opinion
BY STUART E. EIZENSTAT
“H ow long have you known me, Stu?” Madeleine
Albright asked me that question with a sense
of urgency I had not heard from her before.

It was mid-January 1996, and I was in my hotel
room in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic
Forum. She called me through a secure line from
her office in the State Department during the
transition following Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection,
before she was confirmed by the Senate as the
first female secretary of state in American history. I
was about to be nominated by the president to the
position she offered me as her under secretary of
state for economic, business and economic affairs.

“Well,” I replied, “20 years, since you and I
worked together in the West Wing of the Carter
White House, you as congressional liaison for the
National Security Council under Zbig Brzezinski,
and me as President Carter’s chief domestic policy
adviser.” The next question was even more odd: “What
religion am I?”
“Madeleine, of course, you are a Czech Catholic.

What’s this all about?”
She explained that a Washington Post reporter,
Michael Dobbs, was doing an investigative article
on her background as she awaited Senate con-
firmation, and shockingly determined that she
was Jewish, not Catholic. She had known that her
parents twice fled Czechoslovakia: first to London
as Hitler and the Nazis were going to take over,
and then again in 1948, this time to the United
States, after her father, a Czech diplomat who
returned after the war, was confronted by Stalin
and the Communists. She did not know that both
of her parents were born Jewish and converted
to Catholicism during the war, raising her and her
siblings as Catholics.

“What must I do?” she asked. She told me she
feared the American Jewish community would
oppose her nomination, believing that she was
embarrassed by and covered up her Jewish past,
and this might sink her confirmation. Moreover,
she said, “What am I supposed to say to my three
girls? Am I to tell them they should now convert to
Judaism?” My instant advice was to tell the truth, which was
that she never knew about her parents’ conversion;
to embrace her newly discovered Jewish past
with pride; and that of course, neither she nor her
three children should feel they needed to convert
to Judaism. I also explained that given my work
on Holocaust justice in the Clinton administration,
18 MARCH 31, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
looks on as Stuart E. Eizenstat, then-under secretary
of state for economic, business and agricultural
affairs, speaks during the opening plenary session of
the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets
at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Dec.

1, 1998.

and frequent interaction with Holocaust survivors,
that the Jewish community understood that during
World War II all sorts of methods were used to
protect Jewish children, including placing them
in Catholic convents or in Christian households
where they were raised by righteous gentiles.

I told her that several of the Jewish friends I had
made in Belgium when I was U.S. ambassador to
the European Union had been saved in just that way.

Tomas Kraus, the head of the Federation of Czech
Jewish Communities, later confirmed that “[i]t is com-
mon for Jews from this part of the world to be ignorant
of their Jewish roots.”
By being candid, I was certain there would be no
blowback either from the Jewish community or the
Senate. Besides, I reminded her, as U.N. ambas-
sador during Clinton’s first four years in office, she
had established herself as a strong, fervent sup-
porter of Israel against Arab attacks.

She followed my advice and was confirmed
with a remarkable 99-0 vote. On her first foreign
trip as secretary of state, as I was in her office for
a last-minute briefing, she looked at her suitcase
and, with her characteristic wit, said, “Well, with my
newly discovered Jewish background, I suppose I
should say I am going to schlep my suitcase!” We
all burst into laughter.

But Madeleine Albright went beyond my fond-
est hopes in identifying with her Jewish past.

As Secretary of State, in her maiden trip to her
Prague birthplace in July 1997, she went straight
to the Pinkas Synagogue to look for her grandpar-
ents’ names among the more than 77,000 Czech
and Slovak Holocaust victims lovingly inscribed
by Czech survivors on the wall of the synagogue.

