A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  At the stroke of five minutes, Pastor Steve reclaimed his pulpit with a grand gesture. “We’re going to plant a seed today,” he announced, handing Eckstein a check for $5,000. “Remember, when you bless the Jewish people, God blesses you. So I want you all to tell Rabbi Einstein, thank you, Rabbi!”

  “Thank you, Rabbi!” they hollered, as Eckstein pocketed the donation.

  “I HAD THEM at ‘Shalom,’” Yechiel Eckstein said. We were on our way back to Chicago in a rented compact Chevy, Eckstein sprawled in the back, his assistant, Reverend Jerry Clark, at the wheel. Self-deprecating humor is one of the ways Eckstein struggles against the sin of pride.

  Even Eckstein’s severest Jewish critics admit that he has an unrivaled ability to reach conservative Christians, and many who once mocked or opposed him for relying on the kindness of strangers now want his help. Hadassah, the Zionist women’s organization whose magazine once refused to run Eckstein’s paid ads, now begs to do joint projects with him. A few years ago the chairman of the Jewish Agency, the international governing body of Zionism, declined to be photographed with Eckstein. Today Eckstein is a member of the Jewish Agency Board of Governors. Even colleagues in the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America who once scorned him have seen the light. In 2004, despite a nasty protest by some influential rabbis, RCA invited Eckstein to address its annual meeting.

  These erstwhile skeptics have not developed a sudden enthusiasm for evangelical Christianity. They want to know Eckstein’s fund-raising secrets. Just that week he had attended a meeting of major Jewish philanthropies in Las Vegas, but he had adamantly refused to share his techniques or computer files.

  “These evangelicals are pure,” he said, gesturing through the back window as we drove through the fields of Indiana on the way back to Chicago. “I represent the Jewish people to them. And I know very well how cynical some of these Jewish fund-raisers are. They’re just in it for the buck. I should let them manipulate evangelicals like that?”

  This attitude has won Eckstein detractors among the leaders of secular Jewish organizations. Some, like the executive director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, accuse him of poor-mouthing. A few years ago, Foxman demonstratively walked out of a meeting in which Eckstein was getting an award. He accused Eckstein of “selling the dignity of the Jewish people” by pandering to Christians. “We’re not a poor people. What [Eckstein’s] doing is perverse,” Foxman told the Jerusalem Report.

  YECHIEL ECKSTEIN HAS a genuine belief in the basic goodness of evangelicals. A typical headline in one of his solicitations reads: “Needy Jews Discovered in the Arctic Region.” He runs campaigns to save the Russian Jews from “the scourge of anti-Semitism,” as if the Communists were still in power, and calls for assistance to “elderly people living in dire need across the Holy Land,” as though Israel weren’t a modern welfare state. But to Eckstein, this misses the point. “I consider what I do more than fund-raising,” he says. “It’s a ministry. Christians have a need to give.”

  “Jews contribute to Jewish causes out of communal obligation,” he told me. “They say, ‘Send me a letter and a tax deduction statement and I’ll give you something. If I have a good year I’ll up it by five or ten percent next time.’ Evangelical Christians find that abhorrent. They don’t give out of responsibility. They give because the Lord told them to give. They’re moved to do it.”

  Eckstein has dozens of stories to illustrate the point. “We used to get a check every month from a woman in Detroit, something like $26.18. She turned out to be [billionaire philanthropist] Max Fisher’s maid. There’s a woman in Georgia who loves Starbucks but buys generic coffee and sends the difference to us. Kids donate their birthday money and Christmas gifts. One family in Florida sends us $15 every day. They don’t feel comfortable sitting down to dinner unless they’ve helped Jews. These people ask not to publicize their gifts. They feel that the Lord knows who they are, and seeking publicity would be wrong.”

  Eckstein himself has no such qualms. In fact, he requires Jewish recipients of evangelical beneficence to publicly acknowledge the source. He has the power, unique among the heads of major Jewish charities (and rare anywhere in the philanthropic world), to write checks at his own discretion, and he wants his donors to see where their money is going. But there is also a strong element of personal vindication in his unceasing efforts for publicity. Gone are the days when the grandees of the Chicago United Jewish Appeal took Eckstein’s money on condition that they didn’t have to publicly acknowledge its source.

