Michael Oren and I were born within a few months of one another 60 years ago and we both grew up in privileged east coast communities, but our Jewish-American experiences were entirely different. “I often encountered hatred,” he writes in his new memoir. I rarely did. In the spring of 1970, I was scraping money together to see Jimi Hendrix, but Oren was scrimping for a far bolder purpose than I or any of my friends was capable of: going overseas all on his own. At 15, he went to Israel and fell in love with the country.
Then he came home and something terrible happened that confirmed his understanding of America: his synagogue got bombed.
In relating the story in Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, the former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. makes New Jersey seem like the Ukraine during the pogroms:
The only Jewish kid on the block, I rarely made it off the school bus without being ambushed by Jew-baiting bullies. Those fistfights left my knuckles lined with scars. One morning, my family awoke to find our front door smeared with racist slogans; one night our car’s windshield was smashed. Then, when I was a high school freshman, the phone rang with horrendous news: a bomb had blown up our synagogue. I ran to the scene and saw firemen leaping into the flames to rescue the Torah scrolls. The next day, our rabbi stood with Christian clergymen and led us in singing, We Shall Overcome.” But no display of brotherhood could salve the pain.
Oren’s account leaped out as bizarre when I read it; that wasn’t the country I grew up in. So I looked into the bombing of the West Orange Jewish Center on April 18, 1971, and discovered that Oren leaves out the most important fact about the bombing, which you can see in the Daily News headline above: it was linked to an appearance at the synagogue of the Jewish extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane that was cancelled and rescheduled amid controversy.
In fact, Kahane himself was linked to several bombings the same year, and was convicted of making illegal explosives just three months later.
Oren leaves all of that out. It doesn’t fit his narrative: that the United States was unsafe for Jews: “anti-Semitism was a constant.”
Four past presidents of the synagogue (later renamed B’nai Shalom) all told me that the 12:30 AM bombing, for which no one was ever charged, was connected to Kahane’s appearance at the synagogue the following night– an appearance that by one account had been cancelled days before amid controversy over the lightning-rod figure, and that was ultimately held two weeks later. “That was what it was all about,” says Paul Kurland. “It really had nothing to do with our synagogue. It was because Kahane was supposed to speak there the following night. There was no reason to bomb our synagogue. We were just a suburban synagogue.”
The four past synagogue presidents all ascribe the bombing to anti-Semitism, as Oren does. But even if the bomber was someone who hated Jews, Oren’s account lies by omission. He presents the bombing as anti-Jewish terrorism without stating the involvement of a notorious Jewish terrorist.
In recent years, Oren has even attributed the bombing to the Ku Klux Klan. But the late rabbi of the synagogue specifically ruled out the KKK as the culprit at the time. And the former presidents of the synagogue dismissed the idea in my interviews.
Minor details in Oren’s account are inaccurate. There were no flames, for instance; two synagogue presidents who were in the synagogue that night say there was no fire, and newspaper accounts say as much too. The sanctuary was damaged, but the ark was never in danger, Irving Kerzner, a former synagogue president, told me. The late president Murray Gottlieb was said to have moved the Torahs with firefighters.
Such discrepancies in a 44-year-old memory are entirely understandable. But Oren’s omission of Kahane is inexcusable for a political historian. He is simply misrepresenting the American scene of the attack– just as two other writers have now charged him with concocting an assertion about President Obama’s insult to Israel and trying to “twist reality” of US foreign policy.
Meir Kahane admitted being responsible for several bombings in that period. His targets were largely Soviet ones, such as a Soviet mission and a Soviet trade organization; he was applying pressure to compel the former Soviet Union to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel. Three days after the synagogue bombing, Meir Kahane was charged with rioting in New York in a scuffle involving police officers outside the United Nations. Eight months after the West Orange Jewish Center bombing, Kahane played a part in the smoke-bombing of Jewish impresarioSol Hurok’s offices in New York, because Hurok promoted Russian acts. A woman died in that attack.
I am not alleging that Kahane carried out the West Orange bombing. I have no idea; though the police description of the bombing as a professional job aimed strictly at property damage and the issue of the speech’s cancellation raise an eyebrow. The synagogue presidents all say the bombing was anti-Semitic. “I don’t think anyone ever thought it was anybody Jewish. It was a given that it was anti-Semitic,” Paul Kurland says. “There were always threats to anyone who hosted Kahane as a speaker. It was a thing at the time. No one was terribly surprised.”
News accounts all highlighted Kahane’s appearance as a cause. The Jewish Telegraphic
The blast… was touched off the night that JDL national chairman Rabbi Meir Kahane had been scheduled to address a meeting at the building. According to the synagogue’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Harold Mozeson, several placards had been pasted in the town announcing the JDL leader’s appearance on the night of the explosion. The date however, Rabbi Mozeson stated, had been changed to May 2 and the posters were not corrected. Although Rabbi Mozeson declined to link the blast with Rabbi Kahane’s appearance, he did note that it was a “strange coincidence.” He disclosed that he and his congregants had agreed at a meeting yesterday afternoon that “Rabbi Kahane’s invitation for May 2 still stands,” and that the congregants weren’t “going to make our decision subject to this kind of hooliganism.” He dismissed the possibility that members of the Ku Klux Klan, who have stirred up trouble in Highstown, N.J., were involved in the bombing. Rabbi Mozeson told the JTA that Rabbi Kahane’s appearance would be the first in this North Jersey town, although he had addressed a meeting in a neighboring community, Livingston, without incident.
