by Zev Chafets
During the Clinton administration, there were five Jewish cabinet officers. The national security adviser was Sandy Berger. The best-known diplomat was Richard Holbrooke. Even Clinton’s “goyim”—Secretary of Defense William Cohen (who walked away from the tribe after a rabbi refused to allow him to become bar mitzvah because his mother wasn’t Jewish) and Secretary of State Madeline Albright (who had a reporter-assisted recovered memory of her family’s ethnicity) were Jewish.
“Jews contribute more than money to the party,” said The Professional. “We’re a necessary piece of the progressive movement. We are its leaders, in fact. The Ivy League is one-third Jewish these days. MoveOn is funded by Jews. All the major advocacy groups—People for the American Way, the ACLU, the Human Rights organizations, NOW, even some of the labor unions—rely on Jewish leadership. Take the Jews away from the progressive movement and what’s left?
“As far as Israel is concerned, let’s be realistic. Half the Jews in the nation aren’t going to vote against a Democrat no matter what. If Howard Dean had run as the candidate in 2004, he would have gotten sixty-five percent. Nominate Jimmy Carter and he’d get sixty percent. Cynthia McKinney? That one would break fifty-fifty.”
The Professional doesn’t believe that many Jews will go for the Judeo-Christian bargain offered by Republican evangelicals. “The only place Democrats are vulnerable to this is among Orthodox Jews and among men over thirty-five, because of the war on terror,” he said. “In general, it’s very hard to get Jews to vote for people who believe that the world was created five thousand years ago. And as far as Jewish women are concerned, Democrats always get eighty to ninety percent. On choice, even Orthodox women are off the charts on the liberal side.”
AMONG THE DEMOCRATIC stalwarts I talked to, none was more stalwart than Shira Dicker. Dark-eyed and intense, she works out daily at the Jewish center on Amsterdam Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and holds business meetings at the Starbucks around the corner. Dicker is a public relations consultant who works mostly for liberal Jewish organizations. But on the evening we met for coffee, in late November 2005, she was still recovering from a close encounter with the Christian right.
I was first introduced to Dicker a few months earlier at the Marriott Hotel in Washington, D.C., where she was handling publicity for Yechiel Eckstein’s annual Stand For Israel conference, a two-day affair put together by Eckstein’s consultant, Gary Bauer, and attended by a mixed bag of Israel lovers. These included multimillionaires from Toronto and Chicago, a guy from California staying at a D.C. mansion where residents pray four hours a day for Israel in lieu of rent, a contingent of students from Oral Roberts University, a Kansas housewife who runs a pro-Israel lobby from her back porch, a Brooklyn-based Jamaican Pentecostal Zionist, a smattering of Orthodox rabbis, and hundreds of rank-and-file evangelicals. None of these were Shira Dicker’s people.
Or Calev Ben-David’s. A consultant for a Washington-based Jewish advocacy outfit called “The Israel Project,” Ben-David opened the conference with a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation on how to counter Arab arguments and influence the mainstream media. But the presentation left the audience cold. The people at the Marriott supported Israel because the Bible told them to; they didn’t understand why they needed additional ammunition.
Rabbi Eckstein rose and saved the moment. “This battle is really a spiritual battle,” he said. “We are all here because we believe in God’s promise to Israel. That’s what we want our friends in the Jewish leadership to understand.” The crowd applauded loudly. This was the kind of talk they wanted to hear.
Stand For Israel was a hot ticket for ambitious pols. Senators Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback and Republican Representative Mike Pence addressed the plenum. They were Republicans, and so was a large majority of the conferees. Eckstein tries for bipartisanship; in 2003, Stand For Israel honored Democrat Tom Lantos and Republican Tom DeLay. This year, Rudy Giuliani and Joe Lieberman were slated. DeLay was scheduled to give the keynote address, but on the morning of the banquet, word came from Texas that he had been indicted for allegedly laundering campaign money. Everyone expected he would cancel.
