JDL’S New Patrol : Leader of Militant Defense Group Wants to Change Its Approach, Image

Four men patrolled a dark alley in the Fairfax District on a recent weeknight. One had a pair of handcuffs dangling from a back pocket, while another waved a long black flashlight; a third clung to the leash of a large boxer.

The men crossed over to Fairfax Avenue, the center of Los Angeles’ most visible Jewish community, where they rattled doors of the closed shops and restaurants. At a Middle Eastern restaurant, Eat-a-Pita, they jiggled the locks to ensure nothing was amiss.

“We’re here to make sure everything is safe,” said Irv Rubin, national chairman of the Jewish Defense League, adding that the Arab-owned Eat-a-Pita was firebombed 1 1/2 years ago by people he asserts were fanatic members of the Jewish community.

Wait a minute. . . .

Is this the Irv Rubin who asserted that the 1985 assassination of an Arab-American leader in Santa Ana was deserved? Is this the would-be street fighter who has disrupted countless appearances by people he considers too sympathetic to the Arab cause? Is this the militant Zionist who was fond of having his photograph taken while training Jewish children to use firearms? And is this the same group that has been accused by critics of having links to terrorist acts against Arabs and other JDL political enemies here and abroad?

The answer is, well, yes and no.

To hear Rubin tell it, the old JDL has a new face. He contends that neither he nor the JDL is responsible for most of the violence for which they have been blamed.

But they have made big mistakes, he admits. Cheering others’ violent acts, he says, was unconscionable. Disrupting speeches by those with whom they disagreed, he says, was immoral and counterproductive. And publicly teaching children to use guns, he says, was a public relations disaster.

“Not only did it give Gentiles the idea that we were violent,” Rubin says of JDL’s past actions, “it also turned off many Jews and closed tens of thousands of doors to us. We became the black sheep of the family. We need new blood. We can’t win battles without their support, but militancy, in people’s minds, is one step removed from terrorism.”

Rubin’s prescription: a kinder, gentler JDL, a group devoted more to debate and defense than to militancy and malevolence. He envisions a group that steps from the fringe and reaches out to other minorities. He would like it to be a broad-based organization, acceptable to mainstream Jews, that could become an important link in the battle against what he sees as a rising tide of anti-Semitism worldwide.

But his critics say they doubt Rubin or the JDL has changed.

Faris Bouhafa, a spokesman for the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said he sees no evidence of a new, more “moderate” JDL, which he argues has outlived its usefulness.

Jawad George, executive director of the National Assn. of Arab Americans, which lobbies the U.S. government for better relations with the Arab world, said he still considers JDL to be essentially “a terrorist organization.”

James Zogbby, director of the Washington-based Arab American Institute, said that, by claiming to be more moderate, Rubin may be just “blowing smoke” to prop up an otherwise dying group: “I don’t think that the base exists now for them to have the kind of movement that they had at one time. I’m not certain that the conditions which spawned it aren’t just gone.”

Even if Rubin and the JDL have moderated their views and methods, some say they see little role for him or the group in the larger Jewish community.

“Perceptions are rooted in the past and the (JDL’s) past is violent and irresponsible,” said Rabbi Allen Freehling, spiritual leader of Brentwood’s University Synagogue, one of the largest reform temples in Southern California. “They’ve toned down, but in terms of right, left and center, they are certainly far to the right. I question whether the Jewish community really needs them.”

Rabbi Lennard Thal, regional director of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, which represents the area’s reform synagogues, also expressed doubts.

With major groups such as the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress battling anti-Semitism, he said, an organization such as JDL may be unnecessary.

“I’m all for respectability and the organization’s improving their substance and image,” Thal said. “But I’m also for motherhood and apple pie. Unfortunately, the activities and behavior of JDL over the years have generated a fair amount of skepticism on the part of other Jewish leaders.”

But the “new” JDL has won praise from other quarters.

M. T. Mehdi, president of the New York-based American Arab Relations Committee and secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, said, if Rubin had truly become more moderate then, “I congratulate him. It is a tribute, ultimately, to the human individual who can grow up, see his mistakes and is willing to change. It is a tribute to Irv Rubin.”

Jim Brown, a former professional football player who now works with black prisoners, said a recent meeting with Rubin to discuss the shared concerns of blacks and Jews went well.

“I found him to be very attentive,” Brown said. “He listened, he made sense and he was reasonable. The bottom line is that he is interested, I truly believe, in doing something quite different” from what he has done in the past.

As a result of their meeting, Brown said, he hopes to elicit JDL support for a program to combat crime in South-Central Los Angeles.

Usama Fadli, a Palestineborn Arab, speaks highly of Rubin and the JDL. Fadli opened Eat-a-Pita in the heart of the city’s Jewish district, in part, he says, to demonstrate that Arabs and Jews can work peaceably side by side.

But he encountered problems. Then, “Irv Rubin came to my aid,” Fadli said. “I am very pleased. He has been a great gentleman with me and a very fair person.”

To fully appreciate the significance of the recent favorable comments about the group, it’s necessary to know something about the JDL’s past.

