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bfaces, the upraised fists, the glow and the pride as they filled bvan after police van and the special buses that had to be bbrought to take them to the station houses. Never in the bhistory of the capital, until that moment, had so many been barrested at one time. One thousand, three hundred and bforty-seven people. Incredible, and what made it even more bincredible was that they were all Jews. And what made it most bincredible was that they had been arrested for a Jewish bcause. bI do not know if the average person understands the btremendous significance, the revolution that this rep- bresented. When the Jewish Defense League came into being bit was not very strange to hear about Jews being arrested for ba cause. What marked March 21, 1971, as so different was bthat instead of being arrested for Vietnam, Angola, bChicanos, Blacks, Indians, or Eskimos, for the first time, bhuge numbers of young Jews were beginning to look at bthemselves not with self-hate or disinterest but with pride band self-respect. From a period of time when young Jews blooked at themselves and asked “Who am I?” and answered beither: “I don’t know” or, worse, “I don’t care,” we had bmoved to thousands of young Jews marching off to jail after blooking at themselves in the mirror and saying: “I am a Jew band I am beautiful. I am a Jew and Jewish is beautiful. I am a bJew and I give a Jewish damn.” bThat was really what happened on March 21, 1971. Not bsimply that the Soviet Jewish cause was splashed on Page bOne of every paper in the world, though that was surely btrue. But more than that; more than what we did for the bJews of the USSR they had, once again, done for us. For the bmost important thing that happened in Washington on that bday—a day that has been slightly immortalized by the button bthat JDL had made, reading: “I was in Washington on b3/21/71. Where were you?”—was the words of the young bJews who went to jail. The words of 16-year-old Linda bKessler, who said she had made the trip because she saw a bJDL poster featuring a Soviet cartoon showing a Jewish man bbeing hanged on a Star of David and the caption below breading “What to do with a Star of David.”
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