Shira Dicker learned at three in the afternoon that DeLay was planning to keep the date. “I was torn,” she says. “Personally, I thought, ‘This scumbag is our speaker tonight?’ But from a professional point of view, I was getting all these calls from the national media. I didn’t know if it was great or horrible.”
The audience in the packed hotel ballroom that evening had no such uncertainty. DeLay entered to a standing ovation and gave a stem-winding Zionist speech. His appearance made national headlines. It was a triumph of the ‘just-spell-my-name-right’ school of public relations. And it made Dicker decide to quit.
The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews beat her to the punch; her contract was terminated right after the event. Dicker wasn’t sure why, but she took it as a positive development.
“I just don’t feel comfortable with Republicans,” she told me. “I think this is the worst administration in American history. I’m contemptuous of them. George W. Bush is a joke. I think he thinks he’s a joke.”
Dicker is the daughter of a liberal rabbi. Her husband, Ari Goldman, was a religion writer for the New York Times before becoming a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Stand For Israel offended her because she perceived it as an attack on the separation of church and state and, almost as inexcusable, on the New York Times.
“The White House briefing [of Stand For Israel] made me sick,” she said. “I mean, Elliot Abrams blamed the Times for misquoting Condi Rice.”
“The Times did misquote her.”
“Yeah, well…but all those people just cheered Abrams on. And they said a prayer. I just don’t think that’s appropriate to be praying in the White House. These people want to Christianize America.”
“The prayer was delivered by a rabbi,” I pointed out.
“Okay. Maybe. But I still wasn’t comfortable. These people have a grand plan. The Iraq war fits in with a larger scheme. I don’t know how. But I do know I’m not comfortable in America today.”
Dicker was also upset by the terminology she heard at the conference. “Gary Bauer kept saying, ‘Islamo-fascism.’ He doesn’t say, ‘Let’s reach out to moderate Muslims.’ He should say that, even if we know in our heart that it’s useless. We have to at least pay lip ser vice to the idea of reaching out to Islam. Don’t misunderstand. I think Gary Bauer is okay. But did you see G. Gordon Liddy at the dinner? G. Gordon Liddy? I mean, I don’t want him at my bar mitzvah.”
Dicker isn’t what she would call prejudiced. In fact, she pointed out, her nanny is a born-again Christian, albeit a liberal one. But this was different.
“These Christian evangelicals love Jews in an almost get-on-my-nerves way. I sat with this couple at the banquet that was just so pleased to be dining with a member of the Chosen People. They were sweet, a lot of the evangelicals are, but their leaders? Ugh.”
Dicker was once an executive at the left-leaning New Israel Fund. “For a long time I bought Yechiel Eckstein’s line that Jews should cooperate with evangelicals when possible. It’s like having friends with terrible taste in music—just don’t go to the concert with them. But I’ve come to see that their leaders are corrupt, horrible people. People in cahoots with Bush. If we cede power to right-wing Christians, we’ll be marginalized. We’ll have a Christian America. I’m glad they support Israel, but I just no longer felt I could put my name on the press releases. To me it’s a moral issue.”
Moral or political? Dicker considered. “I guess the issue is more that they are Republicans than they are evangelicals,” she admitted, taking a long sip of green tea. “I mean, I’m a Jewish liberal from the Upper West Side. With these people I was just way out of context. I just didn’t know who these people were.”
ON A MUGGY September day in Washington, I joined a long line of white men and white women in front of the Treasury Building.
These were Jewish Republicans, waiting patiently for a security check that would get them into the building, where the Republican Jewish Coalition was celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a gala luncheon whose main speaker would be President Bush.
“How many lunches does the guy eat every day?” asked a man behind me.
“Must be a couple,” said his friend. “He has a lot of events.”
“Jesus, he must get sick of it.”
“Part of the job.”
“I know, but he doesn’t gain weight.”
“Light lunches. He eats light lunches.”
Standing in line I ran into Steve Emerson, the terrorism expert. Middle East maven Daniel Pipes was there. Someone called, “Make way for the Congressman” and Eric Cantor of Virginia walked past. Ask Republican pros who the Jewish comers are and they always mention Cantor and Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota.
