It's Aesthetic When You Win
Evanier, David
David Evanier IT'S AESTHETIC WHEN YOU WIN A final conversation with Nathan Perlmutter. . . . Funny, as my mind is smiling, what I feel I've accomplished. I married the prettiest girl, I made it...
...Compassion, and I'm using'the word ironically—I'm not using it in any way that would suggest respect—compassion for the so-called `underprivileged' is endangering us to the point where we are placing as precedents in law, racial preferences...
...When Jewish baseball fans (supported by some prominent rabbis) protested two National League playoffs scheduled on Yom Kippur, Perlmutter commented: "Part of the cost of being Jewish is that you sacrifice some worldly indulgences, and you don't impose on the rest of the world to adopt your ways and your beliefs...
...We met again later...
...Right...
...In 1987 he reflected: "Somewhere along the line, the mainstream black civil rights organizations, with notable exceptions like Sowell and Loury, made a decision, perhaps an unconscious decision...
...I reminded Perlmutter of his comment when David Saperstein, co-director of the Religious Action Center of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, supported the NAACP's pro-racial quota position and criticized the ADL for being out of step with the Jewish community...
...Perlmutter's unparochial, ecumenical spirit—a component of his feeling completely at home in America—also played a role in the Anti-Defamation League's exceptional growth...
...It was almost as if there was something gauche in taking note of the progress that had been made...
...He sensed when old wounds could be healed, when old alliances had broken down, but also when new alliances were possible...
...So I suppose that this kind of, in my view, failure of liberalism to solve that which made us liberals is in part responsible for the apparent change in me, and also for the fact that so-called liberalism lost its way...
...In 1980, the New York Jewish Week wrote of a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League National Executive Committee: What's this the ADL did at its meeting in Palm Beach, calling for a super military budget and backing registration of the young for possible military duty...
...I learned...
...He looked at his brother and he said, 'Let's go.' And they left...
...Instead of going fishing or writing that forty-yeardelayed novel, I'm back at position one, only I'm no longer an adolescent, and the pain is in knowing that I'll never be a fireman, never a cowboy...
...I asked him...
...it seemed so simple, Perlmutter might say, should we have to keep saying it...
...I asked him, "You never had ambitions...
...I take pleasure in simply having made it to the top, simply having written the books and articles, simply having passed the Parris Island and Quantico tests, simply being Ruthie's husband...
...It hasn't been fun...
...Perlmutter said the poll largely found that evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants in the 1980s do not "consciously use their deeply held Christian faith and convictions as justification for anti-Semitic attitudes...
...But very fortuitously, wow, luckiest thing that ever happened, at some point early on I knew I would never be of thequality I would feel comfortable with as a writer...
...But I don't know what spending money has to do with teenage pregnancies...
...The anti-Semite who makes charges about Jewish domination of law, ivy league faculties, medicine—his motivation is hostile, but his facts are right...
...Over the years, with the conflicts between blacks and Jews, I was always able to talk with him, knowing I would get a deeper feeling of the Jewish aspect of the problem...
...What do I mean...
...What do you mean...
...Tell me, if you're not going to be supportive of nuclear weapons, and one grants the vast superiority in conventional forces of the Soviet Union—and you are also going to oppose the draft, or oppose budgets for conventional weaponry—what are you doing but surrendering...
...My mother was the only woman in the neighborhood who sold ices in the streets...
...He always understood that the most secure and lasting way for all Americans to advance in our multicultural society is to depend upon, adhere to, and advance the principles of individual merit...
...In 1973 he returned to the ADL...
...Many years later, I became director of the social service department of the Workmen's Circle, working with immigrants...
...I married the prettiest girl, I made it to Marine infantry officer, wrote a few books and became director of the A.D.L.—my hill . . . It's not the "contributions" I'm pleased with as much as just having done them...
...I asked Nate Perlmutter: "When and why did you stray off the beaten path...
...My predecessor had tried to help heal the rift between the parents...
...We chose to first hear his side and then have our say...
...I believe that what appears to have been a turn to the right," he said, "was on social issues...
...Right...
...I said earlier I reached what basically looks like a turn to the right...
...Nat Hentoff: "What immediately comes to mind about Nate is that all the time I knew him he was utterly consistent on civil liberties matters—and that is a rare phenomenon...
...Some of the economic panaceas we had been supportive of, not through any reasoned economic theory, but through a feeling—you know, don't just stand there, do something—suddenly we began to understand that some of this stuff simply doesn't work...
