 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
The Klan�s Lawyer Comes Home
Yigal Schleifer/ New York
 HARD TALK: Siegel briefs Rev. Jeffrey L. Berry, the Klan's Grand Imperial Wizard, during the New York Rally |
It was one of those "only in New York" situations. When the Ku Klux Klan was denied permission to hold a rally in downtown Manhattan, the group turned to the New York Civil Liberties Union and its Jewish executive director, 55-year-old Norman Siegel, for help. Siegel, a staunch defender of constitutional rights, was able to win back the Klan�s permission to meet after a last-minute court appeal arguing that the Klan had a right to gather under the First Amendment.
When the day of the rally arrived, there was Siegel - Jewish kid from Brooklyn, veteran of the civil rights battles in the South - standing on a sunny Saturday afternoon surrounded by Klansmen in their white pointed hats and shuttling between them and the police to make sure that nothing got out of hand. Like it or not, Siegel had become - as one local paper described him - "the Klan�s lawyer."
The Klan is just one of a list of unsavory clients Siegel has gone to bat for. In recent years he has defended the right of Khalid Muhammed, a virulently anti-Semitic black nationalist, to hold a rally in Harlem and the right of the Black Israelites, a rabidly anti-white pseudo-religious group, to preach in Times Square.
At the same time, Siegel stood up for the Brooklyn Museum after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani cut off its funding because of an exhibit he found objectionable. He has been one of the most outspoken crusaders against police brutality in New York. As part of that battle, Siegel has most recently been working with the family of Gidone Busch, an emotionally disturbed Orthodox man from Borough Park who was shot dead by the police in August.
Many of his critics dismiss Siegel as a knee-jerk civil libertarian. But in the flesh he emerges as more nuanced than that: principled, yet thoughtful. And thanks to his many entanglements of late with City Hall over free speech and police brutality, after spending many years as a gadfly on the fringes, Siegel may be entering his period of greatest acceptance - even if he did represent the Klan.
"First, I didn�t want the phone call," Siegel says of the day leaders of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rang him after their rally permit had been denied. "I thought to myself, this is going to be another Skokie. This is going to end everything we�re doing." (In 1978, after the American Civil Liberties Union represented a group of neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie, Illinois, the ACLU lost over 20,000 members.)
Siegel, whose curly brown hair hangs over his craggy face, is sitting in his 17th-floor office overlooking the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge. The walls are lined with pictures of Martin Luther King, old voter-registration posters, a stained-glass hanging that reads "Impeach Nixon" and a framed copy of the Constitution. In the summer of 1966, while he was in law school, Siegel went to Mississippi to support the civil rights campaign. Its spirit lives on in his office - which makes his working with the Klan seem even more jarring.
"Emotionally, it�s still very difficult. I still haven�t sifted through it," Siegel says of the last few weeks. But, he adds in an accent that gives away his Brooklyn youth, "The issue was a no-brainer intellectually, legally, in that everyone in America has a right under the First Amendment to engage in peaceful political activity and the right to hold a peaceful rally. The government can�t deny someone that right, even if you find their views repugnant, offensive, bigoted, wrong-minded, which is exactly what the Klan is."
Siegel�s stand on the Klan�s right to rally has had its repercussions. The militant Jewish Defense Organization, an offshoot of the late Meir Kahane�s Jewish Defense League, picketed his apartment building on the Upper West Side, denouncing him as a "traitor," passing out flyers advertising his home phone number, and encouraging people to call him up and give him a piece of their mind.
Siegel received more than 50 phone calls, some of them threatening. But he defends the JDO�s right to picket his home. He even explained to the building�s management where to allow the protesters to gather and asked it not to call the police. He has, in fact, represented the JDO�s leader, Mordechai Levy, on a few occasions when the group was not allowed to speak on college campuses and once when it was prevented from picketing civil rights attorney William Kunstler�s home.
But there has been little Skokie-like fallout from the NYCLU�s support for the Klan. If anything, it seems to have made the organization stronger. Both black leader Al Sharpton and New York�s leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, filed friend-of-the-court briefs endorsing the NYCLU�s intervention. "Only Norman could have gotten Sharpton and the Amsterdam News to come out in favor of a Klan march," marvels Steven Hyman, president of the NYCLU�s board of directors.
Many observers of New York�s political scene suggest that Siegel and his strict take on constitutional rights have more currency than ever among the city�s residents, thanks to Mayor Giuliani�s strong-arm tactics. Siegel agrees. "Giuliani has helped educate the people of New York City with regard to the meaning and significance of free speech and the First Amendment," he says, "because we have gone to court so many times against him and made the point over and over again." In fact, since 1994, the NYCLU has challenged the mayor 21 times in First Amendment cases, prevailing in full or in part on 18 of them.
Siegel's work on the Gidone Busch case has brought him closer to the Jewish community, where some of his positions over the years have made him unpopular. Siegel grew up in Borough Park - only four blocks from where Busch was shot - when the area was a working-class Jewish and Italian neighborhood. He credits his Jewish education, and particularly the Sunday morning lectures of one rabbi, as shaping his interest in civil rights. "Listening to those lectures," he says, "had something to do with it. And the idea of being in a minority, the idea of being in a group that is targeted."
In recent years, though, as Borough Park turned more Orthodox and politically conservative, Siegel stopped feeling welcome in the old neighborhood. Four years ago, after an Indian teenager was allegedly beaten up there by a police officer, he led a vigil with the boy�s family down one of the main avenues. When he was called to speak, Siegel was shouted down by a large group of local Jews, some of whom were shouting "Heil, Siegel."
Nevertheless, after Busch was killed, it seemed almost inevitable that Siegel would be involved in representing his family. Busch, 31, was shot 12 times by four police officers who claimed that he had attacked them with a hammer. When he first started working on the case, Siegel jokingly asked Dov Hikind, an outspokenly conservative Democratic state assemblyman who represents Borough Park and who is also active in the Busch case, if the neighborhood was willing to welcome him back.
"There�s no question that not only myself, as the person representing Borough Park, and others appreciate his involvement," says Hikind. "It�s been very, very valuable to have his dedication and devotion. I�m very, very impressed with Norman Siegel, even though we come from different worlds philosophically and ideologically."
For Siegel, then, working with the Busch family and in Borough Park has been a homecoming. "Throughout my life," he says, "I�ve been using my legal skills to help African Americans, Latinos, gays, lesbians. And here�s an opportunity to do it for a Jewish New Yorker. So, I�m going back to be there as a lawyer and try to get justice for the Busch family. That�s what it�s all about."
Jewish World
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2001 |  |