Jews in the House, and the Senate

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Friday, August 15, 2008

There are many ways in which Jews are overrepresented in American society. Jews are disproportionately found in Hollywood and on university campuses, in the arts and among Nobel Prize winners in science. But this being an election year, I thought it would be interesting to look for a few minutes at Jewish over-representation in the United States Congress.

Most demographers agree that Jews constitute between 2-3% of the American population, while today we have 29 Jewish members of the House of Representatives and 13 Senators. This is the largest Jewish presence in the Senate’s history, the House having hit its high of 34 Jewish members in 1991. Just for contrast, when I graduated from high school in 1973, there were only two Jewish Senators, and 14 Jewish members of Congress.

Jews first hit double digits in the House with the 67th Congress, 1921-1923 and broke 20 with the 94th Congress in 1993-1995. Jews broke into the double digits in the Senate with the 103rd Congress, in 1993-1995. There are currently only two Jewish governors. Looking for an explanation of this disparity one pundit suggested that Jews prefer arguing to administration. Interestingly, only two other countries in the world have had more Jewish legislators than the U.S., one is Israel, of course, and, did you guess, the other is Great Britain.

Among our present 13 senators, three are up for re-election this fall, and of those three, two are running against other Jews. Think of those odds. These are Norm Coleman and Frank Lautenberg. Norm Coleman, Republican, of Minnesota is expected to be in a close race. You may recall that he won his seat when his opponent, Paul Wellstone, also Jewish, died in a plane crash two weeks before the election. He is currently running against Al Franken, in a seat previously held by two Jews, Wellstone and Republican Rudy Bocshwitz.

Two states have two Jewish Senators. Wisconsin with two Jewish men in the Senate, Russ Feingold, whose sister is a Reform rabbi, and Herbert Kohl. California, as we are all aware, is represented by two Jewish female Senators, both Democrats. Among the 13 Jewish Senators today, there is only one Republican, Arlen Specter of PA, but two independents, Bernie Sanders of VT and Joe Liebermann of CT.

Kurt Stone in his recent book The Congressional Minyan, The Jews of Capitol Hill, reports that there is no official Jewish caucus but that when Congressman Gary Ackerman brings down good New York Deli he gathers a crowd. Stone reminds us that the recent issues around the swearing in of the first Muslim to the House of Representatives were not so unlike those of the first Jewish elected officials two centuries ago. In 1809 when Jacob Henry, a Jew, was elected to the North Carolina House of Commons, they tried to remove him on the grounds that he refused to take the prescribed oath of office on the New Testament. Through the 1820’s and 1830’s the Christian nature of the oaths of office was an issue in many states and continued to be an issue in a few states even after the Civil War.

Among the conventional explanations for the disproportion between the percentage of Jews in the population and the number in any field, are:

• the concentration of Jews in large urban areas
• Jews today being primarily of a certain socio-economic demographic
• the carry-over of certain traditional Jewish values, like study and messianic hope
• and the particular history of certain industries.

In the case of Jews in the House and Senate, at least with regard to Stone’s book, I wonder if one factor isn’t his generous counting of Jews. Stone includes in his “Who is a Jew” those considered Jewish halachically, that is born of a Jewish mother or who formally convert, and those conventionally considered Jewish, that is those who so self-identify. However, he also counts those not Jewish under either of these standard definitions, like Senators Goldwater, Cohen of Maine, and Cohen of Georgia, Representative Pulitzer of New York, and the well known Fiorello LaGuardia, one of New York City’s most famous mayors.

Goldwater is included because of his family’s Jewish roots, and Cohen of Georgia similarly because, although he was a practicing Episcopalian, he was the descendent of an old Jewish family. Senator William Cohen of Maine has an interesting story and one that was quoted often in the battles over patrilineality. He was raised as a Jew and belonged to a Conservative congregation until just before his Bar Mitzvah. At that point the rabbi refused to go forward with the ceremony unless his Irish Protestant mother converted and he himself had a symbolic bris. The family was angry that the rabbi had not mentioned this issue through the seven years that Bill was an excellent Hebrew student at the congregation, and left. That was the end of Cohen’s Jewish connection. Later in life he affiliated with the Unitarian Universalist Church.

Representative Joseph Pulitzer of New York is included in Stone’s book primarily because he was the target of anti-Semitic attack despite his non-Jewish mother. He served in the 49th Congress, from 1885-1886. A newspaper publisher, he was elected as a result of his active campaigning for Grover Cleveland, but found Congress so exasperating that he resigned four months into his term and returned to his business interests. His funeral was held at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church though it is questioned whether he had ever been in Church while he was alive.

Finally, LaGuardia, is counted by Stone as a Jew because, despite his association in the public imagination as an Italian politician, his very Italian mother was indeed Jewish and came from a prominent Italian Jewish family. Though remembered as being the colorful mayor of New York, he served six terms in the House from 1917-1919 and 1923-1933. Scholars argue that as good a mayor as he was, and some say he ran the best reform government in American municipal history, he was also an extremely effective and well informed member of the House. Though LaGuardia rarely mentioned his Jewish background, not wanting to be accused of using it as a political prop, he did sometimes joke about being “a balanced ticket” all by himself. His Yiddish was more than passable and he was targeted in Nazi propaganda of the time as a “shameless Jewish lout.” In making the choice to include these non-Jewish Jews, Stone quotes Rabbi Jacob Marcus, the long time dean of American Jewish history, who would on occasion consider someone with more marginal Jewish connections, “Jewish enough” to include in his American Jewish Biography.

So far as I can tell while Jews have been elected in fairly large numbers in the House and Senate, no rabbi has yet served. That may change this year as Dennis Shulman, a therapist and rabbi, runs for the House from New Jersey. Shulman became blind as a teenager but still completed his undergraduate studies at Brandeis University and got a PhD from Harvard in clinical psychology. He was ordained in 2003, reviving an interest he had earlier in his life in Judaism, and has served as an adjunct faculty member at the Hebrew Union College.

Asked about being a rabbi running for office, Shulman reiterated his support for separation of Church and State and insisted that he was respectful of all faiths and of those without a religious faith as well. He traced his inspiration in running for public office to the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, which he has taught for many years. Heschel, as you may recall, told his critics that his feet were praying when he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr in Selma Alabama. "Heschel said to speak about God and not Vietnam is blasphemy," Rabbi Shulman said. "I take the Bible seriously but not literally. It's a serious message. The message is that we have a responsibility to do better."

Along with keeping track of important national and California issues, I know I”ll be watching New Jersey this fall to see how Rabbi Shulman fares.