When Will Alan Dershowitz Change the Name of the Ford Foundation?

Ford Foundation Headquarters. Source.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. A faked book used to facilitate the murder of Jews.
Half a million copies were funded and distributed by Henry Ford. 

I sent the following comments to Mike Kelly of NorthJersey.com.

Three separate and important points must be made about the Chester Grabowski controversy.

First, Chester Grabowski is by no means representational of Polish-Americans or Polish-American culture. Those who support him insist that he is representational. They do this to align him with all Polonia, to speak as if he spoke for all Polonia. Some who criticize him would also like him to be representational of all Polonia. "See," they will want to say. "These Polaks are nothing but primitive anti-Semites."

This is not the case. Grabowski's fame and influence are limited to his immediate neighborhood and to his readers.

Most Polonians do not refer to Jews as Christ killers. Most Polonians do not find the KKK acceptable.

If you want to find Polonians typical of those engaged in Polish-Jewish dialogue today, look to people like Terese Pencak Schwartz, Polish by birth, Jewish by conversion, who publishes about non-Jews who suffered under the Nazis. There is a world of difference between her approach and that of Mr. Grabowski. Her work has reached more people.

In fact, the Polonians who do support Grabowski probably support him because of his help and his enthusiasm for Polish culture, not because of his anti-Semitic comments.

Second, as a Polish-American, I hope that the park is not named after Mr. Grabowski. I do not see him as a fit representative of Polonia.

There is a final point, though. Clifton is not a center of world power. Mr Grabowski was not a man who wielded a great deal of power. Most people ten miles from the park in question will never have heard of it. Alan Dershowitz vowed to drag the issue of the renaming of the park before the entire world. The renaming of a park in Clifton, NJ after a man who made anti-Semitic comments is not an event of world historical import.

Why, then, is Alan Dershowitz paying so much attention to this matter?

Polonians are troubled by what appears to them to be a double standard. To understand this double standard, please consider: Why isn't Alan Dershowitz attempting to change the name of the Ford Foundation? This foundation is named for Henry Ford, one of the most influential anti-Semites in American history.

Henry Ford's anti-Semitic activity included publishing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and manufacturing war materiel for Nazi Germany. Nowadays, though, "The Ford Foundation" is an unimpeachable, benign institution. No doubt we have sites named after Joseph P. Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh, other notorious American anti-Semites or supporters of Nazism. Why isn't Dershowitz going after these? The answer is twofold. One is that a Clifton park is easy pickings; the Ford Foundation is a multibillion dollar endowment.

The second answer is a bit more disturbing. As my book, "Bieganski," demonstrates, the Brute Polak image has been used to epitomize the archetypal hater. When Polaks hate, that hate is far more dangerous than others' hate.

While I object to it, I cannot deny that naming an obscure park in a little-known city after an anti-Semitic man – and not naming it in honor of his anti-Semitism, but in honor of his good works – would probably not harm anyone. Alan Dershowitz would probably admit the same. The troubling feature for Dershowitz, I suspect, is not so much Grabowski's career as Grabowski's ethnicity. His hate is Polish hate, and Polish hate is understood to be worse, more toxic, more hateful than the hate of men far more powerful and influential – people like Henry Ford.

It is this double standard that so vexes Polonians. When they become hot and bothered about Dershowitz's protest, for the most part, it is not because they are anti-Semites. Most are not. It is, rather, because they are tired of being demonized as Poles. Tired of being turned into the boogeyman. Until people like Dershowitz go after institutions like the Ford Foundation, named for a vastly more influential anti-Semite than Chester Grabowski, all Polonians have ample reason to cringe, and to resist.