their front lawns, during the weekend of 20 February, The “Klassen Day blitz” leafleting was in honor of the birthday of WCOTC founder Ben Klassen.

Hate-rock music, designed to lure teenagers into extremist, racist and bigoted organizations, has become an increasingly disturbing form of propaganda. Resistance Records (see above) predict annual sales of hate music CDs to reach $1 million soon, while its website and companion publication Resistance Magazine also promote this music in band interviews, album reviews and easy order forms. In Resistance Magazine, National Alliance leader William Pierce, who owns the company, wrote that he hoped Resistance Records would become “the musical arm of the Aryan revolution.”

The exploitation of the Internet and World Wide Web by hatemongers and religious and racial extremists continued unabated in 1999, and the number of hate sites proliferated. Among the extremists with established hate sites were Don Black of Stormfront, David Duke and his newly-founded National Organization for European American Rights, William Pierce and his National Alliance, Tom Metzger and his White Aryan Resistance, the “Identity” church movement, Matt Hale and the WCOTC, neo-Nazi skinheads, “Aryan” women’s groups and several KKK chapters. Holocaust denial groups such as the Institute for Historical Review and the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust, as well as militia groups, also made their presence felt online.

Internet hate moved in several new directions in 1999. Many extremist sites, such as the WCOTC, Stormfront and skinhead groups began targeting youth. Organizations such as the National Alliance began creating misleading sites that mask racist propaganda as history and politics. The use of e-mail subscription lists and newsletters by extremists is also on the rise. So too is an ongoing pattern of hatemongers sending unsolicited e-mail messages containing propaganda and leading users to hate groups’ websites.

In February 2000, the ADL charged that Yahoo!, one of the United States’ most widely used Intercompanies, was violating its own rules -- which clearly prohibit transmitting content deemed “hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable” -- by allowing dozens of anti-Semitic and racist “clubs” to use its services during 1999 and early 2000. In Yahoo! Clubs, some of which had more than 100 listed users, white supremacists and racists were able to post messages to bulletin boards, chat in real time and plan events using online calendars. Some clubs were accessible by invitation only, enabling extremists to communicate in secret. More than a dozen of the clubs were grouped in the category “White Pride and Racialism,” including such notorious organizations as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and WCOTC. Yahoo! quickly responded with assurances that several of the offending clubs had been removed and that further corrective action would be taken.

Also in February, the eBay online auction site agreed to ban listings of items related to hate groups such as the KKK, neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations. The company had come under scrutiny the previous year for including Nazi-related items, such as a Nazi Stormfront flag and a set of stamps featuring Hitler’s profile. eBay promised to watch the site closely for unacceptable future postings.

The ADL report “Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online” deals with Internet bigotry, extremism and violence, including answers to common questions about related legal issues. The ADL Hate Filter, the first voluntary filter software, allows users the option of screening out hate sites and provides information about hate groups.

ATTITUDES TOWARD THE HOLOCAUST AND THE NAZI ERA

Since its inception in 1979, the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a California-based Holocaust denial organization founded by Willis Carto of Liberty Lobby, has promoted the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that Jews fabricated tales of their own genocide to manipulate the sympathies of the non-Jewish world. Although IHR broke with, and sued, Carto and the Liberty Lobby network in 1993 to its own financial detriment, it remains the world’s single most important outlet for Holocaust denial propaganda. IHR distributes books and propaganda materials such as the work The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. Anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial articles also appear in the organization’s publication, The Journal of Historical Review, which appears irregularly and contains mostly reprinted material.

Holocaust denier Bradley Smith and his Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) continued an aggressive advertising campaign of Holocaust denial directed at university newspapers across the country. Smith's latest tactic was to produce two versions of his publication The Revisionist: one for general readership, the other for college campuses. Smith attempted to have the 27-page publication inserted into campus publications. The Revisionist repeatedly denies that gas chambers ever existed and asserts that there was never a Nazi program of extermination directed at the Jewish people (and others deemed undesirables). While most campus newspapers rejected The Revisionist, two distributed it: The Chronicle of Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, in October, and The Arbiter of Boise State University in Boise, Idaho, in November. While there may be various explanations for their publication of the ad (inexperience, upholding freedom of speech, financial inducement ), it is unlikely that it will appear in The Chronicle next year because of the controversy it caused.

Smith also continued to submit his most recent quarter-page ad, which appeared in eight campus newspapers during the fall semester of 1999. The text of the ad is direct and blatant, in contrast to the more nuanced approach Smith has taken in recent years. As in previous ads, he also includes the Internet address of his website, which contains a massive online library of Holocaust denial and virulently anti-Semitic materials.