...One day he was standing outside the home...
...Later, in his 1987 "Report to the ADL's National Commission," he wrote of this incident: "ADL held its fire...
...He referred to a Federal District Court ruling that 50 percent of all new police officers hired by New York City had to be black and Hispanic applicants...
...Because even most professional civil libertarians sometimes let ideology get in the way of a strict construction of the Bill of Rights...
...He told me that suddenly in retirement he had the unwelcome time in which to ask himself if his life had been a good time...
...But then again, if he were, he might not still be President...
...Perlmutter had responded: "Kissing backsides isn't the way to strengthen relationships—it's an old and familiar snivel...
...What he was in reality was consistent, tough, and wedded to the idea that had brought him and so many American Jews to the forefront of American life: that merit must be the standard by which all people are judged...
...it comes from an honest and dignified exchange of views...
...It's better to talk to than at him...
...The white liberal community's readiness, the trendiness with which crime, criminal behavior, was forgiven...
...And that's back to square one...
...Despite the conflicts, he and I were always able to agree on the basic issues of principle...
...It was as if New York had suddenly opened and we were dropped into a world I didn't know existed...
...She had taken Nate and his brother and sent them to a public home for children, so that the parents could have time alone to work things out...
...Bayard Rustin: "In my experience with Nate, most importantly, he was a person who had absolutely no airs, no pretenses...
...Was it fun, or could you have done without it...
...He saidabout his feelings at the races: "It's very aesthetic when you win...
...That's part of the tradition we grew up in...
...That, and the fact that an America which has to step back from the Soviet Union is an America in which the Jews would become more and more insecure...
...He was built that way...
...Isaac Lewin wrote that in 1919, Rabbi Perlmutter . . . demanded that Poland should be built upon democratic foundations, a republic whose government is responsible to the parliament...
...I considered Notary Publics to be Very Important People...
...He was a mensch...
...He said that while he was "discomfited by those who claim to have the 'truth' whether in religion or in politics, it is our responsibility to seriously explore their attitudes and understand their mindsets...
...That's one issue that led to a parting of the way...
...I mean, think of the billions of dollars that were spent during the Johnson Administration on the poor, the war against poverty...
...Now that Nate is gone, the world will become a more dangerous place without him...
...Right...
...He asked, "Why would an otherwise square couple . . . jump from the secure threshold of their middle age into the . . . uncertainties of thoroughbred ownership...
...Remember how when we were kids, the Who am I, What am I questions that'd keep us awake...
...His father left when Nate was sixteen...
...Now on quotas...
...They want to be governor, or this or that...
...William F Buckley, Jr.: "Nate did a lot for his friends by merely befriending them...
...He raised and raced them...
...I don't know what spending money has to do with brutish Mayor Ed Koch: "Surely no one in this century has done more to ecumenically advance understanding among Christians and Jews and all religions than Perlmutter...
...My wife Ruthie and I lived from 1956 through 1964 in Florida...
...When I visited Perlmutter at his home in June, I brought up what he had said to distress the Jewish Week reporter near the start of his tenure...
...Well," he said, "people have ambitions...
...deployment of nuclear weapons growing apprehensive lest the Presidentof the United States accede to Soviet demands on nuclear weapons...
...She did it from behind a pushcart that weighed several times her ninety pounds...
...Bill, and in 1949 he went to work for the Anti-Defamation League in Denver...
...Now you know Richard Nixon is not the kind of fellow that if I were making a movie I would have cast Van Johnson in his role...
...He did this better than anyone I have ever known...
...More than poor, we were innocent...
...Perlmutter could tell...
...And for Jews to accept precedents that establish entitlements based on race, color, or creed is really an act of self-immolation...
...I thought the circumstances were morally offensive...
...His friend Bernie asked him where he came from...
...We were involved in work that involved racism, desegregation...
...Understanding between groups doesn't come from patronizing...
...It can beseen in Bayard Rustin's description (see box) of the ways in which Perlmutter got along with other groups and faiths: both by explaining and by listening to others...
...he learned...
...He did so with a spirit of inquiry, a sense of proportion, and a sensitivity that broke down walls...
...And then there was the 1972 McGovern-Nixon race...
...A strange term from somebody like me...
...So seven years later, there's the irony of European countries which featured all kinds of demonstrations against the U.S...
...Nate was our advocate...
