Part III: A Personal Journey to Truth

[By Dr. Bill]

My phone call with Alfred Lilienthal only lasted about ten minutes. I never spoke with him again.  At the end of our conversation he asked me where I was located. He did say that if I wanted to visit in DC that would be fine, but failing that there was a man in New York City he wanted me to get in touch with. He gave me his name and number and asked me to wait a few days so he could give him a heads up that I would be calling.

A word about The Zionist Connection: I’m sure I don’t need to review on this blog the history covered in this book which starts at the end of the 19th century with Theodor Herzl and the First and subsequent Zionist Congresses; His Majesty’s governments Balfour Declaration which “approve(d) with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People, it being clearly understood blah blah blah; the Palestine Mandate period; Adolph Hitler and the Nazis, their genocide of European Jews which a half decade after its end came to be called The Holocaust, the founding of the State of Israel, the Nakba, the wars of the 60s and 70s or UN Resolution 3379. I'm sure those reading this are quite familiar with these facts of history. Lilienthal covered these topics while giving for that time, a fairly unique and minority perspective on them to western readers. This perspective was viewed as threatening to Zionists who were determined to control the narrative and that is why the attempt was made to suppress this book. Lilienthal knew it was going to happen because this wasn’t the first time - not for him and not for other anti zionist writers, especially Jewish anti-Zionists.

After a few days I contacted the man Lilienthal suggested, Rabbi Elmer Berger. I knew nothing about Rabbi Berger, and he was very nice to me when I called. He asked me to come visit him at his small office on the upper east side of Manhattan, so I did. Rabbi Berger was the executive director of a group called The American Council for Judaism which was made up of several prominent anti-Zionist Jews of the period, and was the only secular anti-Zionist Jewish organization of the time. The other prominent anti-Zionist Jewish group was a religious sect; the Satmar Hasidim.  The ACJ started to implode after the 1967 war, and by the time I met Berger it was defunct. The Satmar, of course are still going strong, and you always see some of their members at anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian rallies. Rabbi Berger was now basically running a one man operation, and putting out a newsletter under the heading “American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, Inc.” or AJAZ.

His office was located in a fairly nondescript professional medical building. There was a room with a secretary and the usual office equipment and another room which was a library.  The library was unadorned; it was a wall of books on all sides. I was given open access to the books with the simple request that I return them in a timely manner and take good care of them; which of course I did. None of the books which I donated to Making Mensches came from his personal collection. The Strand Bookstore, which thankfully still exists near Broadway below 14th St, had a marvelous stack collection, in which I had found most of them. Many of them are even more informative of the history than Lilienthal’s books, and are wonderful for those of us who love that discipline. But it is certainly not necessary to learn all the details, to ascertain right from wrong.  A five year old understands right from wrong.

I met with Rabbi Berger about three times. The last time I met with him he told me this: “Now that you know the truth, you need to keep it to yourself. If you go public and start making waves they will get to you and try to destroy your practice and you personally.”  My obvious question was who is “they”.  They were the network of Zionist organizations and even some Israeli operatives whose task it was to suppress dissenting views and those promulgating those opinions. This had been going on for years. 

One of the members of the ACJ was a man named Moshe Menuhin. He was in one of the early Aliyahs of Jewish settlers to Palestine as a young man. In the late 50s or early 60s he published a polemic entitled, “The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time”. I once had a copy of it.  It was very personal, certainly biased and angrily written. It was filled with anecdotes of the treatment of the native inhabitants of Palestine by the Jewish settlers (the Yishuv). He was also the father of world renowned concert violinist Yehudi Menuhin. He had to take pains to publicly state that his son did not share his views (a claim which was never confirmed or refuted - Yehudi kept his opinions close to the vest, as Dr. Berger had advised me) and to please leave him and his concert career alone.

Another person whose career was constantly attacked for his views and for his published books was and still is Professor Norman Finkelstein. All of his works are worth reading.

Lastly was a man whom the media at first brought out because of not only his brilliance but also his eloquence, for the rare times they needed a pro-Palestinian viewpoint on TV. That man was Edward W. Said of Columbia University. He was so well spoken that he made the Zionists nervous. After a time he was replaced on TV by a very kind man who was not as well versed and had a very heavy Arabic accent. He was much better for the media biased executives as he fitted the intended perceived stereotype to a tee.

About three years after meeting Rabbi Berger, he moved to Florida. I never corresponded with him again. I heeded what he told me, and I never made my views public during that time. My practice and my family were growing. We now had two young sons. Family and income were my first priorities…

Part IV available next week!