Holocaust restitution issues continued to unfold in 1999, as US and German negotiators reached an agreement on a $5.1 billion fund to compensate slave and forced laborers during the war. The breakthrough came after months of negotiations involving the German government, German industries and survivor representatives in the United States.

American Jewish organizations have been actively involved in the claims of Holocaust survivors and their families against European insurance companies and banks. In May, an agreement was reached with several European insurance companies to settle pre-World War II policies. The Bank of Austria announced an agreement with Jewish organizations in November, providing a $33 million compensation fund for Holocaust survivors whose wartime assets were seized by the largest Austrian banks. In addition, the Volcker Commission, also known as the Independent Committee of Eminent Persons, issued its much-anticipated audit of Swiss banks, at the end of a three-year investigation that identified 54,000 dormant accounts belonging to Holocaust victims. The committee, established through an agreement between the Swiss Bankers Association, the World Jewish Restitution Organization and the World Jewish Congress, was chaired by Paul A. Volcker, former chairman of the Board of Governors of the US Federal Reserve System (see also Switzerland).

In May 1998, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and United States President Bill Clinton agreed to set up a task force to promote international cooperation on Holocaust education, remembrance and research on the eve of the new millennium. Several European countries and Israel have since joined the task force, whose activities culminated in January 2000 in the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (see General Analysis).

RESPONSES TO RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

The spate of hate incidents during the summer of 1999 contributed to a heightened awareness of hate crimes and the onset of a national debate on the effectiveness of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in tracking hate groups in an effort to prevent violence. Attorney General Janet Reno vowed to broaden the FBI’s mandate to allow investigations of fringe groups that promote violence, and to enable the FBI to track hate on the Internet. Under current law, the FBI is barred from investigating hate groups unless an imminent threat is perceived.

Meanwhile, a public dialogue on the efficacy of hate crimes legislation took center stage, with President Bill Clinton and other prominent legislators pushing for stronger federal hate crimes legislation. In recent years, Congress has provided broad, bipartisan support for several federal initiatives to address hate crimes. These initiatives led to significant improvements in the criminal justice system’s response to bias-motivated crimes. The majority of states now have penalty-enhanced hate crime laws. Moreover, the Federal Hate Crime Statistics Act requires the Justice Department to acquire data on crimes which “manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity” from law enforcement agencies across the country and to publish an annual summary of its findings.

The Hate Crimes Prevention Act, designed to eliminate gaps in federal authority to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, was approved by the Senate in July but eventually stripped from a congressional appropriations bill by conservative lawmakers. The issue, however, remained high on the national agenda, with legislation promoted as an important factor in deterrence.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a civil action in court in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, against the white supremacist Aryan Nations. The suit alleges that a mother and son, who stopped near the entrance to the Aryan Nations compound when their car broke down, were terrorized and assaulted on the public road by members of the group’s security force. The suit seeks monetary damages, in addition to an injunction against the defendants.

In another major case of hate-inspired violence, all thresuspects in the murder of James Byrd Jr., an African-American who was dragged to death behind a truck in Jasper, Texas, in June 1998, were convicted of murder. John William King and Lawrence Russell Brewer, who allegedly committed the murder as a publicity stunt to launch their own fledgling hate group, were sentenced to death. Their accomplice, Shawn Berry, was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Chevie Kehoe, a notorious white supremacist, was charged for his part in leading an anti-government movement aimed at fomenting revolution and allowing for the establishment of a whites-only nation on US soil. He, his father, Kirby, and a third man, Daniel Lewis Lee, were accused of committing crimes partly to get cash and weapons to support the group, known as the Aryan Peoples Resistance. Upon their conviction in June on all charges, including murder, a jury sentenced Chevie Kehoe to life in prison and Lee to death by injection. Kirby Kehoe received a 44-month sentence.

In March 2000, the Williams brothers Benjamin Matthew and James Tyler were indicted on arson charges and charged with violating federal hate crime statutes in the 18 June 1999 attack on three Sacramento-area synagogues and in the 2 July arson at a medical center housing an abortion clinic. The brothers were already in custody when they were indicted, having been charged months earlier with the robbery and first-degree murder of a gay couple in Redding, California, in July 1999. Both brothers were found to have literature in their possession about the Christian “Identity” movement, the National Alliance and the WCOTC. Benjamin Williams reportedly claimed he took part in the synagogue arson as a way of proving his loyalty to an anti-Semitic organization he wished to join. He also said he shot the gay couple because their homosexuality violated God’s law. He made it clear that he would use his murder trial as a platform to express his anti-Semitic, anti-gay, white supremacist beliefs. Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty against both brothers for the murders.