San Diego (special) -- Morris Casuto, regional director of the Anti Defamation League, told two stories about himself recently that made me wonder how, of all professions, he wound up in the business of combatting the Jew-haters.

The first story concerned his father, Sabatay, an immigrant from Turkey, who operated a grocery store in the Bronx until hard economic times caused his operation to be downsized to a horse pulling a wagon-load of produce.

"If he were in the neighborhood, he would stop and come upstairs for lunch and it would befall me to watch the wagon and the horse," Casuto recalled. "I don't like horses. They are big.... and here I was, a fairly diminutive individual, standing next to this long wagon, this huge horse, saying 'please don't move!'"

The second story came years later when Casuto was a graduate student at American University in Washington D.C., earning room and board by serving as an adviser on a dormitory floor where nearly everyone but him was a member of the basketball team. Casuto stand 5 foot 5 1/2 inches tall.

"During a (1970) rally in Washington against the Kent State massacre, the dorms had opened their ground floors to people who would be willing to sleep peacefully, but a fight broke out between two galoots," Casuto related. "My normal reaction--a logical one--is to walk the other way, but when I tried to break them up they decided rather than fight each other they would pummel me. 

"And then suddenly they were pulled off me, and there were four giants from my floor holding these guys up by the scruffs of their necks asking me what I wanted to do with them. A number of scenarios went through my mind."

One suspects that anti-Semites, particularly those who walk around in nazi arm bands or in Ku Klux bedsheets, might have a tendency toward violence. Where did Casuto who shied from horses, and had to be bailed out of a fight by basketball players, find the courage to become their arch-nemesis in San Diego County?

"I don't know if one would call it 'courage,' he replied. "It is part of the responsibility that comes with a professional position....You do what you have to do. Do I get scared? Of course I get scared; any individual who does not get scared sometimes is a fool. Does it stop me from doing what I think I have to do? Generally not. I don't look at it particularly as courage because I see colleagues across the country doing exactly the same. I am not a particularly unusual or special individual."

Has Casuto ever been in a physical confrontation with anti-Semites? "Never," he replied. "Although I am short my feet still work pretty well." 

Casuto, 54, likes to joke, but in the time it takes you to think ta dump bump, he can become serious again.

"I have been in a position where I have felt very intimidated: I have been at meetings where as it turned out people I have been monitoring learned who I was," Casuto said. "I've been face-to-face with Tom Metzger. I've been face-to-face with rioters... It was a frightening experience because we don't often come face-to-face with people whose persona is violence."

A few hours before one of our interviews, the parking lot outside Casuto's office building on Mission Center Drive had been stickered with swastikas -- more than likely a reminder from neo-nazis that they knew the workplace address of the man who often had denounced them in the news media for scattering anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-Mexican leaflets throughout San Diego County.

Casuto has become somewhat inured to hate stickers. Death threats he takes more seriously, like the typewritten message signed some years ago by the so-called "Exalted Cyclops" of the "Lemon Grove KKK" which told him not to make statements to certain newspapers . "If at anytime we find out that you do, please understand that we will kill you," said the letter writer. "If we find this difficult we will simply burn down the ADL's headquarters. Thank you."

'Please.' 'Thank you.' Politeness and neo-nazis somehow seem out of sync. Perhaps that is why after police arrested a group of neo-nazis recently on a variety of charges, including the false use of a La Mesa Police Department badge to illustrate a hate flyer, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported wonderingly that one of those arrested--Alexander Curtis, 21-- was known to his neighbors as such a "polite" young man.

The fight against neo-nazis and their ilk represents only a small portion of the work that the Anti-Defamation League does in San Diego, albeit an important part. Combatting discriminatory practices by people who are less malevolent, perhaps just insensitive, is a related aspect of the ADL's mission.

When someone brings a complaint of discrimination to the local ADL office, says Casuto, "our methodology is to approach it in a way so as much as possible not to create future enemies. I was taught a long time ago that you always have an opportunity to ratchet up a problem, but it is very difficult to ratchet one down. If you start at a high level of animosity, then you are in trouble from the very beginning."

