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The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) office here in Boston must be pretty busy.
When a student from the Greater Boston area told her dad how she learned in her high school class that Jews in Israel torture and kill Arab women, the man met with school officials who, as he complained on that community's cable TV station, dissed him.
At least he got a meeting. The ADL didn't even return his calls. Grassroots Jewish groups immediately formed and have been fighting very publicly for over a year to get the "lessons" about Jewish killers of Arab women out of that school system, yet Boston's ADL hasn't lent a hand or said a word. Not one word.
But the new regional chairman of Boston's ADL did just write a column in The Boston Globe with a gayrights activist about hatred and violence toward LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) people.
Rabbi Hillel's wise questions - "If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?" - resonate forcefully today: How should Jews balance self-preservation with concern for others?
The Globe piece pointed out that hate crimes based on sexual orientation are on the rise - up almost 3 percent from previously reported FBI statistics. The public, it is suggested, should be jolted by this news.
Actually, the writers read the data wrong: According to the raw numbers, there 's been just a 1 percent increase (which may be statistically insignificant) in sexual orientation-based hate crimes in die time period they...