A WEEK from today, one of Denver Jewrys most visible figures Bruce DeBoskey, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League for nearly a decade will hang up his proverbial spurs.
When he discussed his impending ride into the ADL sunset, DeBoskey was all smiles. He shed not a single tear nor expressed a single regret, and he was more than willing to share his impressive collection of memories.
Proudest accomplishments?
DeBoskey has a pocketful, from working with the US Air Force Academy to restrict previously unfettered Christian proselytizing on campus, to the regional implementation of the ADLs No Place for Hate campaign in schools, to working for the rights of GLBT community, to a new ADL office in Boulder.
Strangest opponent?
Westboro Baptist qualifies, DeBoskey says of the Kansas-based church that brought their unique brand of hate to Denver earlier this year.
Scariest moment?
The characteristically casual and affable DeBoskey, usually ready with an apt quip, suddenly grows stone serious.
It was a terrifying moment, he says of an incident several years ago that, until this article, has never been publicized.
I opened a letter and out spilled a white powder. I had white powder all over my hands and on the desk and in the room. We were breathing it. The message said. This is anthrax. You Jews will die. And there was a swastika.
The powder turned out to be harmless talcum.
The implications, however, were clear. The incident drove home to DeBoskey and his staff that working for ADL has two starkly differing dimensions.
One is encouraging tolerance and understanding in the hopes of diminishing prejudice and intolerance in society.
The other is staring that hatred in the face.
ADL is both a proactive and a reactive organization, he says. Were constantly working to change and improve the world. Unfortunately, at the same time we have to react to the things that happen in the world that need to be changed and improved the bigotry, the hatred.
DEBOSKEY, 58, came to the ADL in 2002 after a long career as a litigator.
After 25 years as a trial lawyer, I felt it was time to move on and give more to the community, he says, and Ive reached that same conclusion now.
Hes not leaving ADL with any resentment or unresolved issues, he stresses.
Ive had a fabulous, great experience at ADL. Im leaving because I want to have a chance to grow, personally and professionally.
I believe that there comes a time in every organizations lifecycle when new leadership is good, he says.
Were well-positioned. Were strong. Were very pleased with our programs, our fundraising, our board, our young leadership, our standing in the community. Now its time, I think, for someone else to come in and provide their vision and passion and energy to keep the ADL growing.
Whoever that someone else turns out to be and to date, no names have been mentioned DeBoskey is happy to provide a little practical advice.
This job is not placid, he says. We have seen acts of anti-Semitism in this town, in this time, that have been frightening, whether it came from outsiders like the Westboro Baptist Church or people in their own workplaces or schools.
The battle against anti-Semitism is indeed a battle and vigilance is the key. We are vigilant on the global stage against the Ahmadinejads and the other major Jew-haters. We are vigilant on the national stage against the Mel Gibsons. And we are vigilant locally.
Asked to compare his own era at ADL with that of his predecessor Saul Rosenthal who, in the 1980s and 1990s had to contend with the Alan Berg murder and resurgent manifestations of skinheads and the Ku Klux Klan in Colorado, DeBoskey acknowledges that things have calmed down a bit.
It was more in your face then. Fortunately, those days of the neo-Nazis and the skinheads have receded somewhat, but they havent receded totally. The levels of anti-Semitism in our community arent any different than they were back in the 80s. Anti-Semitism still continues as part of the fabric of our local society.
Another legacy of the past was the Quigley-Aaronson conflict, an Evergreen neighborhood dispute that escalated when the ADLs Rosenthal publicly raised the specter of anti-Semitism in the case. After extensive legal combat, the ADL lost a defamation lawsuit that ?ultimately cost the organization $10 million.
DeBoskey, who began his leadership of the ADLs Mountain States chapter before the dispute was finally resolved, says its shadow never affected him as regional director.
He remembers that ADL national director Abe Foxman essentially told him at the outset, Go out and lead, DeBoskey says, and they expected me to, from day one.
The community was welcoming of me as a person with a new idea, a new face, a new vision. We had to slowly rebuild from what many people saw as a sad chapter in our local history.
But it didnt constrain me.
Ive been given a tremendous amount of freedom to lead this region in a way that I thought was best, consistent with the overall national objectives and policies.
The way I thought was best was to demonstrate, over and over again, our credibility, our reliability, our dependability on issues concerned with our mission.