Casuto told of a case in which a mother called him to say that a teacher refused to permit her son to wear his kippah in class "because it represented a cap and no caps were allowed in school because of gang symbols and so forth." The angry mother wanted Casuto to take immediate and forceful action.

But the ADL regional director suggested that a more appropriate next step would be for the parent to visit the teacher and say "that I told you that there must be a mistake because I know the school and the teachers are fine and committed and dedicated and no teacher would say something that would be so stupid when they must know in advance that they are breaking laws and are being incredibly insensitive."

By relaying that message, the parent communicated that the ADL was "involved and that we were giving that teacher a wonderfully easy way out," Casuto said. "The teacher said 'yes, of course, there was a misunderstanding' and the student got to wear his kippah. That was a win-win situation. No one was injured. No one was pressured. No one left feeling abused, and both sides agreed it was simply a misunderstanding. Was it a misunderstanding? Maybe not, but who cares? If anything, we left the teacher a way out that was legitimate and they were able to step out in a non-humbled way. "

His modus for dealing with such situations? "Let people back out like a mensch provided of course that the mistake was one of ignorance and inadvertence," Casuto replied. 

"When someone injures a member of the community consciously and deliberately, I have a simple philosophy: some result has to be attempted. If someone has been discriminated against because she is a member of the Jewish community, it is our responsibility to find the right attorney for her. If someone has lost her job, and if we can, we'll find someone to sue them. We have had both situations."

Taking reactive measures in behalf of Jews who have suffered the sting of discrimination, while important, is only half the story of the ADL's work. The other half concerns proactive programs initiated by the ADL 
to sensitize people to other people's differences and concerns.

Under Casuto's guidance, the local ADL chapter has been working with two large categories of people: those in schools, and those in law enforcement.

The schools program involves training sessions for teachers and administrators, and leadership conferences for students at which, through workshops, they analyze sources of intergroup misunderstandings at their schools and propose solutions. In special instances, as when skinheads have been active, efforts can focus on a single school in intensive "Stop the Hate" programs. 

"A World of Difference," best-known of ADL's varied school programs, deals not only with the relations between Jews and non-Jews; but also with differences that arise among a variety of ethnic and religious groups, as well as between gays and straights.

The director of the program is Sherry Edensmith, who according to Casuto likes to ask her audiences: "What is this middle-aged, white, Christian woman doing working for a Jewish organization?" and then answers, "to work with an extraordinary educational program."

Though Edensmith "is as respected an educator as you will find anywhere in the country," Casuto says, she is hampered by having only one part-time though able assistant, Debra Lobatz, to help her reach the 20,000 teachers in San Diego County.

"Our education department has to be much larger to make a legitimate impact," Casuto frets. "I would hope that there would be five educators working in the San Diego office."

Sheriff Bill Kolender was San Diego's police chief when Casuto arrived in town in 1978, and the two fellow Jews hit it off almost immediately. Kolender got Casuto involved in the San Diego City Schools Integration Task Force, and also was Casuto's entree to law enforcement community.

Today, Casuto serves regularly as a lecturer on hate crimes at the San Diego Regional Law Enforcement Academy where young police officers and sheriff's deputies receive their training. He has become so well known for his easy-going, yet pointed, training sessions that he was recruited to lecture federal law enforcement officials as well.

From the ongoing relationship with law enforcement grew the idea of ADL serving as a coordinating agency for monitoring hate crimes in San Diego. 
Lori Williamson, ADL's coordinator for the hate crimes program, receives reports from law enforcement agencies whenever hate is considered the motive for a crime, whether it be against Jews, Blacks, Mexicans, Whites, Asians, or any other group, including homosexuals.