The JDL was founded in 1968 by Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane in response to attacks on Jews by muggers, Rubin said. As its name implied, the group, Rubin said, was essentially defensive; its main activity consisted of organizing teams of tough-looking Jews armed with baseball bats to patrol Jewish neighborhoods.

“We wanted to create a different image,” he explained. “The image people had of Jews was that they wouldn’t fight back.”

Over the years, the group grew increasingly political. When events in the Middle East heated up, JDL members took strong pro-Israeli positions. And their opposition to those they considered anti-Semites took many forms, including loud, sometimes disruptive, protests at public appearances.

In 1972, when the JDL claimed it had 18,000 members nationwide, an incident occurred in New York City with far-reaching effects.

Three young JDL members were charged with bombing the offices of Sol Hurok, an impresario known for organizing cultural exchanges with the Soviet Union. The explosion killed a receptionist. Although the charges were later dropped, the incident seriously damaged the organization’s image.

There followed many violent confrontations in which JDL members were accused of participating.

In one of what was to become many arrests, Rubin himself--then the group’s West Coast coordinator--was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder after someone fired three shots at a Nazi leader in El Monte. The charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence.

In 1978, Rubin made headlines by offering a $500 reward to anyone who “kills, maims or seriously injures a member of the American Nazi Party” while defending residents of Skokie, Ill. Again arrested, this time on suspicion of solicitation of murder, Rubin was eventually acquitted.

Then came 1985, a year Rubin now considers seminal.

Kahane, deeply embroiled in the politics of Israel, to which he had emigrated, resigned as national JDL chairman, turning the reigns over to Rubin.

Four months later, a booby trap exploded at the Santa Ana offices of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, killing its western regional director, Alex Odeh. Federal authorities later named as suspects in the slaying several former JDL associates who have since emigrated to Israel.

In a statement he now says he regrets, Rubin declared: “I have no tears for Mr. Odeh. He got exactly what he deserves.”

That was a turning point, Rubin says.

Donations, which until then came primarily from the mainstream Jewish community, began drying up. Membership, Rubin said, dwindled to a few thousand nationally and a few hundred in Los Angeles.

The JDL, he said, had lost much of its effectiveness.

“We lost a tremendous amount of support in the Jewish community,” Rubin said. “People stereotyped us. They wanted to kill us.”

The withering of JDL influence coincided, Rubin said, with a worldwide rise in the kind of anti-Semitic sentiments that had first given the group its purpose.

A recent study by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, for instance, found that anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose in 1989 to their highest level in at least 11 years.

Anti-Semitism also seems to be on the rise elsewhere, from the Soviet Union (where nationalist groups have publicly called for violence against Jews) to Paris (where earlier this year an estimated 80,000 people marched in the streets to demonstrate their revulsion at the desecration of a Jewish cemetery and a wave of other anti-Semitic incidents).

Convinced of the continuing need for services that a group such as JDL can provide, Rubin has begun to shift his and his organization’s approach.

Besides meeting with Brown and other representatives of minority groups to discuss ways of working together, Rubin has promised that he will never again publicly encourage or applaud random acts of political violence.

He has appeared before mainstream Jewish congregations to apologize for past disruptive acts.

Freehling said his congregation reacted favorably to Rubin’s recent appearance to apologize for disrupting temple events featuring pro-Palestinian speakers.

“My experience with Irv over several years is that he is definitely attempting to improve the image of JDL,” the rabbi said. “Even his physical presence has changed; all of a sudden he started showing up in three-piece suits.”

Although Rubin and other JDL members recently went to a local Episcopal Church to protest an appearance by South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu--whom they consider anti-Semitic--they took along an Episcopal clergyman to advise them on how to do it unobtrusively.

Recently, he said, the group rallied against Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress leader’s ties to Yasser Arafat. But, Rubin asserted, those protests were toned down to avoid violence.

Instead of emphasizing mastery of guns and bombs, Rubin now says the JDL hopes to focus on tasks such as delivering food to elderly, homebound Jews.

While the new group will continue to strongly support Israel, it will steer clear of internal Israeli politics, he said.

And while the “new” JDL will continue to patrol Jewish neighborhoods to defend them from would-be attackers, it also will renew its efforts to promote Jewish pride, Rubin said.

As part of that effort, he said, the JDL plans to formally recognize those who have helped create a more positive image of Jewry.

Rubin also noted that to get mainstream Jews, who may be frightened of its image, to participate in JDL activities, he is considering the creation of a more moderate, affiliated group. It would carry a different name and have separate leadership.

In Los Angeles, Rubin still regularly holds court at Cantor’s, the famed Jewish deli.

There, he is often the recipient of backslaps and handshakes from strangers.

There, he also attempts, among other things, to convince would-be supporters that things are different--that he has purged the “hotheads” from the JDL.

The group, in other, sometimes odd places, finds new supporters.

During the recent night patrol, for example, as Rubin and his JDL colleagues walked down the dark alley, a young woman peered out of an upstairs window.

She observed the work of the four JDL members and said: “This is fabulous! I’m very impressed. It’s so scary here!”

After chatting with them long enough to learn who they were and what their mission was, the woman had two last questions: “Do you need any help?” And “How do I join?”

Rubin gave her his phone number.