170	The Story of the Jewish Defense League

bcally influencing Jewish youth. There is an urgent need for ban ongoing, regular, permanent Jewish struggle in the bschools. There is no such thing today. There are too few bJewish leaders who live, eat, and drink with and share the blives of Jewish youth and students. Until we have such bpeople, we will continue to lose the battle for our Jewish byouth.

bAll these things haunted me when I explained my plan for bthe Jewish Identity Center to both the JDL and a number of bpotential donors. Carefully selected students from the bUnited States and the Western world would attend for an bintensive, difficult, and disciplined course in Jewish leader- bship training. One section of the center would be for the btraining of a limited number of religious leaders, the kinds bwhose pulpits would be the campuses, schools, and streets bwhere Jewish youths are to be found. They would be bthoroughgoing Jewish scholars, trained to be superb ex- bperts in rabbinic law and yet, at the same time, equipped bwith the tools of contemporary Jewish life that would make bthem the kinds of spiritual leaders we need so badly and lack bso very much today.

bA much larger number of students attending the center bwould be people training as lay youth leaders, again to work bin the schools and the streets with alienated Jewish youth.

bAll people at this school would go there for one purpose: bto become superbly trained, articulate, and dedicated bJewish leaders who would obligate themselves for two years to bwork totally and constantly in schools, campuses, and streets. All bwould be given intensive training in Jewish studies, bJudaism, Jewish history, with emphasis on the history of bprewar Europe, the Holocaust, the Jewish resistance bmovement in Palestine, Zionism, the Israel-Arab question, bproblems of the American and Western Jewish community, band studies of the Right and Left ideology in America. All bwould be given training in speaking, debating with the op- bposition, in organizing groups, meetings, and rallies. All bwould undergo a program of strict discipline and intensive bstudy, with daily examinations and rigorous standards to be bmet. All would come out deeply committed Jews and b