The Anti-Defamation League's National Director is Crazy Like a Foxman

Lenni Brenner. AET White Paper, 13 pp., $2.50.

Reviewed by Edwin Krales

As a self-appointed Jewish defense organization, the Anti-Defamation League has a problem: Anti-Semitism is declining. Abraham Foxman's solution is to pretend it isn't.

In 1994 he published an article, "Holocaust Denial: The Growing Danger," warning us about Holocaust revisionist loons who are read by hardly anyone. Once into reality denial, Foxman went on to find that "Another aspect of Holocaust 'revisionist' thinking can be found on the radical left...Lenni Brenner...asserts that there was a close link between elements of the Zionist movement and the Nazi party...and that they had proposed an alliance with Nazi Germany."

This pamphlet is Brenner's reply. He shows that the ADL knew that he is implacably hostile to the revisionists, and he proves his own charges against the Hitler-era Zionists. Readers of Brenner's Zionism in the Age of the Dictators will be familiar with some of the present documentation, but there are new Zionist curios as well. Here is Yitzhak Shamir's 1994 clean-up for his Stern Gang's mad proposal to ally with Hitler: "It must be remembered that all this was in 1940 and 1941—when it was reasonable to feel that there was little for Jews to chose from between the Germans and the British."

Brenner loves quoting his critics admitting his charges. Robert Wistrich of Hebrew University confesses that "one can make a reasonable case that Zionists did not fight anti-Semitism before 1939 with the appropriate vigor, that some Zionists favored the principle of racial separateness, and that others wanted to develop a 'special relationship' with the Nazis for opportunistic or other reasons."

Brenner puts the attack on him into its proper context, the ADL's right-wing history. It never fought Nazism. Here is the B'nai B'rith, its parent, in 1933: "With the Hitler government threatening reprisals against Jews...discretion is the better part of valor."

The Senate repudiated Joe McCarthy in 1954, but according to the ADL's attorney, Arnold Forster, "It was not until 1956...that we openly attacked McCarthy." In fact, Brenner proves, the ADL secretly collaborated with the McCarthy-era witch hunt.

Don't you know that affirmative action is Nazism? Brenner quotes Foxman's predecessor as national director: "Quotas in favor of one group, by definition, means quotas against another group. That's the very essence of the Nuremberg laws."

Brenner isn't the first libeled by these screwballs. Here are Forster and Ben Epstein protecting the Jews against other anti-Semites: "Film cartoons—like the X-rated Fritz the Cat which...had a tasteless synagogue sequence...contributed to the atmosphere of anti-Jewish denigration, along with...Woody Allen's Everything You've Always Wanted to Know About Sex."

The author closes by asking us to help "expose these incurable frauds" by circulating his pamphlet. Let's do so. It is factual and even funny, thanks to the ADL's inanities and Brenner's caustic style, and deserves the widest readership.

Edwin Krales is a long-time pro-Palestinian activist.