Autumnal Reflections

...That shift does not represent a move towards economic conservatism...

...Yes, that is a Jewish swing to the right, but it is rather a different kind of swing from the one that is supposed to have happened...

...The appetite is there—but not the nourishment...

...On October 28, swastikas, obscenities and five-foot high KKK inscriptions were painted on the walls of the Great Neck North Senior High School...

...Reagan did no better than Nixon and Ford—a respectable showing, to be sure, but not one which warrants sweeping conclusions about major shifts in Jewish voting behavior...

...Our common enemy...

...The issue is the wisdom of making common cause with those whose most basic understandings are so radically at odds with ours...

...He fared badly with the Jews, even though they supported him more than almost any other population group—as, incidentally, was also the case with Mr...

...There is, in short, no reason to conclude, on the basis of this election, that the Jews of America have deserted their liberal disposition...

...why should the one be treated as urgent and the other ignored...

...Here a disgruntled employee, there a troubled youngster, now an ideological anti-Semite, then a drunken gang...

...Apparently, even the Anderson option did not satisfy many regular voters who rejected both Carter and Reagan...

...Large things have happened, are happening, and there are powerful reasons to try to misunderstand those things and what they portend...

...We may imagine ourselves clever enough to use them...

...In the offices of the Anti-Defamation League, I imagine, careful files are kept...

...Fundamentalism is everywhere ascendent, and the United States is not immune...

...Falwell has performed no service whatsoever for the Jewish people, and it is demeaning to suggest that he has...

...The Christian Right is hardly monolithic...

...Those of us who were children before the Second World War had hoped and expected that it would be more different than it has turned out to be...

...Even in the short run, surely in the long, a community that offers its members respite and succor in a careening world will hold its members more certainly than a community that knows only to huddle together against the enemy's stones...

...The Pope has attacked us on Jerusalem...

...The Jewish Press, a kind of newspaper with a mass circulation in Orthodox Brooklyn, endorsed Reagan and D'Amato—and claims now that its endorsement of both made the crucial difference...

...Unless we believe that, we might as well pack it in...

...Government remains the intended expression of our collective goodness, not as a substitute for personal involvement but as an institutional expression—utterly essential—of our commitment to decency...

...they have merely become bored and disillusioned with the stumbling ways in which government has sought to give it life...

...A credible liberal candidate would have restored the traditional Jewish voting pattern...

...No, this is America, and America, of course, is different...

...this is not France, where the anti-Semitic Right has become fashionable, and where PLO assassins ply their trade...

...The political imagination of a mature democracy is shaped by its sense of political possibility...

...Anxiety is a powerful magnet, but it is as dangerous as it is compelling...

...Our common destiny...

...first, among those "legitimately" Republican Jews whose economic status has for some time led them to support conservative candidates—about three out of every five of Reagan's Jewish votes fall into this category— and, second, among very Orthodox Jews in places such as Boro Park...

...On that basis, it appears that Mr...

...There is none among us who can any longer deny that government by regulation is stultifying, no matter how benign the instincts that give rise to the regulation...

...Second, one needs to look at the specific precincts where Mr...

...It is not for the hooligans to tell us how to spend our time or money, much less to tell us what we have in common...

...Lyndon Johnson, in 1964, may have been widely perceived as a liberal—but had the good fortune, whatever the perception, to run against Barry Goldwater...

...There are at least three good reasons to hesitate before accepting that conclusion: First, a careful analysis of the Jewish vote suggests a record level of abstention...

...If the anti-Semites still roam about in the night, our fight against them can free us of the need to ask the hard questions that urgently await our attention, questions that cannot be answered by looking through a window daubed with a swastika, questions that can be answered only by looking in the mirror...

...Nor ought anyone dismiss as Neanderthal the belief of many Americans that moral issues cannot any longer safely be ignored by the society...

...It is not our place in heaven that is in dispute...

...That is not the issue...

...The problems are too vast and too complex to be solved by goodness alone...

...How shall we deal more effectively with crime, and with poverty, and with sleazi-ness, and with health...

...And unless we start figuring out what those things are—say, for example, an obsession with making this world work better—then we have no good reason to insist upon our own survival as a people...

...Some stayed home, others left the Presidential ballot blank...

