OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2000, pages 73-74

Israel and Judaism

The Lieberman Candidacy, the Mideast and Unanswered Questions About American Jewish Identity

By Allan C. Brownfeld

The selection of Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), an Orthodox Jew, as the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate has resulted in extensive discussion of the role of religion in American politics and, in particular, the role of Jews and Judaism in American society.

As the campaign proceeds, few expect religion to loom very large. Political scholars generally dismiss the notion that anti-Semitism among Christians will be much of a factor. In 1937, only 46 percent of voters surveyed by Gallup said they would vote for a qualified Jewish candidate for president. By 1999, 92 percent said they would; only 6 percent would not, and the rest had no opinion.

That result, reflected in other polls, “suggests that even if there is a hidden bias that people are unwilling to admit to pollsters, it is not substantial enough to make a difference,” said John C. Green, director of the Ray Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.

If religion itself is unlikely to be an issue, there is some concern about Senator Lieberman’s support for Israel and his close ties to that country, although he has demonstrated his own independence over the years.

In an editorial, the Houston Chronicle declared: “Lieberman is the first Jewish candidate for the vice presidency. His religion per se should not be an issue. But it’s fair to ask questions about how his holding office might or might not affect U.S. policy in the Middle East.”

Abed Hammoud, a Lebanese-born delegate to the Democratic National Convention from Michigan and president of the Arab American Political Action Committee, said of the Gore-Lieberman candidacy: “I’m behind the man I’m a delegate for [Gore]. On domestic issues, I support him big time. The problem is Lieberman’s voting record on the Middle East. It’s scary. Is he going to be vice president for Israel or a vice president of the United States?”

Arab Americans emphasize that their concern about Lieberman is about his voting record, not his religion. Osama Siblani, publisher of The Arab American News, said of members of his community, “They’re really very, very angry with Al Gore. The issue is not Jew or non-Jew…He selected a Zionist to run on his ticket.”

American Jews believe that anti-Semitism is a serious problem.

Other Arab Americans are prepared to support the Lieberman candidacy. “I have a feeling a guy like Joe Lieberman will bring more fairness to the Middle East peace process than others,” says Tim Attalla, a second-generation Palestinian American. A lawyer who is on the national board of Seeds for Peace, which promotes understanding between Israeli and Arab teenagers, says he is gratified to see that high public office is within reach for non-Christians. “It makes me feel confident that Muslims down the road will be openly accepted.”

In fact, Senator Lieberman’s position on Middle East questions has been as disturbing to many Zionist groups as to some Arab Americans. He signed a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Barak protesting Israel’s plans to sell China sophisticated early-warning aircraft. He visits Arab countries regularly on trips to the Middle East and in 1991 spent a week in Riyadh, where the Saudi royal family fixed kosher meals for him. During the Bush administration, he favored the sale of F-15 warplanes to Saudi Arabia. In 1992 Jim Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, told Lieberman that aides were refusing to let Arab Americans work on the Clinton presidential campaign. Lieberman phoned George Stephanopolous: “This is an Orthodox Jewish senator calling a Greek-American communications director and saying that I want these Arab Americans in this campaign to elect a Southern Baptist president, and I want it done now!” After that, they were welcomed into the campaign.

While many in the organized American Jewish community have urged the release of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, Lieberman signed a 1999 letter urging President Bill Clinton not to pardon Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for passing classified American documents to Israel. In July, Rabbi Mordechai Friedman, president of the American Board of Rabbis, a small Orthodox rabbinical organization, condemned Lieberman on his television show and called him “evil and a traitor” and said there is cause to assassinate him. Federal authorities and New Haven, Connecticut police have launched an investigation. Larry Dub, an Israel-based attorney for Pollard, said: “We do not count on Joe Lieberman to be a friend of ours.”

Hard-line supporters of Israel have been expressing their dismay with Lieberman. New York Post columnist Sidney Zion, for example, wrote: “Don’t let his yarmulke fool you, Joe Lieberman is no great backer of Israel…Lieberman was all for moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem—until Al Gore gave him the nod. Today, Joe shakes off the yarmulke and agrees that now is not the time. He boasts about his friendship with Yasser Arafat, whom he used to regularly condemn.”

AIPAC’s Endorsement

In general, however, Lieberman has been a strong supporter of Israel. He has accepted $186,000 in pro-Israel PAC contributions for his 2000 Senate race, for a career total of $226,508. Tim Wiluger, president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), notes that, “We cannot recall a single piece of legislation affecting the U.S.-Israel relationship introduced during the decade in which Senator Lieberman did not play a crucial role.”

Beyond any possible Lieberman impact upon Middle East policy, what has been lacking in much of the discussion is the larger question of the role of Jews and Judaism in American society and the contradiction between what the organized Jewish community preaches—and fears—and the reality in which the overwhelming majority of those in whose name they speak really live.

Polls repeatedly indicate that American Jews believe that anti-Semitism is a serious problem. In 1985, a third of those affiliated with the Jewish community in the San Francisco area said, in response to a questionnaire, that Jewish candidates could not be elected to Congress from San Francisco. Yet, three out of the four congressional representatives from that area—as well as the two state senators and the mayor of San Francisco—were, in fact, well-identified Jews at the time the poll was conducted. And they had been elected by a population that was about 95 percent non-Jewish.

Many “watchdog” groups such as the Anti-Defamation League raise millions of dollars each year for their crusades against hate. Laird Wilcox, a Kansas author and editor who has spent decades researching what he calls “fringe” groups, says that these “watchdog” groups exaggerate the dangers posed by the small number of racist movements which do exist. The total number of active, organized extremists on the far right, he reports, is not much more than 10,000—out of an American population of more than 270 million people.