"Thank God she is detail-oriented," says Casuto, whose own desktop can be a puzzle. "She is incredibly good, as are all our staff. Meg Goldstein, the assistant director, in five months has become an integral part and important part of the office. The support staff are really hard-working, dedicated individuals who are as responsible as much as anyone else here for the successes, but not at all for the failures. Gail Connors, who does the education; our new office manager Helene Levine; and Cheryl Ray, our fundraising secretary, all are exceptional."

Casuto said since the day he was greeted in San Diego by volunteers Harry and Ellie Nadler, he has been helped, nurtured, coached, and occasionally forgiven his bad jokes by "lay leaders who also have become friends -- Stan Heyman, who is chairman of our board; Mitch Dubick, Jerry Gumpel, Jodyne Roseman, Joe Fisch, Sandy Goodkin. ..."

"They are integrally active in everything we do," Casuto enthused. "They have given me counsel, they have created an office where lay people say 'this is what we have to do' .... I think there is a good base here."

* * *

Life sometimes takes people in unexpected directions. Casuto, a Fulbright scholar, had completed a year of research in Indonesia for his doctorate, and had been heading for a life in academia when he and his wife, Doreen, moved in 1972 to an apartment in Rockville, Md., so they could keep their newly-acquired dog. 

They met the father of a young woman who lived in the complex, and he turned out to be the regional director of ADL's Washington office. "He talked to me. He said 'Do you think you would be interested in the Anti Defamation League? We have openings.' I said 'What do you do?' He said 'We do a lot of different things' and we talked for a while and it sounded interesting."

Casuto went to ADL's headquarters in New York City and "it was the shortest interview I ever had in my life. I thought I had done really well, or really had screwed up. I was offered a job as an assistant director, at that time called a community consultant...Doreen and I talked and we said 'yes.' Doreen has always been exceptionally good at challenges. She said 'let's move!' The job was in Columbus, Ohio."

Initially Casuto believed that he could perform as ADL's assistant director in Columbus by day, and complete his doctoral thesis by night. He already had a few chapters done, but found himself more and more excited by the ADL work and less and less enamored with his thesis, which was intended to describe what effect assigning soldiers to such civilian tasks as road building had on the morale of Indonesia's military. 

Although Casuto likes to joke about himself, he was serious in describing himself as clueless back then about the ADL. Growing up in his neighborhood in the Bronx, where everyone was either Jewish or Italian, anti-Semitism was not something he encountered until his undergraduate years at Hunter College. That's when he attended a speech by George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi party, and sat in the front row to jeer him. At the time, Casuto thought neo-nazis were simply freaks, bad jokes--certainly not a focus of his future professional life.

His second encounter with anti-Semitism came at American University when a young lady to whom he had taken a fancy refused a date with him, explaining that her conservative Virginia family simply would not approve of her dating a Jew. "I felt more sorry for her than for me," Casuto says today.

Being turned down by the Southern WASP probably was the best thing that happened to Casuto. While working as an administrator at the campus Hillel, he met nursing student Doreen Sherwood, whose last name was an anglicization of Shafir. 

They were married June 20, 1970, and left immediately for Jakarta- traveling first to England, then to Holland (where Doreen's father lived), then to France, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Turkey (where Morris met but couldn't communicate with some of his Sephardic relatives), Israel, Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. 

Settled now in San Diego for nearly 20 years, and the father of two sons- Loren and Simon--Casuto still loves to reminisce about that around-the world adventure. He may suspect that he never will have the opportunity to experience the utlimate fantasy trip: taking a civilian ride into space, to see from a closer distance the stars that have become his hobby. 

About his life partner, Casuto reflects, "Doreen is my anchor. When things get too depressing in this job, she is even keel. She balances my emotions. She is brighter than I am. She analyzes people better than I do."

"It is difficult to conceive of a complete life without Doreen," he adds with emotion about the woman who is a professional in her own right. She is a planner and advocate for patients who have suffered catastrophic care injuries. 

The Casutos are members of Adat Ami Synagogue, a Conservative congregation located, like his office, in Mission Valley.