  “Jews have such a cynical, negative view of these people,” says Eckstein. “There are all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories out there about what the evangelicals want. But they don’t have ulterior motives. These are good, religious people who love Israel and want to help. What’s the matter with that?”

  THE NEXT DAY I met Eckstein at IFJC headquarters, which is situated in a downtown skyscraper overlooking the old Chicago city hall. At ten in the morning, the phones were ringing off the hook. Some callers wanted to make donations. Others just felt like chatting, or asking a question. A young staffer walked among the cubicles with a Jewish prayer shawl in her hand. “There’s a man on the phone who bought one of these and he wants to know how to put it on,” she said.

  “It’s called a tallis,” said another young operator. “Just tell him to put it on with the label on the outside.”

  At ten-thirty, the staff gathered for its weekly meeting. Thirty people of various religions and races crowded into a conference room. “We’re going to need more space soon,” sighed Yechiel Eckstein. The Fellowship has moved three times in recent years but what can you do when your gross keeps going up fifteen or twenty percent a year?

  Eckstein’s staff was expanding, too. The first item on the agenda was to introduce Sandy Rios, the new vice president for strategic initiatives. Rios is a former daytime television talk-show host, and she looks like one. Recently she had been in Washington, D.C., where she served as the president of Concerned Women for America, a conservative family issues group.

  The meeting was chaired by George Mamo, Eckstein’s second in command. He led the staff through reports on the fellowship’s activities and major profit centers. There were individual donors to keep track of and cultivate, tours of Israel to plan, television shoots to schedule, educational material to prepare. One woman related details of a recent fact-finding trip to Siberia. Another described a philanthropy seminar she had attended in Maryland. The tone was entirely businesslike, the only moment of fervor coming when a woman implored her colleagues to keep the communal refrigerator clean.

  Finally Eckstein rose to speak. He began with an announcement. The lost tribe of Manasseh (he used the Hebrew pronunciation, Menashe) had been discovered in northeastern India. The tribe’s authenticity had recently been certified by the Israeli rabbinate, and six thousand of its members wanted to “return” to the Holy Land. Some, as I had already discovered in the grocery store next to Armageddon, were already there. Eckstein intended to bring the others, and had promised the government of Israel the money needed to do it.

  I expected this news to electrify the staff of the IFCJ, but it was received instead with an affectionate yawn. That’s Rabbi for you, always coming up with something new and different.

  TRANSPORTING SIX THOUSAND lost Jews from India to Israel is Indiana Jones stuff, but it is also, inescapably, a political act. Israeli political parties were already tussling over patronage of this potential new voting bloc. Palestinians, meanwhile, were condemning the find as another Jewish trick to upset the demographic balance. They had a point: If rabbis can turn six thousand Indians into biblical Jews and bring them to Israel, what’s to stop them from finding six hundred thousand somewhere else?

  Eckstein was untroubled by these concerns. Opponents sometimes charge him with being in the pocket of the right-wing settlers, but this is untrue. “I’ve tried to guide my organization in a nonpartisan way,” he says. Eckstein has supported every Israeli go
vernment, and hands out money on a transpartisan basis.

  In fact, Eckstein’s unwillingness to buck the Israeli establishment has put him at odds with some of his more extreme Zionist benefactors, who oppose any Jewish withdrawal from biblical land. A number of right-wing Israeli politicians have made contact with these evangelicals, and some West Bank settlements receive financial aid from them. But the great majority—Eckstein’s majority—are content to remain within the boundaries of the prevailing Israeli political consensus.

  Eckstein is also somewhat to the left of his constituency on social issues. For most of his life he was a registered Democrat and he endeavors to keep the IFCJ bipartisan in U.S. politics. This is a delicate balancing act, however. Eckstein’s Washington lobbying group, Stand For Israel, has been cochaired by Ralph Reed, and this year by former GOP presidential aspirant Gary Bauer. At noon, over tuna sandwiches, Eckstein, Mamo, and Sandy Rios gathered in a small conference room for a telephone with Bauer over the details of an upcoming meeting in Washington.

  Eckstein included me in the conversation and invited me to ask questions of Bauer.

