The underdog had triumphed, and many of our Christian allies vanished.
Ruth Abram remembers an incident from her teenage years that explains why she had no reservations about her father’s decision to move the family from Atlanta to New York in 1962:
When I was thirteen, I went to the Westminster School and that was, and I think still is, Presbyterian. And on my first day, when like everyone else going to a new school I was a bit scared, at least I had my friends, I had my poodle skirt, I had my bobby socks and my crinoline and my amulets to ward off all the dangers. At that point, all the girls I had grown up with circled me and said that from now on I couldn’t come to any of their parties or go to anything they were doing because I was Jewish. They explained it wasn’t them, they would love to have me, but it was their parents.1
For Morris Abram, the decision to leave Atlanta was not so simple. Still, his daughter’s painful experience in school was not unrelated to the feelings of social isolation he also felt despite his many professional accomplishments. His closest friends from his University of Georgia days had abandoned him for the company they could keep at social clubs, which excluded Jews. These feelings of alienation were amplified by his sense that the southern environment in which he never felt entirely comfortable was both parochial and suffocating.
Besides, Abram’s early legal career in Atlanta had led to a growing desire to perform on a larger stage, motivating him to seek challenges more in line with his talents and ambitions. His law partner Ted Maloof expressed it this way: “Morris had some of the best talent of anybody. He was absolutely brilliant, he was articulate, and he could really argue a case or anything else. He had all the attributes to be an outstanding international lawyer. I’m only speculating, since he never said anything about this, but I thought with his talent he could make a lot more money and go a lot further in New York than he could in Atlanta.”2 To his partner Robert Hicks, the move to New York was entirely consistent with Abram’s growing ambitions.
The one job that would have kept Abram in Atlanta was a federal judgeship, but that was precluded by his political convictions. He later said he would have given his “eyeteeth” to have been appointed to the bench. But “I knew goddamn well Herman [Talmadge] was never going to let me be a judge. It would have been his political life to recommend me or to let me, by 1962, which was when I left.” Abram said he often wondered if he had stayed in Georgia whether President Johnson would have appointed him to the bench.3
Invitations in the late 1950s to join two organizations based in New York engaged in public policy advocacy and research provided openings for Abram to satisfy his growing professional desires. The first was the Twentieth Century Fund (now known as the Century Foundation), composed largely of former prominent New Dealers, including Adolph Berle, Benjamin Cohen, and David Lilienthal. The second was the Field Foundation, the board of its New York branch headed by Adlai Stevenson. The foundation provided grants to organizations supporting poverty reduction, civil rights, and child welfare, among other efforts to promote social reform on a national scale.
A move to New York would also facilitate Abram’s growing involvement in the New York–based American Jewish Committee (AJC), for which staying in Atlanta would complicate his ability to assume a national leadership role. In anticipation of his move, AJC’s executive vice president, John Slawson, helped Abram secure an offer to join the prestigious New York law firm Proskauer Rose, whose leading partner, Joseph Proskauer, had served as AJC’s president from 1943 to 1949. But after some probing, Abram turned down the offer, judging the firm “too much interested in success and money.”4
It was through the Field Foundation that Abram met Lloyd Garrison, the great-grandson of the famous abolitionist, a noted political reformer in his own right, and a highly successful Wall Street lawyer associated with the firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. The firm had a reputation not only for the political celebrities it hired, such as Adlai Stevenson and JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen, but also for the pro bono work it accepted on behalf of often unpopular causes. Although Paul, Weiss had a policy of not taking on “laterals” as partners, preferring to promote its own associates, it did make exceptions such as Sorensen, Ramsey Clark, and Arthur Goldberg.
The firm’s leading figure was former federal judge Simon Rifkind, at the time one of the country’s leading litigators. Robert Rifkind recalls hearing Abram’s name for the first time in the late 1950s, when his father told him “there was this bright, very able and energetic lawyer in Atlanta who had stood up rather courageously to the forces of evil in the segregation world. And there had been some discussions of his joining Paul, Weiss.”5
A final reason for the move to New York was Abram’s growing interest in international human rights and the opportunity to put it into practice in an international arena. In 1962, UN Ambassador Stevenson recommended to President Kennedy that he appoint Abram to serve as the U.S. expert on the UN Sub-Commission for the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities, an appointment he took up shortly after the move to New York.