Newspapers differ on an important detail: Was Kahane’s appearance canceled before or after the bombing? The Daily News said the speech was canceled after the bombing:
While police were trying to determine a motive for the blast, it was learned that Rabbi Meir Kahane, head of the Jewish Defense League in New York, was scheduled to address the men’s club at 8 o’clock last night [April 18]. Because of the blast, the speech was canceled.
It was reported that there was a large demand for tickets for Kahane’s talk and that emotions were running high over his appearance.
But the Newark Evening News reported that the speech was canceled before the bombing.
The bombing occurred the night before Rabbi Meir Kahane… was scheduled to speak. Kahane, however, had canceled the engagement more than a week ago. Police said no bomb threats had been called in.
“We aren’t going to make our decision subject to this kind of hooliganism,” Rabbi Harold Mozeson, leader of the center, said. “We decided that Rabbi Kahane’s new invitation for May 2 still stands.”
Kahane– who was killed 19 years later in New York, allegedly by an Egyptian-American– himself describes the bombing in his 1975 book The Story of the Jewish Defense League, in a chapter describing his burgeoning popularity in 1971, taking on the “Jewish Establishment:”
[T]o the dismay of the Jewish Establishment, every appearance of mine or of another JDL speaker produced astoundingly positive results as Jews were able to hear for themselves the JDL philosophy and were astonished to see a totally different picture than the one they had been given by their Jewish groups and the news media.
Invitations for me to speak came from all over the country, and everywhere I spoke to packed halls. On my first trip to California [in early April 1971] the reaction was truly incredible. The rush to hear JDL speak was so great that not even the bombing of the Jewish Center of West Orange, New Jersey, could stop my speaking. On the night of April 18, 1971, a bomb blast ripped the synagogue where I was due to speak the following night… The talk was rescheduled and I spoke to a packed synagogue….
Former synagogue president Arthur Maron says that Kahane’s speech took place at the synagogue’s cultural hall and was a rousing success. “He was outstanding. He started the first Jewish Defense League after centuries. Remember this was a time when Jews were supposed to keep quiet, don’t make waves. That was the tradition. Kahane said, Oh no, we’re not going to stay still for this.”
Michael Oren never mentions Meir Kahane in his book. On other occasions Oren has blamed the Ku Klux Klan for the bombing.
In February 2013, then-ambassador Oren gave a speech at his old high school. TAPinto.net, a website serving North Jersey covered his return to West Orange High School, and Cynthia Cumming reported:
The second life changing event he described [in addition to meeting Yitzhak Rabin that year] was the bombing of the Jewish Center of West Orange (now B’Nai Shalom) by the Klu Klux Klan in March of 1972. He said he would never forget the image of a rabbi, priest, and Protestant minister walking hand in hand along Pleasant Valley Way and singing “We Shall Overcome.”
A month later, Oren told the story of the bombing to Jenna Portnoy of the Star Ledger in Washington, and again implicated the Ku Klux Klan:
On April 18, 1971, a bomb ripped through the Jewish Center of West Orange, known today as B’Nai Shalom, and it was initially blamed on the Ku Klux Klan. Firefighters, though not likely Jewish, leaped into the flames to rescue the Torah scrolls, he said.
“I can close my eyes and see that today,” he said. The next day, a priest, a rabbi and a minister held hands and walked from the high school to the synagogue, singing, “If We Only Had Love.”
“Can you imagine what this was for a 15-year-old kid? I get very choked up when I think about it,” he said, his eyes reddening.
“No fire was seen after the explosion,” the Newark Evening News reported that day. As for the KKK, Arthur Maron says:
“I would not say the KKK. That never occurred to us. I don’t know of anyone who would link them. Anti-Semitism? Of course. What else would I think. We all assumed it was anti-Semitism.”
I wrote to Random House publicity seeking to ask Oren about the bombing incident. I did not get a response. When Ron Kampeas raised another factual issue with the book, he approached the publisher and Oren’s “aides,” and: “I got a one-sentence reply from the publisher: ‘Penguin Random House does not comment on its editorial and vetting processes.’”
The larger issue here is not about Meir Kahane or a synagogue bombing 44 years ago. It is about whether America was the kind of place where a 15-year-old Jew could imagine his life unfolding back in 1971. For me and so many others, the answer was Yes. Michael Oren reached a different conclusion. Now he is misrepresenting history to try to convince a reader, or himself, of the wisdom of that choice.
Thanks to James North, Adam Horowitz and Peter Feld.