  “Jews think Christian support for Israel is a trick,” I said. “They hear ‘evangelical’ and think ‘anti-Semite.’ What do you say to them?”

  “There’s a lot of history we’d like to do over,” Bauer replied. “But this is a new era. Today, Jews are safer living in countries where Christianity is vibrant than they are anyplace else.”

  Eckstein nodded. “We’ve got to convince Jews to practice what I call the Four A’s,” he said. “One, awareness, that evangelicals are helping Israel. Two, acknowledgment of that help. Three, appreciation. And four, attitude change. There’s been progress on the first two, and number three is coming along, but attitude change remains elusive. I want more than a tactical alliance. I’m looking for genuine fellowship. And the Jewish community is nowhere near that.”

  “A lot of this is hostility from Jews who just can’t stand conservatives,” said Bauer. “It trumps even their support for Israel.”

  “Jews tend to demonize evangelicals,” said Eckstein sadly.

  “And not the other way around?” I asked.

  Eckstein shrugged. “Not really. No.”

  During this conversation, Sandy Rios had been visibly anxious to join in. After Bauer rang off she cleared her throat and said, “You know, the truth is, Christians do want to convert Jews.”

  Eckstein and Mamo exchanged glances. “Not by some bait-and-switch trick,” she added quickly. “We believe it’s part of God’s plan.” Eckstein winced as he had when Pastor Steve introduced him as a born-again Christian, but Rios didn’t notice, or didn’t care. “We love Jews, notwithstanding their rudeness and hatred for us,” she assured me.

  Three days later Eckstein called me in New York. Sandy Rios, he said, had been fired. “It’s really my fault,” he said. “Hiring staff is a problem. Truthfully, it’s extremely hard to find people who understand exactly what we’re doing here.”

  NINE

  FOXMAN’S COMPLAINT

  On November 3, 2005, a year and a day after George W. Bush’s reelection, Abraham Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, declared war on evangelical Christianity.

  Speaking at an ADL National Commission meeting, Foxman warned that the Jews faced “a better organized, more sophisticated, coordinated and energized coalition of groups in opposition to our policy positions on church-state separation than ever before. Their goal is to implement their Christian worldview. To Christianize America. To save us!”

  Foxman claimed that the forces arrayed against the Jews sought not merely to promote Christian values, but to “actively pursue the restoration of a Christian nation.” As exhibit A he offered D. James Kennedy, the Florida televangelist, whom he labeled, with some exaggeration, “one of the most important and influential of today’s evangelical leaders.”

  According to Foxman, the Christian theocrats were just around the bend. “If their agenda was hidden fifteen years ago, today it is in full public view. Just take a look at their websites where they document in considerable detail an agenda on a wide range of issues: judicial nominations, same-sex marriage, and faith-based issues,” he said.

  Such advocacy amounted, in Foxman’s opinion, to “open arrogance.” He called on the ADL, and the wider Jewish community, to take immediate action.

  No mainstream secular Jewish leader had ever taken such a confrontational line against conservative Christianity. Evidently it didn’t occur to Foxman that, as a representative of, at most, less than 2 percent of the population, he himself could be accused of arrogance. It also didn’t appear to dawn on him that the very act of taking on millions of evangelicals, including the heads of the party in power, was an act of self-confidence not likely to be undertaken by the spokesman of a genuinely endangered minority.

  What Foxman was actually doing, aside from raising money, was turning down the Judeo-Christian bargain the evangelicals had placed on the table.

  I first met Abe Foxman in Jerusalem in the late 1970s. He was a rising executive at the Anti-Defamation League, intense, smart, and very ambitious, more hawkish in his foreign policy views than the average American Jewish bureaucrat, Orthodox but not holier-than-thou, a good guy to chat with over a drink. The most interesting thing about him was his biography. He was born in Poland in 1940, saved from the Nazis by a nanny, baptized, and raised as a Catholic until his parents were able to reclaim him a few years later. After he was brought to Brooklyn in 1950, he was raised as a nice Jewish boy. He went to a yeshiva. He graduated from CCNY and NYU Law School. He married a girl named Golda and went to work for the ADL, where he sometimes crossed swords with another young bureaucrat, Yechiel Eckstein. If you had told me when I first knew Foxman that someday he would be a “Jewish leader” bold enough to declare war on Christian America, I would have bet against it.

