Just when you thought things couldn’t get any messier over at the Center for Jewish History, a New York Times columnist who was invited to speak at an event there has unleashed a barrage of verbal attacks on Israel.




The columnist, Roger Cohen, was invited to deliver this year’s Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture. The Leo Baeck Institute is one of six Jewish organizations that operate from the Center for Jewish History building. I did not attend Mr. Cohen’s lecture Oct. 15. But in a pre-lecture interview with the Baeck Institute’s newsletter, LBI News, Cohen violently lashed out at Israel.

“Somehow,” he declared, “the Jews, who were for millennia humiliated and excluded in the diaspora, now find themselves in a semi-colonial situation in which they subject the Palestinian people to much of what we once suffered.”

“Much of what we suffered?” Gas chambers? Pogroms? Ghettoes? Inquisitions? Which of these, exactly, does Cohen think Israel has used against the Palestinians?

He didn’t stop there. Cohen proceeded to declare, “Lawlessness prevails in the settlements.” Another blatant lie. Anybody who is familiar with the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria knows “lawlessness” is an absurd and outrageously false description. Those communities are legal, and the overwhelming majority of their residents are peaceful, law-abiding citizens.

Cohen continued, “The settlers vote as citizens of Israel while the millions around them cannot vote.” Utterly false. Of course the Palestinian Arabs can vote, and they do vote—when Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas lets them.

Just five months ago, on May 13, 2017, hundreds of thousands of supposedly “disenfranchised” Palestinians went to 461 polling stations, and chose the members of the 391 municipal and village councils in the PA-controlled portions of Judea and Samaria. A total of 3,489 council members were elected. But I guess Roger Cohen wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy accusing Israel of denying Palestinians the right to vote.

Of course, it’s not as if the Leo Baeck Institute didn’t know what it was getting into when it chose Cohen as its speaker. He has been an outspoken critic of Israel for a very long time. In his column from Feb. 10, 2014, he accused the Israelis of “keep[ing] their boots on the heads of the Palestinians.” In his column from Jan. 28, 2016, Cohen urged businesses around the world to take action to force Israel to “cease settlement-related activities”—in other words, to boycott Israel. And who can forget his series of articles in 2009 whitewashing anti-Semitism in Iran?

I find it hard to believe that the leaders of the Leo Baeck Institute were not aware of Cohen’s record before they selected him as their speaker. But whether or not they knew of his attacks on Israel in the past, why did they consider it necessary to circulate his latest attacks on Israel, in their newsletter? Why publicize and legitimize his anti-Israel tirades?

A similar question was raised recently when it was revealed that another institution at the Center for Jewish History, the American Jewish Historical Society, was planning a Balfour Declaration event featuring speakers from the anti-Zionist “Jewish Voice for Peace” group.

I am not assuming that the controversial new president of the Center for Jewish History, David N. Myers, is to blame for the activities of either the American Jewish Historical Society or the Leo Baeck Institute. They are autonomous organizations that make their own programming and publishing decisions.