I left Macy and flew up the Mississippi to Moline, Illinois. My destination was the Stardust Motel, where I was supposed to meet Lori Posin of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). At the time Lori was based in Washington, but she spent most of her time on the road, searching out and organizing Jews in the boondocks of America. At AIPAC they call it Jew hunting. I came to Moline to join her annual Midwestern Jew Hunt.
The idea was proposed to me by AIPAC’s director, Tom Dine, over drinks at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. Dine is a Brooks Brothers Jew in his forties, a bright, fastidious fellow with a highly developed aesthetic sense, who judges synagogues by their architecture and rabbis by their political connections. In another Jewish organization, Dine’s unemotional approach might be a drawback. But AIPAC is about politics, and Dine is a consummate Washington insider. Since taking over in 1980, he has turned the group into a sophisticated, powerful voice for Israel.
AIPAC’s success has excited dark conjecture about a Jewish conspiracy on the part of anti-Semites, causing some Jews to fear the lobby’s high profile. But Dine, who was born and raised in Cincinnati, is far too confident to be intimidated by such fears.
“American Jews are American citizens, and American citizens have the right to organize, express opinions, and take part in the political process of their country. There’s nothing wrong with that,” he told me. “The secret of our success is organization and hard work. You ought to go out in the field and see for yourself.”
This kind of self-assurance is relatively new for American Jews. A generation ago they were still political outsiders and the American-Israeli relationship was far from intimate. During the Suez Crisis, for example, President Eisenhower not only threatened Israel, but he refused to discuss the issue with American Jewish leaders (his biographer, Stephen Ambrose, attributed this to Ike’s dislike of Jews). Even John F. Kennedy, whose party had a strong Jewish component, declined to allow Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to pay a state visit to Washington, preferring to meet with him in New York.
The Six-Day War was a turning point for Jewish involvement in American politics. The threat to Israel’s survival galvanized Jews around a national issue. Just as important, the Jewish community had outgrown its immigrant jitters; by 1967, most Jews felt sufficiently self-confident to speak out, something they had failed to do a generation earlier when Franklin Roosevelt charmed and bullied Jewish leaders into silence about the Holocaust.
The year nineteen hundred and sixty-seven also marked the beginning of AIPAC’s transformation from a small, marginal political group into a powerful Washington lobby. Lyndon Johnson was a sympathetic president (his administration was the first to sell Israel sophisticated weapons) and Israel was widely admired in America for its military victory. AIPAC’s growth accelerated once again in 1973, as a result of the Yom Kippur War and the Arab oil boycott. By the 1980s the Reagan administration’s pro-Israel policies, Israel’s high standing in American public opinion, and Dine’s astute leadership combined to make AIPAC one of the nation’s most effective political machines.
The emergence of Jewish political power in America has more than one cause. The United States is a more tolerant and pluralistic country than it was under FDR or Eisenhower. The Holocaust taught American Jews the price of political impotence. And last but by no means least, Israel has proved an ideal issue—the country is pro-American, widely admired by non-Jews, and emotionally compelling for the Jewish mainstream. There may be occasional distress over Israeli policy, such as in the West Bank and Gaza; but basically, there is no downside to support for Israel in America.
In many ways, politics in a democracy are a mirror of society, and talking to Tom Dine on the patio of the King David, it occurred to me that AIPAC could provide an interesting view of the American Jewish state of mind. I was curious to know how Jews talked to each other about issues, how they perceived their interests, and how they pursued them. Of course I knew the basics—most Jews support Israel and tend to be liberal Democrats on domestic issues. What I wanted was to get a feel for Jewish politics at the grass roots level. An AIPAC Jew hunt seemed like a good place to start—which is how I wound up in Moline, at the Stardust Motel, in the middle of October.
The Stardust is a kind of Big Ten Versailles, with marble pillars in the lobby and bogus Greek statuary in the parking lot—not Tom Dine’s kind of place at all. When I arrived, I found Lori Posin in a private room, conducting a working dinner with fifteen or so middle-aged people. The seventh game of the World Series was on television that night and another Jewish organization might have been tempted to cancel or postpone. But AIPAC plays a kind of hardball of its own, and it attracts people who would rather talk politics than watch Boston get clobbered by the Mets.
Lori gave me a brief smile of recognition when I came in but continued explaining the intricacies of the upcoming foreign aid bill to her audience of ophthalmologists, downtown retailers, and lawyers. She looked like a young Jane Fonda playing the part of a political organizer—wholesomely attractive, crisply professional, and self-confident in a way that didn’t threaten or antagonize anyone.
As I listened to her, I felt a poke in the ribs. A pecked-at-looking man sitting next to me tapped my copy of the Quad-City Times (“The Midwest’s Most Exciting Newspaper”) and whispered, “this is a Jewish newspaper.” The paper looked unremarkable to me—just another USA Today clone—but the man was referring to its ownership, not its content.
Unsophisticated people, Jews and non-Jews alike, sometimes imagine there is a connection between the Jewish community in America and the Jews who own or run many of the country’s most prestigious magazines and newspapers. In fact, most of these journalistic Jews are about as involved in Jewish life as Jackie Kennedy is in the Knights of Columbus Ladies’ Auxiliary. But AIPAC is made up of pros, people who deal in Washington reality; they would never consider the Quad-City Times (or The New York Times) to be, in any useful sense, a Jewish paper.
Determined to make an impression, the man poked me again. “See this motel?” he asked. “It’s a Jewish motel.” Here, it seemed to me, he was on more solid ground. Jewish politics in the United States are financed largely by businessmen—the American equivalent of the merchants of Eastern Europe who underwrote struggling Talmudic scholars or built new roofs on village synagogues. In the world of AIPAC, a Jewish journalist means trouble; a Jewish hotel owner means a discount.
Jews originally came to the Midwest for the same reason they went south—to find economic opportunity. My own great-grandfather settled in Sterling, Illinois, a small town not too far from Moline, more than one hundred years ago. He was the only Jew in town. Nominally a tailor, he became a popular figure in the local saloons. It is a little-recorded fact of Jewish history that he organized the first Simchat Torah parade in southern Illinois, holding aloft a Torah he had brought from Europe and leading a procession of staggering Elks down the main street of the dusty little hamlet singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
My great-grandfather spent too much time with the Elks to ever really get ahead, but most of his fellow Jews had a more sober turn of mind and they prospered. In recent years, however, prosperity has turned into decline. As in the South, automobiles, chain stores, shopping malls, and falling farm prices have undermined the small merchants of the heartland. Their children have mostly moved to big cities—Chicago, Minneapolis, or the West Coast. Those who stay tend to marry non-Jews. As a result, Jewish communities in the farm belt are shrinking, their average age is progressively older, and some are already approaching a total collapse like that in Mississippi.
And yet, during the Jew hunt I didn’t feel the same sense of melancholy that had infused Macy’s tour of the Dixie diaspora. Midwestern Jewry has always been a poor cousin of Chicago, and by extension New York; it lacks the southern sense of its own specialness and tradition. And, more important, I was with Lori Posin of AIPAC, a traveling saleswoman with the sexiest item in the American Jewish catalog. In a region of shrinking synagogue rosters and disappearing ethnicity, AIPAC is a dynamic, growing organization. It deals in the substance and glamour of Washington, national politics, and international diplomacy. Lori Posin was able to introduce the provincials to that world, like a drummer showing Paris fashions to farmers’ wives.
Despite its depleted state, midwestern Jewry is an important element in AIPAC’s planning. The organization thrives because it is able to muster a national constituency. The areas of highest Jewish density—New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Southern California—are easy. But there are Jews in the boondocks, too—people who vote and contribute money and identify, or can be taught to identify, with Israel. The job of the Jew hunter is to track them down and throw the AIPAC net over their heads.
That night at the Stardust, Lori and I went over her itinerary for the coming few days. Most national Jewish groups divide the country into congregations or federations, but AIPAC sees the world in terms of electoral units. During her midwestern swing, Lori was scheduled to visit every one of Iowa’s eight congressional districts, with side trips into Illinois, Nebraska, and South Dakota. It is arduous work, but it has its rewards, not least of which is the gratitude and respect she receives from people eager to be caught.