When Abram was approached by Lloyd Garrison to join his law firm as a partner, he was still weighing the costs and benefits of leaving Atlanta. After all, there was the question of supporting a family that by now included a fourth child and was about to include a fifth. And it was ironic that he would be leaving his native state just as the old system he helped to destroy was bringing on a new generation of more progressive political leaders like himself.
Abram’s commute to Washington during the weekdays while serving as general counsel to the Peace Corps in 1961 gave him a taste for what it was like to live outside Atlanta.6 A respected associate and friend reminded Abram that he would never be fully accepted in Atlanta on his merits alone. And another asked him point blank whether he would prefer playing with the New York Yankees or the Atlanta Crackers, the local Triple-A baseball team.7 In the end, the prospect of joining a firm like Paul, Weiss made the decision much less difficult.
In the fall of 1962, Abram moved his family to a three-story brick home near Long Island Sound in Larchmont, a prosperous New York suburb located in Westchester County. From there he bicycled daily on his secondhand Schwinn to the local commuter train, his journey ending at his twelfth floor office at Paul, Weiss overlooking Madison Avenue in midtown Manhattan.8
Among the items on Abram’s resume that made him attractive to the firm was his rising position at the American Jewish Committee. The committee was founded in 1906 by a group of prominent American Jews, most of them the sons of German immigrants, in the wake of a series of pogroms in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe. The first of these pogroms three years earlier in the city of Kishniev had resulted in Sam Abram’s decision to immigrate to America.
AJC’s founders were concerned not only with the fate of fellow Jews abroad but also with the well-being of recent Jewish immigrants to the United States. During its early years, the committee fought to maintain the country’s liberal immigration policy, organized relief for European Jewry, recognized the Balfour Declaration, helped the Jewish community in Palestine survive during World War I, and fought for the rights of Jewish minorities in peace treaties following the war.9
By the early 1960s, although the organization had become more diverse in its staff and lay leadership, an image study found that American Jewish leaders across the country still regarded AJC as an agency composed of wealthy German Jews with an assimilationist orientation and program. The organization began a public relations effort to educate the Jewish community about its work, to recruit from religious denominations other than the Reform Movement, and to energize younger members.10
One year after his move to New York, Abram became, at age forty-five, the youngest president in the history of the American Jewish Committee. Two attributes that had attracted the national leadership of the organization to the young lawyer were his commitment to civil rights and his advocacy skills. As David Harris noted, “In the sixties we were one of the central civil rights institutions. If you map the civil rights moments of the fifties and especially the sixties, AJC was very close to the center of it all. So, his own experience would have been very helpful in that regard as we dealt with our own positions, but the fact of the matter was that at heart, Morris was a superb advocate. His courtroom skills, his legal skills, made him the perfect advocate cum diplomat or diplomat cum advocate.”
Harris continued,
he had an extraordinary courtroom manner that was both deceptive and disarming. Morris had a deceptively folksy down to earth charming manner about him, but he brought with him a razor-sharp mind, an extraordinary ability to juggle complex ideas and convey them clearly and concisely and understandably. When he would stand up, whether in front of AJC’s board of governors, or before the rally in Washington with two hundred and fifty thousand people, or the court of public opinion wherever it may have led him, he was a natural as an advocate.11
Since his move to New York, Abram had not been terribly happy with his new life, with its oppressive sense of anonymity that accompanied his daily commute to the big city. The metaphor he used to describe it was “the shuffle,” the short-stepped march he and hundreds of others experienced walking off the commuter train at Grand Central Terminal.12 Now, however, he was energized by the prospect of working on a host of important issues, including Israel, Jewish-Vatican relations, and the policy of the American Jewish community on desegregation. “I became President of the American Jewish Committee,” he recalled, “and things picked up a great deal for me.”13
Among the early success the organization had begun to enjoy at the time of his accession was in the removal of barriers to Jews in corporate, educational, and associational positions as well as in access to housing and leisure facilities. Studies by AJC staff and campaigns by local chapters were given impetus by the public accommodations provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Los Angeles chapter was successful in opening the city’s three most important social clubs, and Abram’s intervention with the American Bar Association resulted in its canceling all social events at the discriminatory Miami Beach Bath Club during its 1965 annual convention.14
Abram’s leadership of the American Jewish Committee overlapped with his work at the United Nations. When he was appointed by President Kennedy to address human rights issues at the UN, Abram saw an opportunity to bring to the position his experience working on civil rights issues in the United States. But his work on the subcommission would soon expose him to the harsh realities of international politics at a time when the Soviet Union was stepping up its campaign against Jews at home and America’s ally Israel in the international arena.
