When someone lifts his hand, the saying goes, "the Jew lifts his feet." Despite the centuries of Eastern Europe's pogroms and the ultimate horror of Hitler's death pits, the sad, self-deprecating humor persists. But for a small, growing number of New York Jews, the cultural heritage of flight or passivity is being angrily, even bitterly rejected. Especially among the young, the poor and the Orthodox in the marginal neighborhoods of the city, TIME Correspondent Leonard Levitt found a new theme emerging: "We are not going to turn the other cheek. We are not going to take it any more. Sitting back and being passive only leads to Auschwitz." Here is his report:
THE karate class has a special problem: the students' yarmulkes keep falling off. But the pupils persist. Thirty of them have come from all parts of the city to the gym of the Williamsburg Young Men's Hebrew Association, once a breeding ground for that special brand of New York basketball played by short, quick young men. Now the basketball players are at one end of the gym; at the other is the white-robed karate class arranged in five rows of six abreast. Black Belt Teacher Alex Sternberg stalks the rows, suddenly lashing out in instructive attempts to knock his students down. He is small and wiry; he wears sunglasses even in the gym, and they add a sinister quality to his sudden thrusts. He lunges twice, quickly: "Never forget, first to the body and then to the head." The yarmulkes fall, but the lesson goes on. It is an odd avocation for a nice Jewish boy who is studying political science at Kingsborough Community College, but stranger still is his calmly stated explanation: "I teach karate not for sport but for the street. I want my students to be able to kill, so that if a Jew is ever attacked, that attacker will never come near him again."
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Such declarations have come to be expected from the Jewish Defense League, of which Sternberg is a member. The small paramilitary group—the organizational and in some ways cultural equivalent of the Black Panthers—has long since proved it does not mean to rest at rhetoric (TIME, July 4, 1969). Recently league members battled New York City police while besieging the Soviet Union's U.N. mission. Many other Jews strongly disapprove of its activities, and indeed of its very existence. Still, the new Jewish militancy, born in the enclaves of Brooklyn and Manhattan's Lower East Side, now extends to some middle-class businessmen, rabbis in non-Orthodox synagogues, and even upper-middle-class suburbanites on Long Island. At nationally known Yeshiva University, a young doctoral candidate is training 100 students in karate so that they can go out as karate teachers themselves. A dozen karate clubs are already in existence at Jewish day schools, and even in private homes.