Carter and the Jews III. The Non-Jewish Jew and His Jewish Scare

...No American Jew can ever be sure which Carter is actual, the overt decent Jekyll or the unproved, only suspected, hidden Hyde-the Hyde for whom there is no evidence beyond the fact that the same womb which gave the world Jimmy also brought forth Billy, the Hyde for whom there is no evidence beyond the fact that early in the Presidential term (according to the Los Angeles Times) Hamilton Jordan, Carter's closest aide, drunkenly delivered himself of loutish anti-Semitic remarks in a private home in Beverly Hills, California, and that still another White House Georgian, Jody Powell, was quoted by a television newswoman as growling, after Andrew Young's resignation as the U.S...

...The question is put to Bella Abzug "Subliminal9" she says "I don't know I don't know But 1 was shocked...

...The publisher's second portent is rather different, and certainly less notorious It happened on January 12, 1979, and the person it happened to was doughty Bella Abzug, then Co-chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Women The committee had just submitted a report to protest the President's action in cutting the domestic budget for 1980, including the sum for women's concerns Abzug was called into Hamilton Jordan's office Robert Lipschutz, at that time the President's personal counsel, was also present Jordan told Abzug the Administration was displeased with the report Then he fired her...

...Now these are somehow small and mean stones, long-ago tales, blood under the bridge They are evidence of nothing, in neither case do the worrisome words emerge from the President In fact, this pair of anecdotes tells nothing new or even interesting about the President's brother or the President's appointees The President is, it turns out, no one's keeper, especially not his brother's, he believes in individual responsibility So these small and mean stones are not about their own subject matter-not at all What they are about are the fears and vulnerability of American Jews Consider, after all, the kind of man our publisher is-not someone easily shaken by rumor, not a hysteric or paranoiac, not a Holocaust survivor or child of immigrants He is a sophisticated, sober, sane businessman of confident old Jewish Bostoman stock Fear is not bred into him...

...It is the specter of this Presidential muteness that frightens the publisher (By contrast, Theodore Mann, the highest-ranking spokesman for the American Jewish community-he is Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations-remarks mildly, "The President shouldn't be put m a position where he is forced to disown his own brother " Then he adds "It will make him harbor a grudge...

...Lipschutz, a non-Jewish Jew from Atlanta, came back "I hate that word Next thing you know you'll be saying we fired you because you're Jewish ". Uneasily contemplating this dialogue-of-the-absurd, the publisher detects something subliminal Would such a thought slide off Lipschutz's tongue if Lipschutz had not himself been wondering about free-floating anti-Semitism in the White House air...

...The truth (a delicate truth, a gossamer truth) is that most American Jews live their lives feverishly attuned first to the words themselves, and then to the words behind the words The Jewish temper-at its calmest in an assured and unsullied freedom-rises and falls by every gesture, remark, aside, tone, question mark, by every failure to acknowledge Jewish safety and acceptance In May of 1978, Vice President Walter Mondale, a sensitive and sympathetic politician himself attuned to the refinements of Jewish vulnerability, exclaimed in near-exasperation that "every step demands new proof...

...If American Jews hesitated over him, it was not because he was an unfamiliar Southern type, unrecognizable in a political way It was because they thought that he would have trouble recognizing them The old coalition Democrats were felt to be aware of Jewish concerns without having to bone up specially Carter would have to bone up Still, even the most anxious Jews did not hold Carter's ignorance against him Turning up as a fresh Southern Lancelot and a tabula rasa, he was an enterprising new student with the power to choose his own teachers What Jews fretted about was the teachers he might choose, and what they might write on the empty blackboard...

...The researcher is a "committed" Jew, the publisher an "assimilated" one whose idea was the book'' The assimilated publisher's-and this in itself is remarkable He is not only assimilated, he is wholly "acculturated"-i e , there appears to be nothing remotely Jewish about him That famously quirky yet swift characterization, "non-Jewish Jew," fits him exactly He has an all- American name Jim He has almost never, in all his life, been attracted to any Jewish theme or tendril He has rarely published a book "of Jewish interest " For years he has been a seemingly content mock-wasp...

...But this was the report of the full committee,' Abzug protested "Obviously you're making me a scapegoat "She meant, of course, that she was being made a scapegoat for the committee...