She found the names of her paternal grandparents,
Arnost and Olga Korbel, who had perished in the
Nazi death camps — Arnost in Theresienstadt in
1942 and her grandmother in Auschwitz in 1944. At
the synagogue she said publicly, “Tonight … their
image will be forever seared into my heart.”
Later during her tour to welcome her native
Czech Republic and two other former Soviet bloc
countries into NATO — a burning issue today with
the Russian invasion of Ukraine — she toured other
Jewish sites in Prague, and movingly confronted
her past: “The evil of the Holocaust” has taken on
“even greater personal meaning” since she learned
the fate of her grandparents. “To the many values
and many facets that make up who I am, I now add
the knowledge that my grandparents and members
of my family perished in the worst catastrophe in
human history. So I leave here tonight with the cer-
tainty that this new part of my identity adds some-
thing stronger, sadder and richer to my life.”
She went a step further and on a later trip went to
the small villages where her fraternal and maternal
grandparents had lived, to try to relive their history.

As her under secretary, I saw up-close how her
background as a refugee from fascism shaped her
foreign policy views and her greatest triumphs in
the two Balkan Wars, in Bosnia and Kosovo. As
U.N. ambassador, she joined with National Security
Adviser Tony Lake to successfully urge President
Clinton, over Pentagon and State Department
opposition, to take aggressive U.S. leadership of
NATO and direct military strikes against Bosnian
Serbs following the brutality against Bosnian
Muslims encouraged by Serbian strongman
President Slobodan Milosević.

The July 1995 massacre of more than 7,000
Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica, dumped into
a mass grave, evoked for her the Holocaust her
parents had escaped. She confronted Joint Chiefs
of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell, stating,
“What’s the point of having this superb military
that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
That military action paved the way for the Dayton
Accords negotiated by Richard Holbrooke, the
peace agreement that ended the war.

In January 1999, following another Serb massa-
cre of Kosovo Albanians at the small Kosovo village
of Racak, Secretary of State Albright brilliantly com-
bined diplomacy with NATO military force, again
over Defense Department opposition, to secure a
PHOTO COURTESY OF GERSHON BLORITZKY
The Advice I Gave Madeleine Albright
When She found Out She Was Jewish



opinion
peace which lasts to this day.

She was a strong, constant supporter of my work
on Holocaust justice in my negotiations with Swiss
and French banks, German and Austrian slave labor
companies and European insurance companies.

She gave the keynote speech at the Washington
Conference which led to the Washington Principles
on Nazi-Confiscated Art, where she weaved her
own Holocaust background into the contemporary
challenge of returning looted art. And she asked
me to lead the U.S. delegation to the Kyoto confer-
ence on Climate Change, giving me strong backing
for the Kyoto Protocols.

She decided to name the State Department
headquarters after President Harry S. Truman, to
symbolize the leadership he had taken to build a
new, peaceful, post-war world, with U.S. leader-
ship. We shared a laugh when we found out his
middle initial “S” was not an abbreviation for any
name, but was just a letter his mother added to
his name.

We went through tragedies as well. I accompa-
nied her to Dover Air Force Base, where we met
the flag-draped coffins of American diplomats
killed in terrorist attacks at the U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, and she gave an uplifting
speech on the sacrifices American diplomats
take to try to create a better world.

Madeleine Albright, tiny in stature but huge in
impact, had a charisma, a sparkle, a brilliance and
a fluency in Czech, French, Polish and Russian.

She connected the foreign policy she forged
with President Clinton to the lives of everyday
people around the world. All of these qualities
made her larger than life. One of her trademarks
was wearing a variety of brooches on the lapel
of her clothing to underline her political and dip-
lomatic messages. When I asked why, since she
had not done this in our early years together, she
recalled when Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein,
following his invasion of Kuwait, compared her to
an “unparalleled serpent.” She wore a snake pin
in response, and a tradition was born.

The United States has lost a great American
public servant, a role model for women as the
first female secretary of state, a professor at
Georgetown University, an author, a lifelong
proponent of democracy and human rights,
a constant friend of Israel and someone who
embraced her Jewish background. And I have
lost a dear friend. JE
Stuart E. Eizenstat worked with Madeleine
Albright when they were both in the Carter White
House and during the Clinton administration in
which she was the secretary of state and he was
undersecretary of state for economic business
and agriculture affairs and special representative
of President Clinton and Secretary Albright on
Holocaust-era issues.

BY FARLEY WEISS
T The New Iran Deal
Is a Disaster, and
Everyone Knows it
he United States and Iran are reportedly on
the cusp of a new nuclear agreement. One of
the last remaining issues is said to be whether or
not the Biden administration removes the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps from the Foreign Terrorist
Organization list.

