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A contemporary Jewish figure who has worked with conservative Christian groups in fighting America’s culture wars is Rabbi Yehuda Levin. A media-savvy activist, Levin founded a group called Jews for Morality in the 1980s and has served as a spokesman for the Orthodox rabbinical organizations Agudas HaRabbonim and Igud HaRabbonim on social issues.
Levin first got involved in the culture wars in 1978 after seeing a letter from Rabbi Moshe Feinstein urging Jews to “fill the chambers of New York City Hall all the days of the hearing regarding homosexual legislation…to publicly demonstrate that God’s people loath abomination.”
Shortly thereafter, Levin was invited to join a delegation to outgoing New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson to discuss the formation of a national pro-morality organization. Only 24 at the time, Levin was reluctant to go, but Rabbi Avigdor Miller encouraged him, reportedly covering half his travel costs to New Hampshire.
Levin went and never looked back. In 1984 he ran for Congress against Stephen Solarz on the Republican, Conservative, and Catholic-run Right to Life tickets; in 1985 he ran for mayor of New York on the Right to Life Party ticket (“We want to have leadership more grounded in family values,” he told The New York Times); and in 1991 and 1993 he ran for New York City Council on the Conservative ticket. He also spoke at the annual anti-abortion March for Life rally in Washington, D.C. virtually every year from 1979 to 2011.
In an effort to advance his moral agenda, Levin has cooperated with a slew of Christian groups and individuals. In 2003, for example, he protested together with Rev. Jerry Falwell in support of Alabama Judge Roy Moore, who refused to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from his courthouse. A decade earlier, Levin met with Pope John Paul II in New York after receiving permission to do so from two senior rabbis in Israel. The pope encouraged Levin to continue his anti-abortion activism.
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Perhaps the most prominent Orthodox rabbi to have cooperated with conservative Christian groups in promoting traditional morality in America is Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition. The organization first made first waves in August 1994 when it placed an ad in The New York Times blasting the Anti-Defamation League for its alarmist report on conservative Christian groups. Headlined, “Should Jews Fear the ‘Christian Right’?” the ad declared that Judaism is not “coextensive with liberalism” and that “separation of church and state is not the same thing as the elimination of religious values and concepts from political discourse.”
More important, though, was Toward Tradition’s next ad, which appeared prominently on The New York Times’s op-ed page after the midterm elections that thrust Newt Gingrich and like-minded conservatives into power. Wishing “Mazel Tov” to Gingrich, Toward Tradition declared that “Judaism is a conservative and traditional religion” and opined that “many of America’s problems have been aggravated by the secularist rejection of the religious and cultural traditions that built and sustained American civilization.”
Among the signatories to the ad were Rabbi Abraham B. Hecht, Rabbi Avigdor Miller, Rabbi Mayer Schiller, and conservative movie critic Michael Medved.
In the wake of this ad, Lapin soon found himself addressing a Christian Coalition conference in 1995 and offering an invocation at the Republican National Convention in 1996.
In the early 2000s, he once again took to advertising in The New York Times. In a June 2001 ad, Toward Tradition identified itself as a “national coalition of Jews and Christians” and called on “all Americans of good will to…rally to the defense of our nation’s core values: Biblical morality, Constitutional liberty, patriotism, and prosperity.”
