Abe Foxman and the luxury of pessimism

(JNS) — The veteran British broadcaster Trevor Phillips began a recent Sunday-morning program by telling his audience that he had been distressed to learn of a conversation that is increasingly common around Shabbat dinner tables in the United Kingdom. The question being asked is: Who among our non-Jewish neighbors would try to rescue us should we find ourselves being rounded up for the second time in less than a century?

I thought of Phillips’s monologue last Tuesday, when I attended the funeral in Manhattan of my former boss, the legendary national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abe...