  A few weeks after Foxman’s speech, the Reform movement, the country’s biggest and most influential Jewish denomination, held its biennial convention in Houston. My boyhood friend Eric Yoffie, now Reform’s chief rabbi, took the occasion to denounce the war in Iraq, the Bush administration’s domestic policies, and, most sharply, evangelical activists—especially for their opposition to gay marriage, which he likened to Hitler’s persecution of homosexuals. I was struck by the aggressive tone of the speech. Yoffie is a very judicious fellow; attacking other religions isn’t normally his style.

  Soon after, Rabbi James Rudin weighed in with a book titled The Baptizing of America. Like Yoffie and Foxman, Rudin is an experienced organization man, a senior official at the very establishment American Jewish Committee. Rudin’s book began, “There is a specter haunting America…the specter of our nation ruled by the extreme Christian right, who would make the United States a ‘Christian Nation’ where their version of God’s law supersedes all human law—including the Constitution.”

  Rudin went on to describe visiting friends in Boca Raton, Florida. “My wife and I were stunned to see a skywriter flying just above us spelling out this message: JESUS LOVE US—JESUS IS THE U.S.” Rudin took this as a sign that theocratic Christianity was looming just above his head.

  Rudin admitted that most evangelical Christians have no intention of turning the United States into a theocracy. The examples he gave of political encroachments were marginal at best. He cited Pat Robertson’s unsuccessful run for the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, which he characterized as part of a subversive master plan to replace “the Eagle” with “the Cross.” Rudin based this charge primarily on the fact that Robertson had sent his supporters out to Iowa to wage a covert campaign with orders to “give the impression that you are there to work for the party. Hide your strength. Don’t flaunt your Christianity.”

  Rudin portrayed Robertson—and Jerry Falwell, and other political evangelicals—as creatures of two obscure “Christocrat” ideologues, Frances A. Schaeffer and Rousas John Rushdoony. He called Schaeffer the father of dominionism and Rush
doony the propagator of Christian reconstructionism, doctrines, he claimed, that comprise an “ominous belief system that powers much of Christocratic thinking.”

  In fact, Schaeffer, who wrote mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, never advocated Christian government. Rudin admits as much, but accuses him of encouraging evangelicals to get involved in political life. This is true, but not quite the indictment Rudin regards it as being. “When the United States was founded, the population was pretty close to one hundred percent Christian,” Falwell told me. “By 1900 the proportion of Christians declined, and it has been declining ever since. That has been the trend, and it will be the trend fifty years from now. Religion isn’t the issue. I’d support Joe Lieberman for a seat on the Supreme Court if he were pro-life. I’d be his campaign manager. It’s about principles, not people’s religion.”

  Falwell denied that he and his fellow Baptists are theocrats. “God wants nothing to do with theocracy, I’m sure,” he said. “Personally, I’d much rather sit under a political dictator than a religious dictator. Christian government in America would be absolutely ridiculous. Not only do I oppose it, the great majority of American evangelicals oppose it.”

  As for Rushdoony, who did in fact teach that democracy and biblical law are incompatible, he influenced almost no one and died, in 2001, unknown to almost everyone except conspiracy theorists.

  WHILE FOXMAN, YOFFIE, and Rudin were stirring things up on the East Coast, an eccentric lawyer and former Reagan appointee, Mikey Weinstein, was opening a western front in the war against evangelical Christianity at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

  Trouble began when an academy football coach hung an inspirational banner that read, “I am a Christian first and last…I am a member of Team Jesus Christ.” When people protested that a publicly funded institution couldn’t motivate its athletes that way, the banner came down. The academy, sensing trouble, also instituted what it called an RSVP (Respect the Spiritual Values of People) program, but that didn’t put an end to the issue. Neither did a meeting between the superintendent of the academy, Lieutenant General John Rosa Jr., and a group of “concerned Jewish civilians.” An inspection team from the mainline Yale Divinity School was invited by the academy to look into the situation. They reported “overzealousness” among its evangelical chaplains—not a surprising finding considering the anti-evangelical composition of the investigators. Still, no one had actually uncovered any actual anti-Semitic incidents at the school, much less cases of systemic discrimination or persecution.