Divided we stand | page 1, 2

Critics of the Jewish community's response cite the Bosnia crisis of the early 1990s by way of contrast. As early as 1992, long before it was widely understood by the general public, the cause of Bosnia's embattled Muslims was virtually a grass-roots movement among American Jews. One senior community official, Abraham Bayer of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, was so active on Bosnia's behalf that he was eventually accredited as a member of the Bosnian U.N. delegation.

Not all Jews agreed back then, either. A small but influential faction bitterly opposed supporting the Bosnian Muslims, arguing that the Serbs had fought valiantly against the Nazis in World War II -- and that the Muslim world was Israel's enemy.

Still, "when all is said and done there was an overwhelmingly positive response in the Jewish community," said Mohamed Sacirbey, Bosnia's U.N. ambassador. "Part of it was the human factor, the sense of how much Jews had suffered in Europe. But there was also a sense of protecting the legacy, that if you say 'Never again' it has to have a universal application. This was very well understood in the Jewish community at the time."

That said, Sacirbey acknowledges a sort of genocide fatigue may be emerging in parts of the Jewish community. "I think there may be, at least in part, less sophistication and sensitivity on the part of the Albanian community as to how to address this issue. And maybe the Jewish community feels a little more tired of it, after so many years."

Jewish community leaders say the limited public response has a much more mundane explanation: timing. The crisis erupted on the eve of the Passover holiday, when most identified Jews are at home with their families.

"People were scrambling," said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Washington-based Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the organized Jewish community's most respected human rights activist. "It was hard to make decisions because it was hard to reach people."

The long Passover holiday even affected events on Capitol Hill. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said he and Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), longtime head of the House Albanian Issues Caucus, whose Bronx district includes one of the nation's largest Albanian-American communities, had decided shortly after the bombing began to dramatize the mounting tragedy by signing all 24 Jewish members of the House onto a joint statement calling for NATO to send ground troops into Kosovo. "All human beings have an obligation to speak out, but it's especially appropriate for Jewish members because of our history," Nadler said.

By the time the statement was drafted, though, most Jewish members had left Washington for the holiday. "In the end it was just Eliot and me signing," Nadler said. "Life won't really resume for Jewish political activists until after the holidays are finally over next week," said Saperstein. "That's when people will decide what to do. And I suspect that when they do, they'll do it with a bang."

Timing intervened in a larger sense, too. The Bosnian war dragged on for years before the United States intervened. That allowed plenty of time for a grass-roots movement to emerge, fueled by repeated television images of slaughter. In the case of Kosovo, Washington and NATO acted relatively early, before the atrocities reached overwhelming proportions.

Whether they acted effectively is another question. Tragically, there may yet be plenty of opportunity for American Jews -- and Americans of every other creed and color -- to protest the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. In the words of one Capitol Hill aide, "things will get better as things get worse, if that's any comfort."

"As Jewish Americans we may have a special sensitivity to what's going on, because of what our people suffered in the Holocaust," said Engel. "I've been warning for five years that Milosevic would like nothing better than to push a million Albanians out of Kosovo. I'm sorry to be proved right."