Last week, William Korey died at the age of 87, a rare political activist who lived to see his life’s work reach its completion. Bill, who was my wife’s cousin, spent much of his professional life working tirelessly on behalf of the oppressed Jews of the Soviet Union, both as an official of the B’nai Brith in Washington and as a public intellectual; his book The Soviet Cage was the first major work in English to detail the extent of the misery of Soviet Jews, the monstrous racial and religious hostility to which they were subjected, and the determination of the totalitarian regime to keep them in a state of subnational imprisonment.
He began the fight in the late 1950s, played a crucial role in the passage of the Jackson-Vanik amendment that linked Soviet behavior toward the Jewish desire to emigrate to the regime’s desire to achieve freer trade with the United States, and was hale and hearty when the regime crumbled and the great masses of trapped Jewry who had been the cause of his life were finally free to emigrate to Israel and the United States. Later, he played an important part in advocating for the eventual acceptance, in the United States, of the international convention against genocide.
Bill was also one of the first victims in the United States of Islamist terror when, in 1977, he was among the B’nai Brith employees in Washington to be taken hostage in the organization’s headquarters by a sect of Hanafi Muslims, who also took over two other buildings and killed three people in a bizarre quest to have three convicted murderers (Nation of Islam goons who had killed the Hanafi Muslim leader’s family in an internecine psychotic dispute) released into their custody for purposes of execution.
The hostage crisis lasted for 38 hours. Three people were killed as it progressed. This event remains one of the most blood-curdling standoffs in American history. Bill told me once that he had been certain he would die during those two days, and that the men who had taken them had blood madness in their eyes. There had been claims, once the matter was over, that many of the 132 hostages had become seized by “Stockholm Syndrome,” according to which since-discredited theory, hostages begin to sympathize with their captors. Bill laughed derisively at the claim. “They were crazy and evil,” Bill said, and they spent hours spewing anti-Semitic invective at their Jewish captives. “Nobody had any illusions about who and what they were.”
A man of uncommon esprit and slow charm, William Korey led a blessed life in large measure because he dedicated it to his people. His obituary can be found here, and Gal Beckerman offers a tribute here.
