While I'm away, here's the column The Jewish Advocate was kind enough to print in this week's edition (I think. I haven't seen the thing, of course, nor do I know what they titled it or if they made any changes). Regular columnist Michael Steadman was taking the week off and I stood in:

In the end, it all boils down to the basics. In 1943, an American Jew and child of Russian immigrants, Abraham Maslow, gave us a way of understanding human motivation by framing our priorities as a "hierarchy of needs" -- you know, that pyramid-shaped chart we all learned about at some point or another, with the bodily essentials down at the foundational bottom -- air, food, water -- and all those enlightened personality trait -- internal moral motivation, creativity, self-actualization -- way up at the fragile top. You're not so interested in spending time perfecting the inner you, explained Maslow, when your food supply is threatened.

The same construct that helps us understand individual behavior can also be put to use understanding the workings of organizations or communities, including our own. Here in Boston, a new generation of Russian Jews has been among those on the vanguard of sounding a call to quarters, a warning signal that just perhaps, while Jews have been busy doing enlightened good works; tending to the needs of the homeless, the jobless, the sick, and fighting for the Civil Rights of others -- perhaps we have not seen to our foundations, to our own survival.

A madman rises in the east, speaking in familiar turns of phrase and singing tunes whose rhymes we've heard before. He blames the Jews for all the traditional evils -- control of money, corruption of culture, the perpetuation of war, disease. He co-opts the trappings of scholarship and art to deny the Holocaust. His own and his neighbors' airwaves are filled with education and indoctrination for their people's motivation. His intent is pronounced and public. He has the motive and is gaining the means.

It is sensible for Jews, or lovers of the Jews and of Israel, to be concerned at these developments, and to look for someone in authority to run to the warning bell and call for the manning of the parapets.

Yet still, our borders stand open, and every attempt to enforce our immigration laws is met by a cacophony of protest from a shameless domestic grievance lobby and a cadre of pro-bono lawyers from the usual suspects -- ACLU on down.

IIn the face of this, a year ago the ADL's Abe Foxman still felt confident enough to take the podium at a national meeting and tell us that "the key domestic challenge to the American Jewish community and to our democratic values" was...religious Christians. "Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!" exclaimed Foxman.

Well Katy bar the door! We've been dealing with that "threat" rather successfully, some would say too successfully, for some years now, arms firmly clasped behind our backs. No existential threat there by a country mile.

Now it does seem that ADL has been coming around, praise and hallelujah for it, but it was a long time in coming, and some say they, as well as the rest of the establishment organizations, are still too timid, too much behind the scenes operators, and not enough responsive to grassroots activists focused on Jewish survival.

Large organizations take a long time to change " it's not easy or quick to turn a battleship -- and the command to turn the rudder has to come from the bottom-up. Therein the dilemma, for how can the people push their leaders when we wait for those self-same leaders to issue orders and do the educating.

The education necessary to ensure our survival must come from the Jewish establishment groups -- present or forming. We cannot wait for mainstream, traditional news organizations to equip us with the knowledge we need to recognize the threats against us.

The national Green Party stands for boycotts, divestment, sanctions and ultimately the dismantling of the State of Israel. The local Green-Rainbow Party is run through to the core with "anti-Zionists" (a modern euphemism for anti-Semitism as anti-Semitism was a modern euphemism for Jew-hatred). A not atypical discourse one may expect to encounter on the GRP email list might be like that given by former co-Chair Ron Francis as to why the word "Israel" should always be written in quotation marks, as to do otherwise would lend legitimacy to "the Zionist project," or how “the choice made by a Palestinian to attack a noncombatant does not make the Palestinian an immoral person..."

In all of the numerous Boston Globe stories and columns that mentioned GRP Gubernatorial Candidate Grace Ross, not a single one even hinted at her party's disturbing anti-Semitism, despite the reams of evidence they had at their disposal. In the final Brookline and Newton vote tally, Ross beat her overall state-wide average, while Secretary of State Candidate Jill Stein got 24% of the Brookline vote. And what's in a name they ask...

Syrian kids "know" that Jews use gentile blood to bake their matzo, but do American Jews know which parties stand for their destruction? Our big organizations have the resources to teach them, but they need a push from below in order to set their priorities straight. From time to time that push may be heard in overly strident tones, but the hour is late and a growing number in our community have spied the iceberg approaching through the fog.