As he credits his wife, so too does Casuto acknowledge his parents in teaching him life lessons that sustain him in his present role. Father Sabatay Casuto, he said, taught him commitment to a job. Mother Laura taught him how to help people reconcile their differences.

"My father was always something of an outsider in my mother's family," Casuto recalled. "He was foreign-born, while no one in my mother's family was foreign-born except for her parents (who also came from Turkey). He spoke with an accent; no one in my mother's family spoke with an accent. He did not go to high school; everybody in my mother's family did. He worked longer hours than the rest of our family. And yet he showed me that while that might not have been his choice, it was all right; that human beings both make their lot and, in a way, accept their lot."

At times, there were tensions between Casuto's father and his mother's family: "He was different. His language was different. He read Hebrew; my uncles didn't, so he ran the services for our home at the holidays. Everyone was into baseball; my father thought that baseball was boring. They drove, he didn't. Often relationships are built on the basis of similarity and not differences, and there were a lot of differences between him and other members of our family."

When those differences led to tensions, Casuto's mother "was always the peacemaker...in a way, she began to teach me to do a job like this even before I realized it."

Whom should we blame for his sense of humor, I asked during one interview.

"That's an interesting way to put it," he chided. "I don't know, sometimes I think my humor is a defense mechanism. I joke around a lot about things that mean a great deal to me. I don't like to show a great deal of emotion... Maybe it was that I grew up with a very verbal group of friends, you were always sparring--we didn't fight with each other, we fought verbally."

Casuto's sense of humor served him well after he gave his first speech for the ADL. "I will never forget: it was in Akron, Ohio," he recalled. "If you could do 10 things wrong in the list of giving bad speeches, I did 12 of them wrong. At the end I was not wet, I was drenched from nerves."

What did he do that was so terrible? "I spoke to an audience that knew more about the subject (the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s) than I did. I wrote it out and read it. I sat down instead of standing up."

When the speech was over, "someone on the board who lived in Akron put his arm around my shoulder and said, 'You really feel badly, don't you?' I said I was devastated. He said, 'Can I give you a piece of advice?' I said 'anything.' He squeezed my shoulder and said, 'Morris, get out of town as quickly as possible; the mob is forming outside.' That was really just the right thing to say-- at least for me and my own personality."

After 3 1/2 years learning the ropes in Ohio, Casuto was transferred to Indiana to be the regional director there. Looking back, he confesses to be embarrassed by his tenure there. "I come from New York City and I was not terribly comfortable with the rural parts of Indiana. I was not sufficiently trained in community organization so that I knew how to develop leadership. I think in the two years there, I did not develop one individual....For a variety of reasons--I'd like to think not only because of me--prior to my being transferred, the League closed the Indiana office. 

"I somewhat sardonically joked that I am still in the ADL Guinness Book of Records for having closed an office in less than two years that had been open a quarter of a century." 

He remembers "being interviewed in Southern Indiana in the middle of the summer by a television station where the air conditioning had broken down. She said 'stay tuned, we will be right back' and I jumped up and said 'towels, towels, I am melting here!' and she leaned over and whispered, 'Morris, we are not off the air yet' which was a learning experience. 

"This was on tape, so when I came back for the second part of the interview, I stayed in my seat. She said 'Morris, you can move now' and then we started up again. When she said, 'I am talking to Morris Casuto, the Indiana regional director of the Anti-Defamation League,' towels fell on us. It was the same camera crew, and they decided they would have a dozen towels to throw on me. 

"I don't want you to think the almost two years in Indiana was uniformly unpleasant; it wasn't, but when I look at the experience, what did I leave the Hoosiers? I left them without an office. I am not going to tell you I had this wonderfully successful two-year-run in Indianapolis."

Casuto said "amazingly instead of the League saying 'adios,' they said 'guess what, we are going to send you to the Southwest to open an office. To give you an idea how much I knew about San Diego, for months when I first came in and you wanted to call the North County, you had to dial 1 (before the telephone number). No one told me that, and I couldn't figure out why I kept getting busy signals."

