Carter and the Jews V. The Spectacular Sliver and a Perplexed Parenthesis

...The point, though, is that by any standard Jews are a minority Yet in those programs where (overturning a democratic understanding that has characterized this nation since the Fourteenth Amendment) officialdom has begun to notice color and origin in favor of minorities, Jews do not count as a minority Affirmative action and preferential-treatment legislation exclude the 2 7 who are Jews It is taken for granted that nothing special has to be done for them, it is taken for granted (by Jews and everyone else) that they will make it-whatever the definition of "it"-on individual merit...

...No Ambition and worship of education are interesting and occasionally thrilling qualities, but they do not necessarily make for good citizens What distinguishes the Jews of America is another quality entirely, one that has had amazing political consequences, and has raised the mote of 2 7 to an incremental power That quality is represented, both in Hebrew and Yiddish, by the word tsedakah, whose root-meaning is righteousness, it translates as "charity...

...They are among the tiniest minorities, 2 7 per cent of the entire population of the United States What per cent of the American population do the Amish compromise...

...So far, relatively few influential Jews appear to agree with him Although their whole history urges otherwise (e g , while the Bolshevik Revolution against the Jew-hating Tsars seemed a good thing, and Communism promised acceptance for all peoples, it is just as bad for Jews in Russia today as it was under the Tsars), it remains difficult for Jews to shake the habit of universalizing optimism Or the view that what seems in the abstract to be a virtuous goal, a-good-in-itself, is therefore good for the Jews For instance, it looked like an idea of virtue to limit the amount of money available to each candidate in a national campaign Then a moneybags candidate, a Rockefeller, say, would be prevented from outspend-mg a poorer candidate, and positions and issues, not money, would talk With the support of Jewish idealism, such a law has recently come into being Now no single individual may contribute more than $1,000 in Federal elections...

...Percentages aside, in absolute numbers there are 6 million Jews in the United States The figure has a tendency to make many of them shudder, it is the exact equivalent of the number of Jews murdered by the Germans and their collaborators before and during World War II...

...Jews are at this moment giving massively to stem Cambodian hunger and to integrate boat people They give to civic causes, to Jewish causes, including Israel, and to candidates of the major American political parties Over 50 per cent of all contributions to the Democratic Party come from Jewish citizens And analyses of voting patterns demonstrate that Jews, unlike their Gentile counterparts, do not vote their vested interests as an educated and affluent class...

...The last eight or nine years have witnessed the fragmented emergence of a new kind of Jewish thinking, a turn from the generalized messianism that automatically equates the "liberal agenda" with Jewish needs "Having 'interests,'" says Nathan Perlmutter, the Executive Director of the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League, "is not inconsonant with the democratic ideal and with the politics of nourishing democracy Fanners speak as farmers Jews should speak as Jews...

...Both marching and nonmarching Jews gave more money to the civil rights movement, and to Negro causes before there was a "movement," than any other American group...

...I am acquainted with a number of smart Jews, and so, I suppose, are you I also know more dumb ones Jews, despite the credos of anti-Semites, philo-Se-mites and even Jews themselves, really are the ordinary human article C P Snow, the British writer-scientist, believes in a Jewish "gene pool" of a superior order, I do not, possibly because I know more Jews than Snow does But this remains: When Jews are ordinary, they are as ordinary as everyone else...

...Last August, after the Andrew Young contretemps (of which more later), some black leaders thought it opportune to denounce Jewish participation -philanthropic and ideological-in the black movement The Jews, it was said, only acted out of "their perceived interest " Probably no single remark has ever outraged the American Jewish conscience more-it sealed what one black leader called "our independence," the black-inspired tumbling of the old black-Jewish alliance, and not merely because the accusation was designed to wound and spite The hand that fed was bitten The charge of "perceived interest" hurt also because it was spiritually true Jews everywhere have always seen it to be in their self-interest to live in a just society, and they have thrown themselves, body and soul, money and ardor, into the task of fashioning civic decency Jewish self-interest has been woven, m a variety of instances, out of the interests of others...

...when they are inspired, they can be extraordinary The historian Lucy Dawidowicz speaks of "the disproportionate visibility" of American Jews, meaning simply that there are more outstanding Jews than 2 7 would seem to allow The same with affluence Sociological surveys report that Jews are now the most affluent group in America, having finally outstripped the rich Episcopalians This puzzles Growing up in the North Bronx, I never knew a rich anyone, certainly not a rich Jew' To the naked New York eye, Jews drive taxis and run cleaning stores, and the elderly Jewish poor now seem multitudinous But the surveys stand ). Charity This Jewish inspiration, deriving from biblical injunctions concerning the welfare of the stranger and the widow and the orphan and the poor in one's midst, continues to animate significant segments of American Jewish behavior Like other Americans, Jews are nowadays mainly secularized, tradition is largely attenuated, most Jews are probably unaware of how deeply the scriptural and rabbinic sources of tsedakah mark their political obsessions Metaphysical origins aside, and whatever their economic standing, Jews give (whether individually or collectively) impressive sums of money, and years of energy, to social causes Better than half the young whites who went South in the '60s to work (and in several cases to die) for civil rights were Jews, of the clergy who joined the marches there were more rabbis than priests or ministers...