The next morning, Lori wheeled her rented Chevrolet onto Interstate 80 in the direction of Iowa City in the Third Congressional District. In her three years at AIPAC Lori had visited forty-two states and driven hundreds of thousands of miles. Usually she is alone. Most nights she winds up in a motel, curled up with road maps and congregational rosters, eating greasy meals off room service trays, and watching Johnny Carson.
Lori Posin has visited Israel, too, and she likes the country, but she would never consider living there. Although she believes strongly in AIPAC’s message, she is first and foremost an American political organizer; it would be easy to imagine her working for the AMA, the Republican National Committee, or the Teamsters. Like her boss, Tom Dine, there was no schmaltz in her presentation or her personality, no appeal to ethnic ties or religious imperatives. “AIPAC is perfect for people who are looking for a Jewish activity without becoming involved in the Jewish community,” she told me on the way to Iowa City.
Lori’s farm belt tour, like all her visits to the hinterland, began with a single contact, a Des Moines woman who wrote to AIPAC and applied for membership. Lori developed a telephone friendship with the woman, who put her in touch with a local Reform rabbi. That led to contacts with other rabbis around the state, and with interested laypeople.
Eventually Lori was able to set up a series of parlor meetings in various cities, where she could meet prospective members and explain the AIPAC program. During her trip, she would also continue to seek out Jews who were not yet in the AIPAC network, which is why our first stop was the Hillel House on the campus of the University of Iowa.
University people are notoriously uninvolved in Jewish community affairs. Like journalists, they tend to be critical of the establishment, and their primary identification is most likely to be with their profession and its values. Besides, most of them are not willing or able to give large sums of money to the United Jewish Appeal or other fundraising groups. But university people are just what Lori is looking for.
“Money is no problem for us,” she said, as we pulled into the parking lot of the Hillel. “I’m not out here looking for rich Jews. I’m looking for activists. Political science professors can be very good, rabbis, anyone involved in local politics. A few people in a district like this can make all the difference in the world.”
People who can make a difference become what are known as “key contacts.” Ideally they have a personal relationship with a member of Congress or a senator, or have political chits they can cash on behalf of Israel. Given the extraordinarily high degree of Jewish involvement in politics, it isn’t too hard to find key contacts—Lori estimated that AIPAC has them for about ninety percent of the members of the House of Representatives and ninety-eight percent of the Senate.
Our meeting in Iowa City was with Jeff Portman, a Reform rabbi who serves as the local Hillel director. “A couple of years ago we had problems with some of the more liberal rabbis and laypeople who disagreed with Begin’s policies,” Lori told me, “but today things are much easier. Maybe one percent of rabbis give you a hard time and just about all the Jews out here are very supportive.”
Portman, a studious-looking man in his mid-thirties, is a supporter. Unlike some other Jewish organizations, AIPAC does not compete with him for members or money; on the contrary, it enhances his power and prestige by enabling him to introduce congregants to the American political game.
Lori and the rabbi sat in his study poring over a computer printout of Iowa City’s affiliated Jews. Lori wrote down the names of a couple involved in Democratic politics and a woman who once served on the city council. “The faculty here are liberal, but the students are just incredibly conservative,” Portman said with regret, but Lori couldn’t have cared less. AIPAC is an aggressively nonpartisan group, and there is room for everyone. Besides, she got her start as a Reaganite. “Give me the names of some active students and I’ll see them on my next trip out here,” she said.
The meeting took less than an hour, and when it was over she had a list of half a dozen key contact prospects—people whom she could call when she got back to Washington. Not all of them would want to get involved, but Lori knew from experience that at least several would be interested and flattered—and in a place like the Third District, that would be enough. No place is too small or remote for her. After all, every town and hamlet in America has a representative in Congress, and all of them vote on Israel-related issues.
Lori wound up the Hillel meeting with brisk efficiency. We had to make Waterloo by nightfall, and she wanted to stop for lunch at the Amana Colonies. Her years on the road have made her an experienced traveler, and the colonies, founded in the 1850s by a Protestant religious sect from Germany, were the closest thing to a tourist attraction in this part of the state.
After a heavy Teutonic lunch we took a walk through the village, browsing through stores with German names. We stopped for coffee at a tavern with stuffed moose and wild boar heads above the fireplace and a plastic reindeer propped against one wall. I kept reminding myself that the colonies were founded in 1854 by God-fearing Christians who had nothing to do with the Third Reich, but I couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable, and I noticed that Lori did, too. The gloomy, Wagnerian tavern seemed somehow sinister, and I was relieved when we got back to the car and the flat-voiced disc jockey who played country tunes and hawked farm implements on the radio.
It will be a very long time before American Jews feel comfortable around Germans. The trauma of the Holocaust is still sinking in. Its visible manifestations are television documentaries, monuments, museums—and organizations like AIPAC, whose subtext is that only Jewish political power and the existence of the state of Israel can prevent a future catastrophe. In her presentation, Lori never mentioned anti-Semitism or the Nazis; she didn’t have to. Hitler and Arafat were always present, at every AIPAC gathering, uninvited guests who provided a sense of cohesion and purpose.
We arrived in Waterloo around sunset and rendezvoused with Lori’s contact, Martha Nash. They had never met before—Lori got Nash’s name from a local rabbi and called her cold—but within a few minutes the two women were chatting like old friends. Martha, a diminutive grandmother with seemingly boundless energy, took us to the best restaurant in Waterloo, Lodge 290 of the Elks Club. There we were joined by a round, jolly professor of Spanish from the local college, his equally round, jolly wife, and a dignified, Pillsbury-prim widow in her sixties. The professor and his wife were transplanted New Yorkers and they had a Broadway flamboyance. Martha and the widow, by contrast, seemed as austere as Grant Wood figures.
The talk at dinner was mostly about the Jewish community of Waterloo, which is in a state of decline. Once there were ninety pupils in the synagogue religious school; now there are twenty-three. Most Waterloo Jews marry Christians, and the widow lady, who genteelly lowered her voice whenever she said the word “Jew,” confided that her bachelor son would almost certainly marry out of the faith. Neither she nor her dinner companions seemed to feel that this was in any way unusual or undesirable; in a place like Waterloo, Jews have long since made their accommodation with the realities of American life.
Farm belt anti-Semitism was a hot topic that fall—there had been several articles in national publications, and 60 Minutes had recently done a segment on disgruntled Iowa farmers who allegedly blamed Jewish bankers for their financial hardships—but none of our hosts had any personal experience of it. Martha Nash explained that the Elks Club, the pinnacle of Waterloo society, has been open to Jews for years, and even the Elkettes, once restricted, now welcome Jewish members.
A sense of confidence in American tolerance is a necessary condition for Jewish political activity, and it makes up a large part of AIPAC’s appeal. The formula requires just enough atavistic fear to keep Jews on their toes, but not enough real anti-Semitism to frighten them or make them lose faith in the system.
This equilibrium is at the heart of the AIPAC effort. Jews in America remember the Holocaust and the price of powerlessness in the face of an indifferent U.S. government. The determination to develop political power is in large part a reaction to that experience. But it is the sort of power that only works under the existing ground rules. As long as America remains decent, tolerant, and pluralistic, political clout of the AIPAC variety has value. But it is an umbrella designed for a sunny day. AIPAC’s power is conditional, not independent, and even its most assertive members must always keep that in mind.
After dinner we drove to the temple, where about thirty people, most of them middle-aged, were gathered. Martha Nash introduced Lori, who spoke in a low-key, direct way about the AIPAC program. She briefed the audience on foreign aid (“At three billion dollars a year, Israel is a real bargain for American security”), the fight against arms sales to Israel’s enemies (“We support the proposal to require congressional approval for arms sales to the Arabs”), and the effort to grant Israel a status equal to that of the NATO countries. These were Washington issues, well known to capital insiders but somewhat abstract out in Iowa, and she did her best to simplify them. The crowd followed her presentation carefully, and with obvious affection. There was something of the good Jewish daughter about her, and as she spoke many of the older people nodded their heads encouragingly, wanting her to do well.
