Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 8 January 2003 — Page 17

January 8. 2003 NA T13

About Books The Florida sun beckons

By JACK FISCHEL After 38 years of teaching at Millersville University, I'm retiring. Although I will continue to run our annual Holocaust

conference, which is the oldest academic-based one in the nation, I will be spending a few months of the year in sunny

By MORTON I. TEICHER Them. By Jon Ronson. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.330 pages. $24 This somewhat disjointed narrative recounts British journalist Ronson's five-year journey into the fringe world of extremists, fundamentalists, white supremacists, Islamic militants and neo-Nazis. He was usually open about being a Jew himself, even though this sometimes put him at considerable risk, since antiSemitism was intrinsic to most of these hate-mongers. Also common to them is their belief that there is a cabal of secret and shadowy rulers of the world who are determined to establish the New World Order that will enable them to exercise global dominion. Ronson set out to find the "secret room" from which this small band of conspirators, known as the Bilderberg Group, is reputed to control the course of events in every part of the planet. Ronson's book is a kind of travel diary, setting forth his experiences as he traveled extensively to profile the leaders of the extremist groups. He writes about his adventures with ironic humor, satirizing the characters he meets. While this may make them objects of ridicule, it risks diminishing the threat they lay down, especially after September 11 made

Fort Lauderdale, Florida. This is by way of alerting my readers that after 10 years of writing this column without missing a deadline, I will be taking a three-month vacation. This, therefore, will be the last column that will appear in the jewish Pott & Opinion until mid-April. Now, back to work. Number 10 on The New York Times best seller list is The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germain/, 1941-1945, by Michael Beschloss. A section of this favorably reviewed book deals with the failure of the Roosevelt administration to bomb Auschwitz. President

us painfully aware of the awesome power possessed by terrorists. This danger is particularly evident in Ronson's opening chapter, devoted to Omar Bakri Mohammed, a radical Islamic fundamentalist who is Osama bin Laden's friend in England. Ronson portrays him as a pathetic buffoon, thus downplaying and disparaging the substantial peril that he and his fanatic followers pose to Great Britain and, specifically, to British Jews. In his effort to understand the extremists, Ronson presents a sympathetic portrait of Randy Weaver and his daughter, Rachel, survivors of what came to be known as "the siege of Ruby Ridge." Rachel's mother, her brother, and a U.S. marshal were killed there. The Weavers wanted to isolate themselves from "Zionist international bankers" and built a cabin in a lonely part of Idaho, not far from the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi, racist group who wore swastika armbands. When the marshals tried to arrest Randy on a shotgun charge, he fired on them, and hundreds of troops then surrounded the cabin with tragic results. By contrast to his rather tender feelings for the Weavers, Ronson depicts the Anti-Defa-mation League as over-zealous in labeling individuals and

Roosevelt does not come off too well in regard to his concern about saving European Jewry. (Simon & Schuster, $26.95) Osama bin Laden biographer Yossef Bodansky's controversial new book is The High Cost of Peace. Bodansky details Arafat's involvement in terrorism, which he says, "has been calculated to draw Israel into an on-again, off-again war that it cannot win." He believes that Arafat's goal is to destroy Israel in a phased plan. (Prima, $27.95) A different view of the Middle East is provided by Shibley Telhami in his The

groups as anti-Semitic. In the same vein, Ronson makes light of the efforts by Jews to deal with a little-known antiSemite, David Icke, who wanted to spew his hateful ideas in Vancouver. Two chapters are devoted to rival claimants for leadership of the Ku Klux Klan, who disparage each other and who are depicted by Ronson as inept and ineffectual. A visit to Hollywood to learn whether Jews promote their own interests through the movies results in a clever quotation from Philip Roth, who perceived Irving Berlin as a genius because he made Christian holidays acceptable to Jews when he composed "Easter Parade," converting Easter into a statement about fashion, and "White Christmas," making Christmas a statement about the weather. Beyond that, Ronson discovered that Jews in the film industry are not in favor of proJewish movies. Almost as though he is determined to demonstrate how far he traveled in his indomitable decision to track down extremists, Ronson went to West Africa to meet Ian Paisley, a resolute Protestant leader in Northern Ireland who is fiercely anti-Catholic. Why he didn’t meet him in Belfast is unclear. What is clear is Ronson's success in degrading

Stakes: America and the Middle East : The Consequences of Power and the Choice for Peace. The author teaches political science at the University of Maryland and is frequently seen on CNN as a commentator on Middle East affairs. He contends that the United States could defeat Osama bin Laden and even Iraq but still not eliminate the Islamic terrorist threat. Among his many suggestions is that the United States should become more even-handed in its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So what else is new. (Westview, $24). Shalom.

Paisley by deadpan reporting of his activities and words. For some obscure reason that is evidence of its disjointedness, the book includes a chapter about an auction in Romania where former dictator Ceausescu's belongings are being sold. Most of them are bought by a mysterious Mr. Ru Ru, a friend of Idi Amin, the Ugandan tyrant. Ronson tries to relate his visit to Romania to his search for the Bilderberg Group, but he fails to make a connection. Finally, the book concludes with a hilarious account of Ronson's crashing of the Bohemian Grove meeting in California, where political leaders and corporate executives assemble each year supposedly to decide the fate of the world. They also perform a strange pagan owl ritual and urinate against the redwood trees, even though there are plenty of toilets. This tongue-in-cheek, lighthearted presentation tends to minimize the menace of extremist groups. Ronson jocularly strives to amuse us about what surely is no laughing matter. Dr. Morton I. Teicher is the Founding Dean of the Wurzweiler School of Social Work, Yeshiva University and Dean Emeritus, School of Social Work, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ages Continued from prev. page others in the nation, was a far more gracious gesture than what accompanied the Jewish experience in Germany. There, the insistence on purity of blood and the emphasis on the folk element excluded Jews from the fullness of German belonging, no matter what legal rights Jews eventually obtained in that country. In the case of the United States and its treatment of the relatively small Jewish community in the 18 lh century, Jaher succeeds in showing the nuances that permitted the Jewish integration into American society in a way that was more harmonious than in France. French Jews were invited to join the French nation as truly equal citizens, but they were also asked, politely, to reserve their religious obligations and functions for the private domain. Religion was fine but to be observed discreetly and in private. Jaher cites in the American paradigm a much healthier attitude where Jews were also invited to participate fully as equal citizens of the Republic but without jettisoning their public profession of faith. In fact, one of the signers of the American Declaration of Independence, Francis Hopkinson, celebrated the phenomenon of clergymen of all faith, including rabbis, marching together in the procession in Philadelphia celebrating the declaration. There is another dimension to this question which Jaher could have addressed. In the vote in the Assembly in France on Jewish emancipation in 1793, 43 percent of the delegates voted against the bill. Thus it passed by a majority of 57 percent. One could argue quite plausibly that the 43 percent minority continued in France to militate against Jews ever since that vote. In the Dreyfus affair, the Vichy government, the Poujadist reaction, the Le Pen leadership, and the current Chirac government the voice of that 43 percent can be heard in the dark echoes of anti-Semitism. This observation detracts in no way from the freshness and originality of Jaher's well written and well argued explanation of the way in which the fate of Jews expressed itself in France and the United States. This is a work of unimpeachable and imaginative scholarship.

Book Reviews No laughing matter