Excerpt:
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Dr. Charles Jacobs, a columnist for the Boston Jewish Advocate who is concerned about the failure of leadership in America and in the Jewish community to deal with anti-Semitism. He has done a series exposing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for failing to deal with Islamic anti-Semitism. He's been widely published, including in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Jerusalem Post, and the Encyclopedia Britannica. He has appeared on local and national television and radio, including NBC, CBS, NPR, CNN and PBS. He received his doctoral degree in social policy from Harvard. In 2007, he was named by the Forward newspaper as one of America 's 50 top Jewish leaders.
FP: Dr. Charles Jacobs, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Tell us about the series you are doing on the ADL and its failure to deal with Islamic anti-Semitism. What have you discovered?
Jacobs: Thanks, Jamie. Let me provide some context. The Jewish community has come under siege. We have had a wonderful 50 years after the end of WWII but the world has changed and unfortunately some of our leaders seem not to have recognized this. Given our small size and our sizeable foes, the Jewish community has always valued unity. Unity is important, but I reluctantly decided to become critical of some of our leaders because of the seriousness and urgency of the current situation.
A few months back, I decided to break what is in effect a gentlemen's agreement among Jewish leaders not to criticize each other in public. At the end of an op-ed about Wafa Sultan, the courageous Muslim reformer who risks her life daily to fight real threats posed by Islamists to us all, I chided ADL for its relative silence on this, the greatest threat to Jews today. When Abe Foxman responded with a letter to my home town Jewish paper attacking me, I began a series of articles on the ADL's failure, and I proposed a list of key principles for beginning a serious effort against Islamic anti-Semitism.