There was only a month or so until the 1986 elections, and Lori gave a rundown on AIPAC’s view of various contests. She was careful not to endorse specific candidates, but she made the organization’s preferences clear. She was especially concerned about Senator Alan Cranston of California, who was fighting for reelection. “How many of you have received direct mail appeals for Cranston?” she asked, and most of the hands in the room went up. “He’s been very, very good on issues that concern the pro-Israel community,” she reminded them.
AIPAC rarely talks about “the Jews.” The phrase “pro-Israel community” sounds more professional, and in any event about half the people Lori deals with have non-Jewish partners. Intermarriage is not an issue for AIPAC (Dine himself is married to a non-Jewish woman); the organization seeks to build the widest possible coalition, and it takes its supporters where it finds them. One of the great ironies of the “Jewish lobby” is that an increasing number of its activists aren’t Jewish.
After her pitch for Cranston, Lori reminded the audience that Senator Jim Abdnor of neighboring South Dakota was lukewarm on foreign aid to Israel. A few years ago, Israel had some real enemies in the Senate—William Fulbright of Arkansas, James Abourezk of South Dakota, Charles Percy of Illinois—but, one by one, they bit the dust. From AIPAC’s viewpoint, the 1986 elections were for the most part a choice between good and better. Abdnor was the closest thing it had to a villain.
Lori concluded on a Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington note. “You have representatives in the House and Senate, and they want to hear from you,” she said. “Your job is to let them know what you want. Remember, that’s your right as American citizens. Your opinion can really make a difference.”
The next morning we hit the road for Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Lori took the wheel, driving across southern Minnesota with a calm competence. By mid-morning we were both hungry and decided to stop for lunch in Blue Earth, a small town whose entrance is guarded by a huge statue of the Jolly Green Giant. A sign informed us that Blue Earth’s population was three thousand and change.
“Do you think you could find a Jew out here?” I asked, and she grinned at the challenge.
“Give me a stack of dimes and a phone book and a couple hours and I could,” she said confidently. She had noticed a Cantonese restaurant on the main street, a sure tip-off for a Jew hunter. “You find a Chinese restaurant, there’s got to be some Jews around,” she said.
When we arrived in Sioux Falls, Lori changed from her driving outfit of jeans and a sweater into her work clothes, a navy blue suit and high heels. An AIPAC volunteer met us downtown and took us to the home of a local lawyer named Duke Horowitz, where twenty or so people—roughly ten percent of Sioux Falls’s diminishing Jewish community—were sipping coffee and eating sponge cake.
President Reagan was campaigning that day in Rapid City on the other side of the state. According to radio reports, monster crowds had turned out for his rallies, while Lori addressed a group of twenty. But a handful of dedicated people in a state like South Dakota are all you need; it is quite possible that there weren’t twenty people in Rapid City that day—including the president—who would have been willing to give up an afternoon to discuss Middle Eastern policy.
Here, as elsewhere, Lori was greeted with affection by people hungry for a Jewish winner. Most of them seemed to be second- and third-generation midwesterners, but despite their prairie isolation they identified with Israel in a deeply personal way. When Lori mentioned the peace treaty with Egypt, for example, a woman with blue hair and a corn belt twang interrupted with a loud “If you can call what we have peace.” During this trip and all across the country, Jews constantly referred to Israel as “us” and “we,” usages I found alternately touching and gratuitous.
In Sioux Falls, Lori gave her standard presentation and answered the usual questions. The audience was willing, even eager to sign up. She was offering them a Jewish activity they could understand and appreciate, something that didn’t threaten them or put them off.
The accessibility of AIPAC’s work is a key factor in its popularity. A couple of months later, in Los Angeles, I discussed this phenomenon with Norman Mirsky, a sociologist who is an expert on the subject of Jewish affiliation. Mirsky once spent four months at Factor’s Delicatessen on Pico Boulevard in L.A. studying the restaurant’s patrons. He discovered that most of them are highly assimilated Jews, often with non-Jewish partners. “They want to identify as Jews, but they don’t know how,” he said. “They don’t feel comfortable in a temple or synagogue, don’t know how to behave or what to do. But they know enough not to order pastrami on white bread, and they can impress their non-Jewish spouses with their familiarity with Jewish foods. That’s why they come.”
For Jews in places like Sioux Falls, AIPAC is a kind of political Factor’s Deli. They belong to temples because affiliation is the sine qua non of Jewishness; but they are not religious people, and any ethnic differences between themselves and their neighbors are more imagined than real. These people are Jews without Jewish skills, and they feel comfortable with AIPAC because the organization doesn’t require any.
We left South Dakota and returned to Sioux City, Iowa for Lori’s last meeting of the day. Sioux City’s main claim to Jewish fame is as the hometown of “the twins”—Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Back when they were growing up there were three thousand Jews in town; but in recent years the number has shrunk to seven hundred.
“It’s a dying community,” said our host at dinner. The man, a local merchant who had lived for a few years in Israel, grew progressively more morose as he described the decline of Jewish life in his city.
“Believe me,” he said, “it’s a total disaster. The young people all move away, it’s very demoralizing. Even the ones who stay don’t have the same spirit, the same ‘ta’am.’ There’s such a thing as waking up in the middle of the night when Israel is in trouble and not being able to get back to sleep again. I don’t think the younger generation really feels that way anymore.”
In light of his pessimism, I was surprised by the turnout that night. More than fifty people showed up at the home of a wealthy businessman, and a good many of them were in their late twenties or thirties. When Lori passed her list around at the end of her presentation, two dozen people signed up.
That night, back at the hotel, Lori and I said good-bye. I was going on to Milwaukee, and she had to leave at dawn for Nebraska, on the last leg of the Great Plains Jew hunt. She would drive for hours through the bleak countryside to meet with one person, a key contact she had cultivated over the phone, and then drive hours more to Des Moines to catch a plane for Washington.
“Has it been a successful trip?” I asked her.
“Very successful,” she said. “I’ve already got more names than I expected. And tomorrow I might get one or two more. It’s slow work, but it’s necessary. If you want to build a coalition, you’ve got to build it with people. It’s the only way.”
AIPAC deals in political retail but there is another, mass market approach to Jewish political activity. Its improbable center is Fox Point, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb. There, in a blue hangarlike building, two jovial Jewish yuppies named Bruce Arbit and Jerry Benjamin have put together a company called A.B. Data that may eventually make the Jew hunter as obsolete as the blacksmith.
A.B. Data’s headquarters has the anti-architecture common to computer firms, from Cambridge to Silicon Valley. But it is a high-tech company with a difference. The coffee table in its waiting room is stacked with copies of the Baltimore Jewish Times and the Jerusalem Post Overseas Edition, and its walls are decorated with Israeli art posters. A.B. Data is a specialty operation, America’s leading Jewish direct marketing firm.
Like many successful ventures, A.B. Data came about almost by accident. It was founded by Bruce Arbit, a potbellied man in his early thirties who chain-smokes Kools and punctuates his conversation with frequent belly laughs. Arbit is a native of Milwaukee who was raised in a Labor Zionist home and moved to Israel after high school. He attended Haifa University and intended to stay. Instead, he fell in love with an American girl who “dragged me home kicking and screaming.”
Back in Milwaukee, Arbit started a small Jewish publishing business. He wanted to sell books by direct mail, but he soon realized that there were no Jewish lists available. Slowly he began to assemble his own, using synagogue rosters and telephone books. By 1978, he had accumulated so many names that he began to sell his lists to organizations and politicians.
At about the same time he met Jerry Benjamin, a Harvard-trained educator and Jewish activist. Jerry was raised in a small town in Ohio, where he developed strong ideological passions—liberal in politics, conservative in religion. When the two met, Jerry was working as an administrator at the Maimonides Academy, a prestigious New England Orthodox school. Bruce convinced him to leave and join him in Milwaukee.
“In those days, A.B. Data was just a hole in the wall,” said Jerry. He is a plump, sandy haired fellow with a boyish, open manner and an obvious delight in his success. He and Bruce are business partners, but they are also close friends who trade genial insults, finish each other’s sentences, and laugh loudly at each other’s jokes. They could have been a borscht belt comedy duo; instead, they are the proprietors of a multi-million-dollar business that employs 225 people.
