The announcement by a Democratic congressman from Michigan that he will support the Iran deal attracted a great deal of media attention, including sizable articles in The New York Times and Washington Post.
This particular lawmaker found himself in the spotlight not because he chairs an important committee (he doesn’t), or is a powerhouse on Capitol Hill (he isn’t), or is an expert on Iran or nuclear matters (far from it).
What qualifies 83-year-old Representative Sander Levin for all the attention is his ethnicity. He’s Jewish. And Jewish Democrats who support the Obama administration on the Iran agreement are not easy to come by these days.
There are twelve Jews in the Senate, eleven Democrats plus Bernie Sanders. There are 22 Jews in the House of Representatives, 21 of them Democrats. Those who are the most unflinchingly loyal to President Obama (Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Boxer, Al Franken) quickly lined up in support of the agreement. But many others have been silent, and some have been openly critical.
Rep. Eliot Engel, for example, pointed to the latest “Death to America” blasts from Iran’s leaders and asked: “How can we trust Iran when this type of thing happens?”
The administration seems to believe the positions taken by the Jewish Democrats will influence the votes of other members of Congress. Apparently the thinking is that since they are Jews, they are perceived as knowing more than their non-Jewish colleagues about matters that affect Israel, and therefore some members will defer to them and follow their lead. Whether that is true remains to be seen. There are certainly more than a few non-Jewish congressmembers who are just as knowledgeable, and just as concerned about Israel, as their Jewish colleagues.
For the Jewish Democrats in Congress, this is a trying moment. The leader of their party is pulling them one way. Many of their constituents are pushing them the other way. And the fate of millions of Jews overseas could hang in the balance.
They are not the first Jews on Capitol Hill to face such a dilemma. Seven decades ago, the issue was the fate of Jews in Europe under Hitler; the dilemma for Jewish congressmen was whether to break with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over Jewish refugee policy.
In December 1942, the Allies publicly confirmed the Germans were carrying out a “bestial policy of cold-blooded exterminate” of Europe’s Jews, and “many hundreds of thousands” had already been “massacred in mass executions” or starved to death. The State Department had watered down a stronger first draft – because it feared the Allies “would expose themselves to increased pressure from all sides to do something more specific in order to aid these people” – but the bigger problem was that the declaration did not pledge to aid the victims in any way. The only action proposed was to punish the killers after the war.
In the months to follow, American Jewish organizations began to criticize the administration’s refugee policy. This was no small matter for a constituency that had overwhelmingly supported the New Deal and Roosevelt’s re-election, with 85-90 percent of Jews casting their ballots for him in 1940 and 1944. But many American Jews had come to realize that FDR’s “rescue through victory” approach was untenable; there might be no Jews left to rescue by the time victory was achieved, they warned.
There were seven Jewish members of the House of Representatives at the time (no senators). Four of them – Daniel Ellison (R-Maryland), Arthur Klein (D-New York), Adolph Sabath (D-Illinois), and Samuel Weiss (D-Pennsylvania) – were more or less forgettable, unless one counts as memorable the fact that Weiss simultaneously served as a National Football League referee during four of his five years in Congress.