...Just a couple of weeks back, the Solomon Schechter school my daughter Jessica attends was the hooligan's target, and a swastika was painted on its window...

...Save for the sense of common threat, there is little that defines our common destiny...

...What defines that destiny...

...It is not a swing among middle and upper middle class Jews who have finally learned the folly of their liberal ways...

...But while the heart of the matter is the legitimacy of a plural society, which is an entirely straightforward question, there are specific aspects of the matter which make it painfully complex...

...A people that feels itself friendless wants to find allies...

...They will reason that some on the Christian Right—Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, for example—are genuinely friendly, and, more important, do not seek to mold our body politic to conform to their theological perceptions...

...Reagan did especially well...

...That tattered banner has not been nobly lifted for many years, and the reason may have less to do with the quality of the people who are enticed into politics than with the fact that the banner itself is badly frayed...

...Some part of our energy must always be devoted to preventing the development of anti-Semitism, or, if we cannot, to containing it...

...Perhaps more studies of the extent and the roots of anti-Semitism should be commissioned, so that we understand more exactly just what is happening, and why...

...The data here will take many months to analyze, but it seems clear that Jewish support for the Republican nominee was heaviest among two very different kinds of groups...

...The pain that is caused by anti-Semitism, real though it is, is a fraction of the pain that is caused by loneliness...

...But all the episodes do not add up to a pattern...

...Perhaps, in light of what appears to be happening these days, the budgets of these organizations should be increased, their methods improved, their operations more precisely targeted...

...Reagan and Mr...

...We lean into one another in our anxieties...

...They will not go away...

...The fact is that almost all the Jews who voted for Carter in 1976 and did not vote for him in 1980 either abstained or voted for John Anderson...

...A few weeks back, a friend of mine, a ranking official of one of our national defense agencies, was expostulating on the present danger...

...With all due respect to these dear people, my friends, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew...

...it is that theopolitics, and not Christian fundamentalism as such, that threatens us, and that we should have both the good sense and the self-respect to oppose...

...I shall continue to fight for both...

...Better to stumble our way to dignity and meaning than to rely on the crutch our enemies so conveniently offer us...

...The sick will not stop being sick, and the old will not vanish...

...But those ties have weakened considerably of late...

...It is Munich, not Entebbe, that confirms our vision of Jewish destiny...

...But yes, as well, yes, in the first place, we need a gyroscope that will allow us to stay on course, that will permit us to determine for ourselves the ways we choose to travel...

...The so-called Moral Majority is no longer dismissable as a fringe group of trogolodytes...

...For Jews especially...

...it is absurd for the Israelis...

...odds are it is we who will be used...

...As much as we have been disillusioned by the Left, and as complicated as it is to figure out with whom we ought now to be working, those who urge us to turn so sharply rightward must suffer from amnesia...

...Not all Evangels, by any means, accept the currently fashionable theopolitics of Jerry Falwell...

...Perhaps more attention should be paid to what was once quaintly called "inter-group relations," or to ecumenical outreach...

...We can choose to sulk out the next four years, or to revel in opposition, but neither will repair the banner—much less produce the needed program...

...The old combination of Jews, Blacks, and the trade union movement has come unglued, and it is not at all likely that it can be put back together...

...Moving to the right...

...McGovern was surely liberal, but as surely lacked coherence...

...Yet, even so, the Jews voted overwhelmingly in his favor...

...it feels itself triumphant—tomorrow the world—and its success in establishing itself as a political force creates very serious problems for those of us whom it would consign to the immoral minority...

...What connects one Jew to another...

...Frank Church, whose service to both the State of Israel and to the Jewish people are a matter of long and exceptional record, was also slated to receive a Jabotinsky medal, but he had the spine to refuse the "honor": "While I greatly appreciate the award you have conferred upon me," he cabled the evening's sponsors, "I regret that I cannot accept this honor at the same time that you are citing Jerry Falwell...

...Reagan and Hubert Humphrey, or even Walter Mondale...

...But the anti-Semitism of the Right is no aberration...

...If we permit it to divert us from our urgent business, then, when the hooligans are gone at last, we shall not have learned how to walk, we shall not know of what to speak...

...in the view of the so-called Moral Majority, this is a Christian country...

...The apparent 14 percent growth in the Jewish Republican vote suggests that the Jews are, as many observers haye recently been suggesting, moving to the right...