The reason for this growth can be summed up in one word—information. Jerry Benjamin and Bruce Arbit know more than anyone else about where American Jews are and how they can be reached. “Let’s say you want to get in touch with red-haired Jewish doctors who play golf,” Bruce said, bubbling with the enthusiasm of a magician about to perform a well-rehearsed trick. “Okay, first we pull our file on Jewish doctors, which is compiled from medical registries, phone books, and synagogue rosters. Then, for the red hair, we go to the motor vehicle registries—most states list hair color for driver’s licenses and you can get that stuff easily. And then, for the golf, you turn to the subscription list of Golf magazine. Lay one on top of the next until you come up with a list. Jewish doctors with red hair who play golf. Simple.”
Bruce and Jerry estimate that there are roughly 5.6 million Jews in America, or, as they prefer to count, between 2.3 and 2.6 million households. Their computers list the names and addresses of 1.7 million households—approximately two-thirds of the total. “There are no absolutely foolproof figures on this,” said Bruce. “The only thing we know for sure is that the number of Jews in this country is declining, mostly as a result of intermarriage. It’s interesting to note that fewer and fewer of the non-Jewish partners convert. That’s a trend.”
“How do you find Jews?” I asked, thinking of Lori Posin’s painstaking approach. Bruce and Jerry looked at each other and smiled. “Simple. It’s all a matter of names and probabilities,” said Bruce.
“Exactly,” said Jerry, breaking in to finish the thought. “Take the name Cohen, for example. What percentage of the Cohens in this country would you say are Jewish?”
A few weeks earlier I had been looking for Jews in a midwestern inner city and had come across the name “Glorious Cohen” in the phone book. When I called I was informed by an irate Mr. Cohen that he wasn’t a Jew and never had been.
“Not all of them,” I said, recalling that conversation. Jerry seemed disappointed that I had managed to evade his trap.
“Right. Eighty-six percent of Cohens in America are Jewish. But Cohen is easy. There are 80,000 common Jewish names, each with its own degree of frequency. We match them up with neighborhoods and professions, first names, and other indicators, and we get pretty close to the exact percentages.”
“Take the name Gordon,” said Bruce. “It’s a borderline name. Sheldon Gordon from Long Island is likely to be a Jew. Bubba Gordon from Tennessee, probably not. It’s a matter of probability and common sense.”
“Right. First names are very important,” said Jerry. “Only about half of all Jews have Jewish family names, so we look for Yiddish or Hebrew first names. It’s interesting that Jewish yuppies like Hebrew names for their children.”
Arbit and Benjamin not only find Jews, they try to find out about them, and they take a gleeful pride in the information they have accumulated. “What percentage of Jews have Christmas trees?” demanded Benjamin. “Come on, take a guess. Eleven percent.”
“And what percentage keep kosher?” asked Arbit, smiling broadly at his partner. “Bet you can’t guess that one, either. All right, twenty-two percent.”
“I’m a little skeptical about that one,” said Jerry. “The other day I saw a neighbor of mine who claims to be Orthodox at the drive-in window at McDonald’s. I think we should start a new category—people who eat McD.L.T.s only in the privacy of their own car.”
Both Arbit and Benjamin delight in this kind of speculation, but they haven’t built up their data bank to amuse visitors. They sell information about Jews, and to judge by their company’s rapid expansion it is a sellers’ market. They have two kinds of clients—Jewish groups and politicians—and their company is strategically located at the point where the two intersect.
Neither Arbit nor Benjamin is simply a technocrat. A.B. Data sells mailing lists to all the Jewish organizations, but its owners have their own agenda, and this poses a potential threat to the establishment. “Direct mail is the great equalizer,” Jerry said in a matter-of-fact tone. “We can enable Jews’ in Montana and Idaho and places like that to take part in Jewish life without an intermediary organization located on the eastern seaboard. We make it possible to bypass the gatekeepers of the Jewish community.”
The A.B. Data agenda is based on three principles: Zionism, traditional Jewish values, and American political liberalism. In the fall of 1986, the company was still promoting these indirectly, as a resource for politicians and mainstream Jewish organizations. But knowledge is power, and Benjamin and Arbit are potentially very powerful men. When I mentioned the possibility that they might someday create an independent Jewish power center in Fox Point, Wisconsin, they both smiled modestly, but neither one denied the possibility.
We interrupted our conversation to take a tour of A.B. Data’s facilities. At the heart of the operation are giant computers that contain the vital statistics of millions of Jews. I found the concentration of so much information disconcerting. “I bet the Klan or the PLO would love to get their hands on this stuff,” I said to Arbit, who was guiding me through the building. But he dismissed my concern as Israeli paranoia. “America doesn’t work that way,” he assured me. “Besides, there’s nothing here you can’t get out of the phone book.”
Benjamin and Arbit, like the people at AIPAC, view America’s current philo-Semitism and political stability as natural and permanent. It is not dangerous to compile Jewish lists because there is no real threat to Jews; not presumptuous to organize Jews politically, because as Americans it is their right. Although Benjamin and Arbit consider themselves Zionists, they do not accept the Zionist notion that Jews are merely guests in America.
Much of A.B. Data’s work is done for politicians who want to appeal to Jews for support and financial contributions, and Benjamin and Arbit have been exceptionally effective in helping them do it. I mentioned to them that during the Iowa Jew hunt, Lori Posin had asked her audiences if they had been contacted by Alan Cranston. The question always elicited good-natured groans from people who had been inundated with appeals. “My children should write me as much,” one woman had said in Waterloo. “They should send that much money, too,” laughed Benjamin. “We raised four million dollars for Cranston in twenty-dollar checks.”
A.B. Data is picky about its clientele. “We have two conditions for working with politicians,” said Jerry. “They have to be pro-Israel and they have to be liberal on American issues.”
Bruce readily agreed with the first principle. “There is no single Jewish community in this country,” he said. “There are different groups with varying ideologies. The only thing that unites them is support for Israel.” But he disagreed with the second. Like Jerry, he is a political liberal and Jewish conservative; but he is the less doctrinaire of the two, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he occasionally slipped into the McD.L.T. line. “Jerry’s a knee-jerk liberal,” he said fondly. “I consider myself a moderate and I have no trouble working with candidates who are moderate if they are pro-Israel.”
In fact, most of A.B. Data’s political clients are liberals: Cranston; Lowell Weicker of Connecticut; Barney Frank from Boston; Jim Hunt, who ran against Jesse Helms for the Senate in North Carolina; Carl Levin of Michigan; and Paul Simon of Illinois.
“Most Jews are genetically Democrats,” said Bruce. “Jesse Jackson’s performance at the 1984 convention was perceived by Jews as the Democratic Party shitting all over the Jews, and they were freaked out by it. Believe me, it’s had an impact ever since. The worst response we ever got to a direct mailing was one we did to raise money to fight apartheid. Jews in America don’t support apartheid, but as long as Jesse Jackson is a major black spokesman they won’t give money on the issue. Still, in spite of everything, they voted for Mondale three to one. Why? Because Jews in this country, despite what they say, are still basically insecure, and their main fear is of right-wing Christian anti-Semitism.”
I mentioned to them that my next stop would be Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to meet with Ben Waldman. Jerry Benjamin searched his encyclopedic memory of American political operatives and brightened when he recalled the name. “Ben Waldman did Jewish political organizing for Reagan in ’84,” he said. “What’s he up to these days?”
“He’s in charge of Pat Robertson’s Jewish campaign,” I said, happy to be one up on the A.B. Data whizkids. They looked at each other in amused wonder. “Pat Robertson’s Jewish campaign,” said Benjamin. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
In political circles, Ben Waldman is known as Pat Robertson’s Jew. It is a common usage—I heard other people mentioned as “George Bush’s Jew” or “Jack Kemp’s Jew,” as if Jews, like chartered airplanes, are standard issue for presidential candidates.