...My predecessor had kept old handwritten files going back forty years about the families that came to the Workmen's Circle for help in settling in America...
...It just hasn't been fun...
...To hear conversation today about what needs to be done would cause you to assume that these are all new ideas, that they haven't been tried before...
...He left the ADL in 1965 to become associate national director of the American Jewish Committee, and in 1969 became vice-president of Brandeis University...
...In his book, A Bias of Reflections (Arlington House, 1972), he wrote, "I thought my Aunt Esther was rich because she and my Uncle Max had a stuffed chair...
...Leo Cherne is the same way...
...Lewin commented: "The venerable rabbi . . . said that Jews would not permit anyone to rob them of their rights as citizens...
...The matter was simple: Jews had found a "safe harbor" in the U.S...
...And he answered: I'll tell you why...
...Go back a trillion years...
...Almost alone in the Jewish community, Perlmutter and the ADL withdrew their support from the statement...
...Now that relates to race, because before the law they are both in the area of civil rights...
...And he could shape these perceptions into concise phrases...
...It is a recognition that the Soviet Union is the single major power that manufactures and exports anti-Semitism...
...If money were the answer to poverty, then by now we should have been well on the way to having erased it...
...I was 19, he was 20...
...And I'd also comment on the irony that resonates right up to this past week in Europe of those characters who have never met a military budget increase that they favored, but also, also are opposed to any draft...
...You fought anti-Semitism, there was the war, then when I was in Denver they weren't hounding Jews, but the so-called Mexican-American was the low man on the totem pole...
...freedoms, which have proved so crucial for every group seeking safety and opportunity...
...That's what it all comes down to when you're my age, looking down the hill you came up...
...His focus was frequently on issues going beyond expected Jewish concerns...
...After attending Georgetown University, he earned a law degree at New York University under the G.I...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987...
...When we married, we had exactly seven cents between us...
...He was deeply involved in fighting for black equality in the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was threatened with death by the Ku Klux Klan and the white citizens' councils...
...But why civil rights...
...What's the matter, has it gone Right or something...
...Right...
...And then you become director one day...
...Ironic...
...In 1984 he said, "I am more concerned by an isolationism that may deprive America's strongest ally in the Middle East of needed support than I am with some Klansman in a cow pasture in central Missouri...
...Perlmutter told the anxious Jewish Week reporter: "I would say that what is happening in the ADL in assuming this position is the recognition that the U.S., its democracy, has been Israel's safest harbor...
...He described the Saratoga racetrack at 6 a.m.: The morning mist sitting heavily on the stretch turn, its grey lap muffling the clippety-clop of pounding hooves, and lo...
...That spirit could be found in his response to John Cardinal O'Connor's recent trip to the Middle East...
...We saw it in various environments...
...Well—you see, we're a different generation, David...
...Seven years later," he said, "I wouldn't change a word in there...
...Perlmutter's stands stimulated some on the left to label him and the ADL as "right wing...
...We believe that the time will come when the Jewish sovereignty will again be established in Jerusalem...
...Also, anybody who understands and admires Merle Haggard is a true friend of liberty...
...Why would I go out with a nogoodnik like that...
...I said...
...And to stay close to the batting box that I stand in, the Jewish community, as Jewish interests are evidenced abroad by Israel, and domestically by the quota system, there is no question how to rate him...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 25 behavior in classrooms, or with both the brutes and the intimidated quitting school...
...Since 1979, Perlmutter's personality and character shaped the ADUs recent role both in the Jewish world and in American life in a way that was distinct and singular...
...It seemed as worthwhile, if not a lot more worthwhile, a cause to work on, as divorce or corporate law...
...I haven't changed in any way on that...
...Diary of a Cancer Patient" by Nathan Perlmutter New York Times Magazine November 24, 1985 In June of this year, Nathan Perlmut- ter received the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, from President Reagan...
...But we do...
...Perlmutter stated: "We feel on some of these questions the Cardinal is a mistaken friend, but not an adversary...
...WHO SCREWED WHO TO MAKE GOD...
...emerging from deep within the wet greyness, triumphantly shedding the clinging dark, is your horse, drum-rolling down the stretch, growing larger as he looms closer, coloring as he distances the leaden fog...
...In 1964 we came to New York City for a huge meeting on racial issues...
...Ruth Perlmutter told me in June: "I'm told that when I was in my baby carriage, Nate stole my bottle...
...He gave us courage...
...T suppose if I had an ambition—I I never really had ambitions as such—my first would have been to be a writer," Perlmutter told me...