While working on an international antiracism law in the fall of 1962, Abram insisted that it include antisemitism, an issue on which he sparred with his Soviet counterparts while calling attention to its prevalence behind the Iron Curtain. Largely because of this controversy, two separate treaties were proposed by the subcommission, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Religious Intolerance. But over the following two years in which these documents were hammered out, the idea of including antisemitism in either one was successfully contested by the Soviets.15
During the debates in the subcommission on these treaties, Abram insisted that they must not infringe on the fundamental freedoms of speech and press. In arguing the contrary position, the Soviet representatives had given assurances that “a new society had so perfected human nature that harmony between races and creeds now prevailed.” So much so was this the case that “no one wished to express un-neighborly views, and therefore laws impressing these imposed no actual restraint.”16
Abram reacted with incredulity to a report by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and issued by the UN secretary-general in August 1963 that “there are no instances in the Ukrainian SSR of racial prejudice or of national or religious intolerance, either de jure or de facto.” The report went on to state that although there are penalties in the criminal code for such behavior, such was unnecessary since “chauvinism, nationalism and racialism” are alien to the Ukrainian people, given that they are incompatible with Communist ideology. A similar report had been issued by the Soviet government that September.17
Those words proved hollow when that fall, Abram received from an Israeli source a viciously antisemitic book published by the Soviet controlled Ukrainian Academy of Sciences entitled Jews Without Embellishment. The book, by academy member Trofim Kichko, argued that a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, having played a role in Hitler’s 1941 invasion of Russia, was operating to subvert the Soviet Union. The book’s caricatures of Jews bore strong resemblance to Nazi propaganda. In February 1964 Abram called a press conference at the UN to denounce the book.18
Writing to his Soviet counterpart Boris Ivanov, Abram reminded him that during the debates on adopting the convention outlawing racial discrimination, Ivanov had led the charge to include ethnic and national discrimination. Indeed, Abram wrote, “you would have included all conduct, including propaganda which ‘promoted’ discrimination.” Abram continued, “If ever I saw a book which both promotes and incites hatred and discrimination, this is one.”19
Sending him a copy of the book, Abram asked for Ivanov’s opinion as to whether the draft convention the subcommission had presented to the Human Rights Commission “is specific enough to reach the evil of the state organs publishing this book.” After stalling for a month, Ivanov replied with a press release from the Washington Embassy of the Soviet Union on “Jews in the USSR” and another from the Soviet Mission to the UN characterizing the book as “one of several works on the problems of atheism published in Ukraine lately.” His one concession was that the book “contains some slipshod formulations.”20
Undeterred by his colleague’s disingenuous response, Abram continued to seek answers to his original questions throughout the year, but to no avail. In December, the secretary-general’s report on measures to implement the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Religious Discrimination included an assertion by none other than the Ukrainian SSR that all “principles and provisions” of the declaration had been implemented.21
In his statement to the subcommission on the Kichko incident, Abram drew several conclusions: first, no economic system is a guarantee against discrimination and intolerance; second, where it is known that actual instances of human rights deprivations are claimed, these should be met on their own terms candidly, and not by “repleading” the country’s constitution; third, “some organ of the UN must be given the power and the authority to study intensively beyond the government reports, to challenge them if need be, to check fact against claim and hope against reality”; and fourth, the subcommission needs to spend more time on its annual review and increase “our facilities for making it effective.” Concluding, he called for making our work “mean something to the oppressed and persecuted.”22
In the spring of 1965 Abram was appointed by President Johnson to the position of U.S. Representative to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.23 It was the same position first held by Eleanor Roosevelt when she presided over the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In a memorandum to the president recommending Abram’s appointment, Secretary of State Rusk wrote that he considered him “one of the most knowledgeable persons on Human Rights in this country. His leadership for the past two years as the U.S. expert member on the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities has been outstanding.”24
In the spring of 1967, Abram brought before the Human Rights Commission a proposal to appoint a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The idea, dating back to the 1950s, had originated with Jacob Blaustein, the Baltimore oil man and past president of the American Jewish Committee who had been an emissary of President Roosevelt to the founding meetings of the UN. It called for a neutral legal official to investigate human rights violations from an apolitical perspective.