Actually, Jews are intensely involved in virtually every aspect of American politics. In 1986, there were eight Jews in the U.S. Senate—many from states with very small Jewish populations (one, Edward Zorinsky, has since passed away)—and twenty-eight in the House of Representatives. And in twenty-seven of the thirty-six Senatorial races, at least one of the candidates (and often both) had a Jewish campaign manager or finance chairman.
Many of the Jews in politics are professionals who happen to be Jewish and have no particular connection with the Jewish community and its concerns. On the other hand, there are political people who specialize in being Jewish. Some, like the AIPAC activists, lobby for Israel. Others work directly with candidates, as fundraisers or Jewish issues experts; Ben Waldman is that kind of political Jew. In the fall of 1986, there were dozens like him in Washington, but none of them was working for Pat Robertson; I went to see him because I wanted to find out what that was like.
We met in a restaurant not far from Capitol Hill. Waldman looks like the kind of Jew Pat Robertson could relate to, a handsome, fair-haired man in his mid-thirties, with startling blue eyes and the reasonable, patient manner of someone who expects not to be believed. As a boy, growing up in Claremont, California, he wanted to become a Conservative rabbi. Instead, he went into conservative politics.
Waldman’s political baptism came during the 1980 presidential race, when he ran Ronald Reagan’s “Jewish campaign” in California. “You can’t believe how much hostility there was,” he told me. “We went door to door in the borscht belt on Fairfax Avenue in L.A., and people spit at us. Literally. They said Reagan would be bad for Israel.”
In 1984 Waldman headed Reagan’s national Jewish campaign, stressing the president’s pro-Israel record. It proved to be an insufficient argument. Jewish voters appreciated Reagan’s support for Israel, but the Democrats neutralized it by playing up the influence of the radical right on the GOP. “Church-and-state killed us in ’84,” he said in an analytical tone. “It was a negative contest between Jerry Falwell and Jesse Jackson, and we lost.”
For his efforts in 1984, Ben Waldman was rewarded with a middle-level administrative job on the White House staff. But he was dissatisfied. In August 1986 he was contacted by Robertson, who invited him out to his headquarters for a chat. Waldman was impressed, and he signed on.
“Actually, working with Pat makes a lot of sense for me,” he said, sincerity shining from his blue eyes. “I was raised a Conservative Jew, but I’m more to the right on Jewish issues these days. I believe in the Bible literally, in creationism. I believe in the Orthodox interpretation of the Bible.”
My gaze fell to the cheeseburger he held in his hand. “My wife is a convert and she doesn’t understand kashrut,” he said apologetically, “but in my beliefs, I’m very close to Pat.”
If it was hard to convince Jews to support Ronald Reagan, getting them to vote for Pat Robertson seemed a truly imposing challenge. Waldman told me that his main problem was one of education. “Jews are incredibly bigoted in their attitudes toward born-again Christians,” he said. “For one thing, they think they’re all the same—they don’t know that they vary greatly among themselves. Christians like Pat don’t understand Jews, either. They have a deep-seated religious love for Jews, and they are hurt when it isn’t reciprocated.”
Waldman was well aware that many Jews considered Pat Robertson’s vision of a Christian America to be a threat to them. “My favorite uncle stopped talking to me when I went to work for him,” he said sadly. “He called it anti-Jewish. It’s true that many Jews don’t feel comfortable with Christian verbal affirmations of God’s glory. We don’t do that—we’re a more subtle religion. Most Jews don’t know what their prayers mean, anyway. But they misunderstand Pat and his program.”
Ben Waldman’s job is to make them understand, and he had marshaled some novel arguments for the task. “There’s a panic in the Jewish community today about intermarriage,” he said. “In my own extended family, almost all of my cousins, twenty or so, married non-Jewish spouses, and that is very typical today. Some converted and some didn’t. But even the ones who did, a lot of them don’t really consider themselves Jews. Our greatest threat is that we are losing the traditional Jewish family.”
According to Waldman, Christian prayer in school is the solution. “Prayer in school or teaching Christian religion is positive for Jews because it reinforces our sense of being different from the gentiles. And that’s what the Bible commands us to be—different,” he said in a tone of utmost piety.
Another Waldman innovation was his Brooklyn strategy—a plan to attract Chasidic votes for Robertson. “I’m not saying we have widespread support there or anything, but there is potential,” he said. “They tend to be very conservative, anti-communist, like Pat. And they share a lot of his beliefs—they are pro-life, pro-federal aid for parochial schools, anti-ERA, and of course very pro-Israel. Pat is probably closer to them on most issues than any other candidate. After all, they’re both fundamentalists.”
It was a strange scene to contemplate—fresh-faced, born-again Robertson-for-President volunteers in red, white, and blue blazers and straw hats canvassing among the Sotmar and Lubavitch Chasidim of Brooklyn; strange, but not impossible. In many ways, America has become a post-satiric society. Nothing is too sacred to be trivialized or too improbable to be true. I thought of Macy’s Baptist rabbi; Elie Wiesel, tossing out the first ball at a World Series game; McDonald’s Fievel Mousekewitz Christmas Stocking promotion and I wondered: Why not Yiddish bumper stickers that say VOTE FOR A CHRISTIAN AMERICA in Williamsburg?
The boys from A.B. Data, politicians like Ben Waldman, and the Jew hunters of AIPAC have very different interests and approaches, but they all have one thing in common—they are involved in national politics. They deal in large issues and aim for big results. But I was also curious about grass roots Jewish politics. For a closer look I took a train up to Lawrence, Long Island, deep in the heart of the Ninth District, to Carol Berman-for-State-Senate headquarters.
The Ninth District was my last stop during the 1986 campaign. Berman, a Jewish Democrat and former state senator, was locked in a tight race with incumbent Dean Skelos, a Greek Orthodox Republican, who had defeated her in 1984. The Ninth District is in Nassau County, home of the formidable Republican machine that produced Senator Alphonse D’Amato. Democrats start out there at a disadvantage, and to compensate the party sent in Cliff Williams, a political gunslinger from Queens, to run the campaign. Williams, in an inversion of Ben Waldman’s role, was Carol Berman’s goy.
I found him at campaign headquarters, located on the second floor of a shopping center. When I arrived, the small, improvised office was in chaos, with teenage volunteers frantically stuffing envelopes and hollering into telephones. As soon as I walked in I was buttonholed by two middle-aged couples on their way to Israel. Refusing to believe I wasn’t with the Bermanites, they demanded that I tell them how to file an absentee ballot.
I was rescued by Williams, who turned the couples over to a staffer and ushered me into a cramped panel-board office, which looked like the cell of a slovenly monk. A fat man with an unbarbered mustache and the unflappable calm of the true political pro, he made small talk for about thirty seconds before getting down to his favorite topic. Like all New York politicians, he began his assessment of the campaign with a tour d’horizon of the district’s ethnic composition.
“We’ve got approximately two hundred fifty thousand people in the Ninth—one hundred sixty thousand registered voters,” he said, and began ticking off the percentages on his stubby fingers. “We’re almost forty percent Jewish, eighteen percent Italian, twenty percent Irish, and the other twenty percent or so are white Protestants. That’s what I am,” he added, an ethnic disability that may account for the fact that he had recently lost his seat in the state assembly.
Berman’s official campaign theme was that she would be a full-time state senator, while Skelos, a practicing attorney, would not. Her subtext, direct and unmistakable, was an appeal to Jewish solidarity. This, Williams explained, was based not on parochialism but on cold political calculation.
“To be blunt, we got an Irish problem in this campaign,” he told me. “Okay, we got the endorsement of the Irish-American Congress, but that sounds more important than it is. A lot of Irish people still have a problem with Jews.”
Williams said that his working assumption was that half the Irish people in the district were anti-Semites who would vote against Berman out of bigotry. That sounded high to me and I said so, but he shook his head. “There’s one difference between you and me,” he said. “I’m not Jewish, and these people talk openly around me. Believe me, Carol’s going to lose a lot of Irish votes because of the Jewish angle. Coupled with the fact that most Italians will vote Republican, Berman will have to do well among the Jews—better than she did in 1984.”