...Ambassador to the UN, "The Jews won't be happy until the President jumps off a cliff to prove his commitment to them ". None of this is pretty, some of it comes by way of grapevine repetition, one reporter hinting churlishness in high places into the ear of another, little of it can effortlessly be made to stick to the ribs of documented public truth-and yet there it all is, the suspicion, the atmosphere, the churlishness, the cloud With effort, the documentation Israel's former foreign minister, Moshe Dayan, expressing "great appreciation for the present Administration, Carter and Vance," in an endorsement of Carter last September 26, separated himself from the psychological condition of most American Jews "What's important is not what they say, but what they do " But Dayan-who was referring only to foreign policy statements, not to domestic murmurings-is a foreigner who doesn't inhabit the web of American nuance...

...Of the purity of our intentions "He was right The purity of the Carter Administration's intentions has always been in doubt among American Jews...

...Yet unaccountably it is there And if this sort of touchiness, hysteria, paranoia (whichever best characterizes the anxiety of insecurity) is an active stimulus in a man indistinguishable on the surface, and probably even deeper than that, from any other successful American, what about more "typical" Jews -Jews closer to Jewish consciousness, more ingrained with, and also more careful of, Jewish fate...

...And not for the reason that is usually proffered-that American Jews did not know what to make of a born-again Southern fundamentalist newly come to prominence and wearing a populist cardigan Jews were not alone m that initial wonderment Probably most Americans outside the Bible Belt (other than blacks, who felt at home with the style of it even in Northern ghettoes) were hesitant about or baffled by the possible meanings and consequences of a sincerely religious White House We had never had one before As with John Kennedy's Roman Catholicism, nothing "real" developed out of a twice-born Chief Executive As with Kennedy's Catholicism, too, Jews were among the first to put aside doubts about the President's religious expression-historically, no one knows better than Jews the importance of not bothering a man about his beliefs, and not being bothered by them either...

...What accounts for his sudden race to the mirror of neurosis9 It is President Carter, he explains, who has made him nervous-nervous and self-conscious He is all at once afraid to be Jewish in America He feels exposed, insecure, there are signs For example, two incidents, each touching on psychological pulse-taking, have aroused in him a certain queasiness about the President's below-the-surface attitudes...

...The difficulties grew not out of who Carter was, or where he emerged from -though, admittedly, any State House in the Deep South was a place most Jews knew little enough about, and could imagine even less, except in terms of George Wallace and Lester Maddox Carter came up out of Georgia with civil rights champion Andrew Young in tow, his credentials were not Wallace's, they were Martin Luther King's He represented the new technocrat South-those elements that had swallowed the civil rights revolution not only bravely but truly...

...The first is really a nonincident Everyone remembers, of course, how Billy Carter, the President's younger brother, befriended and was befriended by a group of high-level members of Colonel Muamar Qaddafi's radical Islamic regime-that same Qaddafi who last December threw the PLO out of Libya and cut off an $80 million Palestinian subsidy because even the PLO isn't ferocious enough to meet the nihilistic savagery of the Colonel's anti-Israel standards (Qaddafi had been urging PLO terrorists to sabotage oil fields in Persian Gulf countries "as part of the Arab struggle against Israel " He has since reinstituted PLO activity in Libya ) It is not well understood whether it was under the influence of his Qaddafian colleagues, or merely of booze, or of both, that Billy Carter publicly declared the Jews could kiss his ass But immediately following this announcement the President was silent He remained silent for a long tune afterward When he finally spoke, he said, "I love my brother," and not much else...

...The Non-Jewish Jew and His Jewish Scare A New York story Recently, a well-known publisher signed a contract with a well-known sociological investigator for a book about the origins, mores, consciousness, definition, destiny, but above all the vulnerability, of American Jews Books on Jewish topics are said to sell well, a large segment of book buyers is reputed to be Jewish This, then, could simply have been a blatant market decision, and, though the publisher who commissioned the work and the sociologist who will research it are both Jews, the background of each might easily have been irrelevant to the genesis of such a saleable volume In this instance, background was entirely to the point...

...Now, out of the blue, he wants to publish an ambitious study of the vulnerability of American Jews Why...