...the Jewish consensus has come to depend almost wholly on external stimuli...

...The Jews stayed true...

...Carter, but had, instead, been between Mr...

...until now, 35 percent was the record, set on two occasions—the Nixon vote in the 1972 election, and the Ford vote in the 1976 election...

...Neither the Jewish God nor the Jewish calendar nor the Jewish language^) nor the Jewish culture draws us together as once each did...

...We don't even lie that high!' No they don't, although they do tend to inflate...

...These circumstances, together with the more specific issues of the Middle East—issues on which some elements within the Orthodox community find Mr...

...For a wide variety of reasons, more Jews than anyone had thought likely want to be Jews, want to connect with their past, with their future, with each other...

...MOMENT AUTUMNUAL REFLECTIONS LEONARD FEIN This fall has been filled with temptation...

...But I am quite certain that Mr...

...The heart of our problem is obvious...

...Falwell has attempted to distort the American political process by imposing his views of morality as a political litmus test of a man's moral fitness to hold office...

...But only a fringe benefit...

...How easy it would be to draw together in outrage and in apprehension rather than to figure out how to make Jewish education work, and how to make Jewish culture happen, and how to make Jewish thought come alive...

...They can scarcely be blamed for that...

...Liberalism may remain our disposition, but there is a difference between a disposition and a program, and the content of the liberal program is very hard to define these days...

...it is our dreams...

...III...

...Further, the Republicans this time around did not try to disguise their conservatism behind liberal rhetoric...

...Attitudes, too, have consequences, and measles are infectious...

...We had been called the distorted names back then, and more...

...these replace the erstwhile connections...

...Opposition to the death penalty is good liberal doctrine, and so is endorsement of national health insurance, but a series of random convictions, or even of coherent sentiments, does not add up to a persuasive program...

...It is a swing among Orthodox Jews who have finally recognized the contradiction involved in supporting aid to parochial schools, opposing abortion, and generally endorsing conservative perspectives, while continuing to vote for Democrats...

...Later in these pages, Harold Schulweis makes a powerful case for that kind of investment...

...This is not Argentina, where 2500 Jews have been caused to "disappear" by agents of the State over the course of the last three years...

...For years now, there has been no coherent spokesman for that dispo-sition.Tn 1960, when John Kennedy defeated Adlai Stevenson for the Democratic nomination, it was generally believed that Kennedy was not a liberal...

...The American people have not turned their backs on that commitment...

...Church was saying what almost all of us know: An America governed by Jerry Falwell's perceptions would be no friend to Israel, let alone to the Jews...

...and we thought it would be different for our children...

...Anti-Semitism in America is hardly an epic phenomenon, even though it is encouraged by the attacks on Jews elsewhere...

...Such a turn would merely insure an end to our credibility with the center and Left, and would alienate still further a host of our own people, all those who correctly viewed the award to Falwell as an embarrassment rather than as a clever device...

...Danger is so comfortably familiar to a generation that has been schooled in fear and lamentation...

...The general sense within the Jewish community, encouraged in a major way by the call of the National Council of Churches for the recognition of the PLO, is that our erstwhile allies on the moderate left have abandoned us, that they are insensitive not only to Israel's plight but also to the dangers of anti-Semitism...

...Perhaps by now a computer is required to keep track...

...For anti-Semitism can also become a crutch, an especially appealing crutch to a generation that is just learning how to walk...

...Reagan did respectably well among the Jews, but not nearly so well as some of his more enthusiastic supporters would have us believe...

...Instead of 100 Jewish voters, there were only 90...

...The specific remark of Reverend Bailey Smith, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, which evoked so much furor back in August was, "It is interesting at great political rallies how you have a Protestant to pray and a Catholic to pray, and then you have a Jew to pray...

...It is not Rome that burns as we fiddle our fears...

...There is no more important issue on the Jewish political agenda these days than the development of new coalitions...

...Instead, it is a reflection of the political fundamentalism which was so prominent an aspect of this election...

...Anti-Semitism is a blight which, unattended, can lay us waste...

...Yet there seems no reason at all, other than our own constant apprehension, to suppose that what is happening is in any sense at all the product of conspiracy...

...cynicism is fostered with almost every news broadcast...

...A people that thinks itself sophisticated assumes that it can control the alliance, protect against its obvious dangers...