The defeat of 1984 was viewed by Bermanites as an aberration of historic dimensions: “Reagan swept the entire country,” said Williams. “I mean, it was a Republican year. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he actually came to the Ninth District. The president. He had dinner with a local rabbi and visited his synagogue. A local Republican rabbi,” he added darkly.
“Was Reagan’s endorsement really that important?” I asked. Williams, who had been told that I had worked in politics in Israel, blinked at the question. “Yeah, you could say it was important,” he said. “It was the first time in history that an American president appeared in a synagogue. You could call that important.”
The Reagan visit made me wonder what other endorsements might matter in a Jewish district. Cliff Williams stared into space, considering. “Let’s see … Shimon Peres. Abba Eban. Sharansky. In parts of the district, Menachem Begin. That’s about it,” he said.
“Those are all Israelis,” I reminded him. “What about American Jewish leaders?”
“American Jewish leaders?” he asked, unfamiliar with the notion. “Ah, I guess George Schultz is pretty popular. I can’t really think of anybody else.”
In addition to the Reagan factor, Berman had also been hurt in 1984 by a Skelos campaign circular to Jewish voters. “They sent out this letter saying that Carol was practically an enemy of the Jews because she hadn’t denounced Louis Farrakhan,” Williams said indignantly. The charge was unfair; worse—much worse—it had been effective. This time, the Berman campaign was determined not to be out-Jewed by the Greek.
There was a grudge-match edge to the campaign that I had detected a few weeks earlier when I first contacted the headquarters of the two candidates. The Berman people had suggested that I accompany her to Candidates’ Night at a local B’nai B’rith chapter.
“Will Skelos be there, too?” I asked.
“No way,” a Berman aide told me, her voice ringing with contempt. “He’s been ducking Carol all over the district. He’s afraid to debate, especially at a B’nai B’rith gathering. I doubt if you’ll see him at all. He does most of his campaigning by mail.”
The Skelos forces had been equally scathing. “Dean is at his best at these gatherings,” a spokesman told me on the phone. “He’s extremely popular in the Jewish community. But don’t look for Carol Berman—she’s afraid to appear on the same platform with Dean Skelos. She’s been avoiding him for weeks.”
“That’s what they told me about your guy,” I said, eager to stir up a little trouble. The spokesman snorted in righteous indignation. “We don’t avoid anyone. We’ll be there, you can bet on that. But don’t be surprised if Carol Berman has a headache that night.”
Naturally, I timed my visit to the Ninth District to coincide with the Great Debate. I mentioned this to Cliff Williams and told him that I would be going over to Skelos headquarters before the event. He didn’t try to dissuade me from fraternizing with the enemy, but he did give me some reading material to fortify me. One pamphlet began with a quote from Carol Berman: “For years we relied on our ‘friends’ to protect us and our way of life. We learned that in the end we had to rely on ourselves. Our friends forgot us. I will never forget. I can’t forget.”
“Don’t you think it’s just a little blatant?” I asked. “It’s almost as if she’s blaming Skelos for the Holocaust.”
Williams shook his head in vigorous disagreement. “It’s perfectly legitimate for Carol to remind the voters that she’s Jewish. Especially since she’s running against an opponent who spends all his time pandering to Jewish voters. You go over there, you’ll see what I mean.”
On my way out, I was introduced to a spry old man named Harold Forma, the Democratic leader of Woodmere, a Long Island town. Forma told me that he has been in politics for sixty-one years, ever since he broke in with Tammany Hall on the Lower East Side.
Woodmere is a predominantly Jewish area, and Forma predicted that Berman would carry it ten to one. This seemed like an extravagant goal until he explained that, in the past, the town had sometimes voted for Democrats twenty to one.
“We’ve got good voters out here, but this boy Skelos has made some inroads,” he said. “The guy practically sleeps in a yarmulke.”
“Will it do him that much good?” I asked.
“Well, crime is the biggest talking issue out here, but abortion and especially foreign policy are the big voting issues, particularly for Jews. By foreign policy, I mean Israel. And Skelos has put in a lot of work on foreign policy, know what I mean?”
I thanked Forma for his analysis and asked him if he would be at the B’nai B’rith showdown.
“Naw, I’m getting an award someplace else. Outstanding community leadership, et cetera, et cetera. And you know what, boychik. I paid for it, believe you me.” He laughed, a man who knows his value in the political marketplace.
After talking with Williams and Forma, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find Senator Skelos dressed like a Chasid and eating a gefilte fish. But his office in Rockville Centre proved to be a model of Republican decorum. Conservatively dressed young people sat behind desks arranged in two rows, speaking softly to one another and typing away at silent word processors. The room was carpeted, and the overall effect was that of a suburban savings and loan association. Only the walls, decorated with a calendar from Yeshiva Toras Chaim, plaques from the Nassau County Podiatry Society and the Marco Polo Lodge, and signed photographs of Skelos with Ronald Reagan, Bob Hope, and Jack Kemp revealed the political nature of the office.
Skelos welcomed me cordially and told his secretary to hold his calls. He is a boyishly handsome man in his late thirties with a face that looks like it was designed in a laboratory for post-Kennedy political aspirants.
Carol Berman is originally from Brooklyn, but Skelos is a native son, born and raised in Rockville Centre, who settled in his old hometown after law school. As a young attorney he joined the county Republican machine and progressed rapidly. In 1982 he ran against Carol Berman and lost; in 1984 he won. Now, only a few weeks away from the rubber match, he seemed poised and confident.
Part of that confidence was based on his Jewish support. There aren’t many Greek Orthodox in the Ninth, and over the years Skelos had sought to expand his ethnic base by becoming a keen student of Jewish voters. Not surprisingly, he had nothing but good things to say about them.
“Jewish citizens are literate and smart,” he said over the hum of the air conditioner. “They read campaign material and they care about the issues. Most of all, they want a positive campaign. I think Carol Berman’s negative campaign against me is a boomerang. She wraps herself in Jewishness, and I think a lot of voters object to that. Jews are Americans, and they vote and think as individuals, which is why I, a Republican, got thirty-five percent of the Jewish vote in the last election, and almost fifty percent here in Rockville Centre where they know me best.
“If you want to know what Jewish voters really want, I can sum it up in one word—respect. Respect for their traditions, their institutions, their sensitivities.”
Skelos is nothing if not respectful. For example, he refrained from campaigning on the high holidays, and closed his office on Succot and Simchat Torah for good measure. During his term in the state senate he opposed testing at state universities on Jewish holidays, worked to stop price-gouging of kosher turkeys on Thanksgiving, and fought to withhold tenure to a professor at Stony Brook who denied the existence of the Holocaust.
His only major disagreement with his Jewish constituents has been over the abortion issue. “I’m against abortion, even though most Jewish voters are pro-choice,” he told me. “I’m honest with them about my position, which is a way of showing them respect, and I think they respect me in turn,” he said.
Skelos agrees with Harold Forma about the importance of foreign policy in the Ninth District. In 1984 he traveled to the Soviet Union, accompanied by a local rabbi, as the guest of the Long Island Committee on Soviet Jewry. Two years later he went on a junket to Israel that was organized by the local Jewish Federation. The trips were lavishly documented, and Skelos proudly showed me photos of his grinning self with Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir, Natan Sharansky, and an array of lesser notables.
The Skelos foreign policy was not only pro-Israel and anti-Soviet, it was also anti-Greek. Throughout the campaign Carol Berman had been attacking the policies of the Athens government for which she held Skelos personally responsible. The incumbent responded by declaring a personal boycott of his ancestral homeland.
“I won’t even visit Greece as long as the present government is in power,” he said. “I disagree with their policies toward Israel and especially their closeness to the PLO. But I resent Carol Berman’s insinuations that individual Greek-Americans are anti-Semitic.”
I decided to accompany Skelos to a campaign meeting at the Green Acres Senior Citizens Center in Hempstead, where he was scheduled to give a talk with the admirably Republican title “What’s in the Legislation for You?” The audience was composed mostly of Italians and Jews, but Skelos didn’t even mention foreign policy; senior citizens vote age interests, not ethnic ones. On the way into the meeting hall he stopped in a card room where half a dozen men were playing poker. “I have some things to say that I think will interest you,” he promised, but they were unconvinced. “We know what you’re gonna say, Senator, and we’re wit ya,” said one, chewing on a King Edward corona and dealing a new hand.
