<p>cheap air jordan shoes ELAN Steinberg, who brought what he called a new, ''American style'' assertiveness to the World Jewish Congress as its top executive, winning $US1.2 billion from Swiss banks for Holocaust victims and challenging Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary-general, over his Nazi past, has died of complications of lymphatic cancer in New York. He was 59.</p>
<p>As its executive director from 1978 to 2004, Steinberg was a key strategist for the congress as it grew bolder under a younger generation of Jews. He helped organise the research, hearings, press leaks and lawsuit that led the Swiss banks to cough up.</p>
<p>Advertisement: Story continues below He also ruffled feathers. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said he applauded the congress's ''persistence'' but worried that its crusade ''fed into the stereotype that Jews have money, that it's the most important thing to them''.</p>
<p>Even Simon Wiesenthal, the relentless hunter of Nazi war nike air jordan shoes criminals, questioned the congress's new aggressiveness when it threw itself into the Austrian presidential campaign in 1986 to try to defeat Waldheim, who was ultimately elected. Waldheim had hidden his membership in a Nazi military unit linked to atrocities. (Steinberg is pictured holding relevant documents, with the congress's secretary-general, Israel Singer.)</p>
<p>Wiesenthal argued that Waldheim was ''an opportunist'' but not a war criminal. He worried that the congress, by inserting itself into Austria's internal politics, was undoing years of patient work towards reconciling young Austrians and Jews.</p>
<p>Steinberg countered that electing Waldheim would stain all Austrians. ''In the whole world it will be said that a former Nazi and a liar is the representative of Austria,'' he said.</p>
<p>The tough stance was a departure for the congress, which was formed in 1936 in response to the rising Nazi threat in Europe and whose headquarters are now in New York.</p>
<p>''For a long time,'' Steinberg said, ''the World Jewish Congress was meant to be the greatest secret of Jewish life, because the nature of diplomacy after the war was quiet diplomacy. This is a newer, American-style leadership - less timid, more forceful, unashamedly Jewish.''</p>
<p>Steinberg steered the congress in opposing the presence of a Carmelite convent at the site of the Auschwitz death camp and championing former slave labourers under the Nazis in their fight for compensation.</p>
<p>When Steven Spielberg was making the 1993 film Schindler's List, he wanted to shoot scenes inside a building that had been part of the Auschwitz camp, but Steinberg told him: ''You cannot film on the graves of Jews.'' Spielberg instead built a replica of the building.</p>
<p>''Whenever Jews were in danger, or Jewish honour offended, he vigorously yet elegantly spoke up,'' Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, said in a statement read at Steinberg's funeral. ''Whenever Jewish memory was attacked, he attacked the jordan 4 2012 attacker.''</p>
<p>Steinberg was born in Rishon LeZion, Israel, to Holocaust survivors. He grew up in Brooklyn and was a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan and Brooklyn College. He received a master's degree in political science from the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York, then taught there.</p>
<p>He joined the congress in 1978 as its UN representative, and rose to executive director - first of the American section, then of the world body.</p>
<p>Menachem Rosensaft, the congress's general counsel, said Steinberg was instrumental in persuading the Vatican and Spain to recognise Israel.</p>
<p>Steinberg resigned in 2004 but remained a consultant to the congress's president, Ronald Lauder. He was vice-president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants jordan 10.</p>
Young turk of world Jewry aggressively took on opponents
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