...He spoke out—without reservation—about the pro-Soviet orientation of the African National Congress, the anti-Semitism of the Sandinistas, the remarkable affection that Jesse Jackson displayed for dictators of the left, and the central struggle of our time between the forces of Western democracy and the forces of Marxist totalitarianism...
...Lucy S. Dawidowicz: "In my lifetime and Nate's, when we were still young and unseasoned, the ground on which Jews stood gave way, and swallowed up millions of us...
...I think that he's a politician who's not consistently conservative...
...There had to be a preferred poor, something you could genuinely bleed over...
...And yes, there was the sense some of these groups were not being fully responsive to the needs of the black community by crying racism with the same sense of anguish and indignation that they used in the middle 1950s...
...And I was stunned...
...But who made God...
...He died of lung cancer on July 12...
...n many issues, it was possible to link Nathan Perlmutter to the past of the Democratic party, when it \\, 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1987 stood for a strong defense, equated that defense with opposing left-wing as well as right-wing dictatorships, and understood that democracy's enemies had to be identified...
...Were they going to pursue hoped-for fellowships, or were they going to concentrate more of their efforts on self-help...
...He commented, "We don't have quotas for basketball teams or football teams—recognizing the essential ingredient of ability as the primary requisite on the playing field...
...His office looked out on the United Nations, the birthplace of the "Zionism is Racism" resolution...
...Perlmutter wrote, "Nightly, for weeks on end, I thought so hard about Bernie's question, my scalp tingled and my hands formed involuntary fists as if clenched they would somehow propelmy struggling brain to the Secret of God...
...The Jews must enjoy full equality...
...Under those circumstances it's best to be yourself and to say it plainly...
...The New York Times recently wrote of Jesse Jackson's latest attempts to change his image with Jewish voters...
...It has hurt...
...It was a question of justice...
...There was an almost nonresponse to the Johnson decision of the Supreme Court a few months ago, in which sex, qua sex, wasreason enough for a person getting a job and for another person being deprived of a job...
...No, the Jew is an oak tree which proudly lifts its head to the sky...
...his parents were poor and uneducated before him, and his children are going to be poor, uneducated...
...He had this friend Cockeye Georgie, who used to look up girls' dresses...
...Merit and equality are intertwined, and he refused to compromise in an area in which he was under intense fire...
...The young Perlmutter answered truthfully...
...Of course for Jews it's an irony of a very special sort...
...ADL under Perlmutter also released the results of a study it commissioned on the view of Jews held by Christian evangelicals and fundamentalists...
...Religion must not be an obstacle to assuming positions in government...
...And the applause that it received...
...American Jews were painfully aware of the ways in, which quotas were used to exclude them in the past, but Perlmutter, on this issue like so many others, spoke with a directness and passion unmatched in the Jewish community...
...Lucky, I guess...
...We were on relief in the 1930's and while my father was still with us, he worked a shovel for the WPA...
...Above all this, an educational process took place...
...In one chapter he remembered his first pangs of doubt about God...
...This militant tone was not the tone of the other Jewish representatives . . ." N ate Perlmutter was an expert on thoroughbred horses...
...In 1987, he said to me of Ronald Reagan: "I have very uncomplicated views of him...
...There was no reason for that wall, and Nate blasted it away, a great public service fit for a Medal of Freedom winner...
...And of course the audience was mostly white, because the subject was racism...
...And God made Adam and Eve...
...Because the actor was black...
...Freedom was precious...
...The loathing that poured forth from some of the black speakers against the white liberal community...
...But am I to be brought over because he now abjures anti-Semitism...
...Nate deserves all the medals and all the tributes a freedom-loving society has to offer...
...In our conversations, I reminded Nate of his remarks about racial quotas in 1980...
...Bernie kept tracing it back and finally said: "Now go all the way back...
...Is police work less important than basketball...
...Those whose faith is Judaism, they will know what to do...
...But Nate also did a lot to blow away the ridiculous wall that some of his predecessors had erected between the Jewish movement for racial toleration and the conservative movement...
...Relevant here is not that Jewish organizations subsequently agreed with ADL, saying so publicly, but that the New York Times, in the context of editorial reproval of those who shot hastily, commended ADL for its wisdom and fairness...
...I don't know...
...It's almost as if one goes through life semi-passively, semi-passively, because you're doing what you have to do, and giving it your best shot...
