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October 4, 2002
Echoes of bitter quarrel remain
Book examines relationship of the United Church to the Jewish
community.
ARNOLD AGES SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Several pages of the book referred to in this article mention
research that this columnist carried out in the early 1970s under
the auspices of the B'nai B'rith League for Human Rights (the Canadian
arm of the B'nai B'rith anti-Defamation League). The research in
question was executed by the reviewer and then critiqued and edited
both by him and by Sol Littman, who was then the director of the
League for Human Rights in Toronto.
Haim Genizi, professor of history at Israel's Bar Ilan University,
has expertly and dispassionately analyzed and documented one of
the most painful episodes in the history of Jewish-Christian relations
in Canada in his new study The Holocaust, Israel and the Canadian
Protestant Churches, published by Queen's-McGill University
Press.
By meticulously scouring the archival records of the United Church
of Canada and its major publication, the United Church Observer,
and by personally interviewing scores of people involved in the
controversy over the perceived bias of the Protestant churches in
Canada against Israel, Genizi succeeds in piecing together a composite
portrait of the Canadian Jewish community locked in a bitter polemic
with the largest Protestant group in Canada.
Genizi is objective – almost to a fault – in presenting
the origins and evolution of the quarrel that pitted spokespeople
from B'nai B'rith, the Canadian Jewish Congress and individual Canadian
Jewish leaders against the editor of the United Church Observer
and various moderators of the United Church of Canada.
The controversy was ignited and developed into a firestorm after
Israel's victory in 1967. Genizi shows, of course, that the seeds
of hostility between the Canadian Jewish community and the mainstream
Protestant churches began before and during the Holocaust and were
subsequently irrigated by an anti-Zionism that focused on the plight
of the Palestinian refugees.
While the author deals with several other Protestant churches in
Canada (Baptist, evangelical and Anglican) he reserves most of his
critical acumen for presenting the views of the United Church of
Canada, the most widespread, geographically speaking, of the Canadian
church groups.
Genizi examines – with regards to attitudes towards Jews, Judaism,
the Holocaust, Zionism and the state of Israel – the contents
of the United Church Observer and its predecessor from the
pre-Second World War period through the Holocaust to the creation
of Israel. He also tracks the relevant various speeches, statements
and interviews involving United Church representatives during the
same period.
The research reveals that the United Church was occasionally sympathetic,
sometimes ambivalent and often hostile to the Jewish interests,
particularly with regard to Israel and the Arab refugees. The United
Church, it is fair to say, never devoted the same concern for Jewish
refugees before and after the Holocaust as it has for the plight
of the Palestinian refugees.
While there was a consistent undercurrent of anti-Israel sentiment
in the hierarchy of the United Church, it really did not become
an issue for the Canadian Jewish community until after 1967, when
the United Church Observer, under the editorship of A.L.
Forrest, became the single most powerful purveyor of anti-Zionist
journalism in Canada.
It was not only the Observer's anti-Zionism that troubled
the Canadian Jewish community, it was the belief that the editor
was using the imagery and rhetoric of classical anti-Semitic language
in condemning Israel and promoting the cause of the Palestinian
refugees.
Forrest, an able and astute journalist, denied the charges and refused
to knuckle under the pressure of his Jewish critics, arguing that
his church's commitment to human rights could not permit him to
exclude the suffering of Arab refugees. Forrest's determination
to press the latter issue and his continued use of language that
some in the Jewish community deemed to be insensitive towards Jews
at the least and anti-Semitic at the worst, brought the intervention
of leading Toronto area rabbis, professors, clergymen and journalists.
The battle against Forrest and the United Church made regular headlines
in the Canadian press. Charges of anti-Semitism were hurled against
Forrest and were responded to by libel suits. Cooler heads on both
sides tried to intercede and bring down the decibel level of the
controversy.
Forrest was not intimidated by pressure and accusations from diverse
quarters and he continued to use the pages of the United Church
Observer to present a unidimensional picture of the Middle East
in which Israel was depicted as the devil's own experiment station
on earth. One of Forrest's favorite techniques was publishing articles
critical of Israel by Israeli personalities such as Prof. Israel
Shahak.
One of the anomalies in the whole controversy was the role of a
prominent Conservative rabbi and one-time Zionist leader, who tried
to act as a peace-maker by putting the best construction possible
on Forrest's rhetoric: he was, it was said, perhaps insensitive
towards Jews and insufficiently tutored in the travail of modern
Jewish history but he was not really an anti-Semite.
One of the interesting stylistic aspects of the quarrel pivoted
on the question of whether one can make a distinction between the
use of anti-Semitic language and the user of that language. For
this writer, this has always been a distinction without a difference.
Today, the United Church Observer no longer obsesses about
the evils of Zionism and the state of Israel. The magazine's policy
changed dramatically after the death of Forrest in the late 1970s.
But his memory and legacy apparently live on and Genizi will perhaps
be surprised to learn that Forrest's friends have induced the University
of Waterloo in Ontario to offer an annual A.L. Forrest prize for
the best essay on humanitarian issues.
No comment.
Arnold Ages, a professor of French language and literature
at the University of Waterloo, specializes in modern intellectual
history.
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