DeBoskey managed to emerge unscathed from one of the ADLs more contentious recent battles, unlike the Boston regional director who was dismissed in 2007 over comments about Congressional legislation to declare the WWI-era slaughter of Armenians by Turks a genocide.
The national ADL, citing sensitive diplomatic and political considerations, opted not to support the genocide bill, a stance that triggered considerable Jewish anger.
My only personal opinion is that the relationship of Jews to Turkey is very complicated, he says. It is not just a simple response. Had I been asked to respond at the time, I might have responded differently. I might not have.
I wasnt asked to speak about it because it was a national policy. The relationship of the Jewish people living within Turkey and its Muslim majority environment, the relationship of the Israelis to the Turkish government, the relationship of world Jewry to that chapter in history is complicated. I think it was very difficult for ADL to decide how to land on that one.
Although DeBoskey, even at the end of his ADL tenure, refuses to stray from the ADL party line that refrains from applying the genocide tag to the Ottoman mass murders during WW I, he implies that the recent debate was largely one of semantics that the mass slaughter of innocents, by whatever name, is a great evil that demands a strong response.
How can Jews who exist beneath the constant shadow of the Holocaust do otherwise? he asks.
I dream about the Holocaust, he says, and I think about it a lot. How could a society have been turned so fundamentally against one people that extermination was the goal, the Final Solution?
How could men and women go to concentration camps where people were murdered by the thousands every day, with children coming off of trains, and then come home at night and have dinner with their children and read bedtime stories?
DeBoskey is convinced that the dehumanization of human beings is a necessary prelude.
The targets of genocide are always dehumanized, he says. Weve seen that in Uganda, in the Sudan, in every genocide. And we see dehumanization today in the anti-immigration movement. We see some of the same kind of concepts in some of the voices in that movement.
Spending nearly a decade in the ADL trenches, DeBoskey adds, tends to inspire philosophical ponderings about the nature of evil and brutality, not to mention its wellsprings of anti-Semitism, racism, bigotry and intolerance.
DeBoskey believes that ignorance not really understanding how and why people are different is a core component of bigotry.
And two, it comes from fear fear of the other. Xenophobia. The idea that people who are different cant be trusted, or have different value systems that threaten you.
There appears to be throughout history a segment of the population, ranging from very large in some circumstances to not as large, who thrive on fear and play upon that fear in order to motivate people for their own personal gain.
His ADL experience has led him to the sobering conclusion that anti-Semitism the form of racism uniquely tailored to the Jewish people has its own special survival skills. It sustains itself through time, passing from one generation to the next.
What Ive learned at ADL is that anti-Semitism isnt going to go away, DeBoskey says.
Its going to change, mutate, morph into different forms, but there appear to be a group of people, in all times, that have made it their work to hate Jews. What Ive learned, sadly, is that it continues to this day.
IN his post-ADL existence, DeBoskey hopes to traverse far calmer pastures than those to which hes grown accustomed.
Hes opening up a new firm called the DeBoskey Group, and will assume the professional title of philanthropic adviser.
He wants to help businesses, foundations and families organize and strategize the impact of their giving.
It seems likely to be a far less contentious existence than running an ADL chapter but, to paraphrase an old saying, you can take the man out of the ADL but you cant take the ADL out of the man.
DeBoskey says hell continue to ponder, and perhaps find a way to engage, the issues that concern him.
He worries, and says he will continue to worry, about such issues as disunity among Jews, assimilation and the relevance of Judaism in the modern world.
He may no longer be working directly with, but will continue to contemplate, such thorny issues as the razor thin line that separates anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.
Sometimes it crosses the line into anti-Semitism or what we call demonic anti-Zionism, when ?you demonize Israel for defending itself.
Or Holocaust denial: Holocaust denial is protected as free speech but it needs to be vigorously challenged. We cant allow the passage of time and fading memories to help people rewrite history.
No longer occupying a prime position on his list of professional priorities but still vitally important to him is the never-ending debate over freedom of speech.
Im never envious of any country that doesnt have our First Amendment freedom, he says.
That is the cost of freedom, that we have to listen sometimes to hateful, ignorant people who spew their hate and ignorance into the public airways.
The benefit of living in a country where were not told what to believe or where were free to worship or not worship as we please is so precious that we are honored to pay the price, even though it is sometimes painful.
In professional terms, at least, DeBoskey says hell leave such debates for the man or woman chosen to take his place. He says he wishes that person well as he or she embarks upon those considerable responsibilities.
For me, he says, it has been a privilege to be part of the journey.
