Members of the Tribe (6 page)

Only two of the men were under seventy, and only one, Jeff Winters, was not a native. Winters, a Brooklyn-born flight instructor at the nearby naval base, was discovered and recruited by Sammy in the course of his relentless pursuit of a minyan. He told me he wasn’t particularly religious and was married to a non-Jewish woman, but he felt a sense of solidarity with the boychiks and came to services when he wasn’t on duty. His presence lent a touch of vitality to the congregation, and the old men were obviously fond of him; but military life is unpredictable, and they knew he might well be gone before they were.

Sammy introduced Macy to the men, and for the first time on the tour there were several people who didn’t know him. Still, they were able to place him with a couple of questions—“Are you Ellis Hart’s boy from over in Winona? Is Miss Riva your momma?”—and he went to go into his appeal. Looking around the chapel there seemed little of historical value, although the spittoon would make an interesting addition to Macy’s aggregate temple in Utica. But the men were noncommittal, unwilling to consign any part of
their little synagogue to a museum. Instead, they preferred to reminisce.

“When I was a boy, we used to walk to this shul every Saturday morning,” said one old-timer, with a distant look in his eyes. “ ’Course we didn’t have no automobile back then anyways, just this ole Cushman motor scooter my daddy had is all.”

“Yeah, his daddy was somethin’ else,” said another man. “I remember back during the Six-Day War, he packed his forty-five and flew over to Israel to fight. Hell, he must have been in his seventies at least.”

The others nodded, recalling the way it had been back when there were still enough Jews to make a minyan, and young fellows didn’t come by to inform them that they were a dying breed. Macy, sensitive to their mood, didn’t push them. “Y’all talk this over amongst yourselves and let me know,” he said. “We’re not talkin’ about anything urgent, just trying to plan for the future is all.” We shook hands all around and then walked out into the overcast Meridian morning, climbed into the van, and headed down the highway for Jackson.

It had been an exhausting few days out on the road in the Dixie diaspora, and Vicki napped in the backseat while Macy and I discussed the next stage of his plans. For the foreseeable future he would be busy with the new project, crisscrossing Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and western Tennessee, touring museums, spending interminable hours writing grant proposals, and meeting with lawyers, contractors, and benefactors. No one would pay him for his time or trouble, and he didn’t expect them to. He was merely fulfilling an obligation. As we talked, I looked at him closely, as old friends entering middle age sometimes do, and I saw that he had lost his country-boy looks. I was startled by something I saw in him. Balding, with a gray beard and prominent nose, Macy B. looked like a Jew.

Strangely, he wasn’t sure that he felt like one. “Sometimes I don’t even know if I believe in all this,” he said in a soft voice, careful not to wake Vicki. “I mean, I’m not religious. I don’t know Hebrew or anything. You come right down to it, I’m a Jewish illiterate. And I guarantee you, I never planned my life this way. I got out of college and I thought about a dozen different things, but I sure as hell didn’t think I’d wind up doing this. I’ve
been involved in Jewish things now for goin’ on twenty-five years, goin’ back to my youth group days, and I’m amazed that I have. My only reason, I guess, is that I’m doing it for my kids.”

“Hey, Mace, you were doing this for more than fifteen years before you had any kids,” I reminded him, and he thought about that for a long moment.

“Damn, boy, you right,” he said in his squeaky southern twang, and he turned to face me with a grin. “I guess I just got me one of them Jewish hearts everybody keeps talkin’ about.”

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.