TO the best of my memory, Denver Jewry has produced three heads of major national Jewish organizations: Bob Loup, head of UJA; Sheldon K. Beren, head of Torah Umesorah; and now, Barry Curtiss-Lusher, head of ADL.
Curtiss-Lushers term began in Nov., 2012 and will extend to Nov., 2015.
He is national chair during ADLs centenary year. It (like the IJN) was founded in 1913.
Curtiss-Lusher sat with me for an interview this week, and I wondered, not facetiously, whether he still works. Everyone knows how much time even a local shul presidency takes up multiply that many times for a national presidency. Dont these national jobs become full time?
I still work between midnight and 2 a.m., and on airplanes and at other lucky moments. Like last week, when I actually got to be in Denver, and thats only because it was Pesach but in the middle of Pesach I went to Boston for the ADL youth congress. Fifteen hundred kids come from all over New England as part of the No Place for Hate Program.
For the record, Curtiss-Lusher is in the energy business. He is CEO of Nexus Resources, LLC, which is involved in oil and gas exploration in Colorado, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Louisiana; and also involved in thermal electric technology (clean energy,he says), based in Traverse City, Michigan.
How did a lawyer get involved in energy?
Actually, Curtiss-Lusher sets me straight: the real question is, how did a math and science buff get involved in the law?
I always loved math and science and started college at Yale with a declared major in physics and applied mathematics, Curtiss-Lusher says.
But it was 1969, there was a war raging in Vietnam, and I was drawn into the world around me and became an American studies major; then a lawyer at the University of Michigan law school.
He moved to Denver in 1977 to be an attorney and practiced law for five years before going into the oil and gas business with a client and friend, Jeff Yarus (who now lives in Houston). Hes been in energy ever since.
I learn by doing, he says.
In 1975, he married Gay Curtiss-Lusher (she was the Curtiss, I was the Lusher, and we put our names together). Her mother, the late Dorothy Schloss, was from Denver; and her great-grandfather, Louis Herman, was the second mayor of Boulder, in 1896.
Question: What are the unique challenges facing ADL at this time?
Curtiss-Lusher names three:
Hate on the Internet
Transitions in national leadership, lay and professional
Growing anti-Semitism
ONE: Hate on the Internet is a significant challenge were addressing with the Internet industry via an ADL task force of lay and professional leaders.
The task force grew out of a parliamentary committee of the European Union on anti-Semitism.
Chris Wolf, national chair of ADL for civil rights and an internationally known attorney on privacy, put this together.
The task force meets every several months with representatives from all the major companies: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Twitter and many more.
They are exploring definitions of hate speech; First Amendment freedoms as compared to European approaches; what private industry can or should do; and initiatives in education to mobilize online and social communities to respond in appropriate ways.
Our costs for our professionals are covered as part of ADLs budget. Each of the industry leaders pays his own way, as do ADL lay leaders.
TWO, Part 1: Abe Foxman, the well known and well regarded national head of the ADL is 73, born May 1 in Warsaw. Other national professional staff are also older, as is the lay leadership.
The biggest challenge and opportunities during my three years will deal with transitions in senior leadership.
Young lay leaders move up from around the country; and we need to make sure we appropriately provide for our second century in institutional development.
We are looking at succession not just for Abe, but his contemporaries and in our regional offices.
The timing is still not determined. Its mutual. Abe himself is a member of our national succession committee. The 15 members are almost all of our former national chairs and other senior leaders. The committee was formed several years ago and its looking at what we believe the leadership structure of ADL needs to look like moving into our second century.
Our mission is still the same: stopping hate. There is no reason to change that. But how we execute on the mission in education, law enforcement training, response to and prevention of anti-Semitic incidents and other hate crimes much more must be done using the Internet and modern telecommunications.
We start at the other end, in our 27 regional offices in the US and and Jerusalem. How do we make them more efficient and effective? Thats critically important.
We do anticipate another national director, whether titled that or something else. That title is 100 years old. We need a national and international professional leader like Abe, just as we need a national lay leader like me.
I hope Abe Foxman will be a major force in ADL for many years to come. We want to be ahead of the curve. We want to develop the next generations of leaders before our current generation can no longer do it due to age and health.
We want to have a plan while we can.
Were not asking for resumes yet; not until Abe is more formal about his plans. I hope Abe will graduate to an emeritus position.
TWO, Part 2: The ADL transition is not just in terms of staff and best practices.
We do a lot of different programs. We need to prioritize in terms of impact. Some programs might be blended together.
All ADL regional offices do educational programs, peer training, No Place for Hate. Different regions add their own programs: on cyber-bullying, diversity. We need to take a step back and strategically look at best use of our resources.
Will some ADL programs be ended altogether?
Im sure there will be some that will be deemphasized, but subject to regional variation.
Curtiss-Lusher clarifies: ADLs next step in peer training is to train middle school, high school and college students to work with their peers to stand up to bullying, racism and anti-Semitism.
THREE: The audience of ADLs Confronting Anti-Semitism program is high school students, in preparation for college.
In todays world they need to deal with Israel Apartheid Week and other activities on campus that can impact their Jewish identities and comfort level on campus.
