Playing the faith card

Al Gore's pick of Senator Joseph Lieberman as his running mate has profound implications for American political life -- and for 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, on learning that Barry Goldwater's grandfather was Jewish, had said that the first Jewish president would be Episcopalian, my friend countered that the first Jewish president would be someone like William Shatner (who comes across as 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 from sundown Friday through sundown Saturday, but also observes the full array of Jewish religious holidays. October alone brings Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah. All told (including Sabbaths), the Democratic vice-presidential candidate will be out of commission eight days in the month before November's general election.

Conventional punditry has focused on whether Gore's pick will drive all the closeted anti-Semites to Bush (it won't -- the anti-Semites, closeted or not, were with Buchanan to begin with), but 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 who are fed up with President Bill Clinton's sexual shenanigans -- voters believed to have been a lock for Bush. And Gore can do so without alienating those Democratic voters who would have been turned off if he had tapped a conservative Christian as his running mate. A Seventh Day Adventist told me Monday that Gore's choice of Lieberman meant she would vote for the Democrats over Bush and Cheney.

"I see a real role reversal here," says David Luchins, an Orthodox Jew and a 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 a background like that of former defense secretary Dick Cheney surfaced when the Texan flunked news reporter Andy Hiller's foreign-policy pop quiz. Similarly, pundits say Gore was forced to choose someone with an unassailable moral background to separate himself from his boss's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Accordingly, the 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 selected as a result of a dalliance between the president and a thoroughly assimilated Beverly Hills Jew. Credit Lewinsky, then, with this milestone in American political and Jewish history.)

But the Gore-Lieberman relationship had begun 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 -- which prefigured the 1992 "New Democrats" -- emphasized innovative solutions to social and economic problems, and was not afraid to break with the liberal old-liners. 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 anticommunist in foreign policy. Lieberman and Gore were two of the 10 Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the resolution authorizing the use of force before the Gulf War.

If the Gore-Lieberman ticket wins, it will accelerate the polarization of the Senate, especially because both Kerrey and Moynihan have plans to step down. Such a victory would also herald a lurch to the right for a Democratic White House -- even more so than the Clinton-Gore ticket did.

On 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." He also bitterly opposes the Clinton administration's policies toward Iraq. Lieberman was an early sponsor of the Iraq Liberation Act, which calls on the United States to aid the Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein. The Republican presidential ticket, by contrast, features a vice-presidential candidate who served in the administration that chose to keep Hussein in power. It'll 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 call for an end to American sanctions against Iraq.

These Middle East stances won't be the only Lieberman opinions that could give 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," which makes it possible to block violent TV programs. This might not matter if Hollywood powerbrokers weren't already suspicious of Gore because his wife, Tipper, headed the Parents Music Resource Center, a group of politically connected parents concerned with racy lyrics in pop music. Although such issues are unlikely to drive liberals to Bush and Cheney, they might affect fundraising. Gore has scheduled a few events in Hollywood in the coming weeks; unfortunately for him, they come just days after Bill and Hillary roll into town to raise money. Look for the glitterati to give Gore and Lieberman the cold shoulder in LA.

LIEBERMAN'S SELECTION 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 recalls that Gore invited him to stay at his parents' apartment on Capitol Hill so that the Connecticut senator wouldn't have to trek three miles back to his home in Northwest DC on Friday afternoons. (Once the Sabbath begins at sundown, Orthodox Jews do not use fire or electricity, ride in vehicles, or operate machinery of any kind.) At other times, he has made that walk across Washington to cast votes on Saturday.

When news broke that Lieberman was on Gore's shortlist -- along with Massachusetts senator John Kerry, Indiana senator Evan Bayh, and North Carolina senator John Edwards -- American Jewish leaders 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," said Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, 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."

Lieberman's fiercest critics will probably be leftist American Jewish intellectuals. This past May, Philip Weiss, a columnist for the New York Observer, attacked Lieberman for being affiliated with a movement opposed to interfaith 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 intermarriage has been hotly debated by American Jews, especially since the National Jewish Population Study showed 10 years ago that Jews marry non-Jews at a rate of 52 percent. The United Jewish Communities, which is updating the study, has put off releasing its results, leading observers to surmise that the new figures are even more dramatic.

Meanwhile, Michael Lerner, the editor of the magazine Tikkun, wrote on the Web site Beliefnet (www.beliefnet.com) on 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.

Ironically, both Weiss (who appears consumed with personal feelings of guilt and ambivalence over his decisions about his faith) and Lerner (who echoes the left's complaints about centrist politics) miss the concerns that Lieberman raises among many of those 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 mass of white America, a yarmulke-wearing, Sabbath-observant Jew is making a statement about diversity in the United States. (Lieberman's beliefs allow him to forgo headgear when need be.)

Weiss, Lerner, and the Jewish leaders who echo 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 suggest that the descendants of less religious Jews simply disappear from the faith through a spiral of assimilation and intermarriage. The studies have shown that individuals can continue to maintain a semblance of Jewish identity without serious religious practice, but the less observant they are, the less likely it is that their descendants will be Jewish. The "cultural Jew" is becoming an anachronism. The intermarriage issue, then, is one of survival.

THESE ARE the debates that concern the American Jewish community -- but the broader American public has plenty at stake as well. What's important is that Gore has succeeded, at least for now, in getting voters -- and pundits! -- to take a fresh look at his candidacy. If all it does is put Gore back in the running as the convention approaches, then the Lieberman pick was a successful move. But it's silly not to acknowledge that Gore's choice will have longer-term implications for American political life.

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 from campaigning in October? Whatever happens, it's likely that his candidacy will open the door for even more diversity in the selection of national candidates. Plus, 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.