Carter and the Jews VI. 'Ssh!' vs. Clout

...The reformist Jews-the "idealists" -see the black-Jewish division as infinitely sad Last summer, visiting East Hampton just after the Andrew Young affair, I watched a man who had journeyed South in the '60s ("It was " he said, "the most valuable and important period of my life"), who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr , who continues to be a mammoth contributor to black organizations and a loving friend of black leaders, put his head down onto his chest and confess to being "heartbroken " The night before, at dinner, his friends, cooling, had accused him of abandonment The Jewish-agenda Jews, on the other hand, accept the self-evaluation of many blacks as antagonists of Jews, and spend no fond emotions on what they regard as the recrudescence of a flaming anti-Semitism-the "socialism of fools " Among the fools they sometimes count the heartbroken reformist Jews...

...The pragmatists trust America to work They do not pander to the delusions of their antagonists, and they are willing to look at the American Jewish community from the candidates' point of view Why should any American politician worry about the "perceived interests" of 2 7? Because to worry about the Jews and their real concerns, say the pragmatists, is to take care of the whole meaning of American democracy The Jews are the touchstone of the American enterprise-of the Bill of Rights, of the American conscience, of the American promise If the Jews feel safe, America is doing its job, and so are the politicians (And right here who can tell the pragmatists from the idealists...

...The Jewish-agenda people have something more stringent in mind In the first place, they no longer trust liberals They have not abandoned liberalism-on the contrary For them, the old liberal standards, with all their glorious triteness, still obtain that a man or woman ought to be judged as an individual, that the condition of one's birth should not be disabling, that opportunity should be open to everyone without favoritism or bigotry or barrier, that justice is most benevolent when most blind to color and origin, that without what is today called "human rights" (yesterday it was simply "freedom") no other qualities or quantities matter These Jews have on the whole stayed the same, steadfast with a liberalism defined in this way, but all around them others who call themselves liberals have altered...

...Jewish worries openly declared are, according to the pragmatists, a warning to politicians, and can lead directly to political strength The openness means that Jews will constantly be asking, as Vice President Mondale complained, for proof of purity of intentions It means that no candidate without those reassuring and repeated proofs will be able to automatically count on having the Jewish vote in his pocket...

...The idealists (and some of the newly-converted, less assured pragmatists) shrink from such straightforwardness "Think of the anti-Semites'" they murmur "When you speak of Jewish money or Jewish influence, you feed their obsessions, you fuel their theories You even use their vocabulary Better not to say all this out loud...

...the new American generations encountered quotas in medicine, engineering, even the "humanities," in privately-run schools Consequently, for many American Jews of foreign origin, history has dealt out scarcely 25 years of quota-free society (from the end of World War II until, say, the early 1970s) On this subject, the Jewish-agenda faction insists, Jews are not mere alarmists...

...Further, the Jewish-agenda adherents, unlike the Utopian idealists, do want candidates to feel a quid-pro-quo relationship with Jewish support, contributions and especially votes "Liberal credentials" are no longer enough, candidates are expected to be responsive to Jewish interests But the differing judgments of the two contingents should not be mistaken, as they generally are, for a tug-of-war between "liberals'' and "neoconservatives " These are misleading and falsifying labels Nor is the contest one of temperament, as between optimists and pessimists, or between the hopeful and the desperate...

...There is, then, a quiet, almost a subliminal, contest in the American Jewish community over the meaning of Jewish "influence " The majority group, the idealists, see such influence as no more than the scrupulous exercise of the right to vote, a passionate preoccupation with universal political freedom, hard work on behalf of liberal candidates, and contributions to the liberals' campaign treasuries, in both parties The idealists have never viewed giving money to liberals as an invitation to any sort of quid-pro-quo The money is handed over without strings, or with the most minimal expectation -not that the candidate should do something for the Jews (this would be execrable, this would be special pleading, and besides, idealist Jews by their own admission have no special interests), only that he should not do anything against them And if the candidate is really a liberal, how can he possibly harm Jews...