During the debate, Soviet delegate Yacov Ostrovsky launched a personal attack on Abram, charging him, as a Jew, with serving “two masters.” When Abram objected, his Soviet counterpart cut him off, noting with sarcasm that this was not a meeting of “the Zionist organization of which you are president.” Abram countered by pointing out that the organization he headed fights injustice “regardless of race, color or creed,” adding that he had seen the Soviet delegate when he personally visited the committee’s human rights library.25
While making the case for the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Abram again referenced the Kichko book and accused the Soviets of the crudest antisemitism. He also revived the proposal to include antisemitism in the not yet adopted second of the two anti-discrimination conventions, the one dealing with the prevention of religious intolerance. While the High Commissioner proposal was tabled that fall, the attempt to include antisemitism in the second convention met the same fate as the earlier attempt to include it in the first.26
David Harris, who began a lengthy tenure as AJC’s executive director nearly three decades later, said that Abram’s exposure of the Kichko book and his confrontations with Soviet UN delegates received a great deal of attention both inside and outside the Jewish community. “Morris was very much exposed to this Soviet diet of anti-Semitism which in 1967, when the Soviets broke diplomatic relations with Israel as a result of the Six-Day War, very quickly morphed into anti-Zionism.” The Soviet Union and its Third World allies would later exploit the UN conventions of the 1960s to secure the General Assembly’s endorsement of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution in 1975.27
Perhaps no issue engaged Abram during his early tenure at the American Jewish Committee more than that of the position of the Catholic Church in its teachings on Jews and Judaism. In the summer of 1964 he led an AJC delegation to the Vatican to raise the subject directly with Pope Paul VI. For decades the organization had worked to root out passages in parochial school textbooks that were prejudicial to Jews. As part of those and related efforts, AJC staff and lay leadership had cultivated relations with Catholic leadership in the United States and around the world.28
Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in the fall of 1962 to address the relationship between the church and the modern world. Angelo Cardinal Rocalli, a diplomat for the church during World War II, had released church documents resulting in the rescue of thousands of Jews. Under Pope John’s tenure, unofficial relations between the Vatican and Israel became warmer.29 AJC’s efforts to get the church to liberalize its teachings on Jews were dealt a setback with his death in June 1963.
