James Traub has a profile in this week's New York Times Magazine of Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. Traub had a great time making fun of a man he views as an old-fashioned chicken little obsessed with Jews. He sullies Foxman as "the hanging judge of anti-Semitism" who is a "one-man Sanhedrin doling out opprobrium or absolution for those who speak ill of Israel or the Jews." Foxman's demands for an investigation into the murder of a young French Jew last year was an example of his proclivity to "stage public rituals of accusation." The piece amounts to little more than a hit job. Traub accuses Foxman of frequently (and presumably erroneously) smearing individuals as anti-Semites. Other than Professors John Mearsheimer and Stepehn Walt (who have written of their belief in a Jewish conspiracy reaching into the highest levels of the press and the government), Traub does not once name a supposed victim of Foxman's descriptive wrath other than Jimmy Carter, whom Foxman never labeled anti-Semitic--just "bigoted." Another prominent victim of Foxman's Inquisition is the oft-persecuted Tony Judt, whom Foxman allegedly prevented from speaking at the Polish Embassy last year. Yet Traub ends up exonerating the one-man Sanhedrin and shows that it was the Poles themselves who eventually realized that, given their own history with Jews, hosting a man who has called for the end of Israel might not be the greatest idea for a diplomatic mission. Traub writes that it is "tempting to compare Abe Foxman with Al Sharpton, another portly, bellicose, melodramatizing defender of ethnic ramparts." Has Foxman ever instigated race riots, used bigoted language to describe blacks, or libeled police officers? Yes, Foxman can be shrill. But even Traub confesses that his heart is in the right place. And at least Foxman errs on the side of vigilance. At one point in the piece Traub writes tiredly of Foxman's "shouting about Auschwitz and six million." How obnoxious! What's more telling is that the paper of record - which ignored the first Holocaust - decided to devote 5,000 words to maligning and mocking a man who has made it his life's work to avert a second. -- James Kirchick