It wasn’t hard to gauge the mood at Sunday’s Jewish Leadership Celebration in Washington, the main Jewish event in a weekend of political pomp and partying.
These were hardened Democrats, after all, with a lot to celebrate.
For the first time in the memory of most, an elected Democratic president had been returned to office; Congress, while remaining in Republican hands, showed signs of backing away from its experiment in Gingrichism.
With the administration’s active help, the Middle East peace process was back on track, preserving what has become a high-water mark in U.S.-Israel relations. In four years, there have been no significant conflicts between the Clinton administration and the organized Jewish community.
But there was something else at Sunday’s gathering at the newly renovated District of Columbia Jewish Community Center: a palpable feeling that with the Clinton administration, Jews have passed some important but hard-to-define milestone.
“What we’ve seen over the past 20 or 25 years is Jews coming of age, in a political sense,” said Stuart Eizenstat, the assistant secretary of commerce for international trade administration and one of the honorees.
“We’ve become much more vocal, not just as an outside interest group, but by integrating into the system.”
That was the Jewish subtheme to this week’s inaugural: The Jewish community has transcended political tokenism and communal fear of too-visible participation.
That change, more evolutionary than revolutionary, is likely to stand the test of time.
Several veterans at Sunday’s reception remembered an era when Jewish leaders would not be so bold in celebrating Jewish activism.
“Twenty years ago, there were some politicians who felt that the more Jews took leadership, the more they’d be blamed,” said former Rep. Bella Abzug, who didn’t need to remind a reporter that she was never among them. Abzug served in the House in the early 1970s.
Jewish leaders and politicos generally avoided public talk about Jews in high administration positions, or the number of Jews in Congress; the worry was that acknowledging Jewish successes would only reinforce the anti-Semites who insist Jews control everything from the Federal Reserve Bank to sunspots.
In the executive branch, Jews have played key roles in Democratic administrations beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who included many Jews in his “brain trust” but went to great lengths to keep them from being too visible. Jimmy Carter had almost as many Jews around the Cabinet table as Bill Clinton.
Jews have been far less prominent in Republican administrations, although Richard Nixon — despite the poisonous anti-Semitism revealed in his White House tapes — broke the longstanding taboo against a Jewish secretary of state with Henry Kissinger.
But the comfort level of Jewish officialdom lagged far behind the employment statistics.
“Privately, people kept count,” said a longtime Jewish activist attending Sunday’s reception.
“But there was a feeling that we would jeopardize those gains by giving voice to them. The accretion of Jewish political power has taken place over two or three decades, but it’s only been during the Clinton administration that we’ve become comfortable enough with our own achievements to celebrate them openly.”
In the late 1990s, Jews feel secure enough in their accumulated clout and their acceptance in the political workforce to publicly and pridefully point to their politically successful co-religionists.
The idea of keeping Jewish participation out of the glare of public attention “is all washed up,” Abzug said. “This gathering is a visible reminder of that.”
The first Clinton administration included six Cabinet-level officials who were Jewish; the president broke the informal rule limiting Jews to a single Supreme Court seat and the policy against a Jewish ambassador to Israel. There are uncounted dozens of Jewish White House staffers.
For the moment, at least, there are no effective barriers to full Jewish participation in the executive branch. More importantly, for the first time there are no Jewish leaders murmuring that the community should be more discreet in its political involvement.
“Politically, we’ve come out of the closet,” Eizenstat said.
But does that new comfort level reflect permanent changes in American politics, or merely the unique circumstances of the Clinton administration?
Clinton’s own familiarity and ease with the Jewish world is unusual even within the Democratic party; the Republicans, despite years of Jewish outreach, lag far behind in the integration of Jews into the party mainstream.
Still, the more visible Jewish presence in Washington partly reflects the broader acceptance of Jews in American life by the post-World War II generation.
“What’s interesting about Clinton is that he’s the first president from a generation in which Jews are widely accepted,” said Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg.
“He was educated in a milieu in which Jews were simply part of the environment. That’s an important factor.”
The same factor is at work in the Republican party, but not with the same vigor, he said.
“Jewish neoconservatives [such as Irving and William Kristol and William Safire] are an intellectual force in the Republican party,” Ginsberg said. “But this political emergence for Jews is still primarily a Democratic phenomenon.”