After Green Acres, Skelos swung through a residential neighborhood, where he rang doorbells and shook hands with housewives. He then went to a branch campaign office, where I was introduced to Al Ball, a retired importer who was serving as a Republican committeeman and Skelos cheerleader. Ball, a Jew, took me next door, to Roma’s. There, over pizza, he told me about his candidate.
“You want to know about Dean Skelos? Fine, this is Dean Skelos. When he went to Russia he took all sorts of things with him, prayerbooks, tefillin, you name it.” He looked around the restaurant and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Listen, I’m not even allowed to repeat all the things he did when he was over there. But believe me, he wasn’t just a tourist, okay?” I nodded, and he resumed his normal voice. “Let me tell you something else. Jews know that you’ve got to have Christian support. Not just vote for fellow Jews. That’s the basis of Carol Berman’s campaign, and to me it’s abrasive.”
Al Ball was once a liberal, but for the past ten years he has been a conservative Republican. “Look around at the crime, at the situation in the schools, at the secularism in society today,” he said, as if these evils were lurking just in back of the pizza oven. “I don’t think that liberal policies are the answer. And I’ll tell you the truth, I also don’t like Carol Berman from the Jewish angle. She’s too abrasive. That’s it.”
By the time I got back to Berman headquarters for my first meeting with the Democratic candidate, I was expecting a cross between Don Rickles and Ariel Sharon. But Carol Berman proved to be a petite, somewhat brittle grandmother, a Jewish Nancy Reagan with frosted curly hair, prodigious energy, and a Brooklyn accent that made “war” into “woe-ah” and “sure” into “shoo-ah.”
Berman introduced me to John Carbonara, a burly retired New York police lieutenant who was serving as her driver-bodyguard, and the three of us piled in her car for a round of campaigning. Like Skelos, Berman had a Cadillac (“I’ve already worn out a Lincoln town car in this campaign,” she said), but when I mentioned this to her she scowled, offended by any comparison to the Rockville Centre usurper.
“Look,” she told me as Carbonara guided us to our first meeting of the evening, “Skelos is attempting to woo the voters with all sorts of cheap tricks. But I’m not just Jewish at election time—I’ve been Jewish for five thousand years. And I have the right to remind voters that I was a Jewish senator, not just a senator who happened to be Jewish.”
Our first stop was a women’s club bazaar at a local restaurant. Berman charged in, kissing cheeks, fingering merchandise, and calling everyone by their first names. This was her fifth senate campaign, and she worked the room with a deft touch, wasting no effort, talking to everyone but pausing with no one. After watching her for a few minutes I felt thirsty and retired to the adjoining bar, where I found John Carbonara sipping a 7-Up. A powerful man running to fat, he wore horn-rimmed glasses that gave him an incongruously studious look.
I asked Carbonara how he, an Italian cop, liked working for a Jewish woman Democrat. “Hey, no problem,” he said seriously. “First, I pride myself on being a liberal thinker. Second, when it comes to Jews, I got a real soft spot. I see TV programs about the Holocaust and I can’t help myself from crying. And third, as far as her being a woman, well, Carol is competent. Maybe some women aren’t, ya know, but let me tell you something, pal, this lady works her ass off.”
Just about then, Berman came steaming out of the bazaar, cast a disapproving look at my shot glass, and began towing the huge Carbonara in the direction of the Caddy. We were behind schedule for a neighborhood kaffeeklatsch and she urged Carbonara to step on it. He said nothing, and kept the car at a steady thirty-five.
There were about twenty people—all of them Jewish—at the gathering, which was held in the basement rec room of a supporter. Berman greeted most of the people there by name, was briefly introduced by her hostess, and then took the floor for ten minutes of canned campaign rhetoric. Most of it consisted of anti-Skelos barbs. The Republican was, according to her, soft on crime and real estate interests, a part-time senator, and a coward: “He’s afraid to debate me,” she insisted, shaking her head with condescending pity.
Halfway through her presentation she introduced me to the group, making my presence sound like an endorsement by the Israeli government. From there she led into her Jewish theme.
“My Jewish identity is very strong and well known,” she said. “When I was in the senate I single-handedly stopped the Arabs from buying the Bank of Commerce in New York. I almost single-handedly got questions about the Holocaust on the Regents Exam. As a Jewish housewife, I held hearings about price-gouging of kosher food at holiday time. I was responsible for Raoul Wallenberg Day.” Berman ticked off these achievements on her fingers, and the audience murmured its approval.
After the speech, several people came over to say hello to me. One or two claimed to have read my books, although their tentative tone told me it was a claim born of courtesy. Two or three asked if I knew their relatives in Israel (I didn’t) and one man wanted to know if Menachem Begin had Alzheimer’s disease (I didn’t know). In the meantime, Berman shook hands all around, nibbled on a symbolic cookie, and then went charging into the night. It was time for the great B’nai B’rith confrontation at the Rockville Centre Central Synagogue.
Like many long anticipated and loudly ballyhooed political confrontations, this one proved an anticlimax. When we arrived at Candidates’ Night, it emerged that the event was not a debate at all, but serial appearances by various office seekers. Dean Skelos had come and gone. Now it was Carol Berman’s turn, and she would appear alone.
Berman opened with the same attack on Skelos’s platform and performance that she had used at the kaffeeklatsch. Once again she introduced me to the audience, and when she hit the “I’ve been Jewish for five thousand years” line, she gave me a significant look, as if I could authenticate her antiquity. I maintained what I hoped was a neutral attitude as she went on to describe her bona fides.
“I don’t run on my Jewish credentials,” she told the assembly, “but all of you know that I was a Jewish senator, not just a senator who happened to be Jewish.” There was a smattering of applause, and she continued. “I never forget my responsibilities to my roots and my heritage. I don’t need to travel to the Soviet Union and Israel on taxpayers’ money to learn about Judaism.” Once again there was applause, mixed with a few boos. “Senator Skelos is practically professing to be Jewish. Well, I can tell you that I’m not professing to be Greek. I wouldn’t even go to Greece, with its anti-Semitic government.”
This time there were loud cheers and also loud boos—Rockville Centre was Skelos territory, after all. A furious middle-aged man in a dark business suit leaped from his seat. “I take exception to your remark about Dean Skelos,” he said in a tone of lawyerly aggressiveness. “He doesn’t profess to be a Jew, that’s nonsense. So he visited Israel and Russia, is that a crime? He went there to learn about our community and our concerns, and that’s what a legislator is supposed to do.” This time the boos and cheers were reversed. Carol Berman regarded the man with narrowed eyes and snapped, “He did the smart thing,” before taking the next question.
Afterwards, during the coffee hour while Berman mingled with the voters, I was again approached by several people who wanted to ask about Israeli relatives or tell me about their trip to Jerusalem. One of them was the Skelos man, Elliot Winograd. He introduced himself as an Anti-Defamation League activist and former president of the congregation. Having established his credentials, he explained his outburst at the meeting. “Everything being equal, I’ll vote for the Jew,” he said. “But this woman is impossible—she’s totally incompetent. Besides, I’m a Republican. I admit it.”
Once again Berman burst loose from the pack, shot Winograd a Sonny Liston hate stare, and led me and Carbonara in a half-run to the parking lot. By now it was past ten, and she still had to address a meeting at the Therese the Little Flower Chapter of the Knights of Columbus.
When we arrived, a man at the microphone was making some announcements. “I wanna remind you to attend our annual horse show,” he said, and there were groans from the sixty or so people who sat on folding chairs in the wood-paneled room. “Hey, it’s an enjoyable evening, and it’s free.” This time there was applause, and he used it to bring on Carol Berman, “an old friend and former senator from our district, now running in a rematch …”
Berman grabbed the hand mike and launched into a brief speech. There was no “I was a Jewish senator” stuff this time; she concentrated on crime, reminding them that she favored mandatory life sentences for drug pushers and tough punishments for violent rape. “Don’t forget, when I was your senator, I voted for the death penalty five times.…”
As she went on in this law-and-order vein, I felt a powerful hand grip my elbow. I spun around and saw John Carbonara’s face about five inches from my own. He fixed me with a heavy-lidded stare and said nothing. For a moment I thought he might be angry with me. Finally, blinking away a slight stammer, he said, “I was wondering, ah, where are you staying tonight?”