...in dozens of American cities, scores of incidents—spray-painted swastikas on our schools, vandalization of our synagogues and cemeteries...

...For the Jewish people to survive, we must be able not only to repel the anti-Semites, we must be able to develop satisfying responses to the enemy within, to the confusions and uncertainties that plague our understanding of what Judaism and Jew-ishness are and ought to be about...

...Anti-Semitism here is an attitude rather than a doctrine, much less a movement...

...But the notion that the militants of the theopolitical Right are our new partners is absurd...

...The Temptation to Consort How can one speak of liberal possibilities in the age of Jerry Falwell and Bailey Smith...

...Something is clearly happening...

...Such distancing, if it leads to a serious investment of energies in good works, cannot be condemned...

...The temptation is powerful...

...it springs from a venerable tradition, and its practitioners are not fools...

...It does not take very many abstentions to confuse the statistics...

...The Hubert Humphrey of 1968 was a Humphrey neutered, temporarily, by President Johnson, and, in the specific context of that election, Humphrey could not be regarded as a liberal's delight...

...It is a measle, not a tumor...

...Nineteen seventy-two...

...it is not the pride of June 1967, but the terror of May 1967 that draws us together...

...Let's assume that the actual figure was 40 percent...

...I do not mean that we should be content merely to scrub the walls clean and repair the broken windows, comfort our children with stories about the inevitability of it all, and go on about our business...

...Each new incident is meticulously logged, indexed, cross-referenced, stored...

...But it will be a terrible error to suppose that because yesterday's social strategies are no longer persuasive, the beliefs which gave rise to them have been discarded...

...On August 16 last, the Lake Grove Jewish Center on Long Island was burned to the ground...

...Some leaders of the Christian Right are among Israel's warmest friends in this country today...

...Some of the Evangels are in the business because it is lucrative, others because they believe it...

...That's higher than the Jewish vote for the Republican nominee in any recent election...

...Israel's security and America's freedom are inextricably bound together...

...I suspect that many of us will be tempted simply to distance ourselves from the world of politics, which has been so disappointing a world these past years...

...It is not hard to weave a fabric out of all that has been happening, and to feed the conspiratorial fantasy...

...There is anti-Semitism on the Left, and there is anti-Semitism in the center, and these disgusting aberrations are most unnerving...

...Carter...

...A disappointment, but far from a tragedy...

...It is an understandable temptation...

...in England, a sudden flurry of "episodes...

...Can it be doubted that the Jewish vote would have split 80-20 or so in favor of the Democratic nominee...

...Suppose, for example, that 10 percent of those Jews who normally vote for President held back this time...

...On the assumption that a conservative President and a conservative Senate and a more conservative House of Representatives will cut back the dollars available for social programs, the need for voluntarism will grow dramatically...

...If the liberal possibility can be persuasively represented, it will once again fire our political imagination...

...There is no comfort there for us...

...And so, in mid-November, under the aegis of the Jabotin-sky Foundation, and in the presence of Menachem Begin, and with the tacit endorsement of Jewish leaders from dozens of Jewish organizations, Jerry Falwell, the so-called Moral Majority's leader, was awarded a medal for his "distinguished service to the State of Israel and to the Jewish people...

...It is a terrible disappointment to find that we were mistaken...

...Neither we nor the Israelis can look to the traditional coalitions with the kind of confidence we once felt...

...Very, very few ended up pulling the Reagan lever—and for at least some of those who did, it was not fondness for Reagan but antipathy to Carter that moved them...

...Our political and religious freedoms are cornerstones of our system and should not be undermined...

...And this we do, assigning vast sums and some of our best personnel to the Anti-Defamation League, to the American Jewish Committee and the American Jewish Congress and the National Community Relations Advisory Council, to dozens of local community councils...

...Among the Evangels, however, there is much support for Israel and its safety, support which holds that the Second Coming depends on the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land—followed, to be sure, by their conversion to Christianity...

...Jews have not fared well, recently, at the hands of liberal Christians...

...No one can sensibly stay blind to the malignance of the Soviet Union and the need to protect against its spread...

...The CBS/New York Times exit poils estimate that some 39 percent of the Jewish vote was cast for the Reagan-Bush ticket...

...And suppose, further, we use the 40 percent pro-Reagan estimate...

