Carter and the Jews X. The Leadership Praises, the Grassroots Mope

...Soviet Jews "Carter cares He tries He can cooperate to produce results He has been helpful concretely-50,000 Soviet Jews were brought out last year He has been a true friend ". Separation of church and state "The Helms Amendment some months ago would have brought prayer back into the public schools As a Baptist, Carter responded right off the top of his head against it The Baptists are the only group more strongly committed than we are to the separation of church and state ". Brzezinski "His peace plan is in no essential way different from Abba Eban's At his worst he has spoken like Eban...

...Nor is the peace all Mann-who, like the Jewish leadership generally, says he supports no candidate-talks about "an Administration balance sheet in favor of the Jewish community The Administration has been on matters of critical interest almost always excellent ' He cites for special praise the following...

...X. The Leadership Praises, the Grassroots Mope Nearly all highly-placed Jewish observers share the elation over the Egyptian-Israeli peace, whatever other reservations they may have Elizabeth Holtzman, the Democratic Congress-woman now running for Senator from New York, calls it "a miraculous breakthrough" "Camp David couldn't have happened without Carter," Mann argues "Both Begin and Sadat admit this " "It you look at Presidents who have delivered positive accomplishments for Jews," comments Jerome Shestack, recently-appointed U S Representative to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, "no one since Harry Truman has done more than Carter " "Carter is the best friend Israel ever had,' says the editor of a Jewish magazine, since he suspects his subscription list disagrees, he cautiously asks for anonymity (Not Norman Podhoretz What Podhoretz says is "Careful The next one could be worse ") A thoughtful young editor at New York magazine, David Rosenthal, sees the peace as momentous enough to be termed "metaphysical ". Then what is the matter with the grassroots Jews, who don't get invited to the White House, or work for if Carter has presented Jewish Americans with the very treasure that for 32 years seemed unattainable, peace between Israel and its greatest military antagonist If there are hard and important problems over definitions of West Bank autonomy, these are nothing beside the radiant fact that, after so many deaths and so much travail, there is an Egyptian ambassador in Israel and an Israeli ambassador m Egypt Why, then, do the Jews grouse...

...We want your advice ' They left no stone unturned Even before Elghanian's arrest, Cyrus Vance had already asked our reduced-to-skeletal embassy staff to give priority to hastening the absorption of 'minority group' Iranians-meaning Jews " (More than 20,000 Jews were saved before the American Embassy was seized and the hostages captured The Israeli mission had already been seized and handed over to the PLO as its headquarters in Iran...

...Logical enough but there is too much malaise something is eating the Jews...

...Iranian Jews "The White House called me about the Elghanian situation [Elghanian was a Jewish businessman whom the Khomeini regime in its earliest period executed as a "Zionist" for "blasphemy against God "] We sat at length in the Roosevelt Room with State Department people, and I was thinking-when before this Administration did the White House ever call first1 They asked, 'What can we do...

...Other Jewish spokesmen praise the initiation of the Holocaust Commission (now somewhat in disarray, under Administration pressure to alter its character to include Poles, Ukrainians, etc -dispiriting those who believe in the need for a memorial to the wholly vanished Jewish communities of Europe) Still others praise anti-boycott (of American firms by Arab nations) legislation, help for the boat people (which Jews see as their own issue, though it involves no Jews-they remember the refugee ships that the nations of the world, including the U S , turned back to Nazi shores), and human rights "Carter put human rights on the international agenda Before then," Shestack points out, "no foundations funded it, academicians never talked about it This emphasis is good for Jews '. "0verall," Mann sums up, "the Administration's assets are substantially heavier than its liabilities The Jewish community is intelligent and sophisticated In the end it will see that it can't reach for an abstraction or an ideal In the voting booth you choose not between a person and an ideal, but between one person and another person-and that's what will happen in the next election...

...The peace treaty has not made Mark Siegel any happier What is the matter with Mark Siegel'' Why doesn't everyone sound like my White House Source...