The administration is purportedly offering to do
so on the condition that Iran makes some amor-
phous commitment to rein in its regional aggres-
sion and refrain from targeting Americans.

In other words, as far as the Biden administra-
tion is concerned, it’s OK if the Iranians attack
Europeans, Saudis, Israelis or Emiratis.

Such an agreement brings to mind the deal West
Germany reportedly made with Fatah shortly after
the Palestinian terrorist group Black September
hijacked Lufthansa flight 615 on Oct. 29, 1972.

There is strong evidence suggesting that West
Germany released the three surviving Palestinian
Arab terrorists involved in the Munich massacre
in exchange for a commitment that no terrorist
attacks would be carried out in the country.

The Biden administration was supposed to
be negotiating an agreement with Iran over its
nuclear program. Instead, the revised agreement
apparently includes many provisions regarding the
lifting of terror-related sanctions on the IRGC and
numerous individual Iranians, despite their ongo-
ing involvement in terror activity.

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) recently stated that
while the agreement taking shape in Vienna
will not prevent Iran from eventually obtaining a
nuclear weapon, neither will the absence of a deal.

However, this misses the point — with no deal in
place over the past three years, it has been the
actions taken by both Israel and the United States
that have prevented Iran from obtaining a nuclear
weapon. Furthermore, there is the example of North Korea.

The United States signed a deal with North
Korea on Oct. 21, 1994, under which Pyongyang
committed to freeze its nuclear program. In
exchange for North Korea agreeing to shut down
its main nuclear plant and abandon others under
construction, the United States would provide two
light-water reactors, along with oil for heating and
energy production until the new reactors were
completed. In addition, the United States agreed
to lift economic sanctions and end its diplomatic
freeze on North Korea.

Ultimately, however, North Korea never gave
up its nuclear weapons program, and did develop
nuclear weapons, all while economically benefit-
ing from the mistaken agreement. In other words,
the United States would have been far better off
maintaining the sanctions on North Korea.

The original nuclear agreement with Iran, known
as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed in
2015, was supposed to change Iran’s behavior and
rein in its nuclear weapons program, in exchange for
over $100 billion in sanctions relief. However, Iran
clandestinely continued its nuclear weapons pro-
gram, using the massive influx of money to increase
its defense budget by 40%, as well as upping the
budgets of Hamas and Hezbollah.

After the United States unilaterally pulled out
of the JCPOA in 2018 under President Donald
Trump, Iran’s defense budget plummeted, its for-
eign reserves dropped to just $4 billion and
Hamas and Hezbollah budgets were drastically
cut. The United States and Israel were able to take
military action to prevent Iran from obtaining a
bomb; Germany, France and Britain stayed in the
JCPOA, despite Iran openly and flagrantly violat-
ing its provisions.

The Biden administration has already loosened
sanctions even before a new deal has been reached.

Iran’s foreign reserves have already increased to
well over $30 billion, and are still rising.

Iran flagrantly violated the original JCPOA, and
the Biden administration is now pursuing a sec-
ond, weaker agreement, with less nuclear over-
sight and significant terrorism sanctions relief.

Not only that, but that sanctions relief will now
benefit not only Iran but also Russia, which is per-
secuting a war in Ukraine.

It’s obvious that the Biden administration’s
attempt to reach a new agreement with Iran is an
unmitigated disaster. They aren’t even attempting
to sell it as a good deal — instead they’re trying to
blame the Trump administration’s pullout from the
JCPOA for the bad deal they are about to sign.

In the end, providing massive sanctions relief
to an evil regime that calls for the destruction
of Israel and America, and which is the leading
global state sponsor of terrorism, is a terrible idea
— and one that has already been tried. If, as Albert
Einstein famously said, insanity is doing the same
thing over and over and expecting a different
result, then what is doing the same thing over and
over despite expecting worse results?
Apparently, only the Biden administration can
answer that question. JE
Farley Weiss, former president of the National
Council of Young Israel, is an intellectual property
attorney for the law firm of Weiss & Moy.

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