We had barely spoken since our drink at the ladies’ bazaar. I assumed that he wanted to know because he would have to drop me off. I told him I had a room at the Motorway Motel in Lawrence, not far from Carol Berman’s house.
He digested this for a minute, and then began to shake his head slowly. “Uh, well, I’m gonna ask ya to stay with us tonight. Ya understand what I mean? What I’m saying is, you look like you could use a good home-cooked meal instead of eating alone in some motel. Am I right?” I was too surprised to answer. “Hey, I’m gonna go call my wife, tell her I’m bringin’ ya home, okay?”
“That’s really nice, but I couldn’t let you do that,” I protested. It was past eleven by now, and I figured that it would be close to midnight before we got back to his place. I was going to say “I hardly even know you,” but it sounded like a line from a bad movie. Besides, John was already shaking his head again, like a bull brushing away flies.
“Uh, maybe you noticed that I didn’t say ‘I’ll ask my wife’—I said ‘I’ll tell my wife.’ Wait’ll you meet her. I call her Soupy, which is short for super-wife. I already know she wants you to come stay with us and I didn’t even need to call. So it’s all set, right?”
I had been on the road for weeks, and the truth was that I dreaded another night in a motel. There was no way John Carbonara could have known that, of course; but the idea of spending the evening with real people instead of some late-night movie was suddenly very attractive. I looked at this big blunt stranger and felt very moved. “Sure,” I told him, “I’d love to stay with you.”
By this time Berman had finished working the room. We dropped her off, exhausted, at her house and then drove half an hour to Carbonara’s. Soupy, a.k.a. Diane, met us at the door with a kiss for Carbonara and a welcoming hug for me. She was a dark, very pretty woman who looked about thirty-five, and I was surprised to learn that her oldest son was away at college and that the baby, Joe, had just graduated from high school.
Diane returned to the kitchen, where she was preparing an impromptu Italian feast, and Carbonara went into his bedroom, put away his pistol (“I was on the job almost thirty years and I never once had to use this,” he said proudly), and stripped off his shirt. He spent the rest of the evening in his T-shirt, his massive belly peeking out and his powerful arms flexing from time to time.
We joined Diane in the kitchen, and Carbonara hauled out an old scrapbook. He especially wanted to show me a yellowing article from the fifties—the account of a baseball game between shipyard teams from Brooklyn and Philadelphia that had been won by a John Carbonara homer. He wasn’t at all self-conscious about the small boast; his attitude was that I, as a friend of the family, would naturally be interested in and proud of the accomplishment.
Diane produced steaming plates of food, which we wolfed down without ceremony. The Carbonaras gossiped happily about family matters—including me, as if I were a cousin from Brooklyn instead of a stranger from Israel. Although he doesn’t drink, Carbonara produced a bottle of sweet yellow wine and poured me a glass, determined to make me feel at home.
It was past one when their younger son, Joe, joined us in the kitchen. He has his mother’s dark good looks and his father’s intense stare and slight hesitation of speech. He also has a Brooklyn accent that makes his father sound like a graduate of Sandhurst. In conformity with the Carbonara dress code, he was shirtless.
Earlier in the meal, John had spoken angrily about Joe’s decision not to attend college. “He’s a smart kid but all he wants to do is bum around with his friends, go out every night and chase girls,” said Carbonara. Seeing him now, I thought that he had made the right choice. He reminded me of the kids who used to dance on American Bandstand; there was something sulky about him that, coupled with his thick Brooklyn dialect, made him seem unlikely college material.
Diane introduced me as an Israeli writer, and Joe regarded me with a surprising interest. I expected a wisecrack, but instead he blinked in concentration, his father’s mannerism, and then burst into a rapid-fire monologue, stammering occasionally over the words. It sounded something like—
“Ugh, uh, okay. Now, you’re from Israel, right? Okay, I want ya to straighten me out on somethin’. Now, Hizbollah, up in Lebanon, Hizbollah is supported by the Iranians, am I right? And the Iranians and the Syrians, they’re allies, right? Okay, now, wait a minute, Hizbollah works out of, like, Syrian turf—I mean, it’s in the Bekaa Valley but Syria controls it. Okay—now wait—the Syrians are also supporting the Amal, right? I mean, Nabih Bari, those guys. But then, what I don’t get is—why do the Syrians let Hizbollah attack the Amal guys who are supposed to be their allies? I mean, is this, like, a trick to soften up the Iranians, or does it have something to do with the, uh, rivalry between the two Bathist parties, you know, Hafez Assad and Saddam Hussein. Can you answer me that?”
I sat there, mesmerized by the performance. It was the kind of question American undergraduates pay thousands of dollars to learn how to ask; but Joe hadn’t been showing off. He was just curious.
“How do you know so much about the Middle East?” I asked, and he shrugged, embarrassed. “Hey, I’m innerested in foreign policy, okay?”
Carbonara listened to the exchange with frustrated pride. “Imagine, a kid like this not in college, not using his brains. Is it a waste or not a waste?”
Joe, in an effort to derail his father, broke in. “Here’s one more thing I don’t get, okay? I mean, Israel’s got the strongest army in the region. So why don’t you guys just go back into Lebanon and clean it up, ya know, just kick ass and clean the entire place up?”
This was too much for John. “Hey,” he bellowed, “I thought you were smart. What kinda question is that. We can’t get you to stop smoking in your room, you want the Israelis to clean up Lebanon.” He may not know much about Hizbollah, but thirty years on the street have made a realist out of John Carbonara.
We sat up talking until almost four in the morning, and the next day around noon I awoke to the smell of breakfast. In the kitchen I found my place set at the table, and a copy of The New York Times next to the plate. Carbonara reads the Daily News—he had gone out especially to find me a Times. But when I thanked him, he brushed me off with a dismissive gesture. “It’s got a lousy sports section,” he said, digging into his scrambled eggs.
While we were eating, Diane brought in another scrapbook. “John’s a writer, too,” she said, and Carbonara nodded assent, without a trace of false modesty. “I like to write poems. Nothing published or anything like that, just for special occasions, ya know?” He opened the book and began to recite in his rough Brooklyn voice. The poems were mostly about family events, or couplets written to commemorate something that happened on the job. “Here’s one I wrote in honor of my friend Bernie’s son’s bar mitzvah,” he said, clearing his throat. “Yes, my friend Bernie, it was quite an affair; filled with love and affection, steaks so tender and rare …”
I had to get into the city, and I thanked Diane for her hospitality. John offered to drive me to the train. On the way we chatted about the Ninth District election. Although he was a Berman man, he admitted that he liked Skelos, too. And in a discreet way he let me know that he thought Carol was making a mistake with her “I’ve been a Jew for five thousand years” routine.
“There’s all kind of Jews, I’ve noticed,” he said, driving carefully through the sparse traffic. “Some of them are what I call real Jews, but a lot of them, they’re Americans.” There was sarcasm in his voice when he said the word. “They might not like that Jewish stuff so much, you know?” (He turned out to be right; Skelos won the election, carrying a larger percentage of the Jewish vote than he had in 1984).
We arrived at the station and shook hands, but Carbonara had one parting thought. “You know, to my mind there’s nobody better than a good Jew, a real Jew. But last night? I dunno. I mean, there you were and Carol’s introducing you to everybody, like, here’s Ze’ev the writer from Israel. And everybody came up to you and says, ‘Hey, Ze’ev, how ya doin’, Ze’ev, ya know my cousin in Tel Aviv?’ Like that. But I noticed one thing—none of those Jews asked ya if you had a place to stay, nobody said, ‘Come on back to the house for a meal.’ Who asked ya that? Carbonara, the Italian. Sometimes I just don’t know who the real Jews are anymore, know what I mean?”