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American Jewry and the Vice-Presidential Candidacy of Joseph Lieberman
From: Columbia University
| By:
Samuel G. Freedman |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
What change in the national climate made 2000 the year that an Orthodox Jew could be  nominated for vice president of the United States? And why did this seeming breakdown of prejudice fill many Jews with fear rather than joy? Samuel G. Freedman, professor of journalism at Columbia University and author of The Inheritance and Jew vs. Jew, believes that Joseph Lieberman is the embodiment of the centrist politician the Democratic Party was trying to create in the last part of the twentieth century, and that he symbolizes a shift in American Judaism toward more religious observance. |
 f I had the power to invent someone like Joe Lieberman, I would have done so. He embodies much of what I've written about politically, religiously and socially in America by being the first Jew, in particular an Orthodox Jew, on a national presidential ticket and by being a particular kind of ethnic Democrat. |
When he was nominated for vice president, I was disturbed to hear that a number of my Jewish acquaintances were worried that if the ticket lost the Jews would be blamed. Or they worried whether the ticket even could win. This worry--that there is a reservoir of bigotry that would reveal itself only in the privacy of the voting booth--was seen in New York City when David Dinkins ran in 1993 and 1989, and in the Tom Bradley races in Los Angeles. People would tell a pollster, for the sake of sounding tolerant, that they were going to vote for the black candidate, and when it actually came to Election Day there was a bleed, and support was much lower. |
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| The Pietà. | |
I never bought that argument. Some of you, I'm sure, are familiar with the sculpture of the Pietà and its image of Mary holding Jesus in her arms after he's taken from the cross. If you're my age, you remember when it was brought to the United States for the 1964 World's Fair. I think the salience of the Lieberman candidacy begins with the transposition of that image into twentieth-century urban America. |
The Jewish-Catholic Democratic coalition
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| Firefighters battle the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. | |
In March 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City's Lower East Side caught fire. It was a sweatshop of primarily Jewish and some Italian employees, owned by very affluent, upper-class German Jews. The owners had locked the exit doors from the outside to keep out union organizers. When the factory caught fire and the exits were locked, 146 workers died, most of them young women. Many died while trying to jump to safety from seven or eight flights up. That fire was tended to by a disproportionately Irish Catholic police force in New York. Up to that point in New York's ethnic history there was a fair amount of antipathy between Jewish immigrants and Irish Catholic immigrants. |
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| Policemen unload corpses from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire. | |
The Pietà image comes to me because, if you go back and read accounts of that fire or look at the photographs, you see the Irish Catholic police force tending to the corpses of the young Jewish women from the factory. It seemed to me that that tragedy initiated a communion that later became the New Deal coalition, a very important political alliance between immigrants, particularly Catholics and Jews--more specifically, in the Democratic Party between Irish Catholics and Eastern European Jews. |
At that time, Al Smith, who had been seen as the quintessential creature of Tammany Hall, was an assemblyman from Lower Manhattan. He was your basic machine politician delivering services to the constituency in exchange for a wide berth for Tammany's corruption. But out of the experience of the Triangle fire and Smith's investigative commission came a series of very important labor reforms. Some of these were brought into law, ushered in by the state legislature and later by Smith as governor of New York. Many of these prefigure New Deal legislation. |
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| Al Smith in 1928. | |
Of equal importance to the actual legislation were the political alliances that came out of the Triangle fire. You can't understand the New Deal or anything after it, including Joe Lieberman, without understanding that the next 50 to 70 years of political history in the US were prefigured by Al Smith's presidential race in 1928. |
Smith was routed by Herbert Hoover, losing the Electoral College 441 votes to 87 and losing 44 states. But beneath the surface he created a political alliance, winning the 12 largest cities in the country by 40,000 votes. The Democrats had lost these cities by more than a million votes in 1924. In states like Michigan and Massachusetts, he won 50 percent more votes than the Democrats and the Progressives together won in 1924. This was the beginning of the tradition of Jews and Catholics voting together under the Democratic umbrella. This is why I did not fear a backlash against Lieberman. |
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One of the reasons that coalition began to erode in the 1970s and the 1980s was the force of social issues. There was an aphorism heard during the Goldwater candidacy in '64 and the Nixon candidacies in '68 and '72 that white ethnics, and particularly Catholics, vote their fears rather than their interests. Their interest in lunch-bucket issues, which should theoretically keep this middle-class or working-class population in the Democratic column, began to grate against their social conservatism. They said, "We didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left us." There's certainly some amount of self-justification in that, but there's also a truth to it--there was a sentimental attachment to the Democratic Party and the New Deal heritage. There was a similar attachment in many of the Jewish neoconservatives who, though smaller in number, were quite an influential group of voters. They would never change their Democratic registration, and held on to the nostalgic sense that they are ancestral Democrats, if not active ones in the voting booth. |
Centrist-ization of the Democrats
The selection of Lieberman as a vice-presidential candidate is part of a recent pattern in the Democratic Party, personified by Clinton and Gore and led by the Democratic Leadership Council, to create a centrist Democrat; someone who could appropriate certain elements of the classic Republican platforms, like welfare reform and reducing the size of the federal government, and marry them with classic parts of the Democratic platform--the sense of class fairness, equity and involvement of the federal government in issues like education and the environment. Someone to take the best of the Republicans' appeal to swing voters and leave the Republicans with the more marginal or more controversial elements of their own platform. |
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| Swing voters comment on Lieberman's candidacy. | |
Lieberman is a perfect embodiment of this. He has been very open about his religious life, he has attacked Hollywood and the entertainment industry and he's been in favor of vouchers for private education. He was staking out that position in the early '60s, when it was even more of an apostasy for a Democratic liberal. He has elements of social conservatism and he has classic Democratic positions on other social issues, such as abortion rights. |
