Think of them as the Navy Seals in wingtips.
For 60 years, the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the American Jewish Committee has been in, out and done with a situation before anyone was the wiser. Operating largely under the media and community’s radar, AJCommittee members rarely read about their exploits in the next day’s papers — but, then again, that was never the goal.
“We don’t make a fuss about things in the newspapers. It works better this way. You don’t want to embarrass people unless they need to be embarrassed,” said Joe Durra, a local board president in the mid-1980s.
“We put a lot of pressure on companies. If you’re like Bechtel and Chevron and doing work in Saudi Arabia where no Jews are admitted at all, [we] had to pretty much stay under the radar, right?”
Added Richard Johns, the AJCommittee’s immediate past president, “Sometimes people don’t pay attention to us. They don’t pay attention to us the first 30 or 40 times. We don’t yell or scream or pontificate. We just try to be quiet and influential.”
Like most people, Johns can’t give a particularly succinct answer when asked what, exactly, the AJCommittee does. It was founded 99 years ago in response to Russian pogroms, and, in short, has worked to end discrimination against Jews and minorities in the United States and around the world since — in its own way.
Rather than lead a demonstration in front of the Saudi consulate, for example, the AJCommittee smuggled anti-Semitic, jihadist textbooks out of the Wahabi nation, translated them and presented the tangible evidence to the Saudi ambassador.
It was behind-the-scenes work at major international corporations that helped to break the Arab boycott of Israel and the glass ceiling for Jewish executives. Behind-the-scenes work got rabbis into Catholic schools to explain Judaism to the students.
“More often than not, we’ve found that working with some degree of discretion has been infinitely more productive than going in for the immediate hit and the banner headline,” said Ernest Weiner, the AJCommittee’s regional director since 1972.
“Many people here treat diplomats almost as decorations. We don’t,” he explained.
This way, the committe has cultivated a worldwide network of friends and contacts. It’s only a matter of a few phone calls to set up meetings with officials from China to Qatar. A network such as this is a big help when you’re, say, hoping to do something about the International Red Cross’ ongoing brushoff of Israel’s Magen David Adom — as the local AJCommittee does..
But the issues confronting the committee often aren’t global at all. One of Johns’ pet projects was dealing with anger that the 100-foot-tall cross atop San Francisco’s Mt. Davidson was on public land.
While some groups advocated tearing down the metal cross, Johns and the AJCommittee quietly organized an auction — “where anyone could buy this baby” — in which the land atop the hill was purchased by an Armenian group for $20,000.
The Armenians made the cross into a memorial for the Armenian genocide and also, at the AJCommittee’s behest, set up some displays about the separation of church and state.
“So, church and state are separate up there,” said Johns.