There had been hopes that the Vatican II Council would repudiate the Church’s deicide charge against the Jews that had for centuries fueled antisemitism. Abram had done his best to explain to his own children the Christ-killing taunts aimed at them in school before they were in their teens. In May 1964, the American Jewish Committee was granted an audience with John’s successor, Pope Paul VI, through the offices of the International University of Social Studies, Pro Deo, in Rome. The audience coincided with a gift by the widow of the former head of AJC’s Los Angeles Chapter to Pro Deo to establish a research and action center to combat prejudice.30
The previous month, Abram and AJC Executive Director Slawson had paid a visit to the residence of New York’s venerated Cardinal Spellman, in which they appealed to the cardinal to denounce the deicide charge at an upcoming AJC dinner. This the cardinal did emphatically before an audience that included Secretary of State Dean Rusk and other dignitaries. Prior to leading the committee’s delegation to the Vatican, Abram flew to Washington and received Rusk’s permission to share with the pope his endorsement of Cardinal Spellman’s remarks concerning the deicide charge. Abram’s goal for the visit was “to pin the Pope down.”31
At his private meeting with AJC’s delegation, Pope Paul began by reading a statement articulating the church’s beliefs about the equality of all men and deploring the ordeals that the Jewish people have endured. But Abram and his colleagues were not going to be satisfied coming away from the meeting with little more than platitudes. Abram pressed Pope Paul on the deicide question. When the pontiff indicated that the matter was under formal consideration, Abram saw an opening, informing him that both the U.S. Secretary of State and the leader of New York’s church were united in their conviction that the charge was “absurd.” The pope replied that he agreed with their assessment.32
Much to the surprise and delight of the delegation, the pope also agreed to allow Abram to release the result of this dialogue upon their return to New York, a clear victory for those seeking continuity of the current papal regime with its predecessor in its approach to antisemitism. At his press conference in New York on June 1, 1964, Abram said that the pope had informed the delegation that Cardinal Spellman’s address at AJC’s dinner in April had been forwarded to him and that he had read it “with much satisfaction.” Abram said that as a result of the audience with Pope Paul, AJC felt greatly encouraged about the prospects of the upcoming session of the council adopting the decrees regarding Catholic attitudes toward Jews and other non-Christian groups.33
Making use of the papal endorsement, Abram and other AJC officials traveled to Latin America where they lined up support for a declaration against the deicide charge from key church leaders at the next session of the council. Atlanta attorney Miles Alexander, who later assumed the chairmanship of AJC’s Atlanta chapter, was attracted to the organization in part because of what it began to do behind the scenes: “I was really impressed with their going to various cardinals around the world and lobbying to end the blaming of the Jews for Jesus’ death. Morris led that effort. I think the College of cardinals supported it, and I attributed a lot of that to the lobbying of the American Jewish Committee and Morris’s behind the scenes work.”34
Word got back to AJC’s leadership later that summer that the Vatican could not pass the decree regarding Jews in its current form without facing serious diplomatic consequences in its relationship with the church in the Middle East.35 Cardinal Sheehan of Baltimore, who had a close relationship with former AJC President Jacob Blaustein, and four other American prelates, prevailed upon the pope to keep the declaration back on the agenda of the council when it reconvened that fall.36
The final declaration voted on from October 14 to 15, 1965, did not specifically mention the word “deicide,” but it did remove the teaching of contempt from the church’s textbooks. This marked a radical departure from previous church teachings and a significant step forward in Catholic-Jewish relations. To Dr. Steven Bayme, AJC’s director of Contemporary Jewish Life, he and his colleagues today regard the organization’s work on Vatican II as “AJC at its finest,” since both staff who worked on inter-religious matters under the leadership of Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, and laymen led by Abram, worked closely together in helping to secure the declaration.37
Five days after it was decreed, Abram received a personal message from Richard Cardinal Cushing, Archbishop of Boston. “Dear Morris,” it read, “I really think that the declaration by the Council on non-Christians was the very best we could get. At least we can now follow it up by having some of the hideous phrases especially relative to the Jews, eliminated from the Catholic liturgy. They appear to me to be relics of former ages.”38 At a dinner celebrating AJC’s sixtieth anniversary the following May, past president Joseph Proskauer remarked that if the organization had done nothing else in its sixty-year history than the work it did on the fourth section of Nostra Aetate, dayenu! (It would have been enough.)39
The other major event during Abram’s AJC tenure with consequences for the American and world Jewish communities was Israel’s Six-Day War of June 1967. Although the committee had maintained a non-Zionist posture as late as World War II, it had welcomed the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 as “an event of historical significance.”40 Still, as Bayme pointed out, “Without question, the place Israel assumed on the American Jewish agenda writ large, including AJC, was that pre-1967, Israel was always on the map but not central; after ‘67, so much of the agenda revolved around Israel. In that respect, June of 1967 was a decisive turning point.”41
A month prior to the start of the war, AJC had reiterated its opposition to mass rallies, a relic of its longstanding preference for quiet diplomacy in pursuing its mission. On the fourth day of the war, seeing no need to consult with the committee’s board, Morris Abram became the featured speaker at a rally held in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. This was the largest demonstration held by the American Jewish community in the nation’s capital prior to the one in 1987 on behalf of Soviet Jewry.42
To Abram what was most significant about the Lafayette Park rally was the reaction to it among many of Israel’s longtime friends. In his speech he called upon allies in the liberal Christian churches to join the Jewish community in support of Israel. But by the time of the rally, the military tide had turned in Israel’s favor, and many mainline Christian supporters in its more liberal ranks were beginning to side with those they now considered the “underdogs” of the region.