We want to better prepare students as to what to expect, and with strategies for protection against physical intimidation (such as hecklers), mock check points, people putting eviction notices on their dorm rooms, as happened at Harvard we want students to know not only that they can come to us, but to have strategies for response.
Weve reached thousands of students since we started this several years ago and theres the ripple effect, with these students reaching so many others.
Like a lot of our programs, this started with innovative efforts in certain regions.
Question: What innovations originated in the ADLs Mountain States region that have become national ADL models?
Curtiss-Lusher names three:
The very idea of regional offices
The national young leadership program
Disproportionate influence of local professional leadership
ONE: The concept of having regional offices was originated by our local ADL leadership, by Col. Melvin Schlesinger (he was a prime mover) and Judge Charles Rosenbaum.
Judge Rosenbaum remembers once having a parlor meeting around the time of World War II, with Ben Epstein, then the ADL national director. And the FBI came knocking on the door. We had the best files on the extremist groups and they needed our help.
TWO: The national young leadership program originated in Denver and has grown all over the country. This was begun by longtime local ADL leader Shelly Steinhauser.
Gay and I were in it in 1982. Also in that class were Scott Levin [current Mountain States director] and Andrea Shpall [current Mountain States chair].
Now, over 400 leaders from all over the country meet in Washington, DC. This is our fuel for the future, our board members and ambassadors in the community.
THREE: There is a history of our regional directors being very important in the national conversations. Ben Epstein was originally from Denver.
Sheldon Steinhauser was a nationally respected voice. Abe Foxman will tell you that if Shelly were willing to come, he would be the national director today rather than Abe.
Saul Rosenthal was a national voice, so was Bruce DeBoskey and now Scott Levin is. All have been leaders amongst their peers. Denvers known for that.
Question: What are the longstanding challenges that continue to face ADL?
Curtiss-Lusher names three:
Anti-Semitism, especially in Europe and the Middle East
Catholic anti-Semitism in South America
Jewish intra-group relations
ONE: Longstanding challenges? Our everyday things: dealing with anti-Semitism worldwide, especially in Europe and the Middle East, and although it is not institutional in the US, it is still very real for people who are victims.
When we do our polling we see significant improvements in the last 20 years. Its way down. But, we still identify 12% that hold anti-Semitic views on various levels and thats about 40 million people!
When we ask, Do you think that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the US, we still get 30% who say that. Thats a sobering number for what has been a persistent anti-Semitic canard for generations.
Despite Vatican II, we still get 30% who will say, the Jews killed Christ.
TWO: Question: Anti-Semitism in Catholic circles has gone down, in Protestant circles its gone up: Agree?
Due to Vatican II and interfaith dialogue by ADL and others, anti-Semitism in the Church is down.
Of the 13 people in the Jewish delegation to the investiture of Pope Francis from all over the world, four were from ADL, and we had seats of honor and afterward an audience with the pope.
However, anti-Semitism is still significant in the Church, especially in South America. Thats our next point of focus: worldwide Catholicism. We need to take the word of Vatican II there. Its a matter of education.
The Protestants are a mixed bag. Certainly among the Protestant leadership, weve had some real problems, not on anti-Semitism but on Israel. But sometimes the anti-Israel crosses the line into anti-Semitism. For some, its true, Israel=Jews. But not all criticism of Israeli policy is anti-Semitic.
But certainly anti-Semites try to delegitmate Israel and hold it to standards that they hold no others to.
Question: Is Israel Apartheid Week anti-Semitic?
Yes. Not everybody agrees with me because apartheid week is a political statement, but by focusing on race and racism, theres a not too subtle anti-Semitism behind it.
At ADL we have talked about the BDS movement becoming more anti-Semitic. Clearly, many involved in BDS are not anti-Semitic, but more and more we see that what theyre doing crosses the line, and weve said so in many public forums.
THREE: Its still a challenge within our Jewish community of how we get along with each other. We apply some of what weve learned about inter-group relations on issues of religious pluralism.
What weve learned is that talking to each other, civil dialogue in discussing our commonalities, help us understand our differences.
Theyre all too few Jews in the world, and wed like to see less conflict between groups in the Jewish community.
ADL in and of itself does that to a certain extent. While we attract people who are already deeply involved in the Jewish community, we are also a portal for people to be involved because of our social justice and civil rights focus. People who are not so comfortable in other affiliations very leery of getting involved in the organized Jewish community get involved in the ADL.
For my wife and myself, the ADL became our first congregation.
We hope that many of our activities in our Jerusalem office will help bring Jewish groups in Israel together, from the secular to the haredi.
We are more successful in getting Israeli Jewish groups to talk to each other than in the Diaspora.
Question: How will ADL meet the challenge in the Diaspora?
That gets back to our concept of ADL being a portal that brings in the estranged, the interfaith families, who still have that kernel of Jewish identity. They can be comfortable with a group that fights hatred and discrimination of all sorts.
Some never go beyond that. For others, ADL opens up another new aspect of Jewish community.
Copyright © 2013 by the Intermountain Jewish News
