What Is a Jew in Power to Do?

During the Bush years, we heard a lot about the sinister influence of powerful Jews. Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Doug Feith, Richard Perle: These were the men who supposedly led America to war.

There was always one flaw in the theory: none of these men held a top job. Wolfowitz was deputy secretary of defense, not secretary of defense. Libby was chief of staff to the vice president, not to the president. Feith ranked third at the Department of Defense; Perle headed an advisory board.

Bill Clinton had a secretary of state who was born Jewish. Not Bush. Two of Clinton’s three secretaries of the Treasury were Jewish. Not one of Bush’s. Under Clinton, Jews (by birth or conversion) held the jobs of director of central intelligence, national security adviser and White House counsel. Under Bush: nope, no, nada, zilch.

I’m not complaining! Jews tilt Democratic, and so it is unsurprising that a Democratic president would have more Jews on his team than a Republican president. Still, the record is the record. Now the Democrats have returned to power, and again Jews are receiving senior appointments: White House chief of staff, director of the National Economic Council and more to come.
All of which raises an interesting question: What, if any, special moral responsibilities do Jewish power-holders have as Jews?

The Catholic hierarchy has long demanded that Catholic officeholders oppose abortion. Indeed, individual bishops have sometimes threatened to refuse communion to those officeholders who do not comply.

American Jews, by contrast, have never expected any particular degree of observance from Jews in office. Some Jews were impressed by Joe Lieberman’s effort to observe Shabbat as a senator and candidate for vice president, while others could not have cared less.

What is broadly felt is a requirement spelled out in the Book of Esther, the text of the festival of Purim that occurs just a few months after Obama’s appointees begin their new duties. The Persian emperor Ahasuerus chooses Esther as queen unaware of her Jewishness. Esther’s cousin Mordechai comes to her with news of a vast conspiracy to annihilate the Jews launched by the emperor’s vizier Haman and warns Esther not to hesitate:

“Do not think that because you are in the king’s house you alone of all the Jews will escape. For if you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance for the Jews will arise from another place, but you and your father’s family will perish. And who knows but that you have come to royal position for such a time as this?”

Jewish history tells the story of many Jewish powerholders. The kings and judges of the Bible held power in predominantly Jewish societies. Their example offers little guidance to American Jews. The patriarch Joseph rose to power under Pharaoh in Egypt, but as the Bible tells us, he was the only Jew in the whole country at first.

Esther and Mordechai, however, lived in a multiethnic, multicultural society. They participated in a larger community.From the point of view of the authors of the Book of Esther, Esther and Mordechai succeed brilliantly in balancing their duties to both their fellow Jews and that larger community. Mordechai saves the emperor’s life from assassins and replaces Haman as the emperor’s principal adviser. Esther (we are left to infer) does a more satisfying job as queen and consort than her discarded predecessor. At the same time, they save the Jews from extermination—and indeed turn the tables on their would-be exterminators.

In real life, things are seldom so easy. It’s not always obvious what the requirements of Jewish survival in fact are. In the Middle East, for example, some say that Jewish survival requires the construction of a Palestinian state alongside Israel; some say that Jewish survival precludes such a thing. Some say that the Iranian nuclear program presents a clear and immediate threat; others believe the threat to be more remote and contingent.

At the same time, many reject any special duty to fellow Jews as improper, indeed a betrayal of a duty to the larger society. Any sense of special duty shows “dual loyalty”—a charge that has been flung about often in these past eight years.

Such charges intimidate many Jews in high office—which may explain why it has so often been non-Jews who have championed endangered Jews at decisive moments since 1945. It was Richard Nixon, not Henry Kissinger, who pushed through the emergency airlift that turned the tide of war in October 1973; Ronald Reagan who pressed the Soviets to release Natan Sharansky; the elder George Bush who adopted the Falasha of Ethiopia as a personal cause.

Does any other group in American society feel such strong inhibitions about speaking for itself? Surely not—and for good reason. There are always those, and not small numbers of them, for whom Jews are inherently problematic—and Jews in positions of trust inherently illegitimate. In a city full of lobbies for everything from Albania to zirconium, it is the Jews who are damned as “the” lobby.

America has just elected a president with less emotional connection to Israel than any holder of that office since perhaps Dwight Eisenhower. Yet there will be more Jews in higher positions in these next four years than there were in the past eight. For those for whom Jews are always targets, the operating environment is about to become much more target-rich.