What's a Jewish Subject?

A recent letter complains that the Voice & Herald is becoming a platform for the Democratic Party with a leftist agenda that alienates conservatives and uses me and my last column as his prime example. I admit to being an economic liberal. In fact, I’m proud of it. I think that taxing the wealthy to support public programs such as bridge repair, heath insurance, medical research etc. is all to the good. I think that President George W. Bush was right on target when the announced that his form of conservatism was “Compassionate Conservatism” suggesting that the other kind, the usual kind, the Reagan kind, is not. It’s too bad that his words were lip service only. In his 1988 acceptance speech when nominated by the Republicans to run for President George H. W. Bush talked of making America a kinder gentler nation which upset Reagan acolytes, but he too was on to something. Do liberals have all the answers? No. Do I disagree with some liberal positions? Yes. As to being called a liberal or a conservative, I think the terms have lost their meanings. Given the choice I’ll define myself as a “Humanist” by which I mean someone in the tradition of Cicero, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, someone who believes that if an action liberates humanity it is positive; if it retards it, if it enslaves, it is to be opposed. If humanist is too vague, just call me Jewish.

So, in my last column I started out by discussing union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere and then segued to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Where’s the Jewish content? My critic wants “to hear about Jewish news and interests in the paper.” In the Forward (a Jewish newspaper) Leonard Fein (a Jew) writes in his March 2 column about “Sam Gompers, David Dubinsky, …Albert Shanker, to say nothing of … Andy Stern, Randi Weingarten and a host of others who have played — and still play — central roles in America’s labor history…[Labor] is… a Jewish issue because justice is everywhere and always a Jewish issue.” Who can disagree? You don’t have to be a Marxist to know that the ruthless exploitation of the worker is not only immoral but economically counter-productive—just read Adam Smith’s “On the Wealth of Nations,” that primer of capitalism and you’ll find the same thing. Is Smith not Jewish enough? “Justice, Justice thou shall pursue,” is or ought to be a familiar quotation. It’s from an old book my critic might once have read. Each Yom Kippur we chant from Isaiah on treating our workers fairly and find nothing with which Governor Walker and his ilk would agree. Jeremiah’s explanation for the coming destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple was that masters were enslaving their workers. Micah (another Jew) asks “what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” Does this include depriving people of their rights so that the wealthy can become wealthier? Is Moses Jewish enough? Read what he has to say about Egyptian labor practices and about how Jews in their own land should treat gleaners.

Too old fashioned? There’s Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma and Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman who along with James Cheney were lynched, two Jews and a black man murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi because they tried to register Negroes to vote. Not by liberals. When Ronald Regan, that demigod of the modern conservative movement began his quest for the presidency as the Republican candidate in 1980 he went first to Philadelphia, Mississippi of all places, and proclaimed that he believed in states’ rights, a code word in those days (and maybe in ours) for segregation. He was a conservative; I’m not, I’m a Jewish humanist, and if being a humanist offends those who are not, such is life.

If there are conservative Jews who in the modern context place the greed of the land owner above the rights of the gleaner, who do not walk humbly with their God, who do not place Justice before all other considerations, are they living up to the standards set before them by generations of greatness? Or have they succumbed to Mammon like the Jewish owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, Max Blanck an Isaac Harris, union-busters who locked poor immigrant girls into their factory and escaped while 146 of them died within a few minutes, jumping out of the building, crushed against the bolted doors, of burns and smoke inhalation. Blanck and Harris were found not guilty of manslaughter by a jury of their peers, other people who as Abraham Cahan (another Jew) reminds uswere businessmen, salesmen, rent-collectors, not poor Jewish women denied the rights of collective bargaining.