66	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bphia head, Cecil Moore, rose in court to shout at Board of bEducation counsel David Berger: “You and the rest of the bJews get out of my business!” The American Jewish Con- bgress was busy fighting and licking Christmas stamps.

bJewish merchants in the inner city of every single urban bcommunity became the targets of vicious crime and open banti-Semitism. Racial riots burned them out and they stood bin their stores with pistols and fear in their hearts each time bthe door opened and someone walked in, the question bbeing: buyer or killer? The destruction of the small Jewish bmerchant, accompanied by clear anti-Semitism, was evident beven to the National Observer, published by the parent bcompany of the moderate, conservative Wall Street Journal. bIn May 1968 it printed a major story headed: “Black bAnti-Semitism: Ruin for Tiny Merchants in Chaotic Wash- bington.” It described the robbery of a Jewish liquor store bowner with a Black man holding the jagged neck of a bottle bto his throat while telling him: “You’re in deep trouble, bJew man . . .”

bIt was not only in Washington. It was in Boston, Cleve- bland, Baltimore, Detroit, and New York, where so many of bthe Jewish stores were little “Mom and Pop” grocery stores, bsandwich shops, and clothing stores, and where a survivor bof a concentration camp was shot to death when he had no bapple pie. The Union of American Hebrew Congregations, bthe Reform Jewish Establishment, had no comment on such bJewish problems; it was too busy fighting for Negro civil brights in Mississippi.

bJewish neighborhoods in inner city after inner city died. bAreas where tens of thousands of Jews had lived, worked, bbuilt lives and careers, synagogues and schools, and which bhad come to mean warmth, familiarity, and roots, suddenly bbecame places of horror and nightmare. Streets once free band safe at all hours of the night became dangerous during bthe day. Houses whose doors were never locked became bfortresses of fear. And the exodus began and became a flood bof panic. The wealthy Jew had long since left for the upper bstatussphere and now the middle class retreated before the bhostile nightmare. Only the poor and the elderly remained, b