By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
As national president of the American Jewish Committee, Richard Sideman has met with several world leaders, including having two meetings with U.S. President George W. Bush. The first meeting was when President Bush spoke at the AJC’s 100th anniversary, where the two spoke about mutual acquaintances. The second meeting, Sideman said, was much more substantive: Sideman traveled to Washington, D.C. as part of a delegation from the Council of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. He described that meeting as “a command performance.” It was the first meeting the president had had with the Council of Presidents in his tenure.
“We didn’t know why the president had asked to meet with this group,” Sideman said. “What was interesting to me was that he sat down in a chair — he didn’t stand behind a podium, there wasn’t a desk in front of him, and he didn’t have any notes. He just sat there with his hands in his lap and he talked for 20 minutes about Iraq — why it was important to America’s security, why it was important to Israel’s security, why it was important to the security of other nations in that part of the world and what would happen if it failed — if America withdrew precipitously.”
Sideman said that both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who also attended the meeting, told the Jewish leaders that the U.N.-imposed sanctions on Iran over its continued uranium enrichment activities was having an effect on that country. The president stopped short of predicting whether the economic pressure would yield positive results however.
Sideman said the group also talked in depth with Sec. Rice about the situation on Israel’s northern border where, he said, they were told that the U.S. was well aware of the problem of weapons coming across the Syrian border into southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah continues to be a dominant force.
Rice, Sideman said, told the Jewish leaders that the administration was concerned by the flow of weapons, and hoped to bring more pressure to bear through the United Nations by working with other Security Council members to strengthen the hand of UNIFIL, the military contingent that has been stationed near the Lebanon-Israel border since the end of the 2006 war with Hezbollah.
“If they had 52 members of that conference, they had 48 members there that day,” Sideman recalled.
Sideman came to town on Nov. 16 for the AJC Seattle chapter’s Human Relations Award Dinner, which honored University of Washington regent Stan Barer. He then spoke at a lunch the following day with a group of AJC members. The discussion centered on the current work the organization is doing around the globe.
In talks with European leaders on trips he has taken across the Atlantic, Sideman said that most European leaders he has spoken with are “resigned” to the Syrian and Iranian weapons being brought into Lebanon. When he asked Romano Prodi about the infiltration of weapons destined for Hezbollah, the Italian prime minister responded:
“Sir, you are being very discrete. It is not an infiltration; it is a deluge.”
Dealing with international security is one of the new directions in which the AJC has begun to reposition itself. Another is attitudes about Israel on college campuses. Sideman spoke about initiatives to counter what he said is widely seen in the Jewish community as a tilt toward Arab positions on Israel and the Palestinians. One effort is a program to bring U.S. academics to Israel to see the situation on the ground for themselves, so that when they return to their campuses, “they can speak in defense of Israel” from firsthand observations.
At the dedication of the Holocaust Studies Center at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, at which Sideman spoke and where the AJC supplied some books and materials, he said surveys found that a majority of students knew virtually nothing about the Holocaust. But, he said, when students heard about it, they were eager to learn more.
Discussing energy independence, Sideman said “there is a sensitivity to greening and energy independence within the organization.”
One step the AJC has taken is to require that all staff cars be hybrid gas-electric vehicles as a small part in the campaign to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, much of which comes from countries not friendly toward the U.S. or Israel. He said the agency is also providing staffers with subsidies to buy hybrids for themselves. Israel and Germany, he added, have also begun to take similar steps at their embassies and consular offices.
Sideman is a partner in the San Francisco law firm of Sideman & Bancroft, representing individuals and companies in disputes with the IRS. Before entering private practice in 1978, he worked as a trial attorney in the Department of Justice Tax Division and as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Tax Division for the Northern District of California for more than a dozen years.
Sideman took over as the AJC’s national president in May, and has been an AJC member since 1982. After serving as president of AJC’s San Francisco chapter for four years, he was elected to the National Board of Governors, where he served for three years before being elevated to his current post. He has served as chair of the Community Service Commission, chair of the International Relations Commission, and was the founding chair of the Anti-Semitism Task Force.