If it be true that we learn not from our successes but from our failures, San Diego was fortunate that Casuto had such difficulties in Indiana. 

"I realized in part what I had done wrong," he said. "Lack of program, lack of visibility, lack of leadership, lack of fundraising. I knew that I had to go out and introduce myself to as many different community organizations as possible. I understood that if I were able to articulate properly what we do, there would be people interested in helping us."

When Kolender approached him about serving on the integration task force, "I realized it was an important committee and I thought it was important to have a representative of a Jewish organization there, to show the general community that the Jewish community was concerned about this issue. There was a snowball effect: the more people you know, the more relationships you develop, and the easier it is to do your job. 

"There is an advantage to longevity because people don't see you as an outsider, they see you as an integral component and an integral player to the well-being of the community.

"I figure in another 20 years I should have this job down pretty well,"
he quips.

* * *

The ADL regionally and nationally often hears contradictory criticism. Some people say that the time of real anti-Semitism in America is over, and that the ADL tends to overblow threats to the Jewish community to justify its institutional existence. You also hear people coming from the exact opposite side, saying the ADL does too little to protect Jews from anti-Semites.

I asked Casuto to respond to each charge in turn.

"I know that the ADL doesn't overblow the threat," he replied. "You can disagree with the analysis...but to presume that we are dong this solely for our own well being is not only ludicrous but stupid. ...Because we live so well, are we to presume that we will always do so? Where are the Jewish communities that lived well in the past? In Spain? In Germany? Even in Poland, to a degree?

"Please don't get me wrong or misunderstand me. I am not suggesting those histories are about to repeat themselves. But for anyone to suggest that we have come to an end time, and now the millennium is here, they are more than foolish: they are dangerous."

Casuto deals more kindly with the critics who say that the ADL doesn't do enough. He agrees with them.

"We aren't as effective as we should be," he declared. "Is it because we are inept? Or that we misjudge? Or that we analyze the situation inaccurately? Most of the time it is because there is too much to do, simply too much to do.

"Look at our educational program which is impactful on the educational structures of San Diego County that indirectly benefits the Jewish community and Jewish security," he said. "My teaching at the San Diego Regional Law Enforcement Academy: that helps to create an educated, sensitive group of police officers who understand the concerns that minority communities have about hate crimes. 

"The committees that we serve on at the U.S. Attorney's office, or my travels with the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center: is that enough to do? Absolutely not. Are there 10 other things I would like to do? You bet. We don't have the money, the staff."

Casuto said the regional office hasn't done "nearly enough" in the area of "interrelationships with different ethnic, racial and religious organizations." He said more knowledge is needed in the Jewish community about Blacks and Chicanos, as well as about Evangelical Christians.

"There are a lot of areas that we are not touching and that is one of the things that worries me on a regular basis," he said. "Are we establishing our priorities correctly? Are we utilizing limited resources and staff and volunteers appropriately?"

He said the ADL's lay leadership is constantly fine-tuning the agency's program mix. "One year Evangelicals may be the hot topic; another year, another group," Casuto says. "The difficulty is to be consistent in your approach. We try to be, but...we are not doing the job we should be doing. There is too much more to do."

"I see the ADL as one of the most important Jewish defense agencies in the world," he said. "Our responsibility in part is to serve as an early warning tripwire for the Jewish community.

"If one looks at the Jewish community today, one would have to be a fool not to realize that we are institutionally secure. We have been an incredibly successful community; we are generally successful economically, and fabulously successful educationally, and we are an influential and powerful community....

"But one thing you know is that life changes, and it is presumptuous to presume that tomorrow is going to be better and that Jewish security will be maintained. So in a narrow sense, that is my job, and that is the job of those who work at the Anti-Defamation League, to insure as best as we can that the security of the Jewish community tomorrow, if anything, will be better than today."