He was almost perfectly engineered to win back the middle for the Democratic Party. What the party needed to win back--with all due respect to soccer moms and Hispanics and the other perceived swing voters--was this bloc of ethnic Catholic voters, who have been the swing voters in every presidential election since Reagan. These blue-collar to upper-middle-class Catholic voters, ancestral Democrats, remain the important swing voters because they change columns, because they turn out in large numbers and in large proportion and because they're concentrated in many of the swing states, like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. I felt Lieberman would appeal to Catholic voters precisely for the reasons he was unsettling to a lot of Jewish voters--his religious life, his social conservatism, his willingness to wear his practice on his sleeve. |
And he is trying to reclaim for the Democratic Party a whole body of social issues, including the idea that a religious point of view is as much the property of the political center or the left as it is the property of the right. I thought it was very fitting that Lieberman gave one of his campaign speeches, later criticized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), from the pulpit of a black church. The civil-rights movement is the classic example of putting a religious sense of morality and social justice to liberal use. It wasn't a secular movement; it was a religious crusade. It was no accident that it was organized out of black churches and led by preachers. I think it's very helpful for the dialogue of the country that morality or social conservatism is not the property of the Christian Coalition. |
Lieberman, a symbol of American Jewry
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| "God talk." | |
It was no accident that the first criticism of substance against Lieberman in the 2000 presidential campaign came from the ADL for his "God talk." Part of me wished I could ascribe that to the ADL's wonderful ability to insert itself into the public eye, which is vital for any organization like that to get donations and to remain vibrant. But the fact is that the ADL position reflected a real feeling of anxiety about Lieberman at a more grassroots Jewish level. There was Lieberman, the symbol of Jewish accomplishment, of Jewish achievement or Jewish aspiration, uniformly applauded in Jewish circles. Even the right wing of the Orthodox world resisted the opportunity to criticize him for what they would see as deviations from Orthodox viewpoint--for instance, on abortion rights. They said, "He's not running for chief rabbi; he's running for vice president." As a symbol, he has been a Teflon figure, uniformly acclaimed by Jews. |
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| Al Gore and Lieberman. | |
At the same time, as an individual, he's been a confounding and even controversial presence because he has defied the expectations and the pattern of American Jewish history. What kind of Jewish figure could get onto a national ticket? What does it take for a Jewish person to rise in this country? |
When Barry Goldwater was running for president in 1964, the humorist Harry Golden said he always knew the first Jewish president would be an Episcopalian. That joke got at a deeper truth--not that a Jew who could rise to that level would have to convert, even though the first Jews elected to the Senate and governorships in the nineteenth century were converts. Golden was talking about a sense that to rise in politics you had to efface your Jewishness, to become less visibly ethnic or less visibly religious. You couldn't be an outsider or draw attention to your Jewishness. |
In the 1960s and 1970s, a high-water mark of liberalism in modern America, many of the most renowned Jewish liberals in Congress--people like Allard Lowenstein and Bella Abzug, who came out of safely liberal districts-- served only one term. Even in that political climate they were not viable over the long run. Nonetheless, the idea persisted that if a Jew could make it to a national ticket it would be a Dianne Feinstein or an Ed Koch--someone who was ethnically Jewish but not religiously Jewish, someone who didn't stick out. Lieberman defied all that. And in defying that political thinking among American Jews about what it would take to rise, he has also been the personification of a drastic shift in the balance of power within American Jewry. |
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| Immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. | |
The preponderance of immigrants who shaped Jewish life early in the twentieth century were secularists, cultural and ethnic Jews. Their motivations, their way of being Jewish, was like a magnet pulled through all of Jewish life in this country, dragging other loose filings along with it. Even religious Jewish life moved toward Americanization and assimilation, away from what we now call ultra-Orthodox practice. When Irish Catholic immigrants came here and found the public school system dominated by Protestants, they formed parochial schools as a bulwark against being acculturated by Protestants. When Jews arrived here, similarly oppressed and encountering a similarly Protestant school system, they very consciously submitted themselves to it. Rather than setting up a parochial school system, they wanted to Americanize. In 1915, there were 3.5 million Jews and five Jewish day schools in the entire country. |
Now, counterintuitively, there are about 5.7 million Jews and 670 day schools. That is emblematic of the totally unexpected power of Orthodox and religious Jewish life in this country over the last 20 or 30 years of the twentieth century--as powerful as secular cultural Jewish life was for the preceding 60 or 70 years. |
Something has changed profoundly in the driving force of American Jewry. Where the question in American Jewish life once was "Why aren't you becoming more American?" the question has become "Why aren't you becoming more frum? Why aren't you becoming more observant, more religious?" That is why Lieberman has been every bit as controversial as an individual as he's been applauded as a symbol. He could give a boost to Modern Orthodoxy at a time when it's been very much on the defensive. |
To that extent, he is a perfect barometer for some of the strife within the Jewish community today. In a way it's ironic, because, if you look closely at his résumé, he's been able to straddle many of the divides. Lieberman is an Orthodox man who went to public school, not to day school. He sent his children from his first marriage to summer camps run by the Conservative movement. Yet, simply because of where he worships, what he chooses to observe and what he chooses to say in public, he has become a rather divisive figure. |
Joseph Lieberman embodies the changes in American Jewry. He belongs to an Orthodox synagogue, he announced that he can't campaign on the holy days or Sabbath, he finds himself explaining the various religious strictures or the releases from religious strictures that let him cast a vote on the Gulf War on a Sabbath--after having walked from Georgetown to the Capitol so as not to violate the Sabbath by driving. That he did all that as a vice-presidential candidate is a reminder to a lot of nonreligious and non-Orthodox Jews that the tables have turned. |
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