“The underdog had triumphed,” wrote Abram, “and many of our Christian allies vanished. Yet, Israel’s cause was not less valid on the fourth day of the war than on the first.” Abram was forced to revise his long-held view “that the orthodox forms of religion were the chief obstacles to the development of warm ecumenism between Jews and Christians.”43 The experience foreshadowed many of Abram’s future efforts to defend the state of Israel against attacks from those who no longer saw it as David fighting Goliath but rather as the region’s dominant power.
Within the Jewish community, the Six-Day War marked a pronounced shift in its perception of Israel. It also brought about a shift in Abram’s own perception of himself and his appropriate role as a Jewish leader.44 When he began his association with AJC, Abram had avoided using the phrase “the Jewish people.” By the time he handed over the presidency of the committee to his successor Arthur Goldberg in 1968, Abram saw no conflict between the idea of being both a proud American and a dedicated Jew.45
In addition to the opportunity to serve in a leadership role at the American Jewish Committee, New York opened additional doors for Abram as well, including his active involvement with the Field Foundation. The foundation was established in 1940 by Marshall Field III, the grandson of the founder of Chicago’s famous department store. In the wake of the Great Depression, Field became a strong supporter of the New Deal and filled the board of the foundation with some of the country’s leading social scientists, scholars, business leaders, and judges. Field believed passionately in racial integration and involved the foundation in matters related to race and juvenile behavior.46
In 1960, the foundation was split into two separate entities, one based in Illinois headed by Field’s son and the other in New York, led by his widow Ruth. While the Illinois entity was more focused on local activity, the Field Foundation of New York maintained its national perspective, including on matters of race. It was that focus that led Ruth Field, shortly after the division of the foundation, to arrange a dinner in New York for board members to meet with Abram and Atlanta Mayor Hartsfield to discuss the race issue. The group included Adlai Stevenson, Lloyd Garrison, and Ralph Bunche, the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
At the dinner, Abram noted the centrality of Georgia among all the southern states to determining the direction of desegregation. But until the abolition of the county unit system, very little could move forward on that front. He injected an important dose of reality into the discussion of race by pointing out that it was the class issue that was burdening the South every bit as much as racial prejudice. Closing the class gap, he argued, would be critical to solving the race issue. Shortly thereafter, Ruth Field asked Abram to join the foundation’s board, and he succeeded Adlai Stevenson as its president after Stevenson died in 1965.47
In May 1966 the American Jewish Committee celebrated its sixtieth anniversary at its annual meeting, which included a televised conversation involving Senator Robert Kennedy, New Jersey senator Clifford Case, and Morris Abram. The conversation addressed the topic “Extremism in America Today.” In assessing the difference between a right-wing extremist and a genuine conservative, Abram noted that the latter accepts the need for gradual social change, “but he is concerned with preserving that which is wholesome and worthy of retention in our society.” By contrast, a right-wing extremist views all social change as inherently evil. While the true liberal is less sentimental than the conservative about the past, he would accelerate the process of social change.
Thus, while liberals and conservatives take a different approach to change, they share a “faith in the American people and hold sacred the democratic process.” By contrast, extremists of all stripes “would take the basic decisions away from the people and substitute their own judgments of right and wrong. And—most important of all—the extremists, left and right, are convinced that the end justifies the means.”
