Members of the Tribe Read online

  After dinner we drove to the temple, where about thirty people, most of them middle-aged, were gathered. Martha Nash introduced Lori, who spoke in a low-key, direct way about the AIPAC program. She briefed the audience on foreign aid (“At three billion dollars a year, Israel is a real bargain for American security”), the fight against arms sales to Israel’s enemies (“We support the proposal to require congressional approval for arms sales to the Arabs”), and the effort to grant Israel a status equal to that of the NATO countries. These were Washington issues, well known to capital insiders but somewhat abstract out in Iowa, and she did her best to simplify them. The crowd followed her presentation carefully, and with obvious affection. There was something of the good Jewish daughter about her, and as she spoke many of the older people nodded their heads encouragingly, wanting her to do well.

  There was only a month or so until the 1986 elections, and Lori gave a rundown on AIPAC’s view of various contests. She was careful not to endorse specific candidates, but she made the organization’s preferences clear. She was especially concerned about Senator Alan Cranston of California, who was fighting for reelection. “How many of you have received direct mail appeals for Cranston?” she asked, and most of the hands in the room went up. “He’s been very, very good on issues that concern the pro-Israel community,” she reminded them.

  AIPAC rarely talks about “the Jews.” The phrase “pro-Israel community” sounds more professional, and in any event about half the people Lori deals with have non-Jewish partners. Intermarriage is not an issue for AIPAC (Dine himself is married to a non-Jewish woman); the organization seeks to build the widest possible coalition, and it takes its supporters where it finds them. One of the great ironies of the “Jewish lobby” is that an increasing number of its activists aren’t Jewish.

  After her pitch for Cranston, Lori reminded the audience that Senator Jim Abdnor of neighboring South Dakota was lukewarm on foreign aid to Israel. A few years ago, Israel had some real enemies in the Senate—William Fulbright of Arkansas, James Abourezk of South Dakota, Charles Percy of Illinois—but, one by one, they bit the dust. From AIPAC’s viewpoint, the 1986 elections were for the most part a choice between good and better. Abdnor was the closest thing it had to a villain.

  Lori concluded on a Mr.-Smith-goes-to-Washington note. “You have representatives in the House and Senate, and they want to hear from you,” she said. “Your job is to let them know what you want. Remember, that’s your right as American citizens. Your opinion can really make a difference.”

  The next morning we hit the road for Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Lori took the wheel, driving across southern Minnesota with a calm competence. By mid-morning we were both hungry and decided to stop for lunch in Blue Earth, a small town whose entrance is guarded by a huge statue of the Jolly Green Giant. A sign informed us that Blue Earth’s population was three thousand and change.

  “Do you think you could find a Jew out here?” I asked, and she grinned at the challenge.

  “Give me a stack of dimes and a phone book and a couple hours and I could,” she said confidently. She had noticed a Cantonese restaurant on the main street, a sure tip-off for a Jew hunter. “You find a Chinese restaurant, there’s got to be some Jews around,” she said.

  When we arrived in Sioux Falls, Lori changed from her driving outfit of jeans and a sweater into her work clothes, a navy blue suit and high heels. An AIPAC volunteer met us downtown and took us to the home of a local lawyer named Duke Horowitz, where twenty or so people—roughly ten percent of Sioux Falls’s diminishing Jewish community—were sipping coffee and eating sponge cake.

  President Reagan was campaigning that day in Rapid City on the other side of the state. According to radio reports, monster crowds had turned out for his rallies, while Lori addressed a group of twenty. But a handful of dedicated people in a state like South Dakota are all you need; it is quite possible that there weren’t twenty people in Rapid City that day—including the president—who would have been willing to give up an afternoon to discuss Middle Eastern policy.

  Here, as elsewhere, Lori was greeted with affection by people hungry for a Jewish winner. Most of them seemed to be second- and third-generation midwesterners, but despite their prairie isolation they identified with Israel in a deeply personal way. When Lori mentioned the peace treaty with Egypt, for example, a woman with blue hair and a corn belt twang interrupted with a loud “If you can call what we have peace.” During this trip and all across the country, Jews constantly referred to Israel as “us” and “we,” usages I found alternately touching and gratuitous.

  In Sioux Falls, Lori gave her standard presentation and answered the usual questions. The audience was willing, even eager to sign up. She was offering them a Jewish activity they could understand and appreciate, something that didn’t threaten them or put them off.

  The accessibility of AIPAC’s work is a key factor in its popularity. A couple of months later, in Los Angeles, I discussed this phenomenon with Norman Mirsky, a sociologist who is an expert on the subject of Jewish affiliation. Mirsky once spent four months at Factor’s Delicatessen on Pico Boulevard in L.A. studying the restaurant’s patrons. He discovered that most of them are highly assimilated Jews, often with non-Jewish partners. “They want to identify as Jews, but they don’t know how,” he said. “They don’t feel comfortable in a temple or synagogue, don’t know how to behave or what to do. But they know enough not to order pastrami on white bread, and they can impress their non-Jewish spouses with their familiarity with Jewish foods. That’s why they come.”

