My name is Bruce Friedman. I have been a practicing attorney for 25 years, handling strictly civil litigation matters. One of the things I've learned from my experiences in this profession is that when anti-Semites need an attorney, they suddenly put aside their prejudice against Jews. Why? Because they "know" that all Jews are smart and devious, the two most important qualities to look for in an attorney.

You may ask, why would I represent an anti-Semite? For two reasons. First, where does one draw the line between who is or isn't an anti-Semite? For example, many of my clients are Christians. According to some fundamentalist Christians, the Nazi murderers went to heaven and their victims went to hell. Nevertheless, it would be ludicrous for me to administer a litmus test to every Christian who comes to my office prior to accepting him as a client. As far as I am concerned, that would be a breach of my ethical obligations as an attorney.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, I've always felt that if I am honest and ethical in the way I treat my non-Jewish clients, maybe I will help to dispel some of their stereotypical notions about Jews. After all, most prejudice is based on ignorance. For all I know, I may be the only Jew a client will ever come to know on a personal basis. Consequently, how I relate to this individual could have a significant impact on his or her perception of Jews in general. Think about what that could mean if we all did the same.

Anyway, that is what I've always believed. At least that is what I believed until one day -- about ten years ago -- when I received a telephone call from the distraught mother of a 17-year old boy who had been attending a birthday party of a friend. A small group of them walked across the street to the 7-Eleven store to buy some munchies and soft drinks to take back to the party. While there, they apparently exchanged words with one of the employees before leaving the store. Later, when they came back to buy more food, the employee and a group of his friends he had called attacked them. One of the assailants shot the 17-year old in the neck, severing his spinal cord, and rendering him a quadriplegic for the rest of his life. The reason these youths were attacked was because the employee, who was Hispanic, recognized them as racist skinheads.

I don't recall how these clients ended up calling me. However, on their first visit to my office, I told them I was Jewish because I thought they should know. They showed me no surprise. Nor did it seem to bother them. I'm not sure whether they wanted me to represent them for the same reason many anti-Semites seek out Jewish lawyers or because they thought it would look better in front of a jury if they were represented by a Jew, or a combination of both reasons.

In any event, I found myself on the horns of a dilemma. After all, these young men were the innocent victims of a vicious, unprovoked attack, based solely on their beliefs. Under this set of circumstances, wouldn't it have been wrong for me not to represent them? (Not to mention the fact that the potential fee would have paid for private college tuition for both of my kids, with money left over for my retirement.)

I was preplexed. I couldn't deicde what to do. I talked to everyone. My wife, my children, my friends, and several rabbis. Opinions varied. I even talked to Irv Rubin, although I could have predicted what he would say. He told me if I represented them, he'd never speak to me again. At one point I called Rabbi Cooper at the Simon Wiesenthal Center. I asked him if the Center would accept my fee from the case as a contribution. He said "no" without hesitation.

I will candidly admit, when I visited the 17-year old boy in the hospital, his head immobilized with a metal brace and screws, and knowing what he faced for the rest of his natural life, I decided he had suffered enough for his beliefs (in spite of the fact that he continued to spew racial epithets from his hospital bed) and that accepting the case was the right thing to do. I also reasoned to myself that, while I despised what these young men stood for, they were still barely older than children, and that this could just be a stage they were going through.

Then something happened. About two weeks later one of the other clients sent me a videotape of a meeting between the 17-year old and Tom Metzger, the leader of White Aryan Resistance. Mr. Metzger apparently had read about the shooting incident in the newspaper and had decided to exploit the situation by making a videotape of himself interviewing the paralyzed youth from his hospital bed. After watching the videotape, in which the two of them blamed all the ills of society on the "niggers" and the "spics," I knew that there was no way I could represent these clients. Tom Metzger epitomized everything that is evil and hateful to me, and the mere thought that I might one day be sitting in the same room with the likes of him turned my stomach. I would not have been able to effectively represent these clients, because my personal feelings would have prevented me from doing so. At that point I realized that I had an ethical obligation not to accept the case.

A couple of years later I read that another attorney, a non-Jew in Orange County, had taken the case and settled it for $750,000. Did I have any regrets? Truthfully, I did for about 30 seconds. Then I remembered the videotape, and all regrets vanished.

So what did I learn from this experience? Nothing new. But it did serve as a reminder that we are all human, and humans are a complex mix of reason and emotion. Sometimes our emotional reaction to certain situations is so strong that we need to step back and say to ourselves, "I accept the fact that my views may not be entirely consistent, because I am human." If others judge me harshly for that, so be it.

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JDL's Point of View: Bruce Friedman and his tortured decision goes to the heart of the issue: Should a Jewish person ever represent or help his/her potential murderer? The JDL, without qualification, says no. Never did Rabbi Kahane's words ring so true, "Those who are merciful unto the cruel will be cruel unto the merciful." As far as JDL is concerned, it would be a Jewish holiday if all skinheads would wind up like that17-year old. If anyone judges us harshly as a result of this statement, we have Six Million reasons to believe as we do.

If you want to contact Bruce Friedman, you can do so by contacting us.