The ballroom was arranged with round tables, VIPs sitting above the crowd on a stage. Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, was up there, along with a smattering of Jewish legislators, a contingent of former ambassadors, and a few billionaires. Ari Fleisher was the MC; since leaving his job as Bush’s spokesman he has become a political consultant for the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“Twenty years ago, ‘Jewish Republican’ was an oxymoron,” Fleisher told the crowd. “We got eleven percent of the Jewish votes in the presidential race of 1992, we got sixteen percent in 1996, we got nineteen percent in 2000, and we went up to twenty-four percent this past election. That’s called inroads!”
The Jewish Republicans cheered. Still, the pros in the room understood that inroads is what you get when you don’t achieve real results. True, in 1992, George H. W. Bush won just 11 percent of the Jewish vote. But start counting in 1972, and you get a different trajectory. Nixon got a third of the Jews against McGovern, Reagan tickled 40 percent against Carter. By those measures, Dubya underperformed badly in 2004.
A Republican provided a brief invocation, and then, with no “Hail to the Chief,” George Bush appeared on the stage and went right to the microphone, solving a mystery: at these lunches, he skips the food.
The president began with a eulogy to the recently departed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. “We stand with the victims of the Shoah,” he proclaimed. Bush pronounced it shoo-haw. Clinton would have nailed it with a perfect Hebrew accent.
Bush’s speech to the Jewish Republicans hit all the right notes on the fight against international terrorism and support for Israel. But you could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Hurricane Katrina had just struck and Bush devoted much of his speech to that.
“Rabbi Stanton Zamek of the Temple Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, helped an African-American couple displaced by the storm track down their daughter in Maryland,” recounted Bush. “When Rabbi Zamek called the daughter he told her, ‘We have your parents.’ She screamed out, ‘Thank you, Jesus!’ He didn’t have the heart to tell her she was thanking the wrong rabbi.”
The line got a laugh, but there was something off about it. For one thing, it is redundant to refer to a temple as a synagogue. For another, anecdotes featuring Jesus make Jewish audiences—even Jewish Republican audiences—uneasy. Bill Clinton would have known that, too.
Not long after the gala, I met Ken Mehlman at his red, white, and blue office. Mehlman was Bush’s campaign manager in 2004, and he is still annoyed at his fellow Jews.
“A lot of them care about Israel last,” he said. “Liberalism is their main concern, and they tend to hate anyone who isn’t liberal. People like George Soros are self-hating Jews. Their instinct is to blame America first, and to blame Israel first.”
I had been in Washington for several days, meeting with political analysts, all of whom seemed to feel that Bush’s evangelical Christianity had alienated Jewish voters. Mehlman agreed, but he put it down to bigotry. “A lot of what pisses Jews off about the religious right is just snobbery and ignorance,” he said. “These are people who have never even met religious Christians. It’s not about issues for them. Everything they see is through partisan hearts and minds. It’s a generational thing. Jews were raised to be Democrats. We’ll make inroads. Incremental inroads.”
GEORGE W. BUSH is far more popular in Tel Aviv than he is in Washington. He’s probably more popular in Tel Aviv than he is in Crawford. In the 2004 presidential election, among the forty thousand or so absentee ballots cast by Americans from Israel, about 70 percent were for Bush. Israeli public opinion polls showed a similar number of non-American Israelis favored the Republican candidate over John Kerry—despite the fact that Kerry had recently “discovered” that his grandparents were Jews and dispatched his brother to Israel to spread the news.
This Israeli-Republican affinity is relatively new. Through the 1960s, Israeli leaders usually preferred Democrats. Lyndon Johnson, in particular, was a great favorite of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s. But, in 1972, when the McGovernites took control of the Democratic Party, things changed. Jerusalem was horrified by the dovish nature of McGovern’s foreign policy and concerned by the large number of people around him who were, at best, tepid on the subject of Israel.
Israeli ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, with the blessing of Prime Minister Golda Meir, more or less openly campaigned for Richard Nixon in 1972 and helped him achieve about 40 percent of the Jewish vote.
