A Godsend?

Gore's pick of Senator Joseph Lieberman for his
vice-presidential running mate has profound implications for
American political life -- and America's Jewish community

by Seth Gitell

A FRIEND OF mine used to joke that the first Jewish president would have to be an incredibly "un-Jewish Jew." When told that the writer Harry Golden, upon learning that Barry Goldwater `s grandfather was Jewish, had said the first Jewish president would be Episcopalian, my friend countered that the first Jewish president would be someone like Captain Kirk (William Shatner, a very all-American midwestern kind of Jew -- for a Canadian).

Al Gore's pick of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to serve as his vice-presidential candidate turns those ideas on their head. Lieberman, who is Orthodox, is anything but un-Jewish, Episcopalian, or Midwestern. He is what other Jews refer to as "Shomer Shabbos." This means that Lieberman not only refrains from work on sundown Friday through sundown Saturday but also observes the full array of Jewish religious holidays. October alone brings Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah. All told, the Democratic vice-presidential candidate will be out of commission eight days in the month before November's general election.

While conventional political punditry has focused on whether Gore's pick will drive all of the closeted anti-Semites to Bush (no, it won't -- the anti-Semites, closeted or not, were with Buchanan to begin with), most politicos have missed the larger point: Gore now offers a choice to deeply religious voters. In a perverse way, Gore's selection of a non-Christian "person of faith" allows him to grab some of the religious voters fed up with President Bill Clinton's sexual shenanigans -- voters believed to have been a lock for George W. Bush. And Gore can do so without alienating those Democratic voters who would have been turned off if he had tapped a conservative Christian candidate for his vice-presidential running mate. A Seventh Day Adventist told me Monday that Gore's choice of Lieberman meant she would vote for Gore and Lieberman over Bush and Cheney.

"I see a real role reversal here," says David Luchins, an Orthodox Jew and senior adviser to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. "The Republicans have always been the party of faith. You didn't see any talk of faith or religion at the Republican convention. Watch for the Democrats in LA to play the religion card, the faith card."

IT'S WIDELY believed that Bush's need to pick a candidate with former defense secretary Dick Cheney's background surfaced when the Texan flunked news reporter Andy Hiller's foreign-policy pop quiz. Similarly, pundits say, Gore was forced to go with someone with an unassailable moral background to separate himself from his boss's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Accordingly, New York Republican pollster John McLaughlin, speaking to the New York Post, described the Lieberman pick as a "defensive choice." (Surprisingly, no one has pointed out the irony in this: the first Jewish vice-presidential candidate was ultimately selected as a result of a dalliance between the president and a thoroughly assimilated, conservative, Beverly Hills Jew. Credit Lewinsky, then, with this milestone in American political and Jewish history.)

But the Gore-Lieberman relationship began to gel soon after Lewinsky had her Bat Mitzvah. Lieberman joined the Senate in 1988. His candidacy was supported by National Review founder William F. Buckley and opposed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which backed the Republican incumbent Lowell Weicker. With his election, Lieberman joined the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. This faction of the party -- which prefigured the 1992 "New Democrats" -- emphasized innovative solutions to social and economic problems and was not afraid to break with the liberal orthodoxy. Members included Nebraska's Robert Kerrey, New Jersey's Frank Lautenberg, New York's Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- and Tennessee's Al Gore. They rallied under the banner of Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson of Washington who was progressive on domestic policy and staunchly anti-Communist in foreign policy. Lieberman and Gore, for instance, were two of the 10 Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the use of force prior to the Gulf War.

If the Gore-Lieberman ticket wins, it will accelerate the polarization of the Senate. In addition to Lieberman's exit, both Kerrey and Moynihan have plans to step down. Such a victory would also herald a lurch to the center for the Democratic administration -- even more so than the Clinton-Gore ticket did.

In terms of foreign policy, for example, Lieberman is staunchly pro-Israel, so much so that he once told me that Clinton's refusal to move America's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was "very frustrating, even infuriating." But he also bitterly opposes the Clinton administration's policies regarding Iraq. Lieberman was an early sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act, which calls on the United States to provide financial assistance to the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. This provides a contrast with the Republican presidential ticket, which features a vice-presidential candidate who served in the administration that elected to keep Hussein in power. But it will be interesting to see how this plays next week during the Democratic National Convention, which is expected to draw thousands of grassroots protesters -- many of whom advocate for an end to American sanctions against Iraq.

Lieberman's conservative opinions on the Middle East won't be the only ones giving Gore headaches in California next week. Lieberman, after all, crossed the aisle to work with conservative thinker Bill Bennet in criticizing the entertainment industry and promoting the V-chip. This might not matter if it weren't for the fact that Hollywood power brokers are already suspicious of Gore and his wife, Tipper, for heading up the Parental Music Resource Council, a group of politically connected parents concerned with lyrics in pop music. Although it's unlikely to drive liberals to Bush and Cheney, it might hinder fundraising activities. Gore has scheduled a few events in Hollywood in the coming weeks; unfortunately for him, they come just days after Bill and Hillary have rolled into town to raise money. Look for the glitteratti to give Gore and Lieberman the cold shoulder in LA.