  For Jews in places like Sioux Falls, AIPAC is a kind of political Factor’s Deli. They belong to temples because affiliation is the sine qua non of Jewishness; but they are not religious people, and any ethnic differences between themselves and their neighbors are more imagined than real. These people are Jews without Jewish skills, and they feel comfortable with AIPAC because the organization doesn’t require any.

  We left South Dakota and returned to Sioux City, Iowa for Lori’s last meeting of the day. Sioux City’s main claim to Jewish fame is as the hometown of “the twins”—Ann Landers and Dear Abby. Back when they were growing up there were three thousand Jews in town; but in recent years the number has shrunk to seven hundred.

  “It’s a dying community,” said our host at dinner. The man, a local merchant who had lived for a few years in Israel, grew progressively more morose as he described the decline of Jewish life in his city.

  “Believe me,” he said, “it’s a total disaster. The young people all move away, it’s very demoralizing. Even the ones who stay don’t have the same spirit, the same ‘ta’am.’ There’s such a thing as waking up in the middle of the night when Israel is in trouble and not being able to get back to sleep again. I don’t think the younger generation really feels that way anymore.”

  In light of his pessimism, I was surprised by the turnout that night. More than fifty people showed up at the home of a wealthy businessman, and a good many of them were in their late twenties or thirties. When Lori passed her list around at the end of her presentation, two dozen people signed up.

  That night, back at the hotel, Lori and I said good-bye. I was going on to Milwaukee, and she had to leave at dawn for Nebraska, on the last leg of the Great Plains Jew hunt. She would drive for hours through the bleak countryside to meet with one person, a key contact she had cultivated over the phone, and then drive hours more to Des Moines to catch a plane for Washington.

  “Has it been a successful trip?” I asked her.

  “Very successful,” she said. “I’ve already got more names than I expected. And tomorrow I might get one or two more. It’s slow work, but it’s necessary. If you want to build a coalition, you’ve got to build it with people. It’s the only way.”

  AIPAC deals in political retail but there is another, mass market approach to Jewish political activity. Its improbable center is Fox Point, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb. There, in a blue hangarlike building, t
wo jovial Jewish yuppies named Bruce Arbit and Jerry Benjamin have put together a company called A.B. Data that may eventually make the Jew hunter as obsolete as the blacksmith.

  A.B. Data’s headquarters has the anti-architecture common to computer firms, from Cambridge to Silicon Valley. But it is a high-tech company with a difference. The coffee table in its waiting room is stacked with copies of the Baltimore Jewish Times and the Jerusalem Post Overseas Edition, and its walls are decorated with Israeli art posters. A.B. Data is a specialty operation, America’s leading Jewish direct marketing firm.

  Like many successful ventures, A.B. Data came about almost by accident. It was founded by Bruce Arbit, a potbellied man in his early thirties who chain-smokes Kools and punctuates his conversation with frequent belly laughs. Arbit is a native of Milwaukee who was raised in a Labor Zionist home and moved to Israel after high school. He attended Haifa University and intended to stay. Instead, he fell in love with an American girl who “dragged me home kicking and screaming.”

  Back in Milwaukee, Arbit started a small Jewish publishing business. He wanted to sell books by direct mail, but he soon realized that there were no Jewish lists available. Slowly he began to assemble his own, using synagogue rosters and telephone books. By 1978, he had accumulated so many names that he began to sell his lists to organizations and politicians.

  At about the same time he met Jerry Benjamin, a Harvard-trained educator and Jewish activist. Jerry was raised in a small town in Ohio, where he developed strong ideological passions—liberal in politics, conservative in religion. When the two met, Jerry was working as an administrator at the Maimonides Academy, a prestigious New England Orthodox school. Bruce convinced him to leave and join him in Milwaukee.

  “In those days, A.B. Data was just a hole in the wall,” said Jerry. He is a plump, sandy haired fellow with a boyish, open manner and an obvious delight in his success. He and Bruce are business partners, but they are also close friends who trade genial insults, finish each other’s sentences, and laugh loudly at each other’s jokes. They could have been a borscht belt comedy duo; instead, they are the proprietors of a multi-million-dollar business that employs 225 people.

  The reason for this growth can be summed up in one word—information. Jerry Benjamin and Bruce Arbit know more than anyone else about where American Jews are and how they can be reached. “Let’s say you want to get in touch with red-haired Jewish doctors who play golf,” Bruce said, bubbling with the enthusiasm of a magician about to perform a well-rehearsed trick. “Okay, first we pull our file on Jewish doctors, which is compiled from medical registries, phone books, and synagogue rosters. Then, for the red hair, we go to the motor vehicle registries—most states list hair color for driver’s licenses and you can get that stuff easily. And then, for the golf, you turn to the subscription list of Golf magazine. Lay one on top of the next until you come up with a list. Jewish doctors with red hair who play golf. Simple.”

  Bruce and Jerry estimate that there are roughly 5.6 million Jews in America, or, as they prefer to count, between 2.3 and 2.6 million households. Their computers list the names and addresses of 1.7 million households—approximately two-thirds of the total. “There are no absolutely foolproof figures on this,” said Bruce. “The only thing we know for sure is that the number of Jews in this country is declining, mostly as a result of intermarriage. It’s interesting to note that fewer and fewer of the non-Jewish partners convert. That’s a trend.”