...In America, claims the Jewish-agenda faction, democracy has in the past chiefly signified the protection of the individual from being measured by irrelevant criteria, now the liberal swerve toward recognition of group rights instead of individual rights undermines all the old values, and promises that race and origin will count in the scale Once it was a democratic virtue for these not to count, now it is a democratic virtue for designated skin color and designated sex and designated group history and designated last names, all of that, to be "taken into consideration " In the 1960s, "affirmative action" meant to go out of one's way to discover those who have merit and enable them to get into the system...

...Predictably, when President Carter proposed abolishing the electoral college, the "reformist" Jews pressed to eliminate it as undemocratic, the "Jewish-agenda" Jews vigorously supported its retention, in order to preserve Jewish power at the polls Black groups were similarly active in the argument to keep the electoral system intact-they are also bunched in the big cities of the important states, and the electoral college is in their "perceived interest " Yet even here, where Jewish-agenda and black objectives were identical, blacks steered clear of Jews In "coalition" or "alliance" days, there would as a matter of course have been, at the minimum, a joint black-Jewish news conference on the issue...

...But it misrepresents terribly to speak in a political way only of the well-off," argue the idealists "After all, there is a Jewish middle class, a Jewish lower-middle class, a working class There are so many poor Jews " "Quite true," say the pragmatists, "but the poor don't give money to campaigns " (Mostly it is the pragmatists who start the programs for the inner-city poor, by the way The philanthropic idealists live in the suburbs...

...It is, for instance, a curious and powerful truth (which looks paradoxical only at first glance) that the Jewish-agenda pragmatists trust American society more than the idealists do The idealists tend to quail-secretly, of course They quail about publicizing the Jewish presence, they are afraid that news of Jewish success of any kind will "foment anti-Semitism " The pragmatists simply go about their business of making representative democracy do its job It is in this respect that there are two Jewish communities for any current candidate to fathom...

...The assignment of places in society according to a group's proportion in the population-i e , Federally-mandated "goals" that are swiftly institutionalized as quotas-is particularly threatening to Jews Eighty-five per cent of Jewish young people go to college-suppose that percentage were made to conform to 2 77 In Tsaris Russia, an official quota system kept my father out of the government-run gymnasium...

...No longer Today there is a prior qualifying question What group do you belong to...

...Clout As for political weight, American Jews have had it for several decades, despite the tininess of that 2 7-due, in part, but not altogether, to the electoral college Demographically, Jews are bunched in the big population centers, and it is the big population centers that deliver the greatest number of electoral votes In that sense, Jews count for more than their proportion m the population, they can sometimes-at least in theory-swing an important state, and thereby an election Jews also count for more simply because they arrive at the polls to be counted...

...The louder the better, retort the Jewish-agenda people Jewish clout' There is nothing occult or miraculous about the disproportionate strength of the 2 7 sliver It is not the sort of power the Protocols of the Elders of Zion envision Any other aggregate of like-minded citizens can make it happen-all it takes is casting ballots, caring about issues, paying conscientious attention, never sloughing off, living and breathing politics, reading books and newspapers, being serious and unselfish about fund-raising, watching out for knaves Politicians should know, say the pragmatists, that the benefits of spectacular citizenship can be withheld as well as conferred...

...Ultimately, craven fear about how Jewish words and behavior will affect the anti-Semites is inutile and self-defeating In a speech before the Jewish Reconstructionist Foundation last November, Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who voted for abolishing the electoral college, suggested that it is in the Jewish self-interest not to display self-interest "If the American people"-a phrase the Senator here uses to exclude Jews- "see us as acting from a motive powered by 'Jewish self-interest' rather than 'American self-interest,' then we can become threatened -and so will Israel " The "us," he explained, must be "integrated" into the "overall", failure to achieve this "would needlessly provide ammunition to those who would charge us with divided loyalty or a too narrow perspective and analysis And that ammunition would be turned against us ". Immediately after the Yom Kippur War, the historian Barbara Tuchman wrote three definitive sentences about what might be called Ammunition Anxiety, or Fear-of-Fomenting Syndrome They touch on the psychology of freedom Both Jews and anti-Semites should commit them to memory " Anti-Semitism is independent of its object What Jews do or fail to do is not the determinant The impetus comes out of the needs of the persecutors...