...Here I want to intervene with a perplexed parenthesis Are Jews as smart and as rich as they are reputed to be...

...Nonetheless, the number who incline toward Perlmutter's position is on the increase In a symposium on "Liberalism and the Jews" in the January 1980 Commentary, Rita Hauser, a well-known Republican attorney who campaigned for Nixon, Javits and Rockefeller, but dropped away from Connally, observes that the limitation on campaign contributions "has eliminated the strongest weapon the Jewish community exercised in influencing the selection of nominees m both political parties John Connally could risk alienating Jewish Republicans by a profoundly anti-Israel position taken very early in the campaign season because, among other things, there were no heavy Jewish contributions weighing m Jewish liberal "reformers' were in the vanguard of those who supported this limitation perhaps ashamed of how money, yes, Jewish money, could count ". Until very recently one would have been hard put to find a Jewish voice unabashedly admitting to the force of the phrase "Jewish money," let alone to the notion that it ought to "count" for Jewish, not universalizing, objectives In the same symposium it is possible to hear, from the geographer Erich Isaacs, a new aphorism "powerlessness corrupts " He means that Jews will be lying to themselves if they do not use what they have to achieve political weight, they will hurt themselves if they do not help themselves What an American Jew should not do, he believes, "is enter alliances in which the targets of others impose on him a compliance with purposes that are not in his interest, often indeed in direct conflict with the Jewish agenda '. "The Jewish agenda"-this too is a new phrase, and, in America, a new political idea for Jews...

...Hispanics?It is not easy-in some cases it is impossible-to find these figures We are still lucky enough to be living in a country where, by and large (albeit with important and sometimes distressing exceptions, like the 1980 census), no numerical notice is taken of groups on the theory that a citizen is a citizen, period Until only yesterday it was a point of national pride that officialdom was blind to color and origin...

...Spectacular citizenship This portrait of majority Jewish political behavior may seem romanticized to skeptics Nevertheless, it has been true from the start-ever since Hyam Solomon helped finance George Washington Idealism (can one still use this word purely, as if it had never been spoiled by mockery...

...It is known, however, that blacks constitute nearly 12 per cent of the population, and multiply beyond the national average Jews, on the other hand, do not multiply at all, at least statistically Jews have the lowest birth rate of any population group, and achieved this status-if such a positive word as "achieved" is at all appropriate here-well in advance of the nation's recent arrival at zero population growth In addition, one out of every three Jews intermarries, and the children of intermarriages frequently drop out of Jewish identity-conferring activity So this minuscule percentage, this astonishingly infinitesimal 2 7-given a constantly diminishing birth rate and a constantly rising rate of intermarriage-is bound to dwindle even more...

...Most Jews account for their pragmatic utopianism by explaining that it is natural, for example, for one minority to sympathize and identify with other minorities But Milton Himmelfarb, author of The Jews of Modernity-an unsurpassed and possibly unsurpassable philosophical exposition of American Jewish sociology-notes that, far from such ldentification being "natural," the Jews are the only minority to exhibit this characteristic...

...Who, after all, are the American Jews...

...And in impressive numbers they have, often against dispiriting odds This tiny sliver of the American population bundled itself out of Europe as one of the most horrendously oppressed of all immigrant groups The largest wave came at the turn of the century, beaten down by government quotas, persecution, killings, in profound poverty, without skills, the wave after that, in the wake of World War I, in the same condition, the wave after that, just before World War II, a desperate traction fleeing slaughter, who had somehow slipped through Roosevelt's iron anti-refugee grid, after World War 11, the hollow-eyed survivors of Nazi Germany's murder machine, and currently the refugees from the brutalities of Soviet anti-Semitism Each group has fallen on the breast of America as refugees and survivors, and each contingent has been smaller than the one before...

...they vote with, and for, the disadvantaged When one speaks of Jews voting, that is what they do abundantly, indeed fanatically Nobody has to "get out" the Jewish vote, 95 per cent of the Jews show up at the polls...

...Out of this heap of bedraggled, bewildered, bottom-of-the-barrel foreigners have sprung many of the country's most passionate Americans Jews are not simply model citizens, they are spectacular citizens Not because their grandfathers embraced the land of golden chances-which, bristling with ubiquitous (if not legal or official) quotas and the abyss everywhere of and-Jewish bigotry, was less than welcoming Not because the immigrants worked as if work meant life itself-which is precisely what it did mean What are now the most lavish department stores across the whole breadth of America began as outlandish packs on Jewish peddlers' groaning spines Not because of the joyful leap into public libraries, public schools, and, in New York City, a remarkable public college Not because of the steady rise of Jews from one generation to the next -from the rural peddlers or the early union organizers in the city to the merchant class to the professional class to the professorial class to the free-wheeling intellectual adventurers, the scientists and idea-inventors Not because of the vastly-out-of-proportion number of Nobel Prize winners...

...the aspiration to repair an imperfect world-continues to be a vivid impulse in the American Jewish community, and it is buttressed by wide-ranging philanthropy...

...Italians...

...The Arabs...

...Native Americans (i e, Indians...