c. 1996 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Author J.J. Goldberg has broken a time-honored Jewish taboo. He has dared to discuss openly the power that Jews have in American society, mere mention of which often prompts hyper-sensitive Jewish defense organizations to cry foul.
American Jews, said Goldberg, author of the newly published”Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment”(Addison Wesley), have good reason to recoil at the mention of Jewish influence. For too many centuries, the notion of Jewish political and economic power has fueled anti-Semitic outbursts, he said.
Still, Goldberg, a respected journalistic observer of the American Jewish scene, contends it’s time Jews acknowledged their disproportionate influence in comparison to their numbers. But, he said, it’s also time that non-Jews understood the limits of Jewish power.
The widening chasm between a minority of highly visible, increasingly conservative Jewish leaders and the overwhelmingly liberal rank-and-file could dissipate the power that Jews have amassed in America over several generations, he said.
The sensitive subject of Jewish media influence is as good a place as any for Jews to begin acknowledging the impact that members of their community of less than 6 million have on the nation’s political and cultural life, Goldberg said. “Let’s get Jews to stand up and admit, yeah, Hollywood is run by people who are Jewish,”Goldberg said during a recent interview.”But these are not Jews who work together toward any collective Jewish end. They happen to be Jewish like my dry cleaner is Korean. That doesn’t mean there’s some Korean conspiracy to ruin my shirts. Jews are not this vast conspiracy as they are sometimes portrayed.” Jewish power is not without focus, however, as was evident in passage of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment, which tied U.S.-Soviet trade relations to freedom for Jews in the former Soviet Union. It’s also apparent in the $3 billion in foreign aid the United States annually gives to Israel.
Domestically, the resolutely liberal Jewish influence is felt in such causes as maintaining separation of church and state, support of public education, abortion rights and less restrictive immigration and refugee policies.
Jews represent less than 3 percent of the total U.S. population, yet they are among the minority groups most actively courted by politicians, as much or more for their ability to contribute campaign money as for their votes.
Jews consistently vote Democratic _ more than 80 percent of their presidential votes went to Bill Clinton in the recent election. But that does not stop Republicans from also chasing after them. Evidence of this was GOP candidate Bob Dole’s attempt to curry Jewish support by backing efforts to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, despite that city’s disputed status in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his own earlier opposition to such a move.
The key to Jewish power, Goldberg noted, is organization and coordination, contemporary Hollywood notwithstanding. The Jewish community is awash in organizations: the Anti-Defamation League, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, B’nai B’rith, the Council of Jewish Federations, Hadassah, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Orthodox Union, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and the World Zionist Organization, to name just a few.
Run by a plethora of professional managers and tacticians and fueled by donations from the Jewish community that top $1 billion annually, these groups have become a model of how a dedicated minority can make the most of its assets, even though they often squabble among themselves and take contradictory positions.”Although democracy does mean that the majority rules, it also means that everyone is entitled to have a say before the vote,”Goldberg wrote.”With enough passion and enough persistence, a minority can exert more influence than its numbers justify. …”Whether this phenomenon is good or bad for democracy depends upon whose ox is being gored.” Goldberg, 47, describes himself as a”traditional Conservative”Jew who spent six years in Israel and is now a New York-based contributing editor to Jerusalem Report magazine. He views Jewish power as”mainly used for good.” Jews, he said,”have used their power to create a more pluralistic, accepting society.”While Jewish motivation clearly grew out of concern for the community’s own full participation in American society,”Jews never acted in their own interest exclusively”and contributed”in a big way”to the larger society, said Goldberg.
In the years after World War II, when contemporary American Jewish power solidified following the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, Jews were in the forefront of the legal and moral battles to overturn laws that discriminated on the basis of race and religion.”Slowly, taking one issue at a time,”said Goldberg,”the major Jewish organizations began to work together. … Eventually, the Jewish community forged coalitions with trade unions, liberal churches and other groups.” African-American leaders were among those with whom Jews worked closely. Goldberg noted that the American Jewish Committee”largely funded”the research that went into the defining legal victory of the civil rights era, the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation.
Goldberg’s book, written in a breezy journalistic style and laden with insider detail, has generally been well-received by Jewish leaders, although some question various details or conclusions.
Marshall Breger, for one, who was President Ronald Reagan’s liaison to the Jewish community, said Goldberg’s account of the growth of Jewish power gives too much credit to Jewish organizations and not enough to external factors, such as the Holocaust and America’s adoption of Israel during the Cold War.
Officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel Washington lobbying agency, are known to be unhappy with Goldberg’s characterization of them as less successful than ordinarily thought and controlled by a deeply conservative coterie of millionaires.
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that fares well in Goldberg’s account, said such complaints are to be expected.”(Goldberg) comes as close to reality as has anybody in recent years, given that dissecting Jewish influence is certainly no science,”said Foxman.”Those who come off well like a particular reading of history, those that don’t, don’t.” Rabbi Alexander Schindler, the long-time president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, now retired, agreed.”His central theme is sound,”he said of Goldberg.”I would dispute small details, but nothing that is substantial.” Despite the successful history of Jewish influence, the great irony of American Jewish life, according to Goldberg, is that while non-Jews may overestimate Jewish power, American Jews consistently underestimate their community’s influence.
Having largely shed traditional religious Judaism and the concurrent connection to community authority, American Jews”have a difficult time believing that the leadership so many have distanced themselves from are actually effective,”Goldberg said.
The 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel vanquished its Arab adversaries is the cause of much of the Jewish community’s current myopia, Goldberg added.
Rather than bolster Jewish confidence, as might be expected, the rejection of the Jewish state by many American liberals _ who began to consider Israel a pariah state after its takeover of the Palestinian-populated West Bank and Gaza Strip _ produced an opposite reaction in the Jewish community. Compounding the situation was the collapse of the liberal black-Jewish coalition over the issue of affirmative action.
Ever since, said Goldberg, Jewish community leaders in particular have tended to turn inward and more defensive.
The result is a growing split within the American Jewish community between increasingly conservative leaders and a more liberal rank-and-file disinclined to follow the leadership’s agenda, Goldberg said.
In his view, this ideological gulf _ not intermarriage, loss of religiosity or any other sign of Jewish assimilation _ poses the greatest threat to the Jewish community’s future ability to maintain its political power.”My concern is that a small number of right-wing leaders who claim to speak for the community and who continually bash Democrats, the (Israeli-Arab) peace process and separation of church and state will undermine Jewish influence,”he said.
Despite that, Goldberg believes American Jewish influence is in no immediate danger of dissipating.
Anti-Semitism, he said, is”out of favor”and intermarriage has gained American Jews the support of additional non-Jews who now have family ties that cause them to have concern for Jewish issues.”There’s a minimum of 8 million American households who contain a Jewish member today and who can be counted as part of the Jewish community to sweat if a cross is burned on their lawn,”said Goldberg.
Given that, he concluded, American Jewish power will remain strong for the foreseeable future.
MJP END RIFKIN