As to which form of extremism posed the greater danger, Abram left no doubt where he stood. While demonstrating with a Viet Cong flag and burning draft cards are to be deplored “because they clog the channels of debate rather than they contribute to rational discourse,” the greater danger comes from those on the far right “who are apt to equate any kind of dissent with disloyalty,” regarding all who oppose them as guilty of treason. Such an attitude, he continued, “makes it impossible for democracy to solve its problems, which can only be done by debate, discussion, consensus, or at least a vote, and the acceptance of the will of the majority.”48
Abram’s years in New York, while broadening his interest in public policy both domestic and international, also brought him closer to his Jewish roots. His involvement with the local chapter of the American Jewish Committee in Atlanta had begun largely as a way of supplementing his modest income at a time when his family was growing. But years of lobbying on behalf of Jewish causes at AJC and fighting antisemitism at the United Nations not only made him one of the leading spokesmen for the American Jewish community but also led to a turning point in his worldview that would last for the rest of his life.
Bayme has a clear recollection of a debate between Abram and Albert Vorspan that took place in May 1983 at AJC’s annual meeting. The debate centered around the question of Jewish universalism versus Jewish particularism. Vorspan, who headed the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, expressed his concern about “a growing JDL-type mentality” within the Jewish community, making reference to the militant defense group led by Meir Kahane. In doing so, he was decrying the shift toward particularism in the Jewish community that had been sparked by the Six-Day War. As Bayme pointed out, “What Vorspan was trying to say, I think inelegantly, was that in the balance between universalism and particularism, we have tilted too much toward particularism.” In other words, Jews were abandoning the principle of Jewish universalism.
For his part, Abram did not object to a Jewish stake in a universal imperative. Precisely because Jews have done so well in America, he said, we have a moral imperative to those less fortunate. But “there is no question he was becoming more particularistic as the years went on. What he was saying was let us not forget about Jewish imperative in the name of the universalist banner.”49
In 1983 Abram was asked to join an international panel established by the head of the Jabotinsky Foundation to honor individuals with the Shield of Jerusalem Jabotinsky Prize for their defense of the rights of the Jewish people. The award was named for the intellectual father of the “revisionist” movement within Zionism that challenged the more established leadership for its lack of militancy in pressing the British for a Jewish homeland during the 1930s. The first awardees were the late Senator Henry Jackson, the Soviet refusenik Yosef Begun, and the French human rights advocate Simone Veil. A special award was given to former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a protégé of Jabotinsky.50
The day after the award ceremony, Abram addressed the Southern Jewish Historical Society on the topic of taking another look at one’s own past. He started by noting that his involvement in the selection of the recipients of the Jabotinsky prize had impelled him to go back and learn more about the man. “Oh, I can remember what I thought about him when I was a young man in college and I first heard his name. I thought, of course, the very worst things about him, the very worst. He represented every tradition in Jewish life that I regarded as false.” But the more Abram learned about this son of Odessa, including his extraordinary mastery of the Hebrew language, leading to highly regarded translations of Dante and Edgar Allen Poe, the more he could understand why Jabotinsky had been honored with a state funeral in Israel thirty years after his death.51
In the last decade of his life Morris Abram was invited to be the guest speaker at an AJC dinner honoring the historian Naomi Cohen with the Akiva Award for Jewish scholarship. The award is named for Rabbi Akiva, the legendary sage who was the most important spiritual leader of the Jewish people following the destruction of the Second Temple. Bayme recalled that one of the reasons to choose Abram was that “while he himself was not a scholar, he was someone who valued Jewish scholarship. That interest intensified over the years. I doubt he could have given a speech like that or chosen to give a speech like that fifteen years earlier.”
According to Bayme, Abram clearly was very upset by the level of antisemitism and of the unfair treatment of Israel internationally. And in his speech that evening, he said that a strong Jewish identity is the key to Jewish survival. “So I think in that sense his perceptions of anti-Semitism or anti-Israelism as the case may be in many ways set a very strong nurturing sense that the Jewish world and the world of Jewish values is the world in which he felt most anchored.”
Morris Abram, who began his career looking outward to champion political and social reform, “became increasingly conscious of the degree of hostility Jews faced, increasingly proud of what Jews had done as a people, and increasingly convinced that the Jews cannot relax their guard, but the key to Jewish survival lies with strong Jewish identity, Jewish education, Jewish culture.”52