...And there in the files was the account of Nate's mother and father before the rift between them...
...These positions derived from his unqualified love for American David Evanier is a research specialist with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith...
...In the last week of June, I spent two afternoons interviewing him by his bedside for this piece...
...Rabbi Perlmutter was selected to represent the Jewish community of Warsaw at the sejm, the Polish parliament...
...Does one get rewarded for not being a bigot...
...And if I changed on economic issues, that followed later...
...His book, How to Win Money at the Races, was a best-seller and is in its fifteenth printing...
...Eight years ago, Perlmutter became national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith...
...He said then that at one time quotas were used to keep minorities out of jobs...
...In high school, I wouldn't look at him...
...He was the leader...
...The family was poor...
...Well, I'm at it again...
...He is completing a novel about American Communism entitled The Prince of Progressive Humanity...
...I would also recall that Dore Schary, the very personification of Democratic party liberalism, introduced the motion for the military budget in Palm Beach...
...But the almost physical dislike of Nixon was causing otherwise normal, rational people to be supportive of a man who had absolutely no understanding (or worse, perhaps he did have an understanding) of what the Soviet Union represented...
...Mostly white and well-to-do Jewish...
...If because of your race, you are automatically entitled to a job, the quota system by definition means that if you are going to get a share, somebody else is not going to get a share...
...Is that the same ADL we've always known...
...There was a kind of inverse racism involved in the patronizing approach it had to the poor...
...Life wasn't that way...
...And he answered himself, because he was really talking to himself...
...The fact that their thinking and values are different from ours does not mean per se that they are anti-Semitic...
...Knowing who ones friends are is one of the most difficult tasks for a long-persecuted minority...
...For those whose faith is the Mets, they ought to go to Temple Shea...
...But I don't hear any sociologists, never did, coming around and saying about their behavior, yes, but you've got to understand they have suffered from bla bla bla...
...Dr...
...Nate was one of the few American leaders who over the years fought against every aspect of bigotry and fought all agencies and institutions advocating bigotry, whether the Ku Klux Klan on the far right or the Communist Party with its proposals for segregated states for blacks on the far left...
...Take off the pressure of these two very rambunctious little boys...
...In response to the pogroms that occurred in Poland in 1919, the Rabbi said: "The Jew is not straw which is bent over by every little wind...
...Where do you get the nerve to talk like that...
...And you reach the point at which you decide that hey, an imperfect democrat, Richard Nixon, a wanting democrat, Richard Nixon, is far, far preferable to somebody who speaks in idealized language about peace and about poverty...
...But there have been changes...
...Referring to Jackson's apology at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, Perlmutter told the Times: "A man can feel genuine remorse, and I am prepared to believe that Jesse Jackson felt genuine remorse...
...Well, self-help is not a popular political program...
...Yeah, I think it was as normal as growing up in some parts of the South and throwing hardballs and going into baseball...
...Nate Perlmutter's great-uncle was the Chief Rabbi of Warsaw, Rabbi Avraham Zvi Perlmutter...
...today quotas are used to bring minorities in, yet quotas in favor of one group, by definition, mean quotas against others...
...The poor could not be white and unshaven and rednecked...
...You cannot, on the one hand, continue to call for increased military assistance for Israel, and not be supportive of America's capacity to help Israel...
...Because Jews, in their compassion, accept racial and religious proportionality...
...Adam and Eve made the first people...
...I always felt I was able to communicate to him the confusions of the black community that are a part of the conflict...
...He was 64...
...But I think it was simply consistent with the notion of 'a man's a man' for what he is, regardless of race, color, or creed...
...Well, I never claimed to be an intellectual or a do-gooder...
...He wrote in National Review of owning a racehorse, Ruthie's Native ("Ruthie, because that's my partner's name...
...It had two standards...
...Other Jewish organizations bridled at what they felt were the Cardinal's insensitive remarks about the Holocaust and disproportionate references to the Palestinians, and issued a public statement of criticism...
...But Nate didn't like it...
...I think he's a good man...
...The anti-Semite, whose motivation is anti-Semitism, may nonetheless have some facts...
...Hunched with a friend I hadn't seen in years...
...I mean, after all, you can take a Klansman: he's usually poor, uneducated...
...And I thought that was hypocrisy...
...Certainly in the South, the circumstances to which blacks were subjected...
...Nate Perlmutter grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn...
...It never occurred to me...
Vol. 20 • September 1987 • No. 9