The small size of such fringe groups represents a tiny danger, yet they are the target of what Wilcox calls an “industry” of watchdog organizations. In his 1999 book, The Watchdogs, Wilcox writes: “There is an anti-racist industry entrenched in the U.S. that has attracted…moralizing fanatics whose identity and livelihood depends upon growth and expansion of their particular kind of victimization.”

Watchdog groups, which spread fear among their constituents, may actually help the hate groups they claim to oppose, says author Jim Redden: “My belief is that there aren’t that many hard-core racist activists in this country…And even with their Internet sites, they’re very limited in their ability to get their ideas before the public, so the mass media coverage of their movement does more to publicize their beliefs than what they do themselves.”

Many Jewish groups have spent their time and energy in recent years portraying American Jews as “victims,” using images of the Holocaust, as if this event had occurred in the United States. In his book The Holocaust In American Life, Professor Peter Novick of the University of Chicago argues that this has been a largely fanciful effort: “Their contemporary situation offered little in the way of credentials. American Jews were by far the wealthiest, best-educated, most influential, in-every-way-most successful group in American society, a group that…suffered no measurable discrimination and no disadvantage…But insofar as Jewish identity could be anchored in the agony of European Jewry, certification as (vicarious) victims could be claimed, with all the moral privilege accompanying such certification.”

In addition to seeking a status of “victims” for American Jews, the organized Jewish community has embraced the Zionist idea that all Jews living outside of Israel are in “exile” and that the State of Israel—not God—is “central” to Judaism. Even Reform Judaism, which previously rejected Jewish nationalism, adopted a new statement of principles in May 1999 which, among other things, calls upon American Jews to make “aliyah,” or emigrate to Israel. Israeli leaders miss few opportunities to tell American Jews that their religion is illegitimate and that Israel is their genuine home. At a 1998 convention of North American Jews in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu called for “massive aliyah from every country in the Diaspora, including the United States.” President Ezer Weizmann has frequently said, “The place of Jews is in Israel. Only in Israel can Jews live full Jewish lives.”

Classic Zionist Theory

All of this, of course, is classic Zionist theory. Jacob Klatzkin, a leading Zionist writer, expressed the accepted view that Jews are in “exile” outside of the “Jewish state.” He declared: “We are simply aliens, we are foreign people in your midst, and we emphasize, we wish to stay that way.” In 1941, Nazi Germany reprinted the following statement by Simon Dubnow, a Zionist historian and author: “To be sure the emancipated Jew in France calls himself a Frenchman of the Jewish faith. Would that, however, mean that he became part of the French nation, confessing to the Jewish faith? Not at all…A Jew…even if he happened to be born in France and still lives there, in spite of these he remains a member of the Jewish nation.”

And now we have the Lieberman candidacy which has produced an outpouring of support from almost every sector of the Jewish community. Few have questioned the hypocrisy of claiming that the free, open and tolerant American society is a hotbed of anti-Semitism at the same time that Jews face few, if any, obstacles in their lives based upon religion. Nor has the idea that American Jews are in “exile’ been properly rejected—particularly since, in a free society, anyone who feels in exile is welcome to leave.

There are some signs that, while the organized Jewish groups may be unwilling to abandon their campaigns of fear and their obsession with Israel, most American Jews, and increasing numbers of articulate Jewish observers, are now in the process of leaving them behind.

Writing in The Forward, columnist Leonard Fein expresses the hope that, “Perhaps, at last, we will be able to disabuse ourselves of the notion that anti-Semitism is an urgent issue, a position that every survey of Jewish opinion shows we still hold. One might have supposed that the fact that the state of Wisconsin, not exactly a hotbed of Jewish life, is represented by two Jews in the United States Senate, as is the state of California, would have been sufficient to cure us of our obsession with anti-Semitism—that, plus the fact that very few Jews have experienced anti-Semitism.”

Beyond this, American Jews have acquiesced far too long in being told by Israelis that they are in “exile.” Slowly, the fact that this alien ideological concept bears no relationship to reality has become increasingly clear. More and more respected Jewish spokesmen are vocally rejecting any such idea.

Even such an outspoken supporter of Israel as Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor of Commentary magazine, rejects the idea that American Jews are, somehow, in “exile.”

In his new book, My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative, Podhoretz discusses his time as a graduate student in England and an early visit to Israel: “Six weeks there [in Israel] finished what a year in England had inaugurated. No doubt the Jewish people had been in exile, but not this Jew, not me. My true homeland was America, and the Jewish homeland was, so far as I was concerned, a foreign country.”

Hopefully, the Lieberman nomination and the increased interest it has brought to the question of Judaism and Jewish life in America will cause a serious re-evaluation by those in the Jewish community who have, for so long and with so little reason, engaged in the politics of “victimology” and in stirring alienation on the part of the younger generation by telling them that living in their own country was a form of “exile.”

Professor Stephen J. Whitfield of Brandeis University, author of In Search of American Jewish Culture, says this of Senator Lieberman’s choice as a vice presidential candidate: “In 2000 the choice could be made precisely because it was not bold…Mr. Gore’s decision ratifies the obvious: America is not galut, where Jewish life is precarious and beleaguered…What has been vindicated is the abiding Jewish faith in a society in which personal merit is supposed to count more than membership in a group in which privileges can be expanded into rights.”

Perhaps, at long last, the American Jewish establishment will finally take “yes” for an answer.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.