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DAILY SHVITZ
ADL Regional Director Fired For Challenging Foxman On Armenian Genocide
by Joey Kurtzman, August 18, 2007
9 comments
TAGS:

Unbelievable! Remember Andrew Tarsy, the ADL regional director for New England who was booed out of the Watertown City Council for defending the ADL's Ahmadinejad-esque position that it can neither confirm nor deny an Armenian Genocide took place?

Well, the Boston Globe reported today that at an emergency meeting Tarsy and the rest of his regional board voted to break ranks with the national office of the ADL.

"I strongly disagree with ADL's national position," Tarsy said in an interview with the Globe, declining to explain his change of stance. "It's my strong hope that we'll be able to move forward in a relationship with the Armenian community and the community in general."

Then, twenty minutes ago, the Globe confirmed what a commenter said several hours ago in the comment thread to our petition: Andrew Tarsy has been fired.


Other details:

Tarsy, 38, said he had been struggling with the national position for weeks and finally told Foxman in a phone conversation Thursday that he found the ADL's stance "morally indefensible."

The regional board's executive committee backed Tarsy and, according to a source familiar with the discussion, even went a step further, resolving to support legislation now pending before Congress to acknowledge the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians during the World War I era as genocide.

The regional board's willingness to support the Congressional resolution is auspicious news, bringing them into line not just with Jewcy's more modest demand to acknowledge the genocide, but also with the demands of Armenian-American activists at the website No Place for Genocide Denial.

Will the national ADL under Foxman have the courage to admit it's made a terrible mistake, and reverse course? No sign of that yet:

The national ADL leaders also said employees who do not agree with the ADL's position should not differ pubicly, but should resign.

But things are getting very interesting. Call me a Polyanna, but my Spidey Sense tells me that this is going to end with Abraham Foxman's resignation.


Joey Kurtzman was president of Jewcy Partners, LLC, and co-founding editor of Jewcy.com. Prior to joining Jewcy he was an on-air contributor to Ireland's political and cultural radio program, The Wide Angle.

He lives in Los Angeles with


More...
9 comments | leave a comment

Paul

08/18/07 5:12 am

Wow

No other way to put it. Just wow. This is really getting out of control. This went from being a small blip on the Watertown radar a few weeks ago to a maelstrom threatening to rip the ADL apart! Meanwhile Andy Tarsy goes from being booed at a Watertown town meeting on Tuesday for refusing to acknowledge the genocide to being a sacrificial lamb to the cause of genocide recognition! It's enough to give one whiplash. Now the ADL central council has put down an ultimatum that anyway diverging from them and recognizing the genocide will be asked to resign and fired. It's utterly absurd. One can only hope (and assume!) that Andy Tarsy's sacrifice will not be in vain with the rest of the ADL following him. I can't imagine an ADL without membership or staff to be very good to him! This firing was a terrible idea, he's turned a localized rebellion into a full-fledged revolt.



zalel

08/18/07 9:29 am
Comments: 4
Friends: 16

Dap & props to Andy

I've only met Andy twice, so I couldn't have predicted whether or not his Inner Forthright contained an Or that was bright enough for him to stand up to Foxman & Co; now, he'll be getting a double handshake and backslap from me. 
Paul is certainly right in his prediction. When the Sunday Times Magazine postmortem of Uncle Abe's career is published a few months from now, I wonder how they'll try explaining this last, incomprehensible hubris? I can't remember ever liking Foxman, but some of the ADL's activities were beneficial for progressives, as well as mainstream foundation-types. I hope that the central committee will choose to pitch him before he sinks the whole place. Hopefully, they will find someone more like the recent incarnation of Andy.
An ADL that really acted forward looking, less egotistically attached to driving the party line, would be able to regain its stature by using candor for creating positive intergroup connections, instead of making it look like power politics is all that matters to us.  
This is an example of how the ADL's information gathering can be advantageous for progressives' ends, too. Although, numerous occassions, I've been infuriated to hear Foxman tell obviously well informed and thoughtful Jews how confused and self-hating they were, I have appreciated being able to use ADL stats to back up my side in quite a few conversations pertaining to social trends and attitudes toward members of the Tribe. When someone asks me, "Why did you people choose Farrakan as your new leader?," it was great referring to an item on the ADL site that could show that only 27% of black Americans considered Farrakan their leader in 1997, a year after the Million Man March, at the height of Farrakan's popularity. Our fellow Jews have lots of misapprehensions that need to be dispelled. A mainstream group, one they can accept as a source, is important. There have are a variety of ways that similar misconceptions can get rebutted with ADL data. 
Maybe, if we're lucky, soon Abey will go fishing, the old appatchiks will retire with him, and the ADL will find some new and useful focus for its energies.


Anonymous

08/18/07 10:41 am

Zalel

Who and why were you asked if you 'chose Farrakhan as your leader'? I don't quite understand what you where trying to say.



Anonymous

08/18/07 10:48 am

I guess my letter to the ADL

I guess my letter to the ADL complaining about Foxman's Armenian genocide comments haven't done much good.

Note to Craig:

The Captcha Validation is very difficult to read and makes it diffucult to post.



Anonymous

08/18/07 11:10 am

Joey is my hero

Joey is my hero. And I thought people said that one person cannot make a difference? I guess they were wrong!



Lisa Williams

08/18/07 4:13 pm

What to make of this?

Got this comment defending the ADL's stance on H2otown, the community site I run for Watertown, MA. Honestly, made my head spin. Yikes.



JewcyCraig

08/18/07 6:21 pm
Comments: 450
Friends: 58

Captcha's

All the more reason to sign up, anon! ...But actually, I think something is seriously borked with the Captcha's, you're right. I will examine that this week. The backend of the site is going through a major upgrade hopefully this week or next, so that may actually fix it. But anyway, thanks for the heads-up.



Joey Kurtzman

08/18/07 8:08 pm
Comments: 510
Friends: 168

Captchas

I lowered the noise in the textimage settings, it should be easier to do the captchas now.



Pants Wearer

08/20/07 11:48 am
Comments: 16
Friends: 1

Heart? Yes. Head? Not so much

I think Andy and the board had the right idea, but it might not have been the best way to handle it.

 If you've got an organization that is trying to espouse a specific message, then the employees have to fall in line, regardless of their personal beliefs. It's not like a company, or a content neutral group; to be effective, the message has to be monolithic. I respect them for disagreeing, and for putting their money where their mouths are. But the right thing to do was to resign. There was no way they were going to get away with breaking away from the national organization, especially under these circumstances, and now, as people said above, it's an even bigger black eye to a group that still play an important part in Jewish life, regardless of Foxman's eternally maddening foot-in-mouth fetish. Hopefully at some point the ADL can reacquire its credibility.