By the time Jimmy Carter became president, in 1976, Rabin was prime minister of Israel. Rabin came to Washington and dined at the White House. After the meal, President Carter invited him to go upstairs to say good night to his daughter, Amy. Rabin, who dreaded intimacy and didn’t much care for children, said a curt no.
In 1977, shortly after his election, Menachem Begin traveled to Washington. He took the trip so seriously that he bought two new suits to replace the threadbare ones he had been wearing for years. He thought he was going to the United States to make history.
Begin’s approach to Carter was the opposite of Rabin’s. He turned on the charm, dwelled on their supposed mutual love of the Bible, and came back to Israel praising the president, calling him “the greatest man I have met since Ze’ev Jabotinksy.” But Begin had misread Carter, who had been horrified by Begin’s expansionist reading of the Old Testament and intended to do what was necessary to stop him from implementing it.
In November 1977, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat shocked the world by coming to Jerusalem to meet Begin. The meeting had been prepared behind the backs of the Americans. Carter was furious and determined to take back control of Middle East diplomacy.
These events marked the start of a very nasty relationship between Carter and Begin. Carter labeled West Bank and Gaza settlements “illegal” and put opposition to them at the center of U.S. diplomacy. Carter saw that many liberal American Jews were themselves uneasy with Begin’s settlement policy, and he used them, and the media, to paint Begin as a religious fanatic.
The strategy, like so many of Carter’s strategies, failed. A lot of American Jews didn’t like Begin, but they didn’t like seeing Israel get beat up, either.
As relations between Washington and Jerusalem became more acrimonious (at one point Begin summoned the U.S. ambassador, Sam Lewis, and more or less publicly informed him that Israel was not an American-owned banana republic), Carter grew less and less popular with his Jewish constituents. In 1980, Ezer Weizman, Begin’s former defense minister and bitter rival, campaigned for the president, but it didn’t help much.
When Ronald Regan won in 1980, Begin was delighted. He admired Reagan’s anticommunism. He had seen, and enjoyed, some of Reagan’s movies (Begin had a taste for melodrama; he sometimes wept in the cinema). But most of all, Begin liked Reagan because he wasn’t Carter.
Reagan stopped calling the settlements illegal. He gave tacit approval to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 but stepped away from it when the television coverage of the Israeli bombing of Beirut turned American (and Israeli) public opinion. Still, while they didn’t always agr
ee, Begin never seriously questioned Reagan’s essential support.
The warm feeling between the United States and Israel changed after Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister and George H. W. Bush came to the White House. Shamir was a hard-boiled, taciturn man, a hands-on former leader of the pre-Israeli right-wing Lehi terrorist group. Most of Shamir’s career had been spent in the Mossad. He never believed that there was any prospect of peace and often cautioned against optimism: “The Arabs are the same Arabs, and the sea [they want to push us into] is the same sea,” he often said. Shamir was determined to retain the West Bank and Gaza, not out of any religious sentiment (he was neither religious nor sentimental) but because he thought surrendering land would weaken Israel’s defensive posture.
George H. W. Bush, for his part, was close, through his oil business connections, to the Saudi royal family (he called the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar, “Bandar Bush”). He was a mainline Christian, of the kind Bill Clinton later called “the frozen chosen.” And he was a foreign policy “realist.” Bush had no feeling for Israel, and his secretary of state, James Baker, was even less sympathetic. During a disagreement with Israel over settlements and loans, he supposedly said, “Fuck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.”
This was a self-fulfilling prophecy. In 1988, running against Dukakis as Reagan’s heir, Bush received roughly 35 percent of the Jewish vote. In 1992, as his own man, he got just 11 percent, barely more than third-part candidate Ross Perot.
Republican Christian Zionists like Jerry Falwell supported Bush, but this didn’t do him much good. The president was perceived by many evangelicals as patrician, high-church, and distant. Clinton was a Baptist, and if he was a sinner, at least he was a Southern boy, one of their own. The failure of Republican evangelicals to turn out in large numbers for Bush cost him the election. His attitude toward Israel almost certainly contributed to the general lack of born-again enthusiasm.