LIEBERMAN'S SELECTION as Gore's vice-presidential pick has even broader implications for American Jews than it does for American politics. The most important fact about Lieberman is not just that he is Jewish, but that he is an observant, Orthodox Jew. In his most recent book, In Praise of Public Life (Simon & Schuster), Lieberman recounts Gore's invitation to stay at his parents' apartment on Capitol Hill to save the Connecticut senator the three-mile trek back to his home in Northwest DC on Friday afternoons at the beginning of Sabbath, during which Orthodox Jews -- following the practice of not using fire or electricity during the Sabbath -- do not ride in cars or operate machinery of any kind. At other times, he has made that walk across Washington, DC, to cast votes on Saturday.

When news broke that Lieberman was on Gore's vice-presidential short list, along with Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, and North Carolina Senator John Edwards, leading American Jews privately worried about what it would mean to have a high-profile Orthodox Jew as vice president. Some told me they thought it might compromise Lieberman's ability to advocate on behalf of Israel. Others saw it as a mistake for Lieberman to get caught up with the Clinton-Gore attack machine. And still others said they feared it would draw out anti-Semites.

"I am so flabbergasted," says the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, who has heard some of the whispered concerns of American Jews. "I thought the Jewish community was a lot more secure than [what] I'm hearing."

Nevertheless, Lieberman's fiercest critics will likely be leftist American Jewish intellectuals. Last May, Philip Weiss, a columnist for the New York Observer, attacked Lieberman for being affiliated with a religious movement opposed to inter-religious marriages. "The rhetoric and practices surrounding opposition to intermarriage are often so discriminatory they seem to border on racism," Weiss wrote in a piece titled "What Would a Jewish Veep Say About Intermarriage?" The question of inter-religious marriages has been hotly debated by American Jews ever since the National Jewish Population Study showed 10 years ago that Jews marry non-Jews at a rate of 52 percent. Given that the group -- the United Jewish Communities -- updating the study has put off releasing its new results, observers surmise the new figures are even more dramatic.

Meanwhile, Tikkun editor Michael Lerner wrote on the Web site Beliefnet Tuesday that "Lieberman's nomination is bad for the country and bad for the Jews." The crux of Lerner's critique is that Lieberman is too conservative on economic issues to be good for the country.

Ironically, both Weiss -- whose critique is consumed with personal feelings of guilt and ambivalence over his decisions about his faith -- and Lerner -- who echoes the left's complaints to centrist politics -- miss the concerns Lieberman raises among many American Jews, who are thoroughly assimilated into American life. And that is that Lieberman's overt, in-your-face Jewishness is scary. Unlike non-observant Jews who can vanish voluntarily into the broader mass of white America, a yarmulke-wearing, Sabbath-observant Jew is making a statement about diversity in America. (Lieberman's beliefs allow him to forgo headgear when need be.)

Weiss and Lerner and the numbers of other Jewish leaders echoing their complaints are also missing an even bigger point: within a few generations the only Jews involved in public life will be the observant ones. Demographic studies show that the descendants of less religious Jews simply disappear through a spiral of assimilation and intermarriage. The studies have shown that while individuals can continue to maintain a semblance of Jewish identity without serious religious practice, the less observant they are, the more likely the probability that their descendants will not be Jewish. The so-called "cultural Jew" is becoming an anachronism. The position of Jewish groups regarding intermarriages, then, is one of self-survival.

STILL, THESE debates are of concern to the American-Jewish community, not the broader American public. What's important is that the first wave of reaction to the Lieberman pick suggests that Gore has succeeded in getting voters -- and pundits! -- to take a fresh look at his candidacy. If all it does is put Gore back in the running against Bush going into the LA convention, then it was a successful pick. But it's silly not to acknowledge that Gore's pick of Lieberman will have longer-term implications on American political life. One example can be found right here in Massachusetts. Steve Grossman, for example, is vying to be the first Jewish governor in the history of the Commonwealth. In an interview with the Phoenix, he said the Lieberman pick might help his chances here. "I used to say, `If a Jew could be lord mayor of Dublin, a Jew could be Governor of Massachusetts.' Now I'll amend that to `If a Jew could chosen as a candidate for vice president, a Jew could be a governor of Massachusetts.' "

The coming months will shed more light on what kind of country America is. Will Lieberman really be able to take all those days off campaigning in October right before the election? It is likely that the Lieberman candidacy will open the door for even more diverse national candidates in the future. At least, we'll get to see Lieberman go to work against Cheney. And perhaps a Jewish mother will finally see her son in the White House -- well, the vice-president's residence at the Naval Observatory, at any rate.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.