...And as to 1976, whatever good things may be said about Jimmy Carter, he did not present himself then as a plausible carrier of the liberal banner...

...Finally: Imagine that this last election had not been between Mr...

...So the temptation is to use the threat of anti-Semitism...

...That's 40 percent of 90, or 36 votes...

...But there are those among us who imagine that by seeking to ingratiate ourselves with Falwell et al., we will blunt the mischief of which they are capable...

...this is manifestly not the USSR, where anti-Semitism has been adopted as a policy of the State...

...I. The Temptation to Withdraw On election night, at Republican headquarters, one of the principal organizers of the Jewish vote rushed into the room with the latest estimate of how the Jews were voting: "The California exit polls show that we're getting 70 percent of the Jewish vote," he announced...

...We are witness today to a resurgence of the Jewish appetite such as none had foreseen, none predicted...

...it is our place in the United States...

...Since then, we have stuttered and sputtered, and it is evident that the old slogans no longer will do...

...other neutral estimates add a couple of points more...

...I am unaware of any service whatsoever that Falwell has performed for the State of Israel, save for not attacking it—but my files are incomplete, and it is possible that he has done something praiseworthy...

...Good to have friends everywhere...

...I do not accept that we need the threat, that we depend on it, not even as a substitute while we learn to wrestle with God again...

...Not since the heady days of the Great Society has there been a sense of genuine possibility, of excitement regarding the liberal prospect...

...Our contributions of money and time to help care for them will have to grow, and if those to whom such matters have always been of concern are moved, in a period of government retrenchment, to, fill the gap, that will be a productive fringe benefit of the recent elections...

...Begin too dovish for their taste—led the precincts of Boro Park, for example, to go two and three to one for Reagan...

...For many years, the specific ties between the Jewish community and the Democratic Party were so tight that even right wing Orthodox Jews, whose cultural orientation was manifestly illiberal, were swept along by it...

...But a condition is not a vocation...

...We have more important things in common than their enmity...

...Good...

...it consists of a very loose and often competitive group of private entrepreneurs, and the temptation is to try to take advantage of their disarray and of their disposition to support Israel by embracing those who indicate a readiness to work with us on matters of common interest...

...Jews perceived him as his father's son, and the overwhelming margin of support they gave him was as much an anti-Nixon vote as this year's returns were an expression of opposition to Carter...

...Liberals cannot avoid asking how their tradition of reliance on government can be reconciled with the manifest clumsiness of government, how their instincts for pacific d?tente can be reconciled with the warring malice of the USSR, how their insistence on moral freedom can be stayed from inviting moral license...

...At the same time, the old questions remain...

...Away from the urban cauldrons, in the insulated safety of our single family homes and condominiums, in the sympathetic aftermath of the Holocaust, we expected that our children would know anti-Semitism only secondhand...

...The Temptation to Evade Anti-Semitism...

...Indeed, it is quite likely that if there was a net increase in the number of Jews who voted for the Republican nominee, much of it can be accounted for by the Orthodox shift...

...We know very little about why it is happening, but the events themselves cannot be denied...

...For if we do not oppose it—if, worse, we lend it respectability in the name of temporary advantage—we shall lose our claim to the friendship of those whose friendship matters more, and with whom we more naturally belong...

...in Paris, the bombings...

...Fear is our Stradivarius, and we are virtuoso fiddlers...

...But over-attended, it will ravage us more certainly still...

...The Jewish response was predictably indignant, though it is questionable whether very many Jews think that God hears our prayers—or anyone's—and it is indignant because we understand precisely what is at stake...

...How shall this great and generous nation Finally come to grips with the gross inequities that persist within it, inequities that have never much troubled conservatives...

...It reflects a failure of imagination rather than a new sophistication...

...it is absurd for us...

...v But one thing is clear, or should be, amidst all the "perhapses": If we permit the new outbreak of hooliganism to divert us from the other issues on the Jewish agenda of our time, we will have needlessly abetted the insult it offers, helped to convert that insult into an injury we can ill afford...

...Yes, we are a threatened community, and yes, therefore, we need a radar system that will warn us when the missiles fly...

...The cements that once bound us to one another have dried out...

...Erev Yom Kip-pur, the walls of the Ramaz School in New York City were defaced...

...Seventy percent...