  “How do you find Jews?” I asked, thinking of Lori Posin’s painstaking approach. Bruce and Jerry looked at each other and smiled. “Simple. It’s all a matter of names and probabilities,” said Bruce.

  “Exactly,” said Jerry, breaking in to finish the thought. “Take the name Cohen, for example. What percentage of the Cohens in this country would you say are Jewish?”

  A few weeks earlier I had been looking for Jews in a midwestern inner city and had come across the name “Glorious Cohen” in the phone book. When I called I was informed by an irate Mr. Cohen that he wasn’t a Jew and never had been.

  “Not all of them,” I said, recalling that conversation. Jerry seemed disappointed that I had managed to evade his trap.

  “Right. Eighty-six percent of Cohens in America are Jewish. But Cohen is easy. There are 80,000 common Jewish names, each with its own degree of frequency. We match them up with neighborhoods and professions, first names, and other indicators, and we get pretty close to the exact percentages.”

  “Take the name Gordon,” said Bruce. “It’s a borderline name. Sheldon Gordon from Long Island is likely to be a Jew. Bubba Gordon from Tennessee, probably not. It’s a matter of probability and common sense.”

  “Right. First names are very important,” said Jerry. “Only about half of all Jews have Jewish family names, so we look for Yiddish or Hebrew first names. It’s interesting that Jewish yuppies like Hebrew names for their children.”

  Arbit and Benjamin not only find Jews, they try to find out about them, and they take a gleeful pride in the information they have accumulated. “What percentage of Jews have Christmas trees?” demanded Benjamin. “Come on, take a guess. Eleven percent.”

  “And what percentage keep kosher?” asked Arbit, smiling broadly at his partner. “Bet you can’t guess that one, either. All right, twenty-two percent.”

  “I’m a little skeptical about that one,” said Jerry. “The other day I saw a neighbor of mine who claims to be Orthodox at the drive-in window at McDonald’s. I think we should start a new category—people who eat McD.L.T.s only in the privacy of their own car.”

  Both Arbit and Benjamin delight in this kind of speculation, but they haven’t built up their data bank to amuse visitors. They sell information about Jews, and to judge by their company’s rapid expansion it is a sellers’ market. They have two kinds of clients—Jewish groups and politicians—and their company is strategically located at the point where the two intersect.

  Neither Arbit nor Benjamin is simply a technocrat. A.B. Data sells mailing lists to all the Jewish organizations, but its owners have their own agenda, and this poses a potential threat to the establishment. “Direct mail is the great equalizer,” Jerry said in a matter-of-fact tone. “We can enable Jews’ in Montana and Idaho and places like that to take part in Jewish life without an intermediary organization located on the eastern seaboard. We make it possible to bypass the gatekeepers of the Jewish community.”

  The A.B. Data agenda is based on three principles: Zionism, traditional Jewish values, and American political liberalism. In the fall of 1986, the company was still promoting these indirectly, as a resource for politicians and mainstream Jewish organizations. But knowledge is power, and Benjamin and Arbit are potentially very powerful men. When I mentioned the possibility that they might someday create an independent Jewish power center in Fox Point, Wisconsin, they both smiled modestly, but neither one denied the possibility.

  We interrupted our conversation to take a tour of A.B. Data’s facilities. At the heart of the operation are giant computers that contain the vital statistics of millions of Jews. I found the concentration of so much information disconcerting. “I bet the Klan or the PLO would love to get their hands on this stuff,” I said to Arbit, who was guiding me through the building. But he dismissed my concern as Israeli paranoia. “America doesn’t work that way,” he assured me. “Besides, there’s nothing here you can’t get out of the phone book.”

  Benjamin and Arbit, like the people at AIPAC, view America’s current philo-Semitism and political stability as natural and permanent. It is not dangerous to compile Jewish lists because there is no real threat to Jews; not presumptuous to organize Jews politically, because as Americans it is their right. Although Benjamin and Arbit consider themselves Zionists, they do not accept the Zionist notion that Jews are merely guests in America.

  Much of A.B. Data’s work is done for politicians who want to appeal to Jews for support and financial contributions, and Benjamin and Arbit have been exceptionall
y effective in helping them do it. I mentioned to them that during the Iowa Jew hunt, Lori Posin had asked her audiences if they had been contacted by Alan Cranston. The question always elicited good-natured groans from people who had been inundated with appeals. “My children should write me as much,” one woman had said in Waterloo. “They should send that much money, too,” laughed Benjamin. “We raised four million dollars for Cranston in twenty-dollar checks.”

  A.B. Data is picky about its clientele. “We have two conditions for working with politicians,” said Jerry. “They have to be pro-Israel and they have to be liberal on American issues.”

  Bruce readily agreed with the first principle. “There is no single Jewish community in this country,” he said. “There are different groups with varying ideologies. The only thing that unites them is support for Israel.” But he disagreed with the second. Like Jerry, he is a political liberal and Jewish conservative; but he is the less doctrinaire of the two, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he occasionally slipped into the McD.L.T. line. “Jerry’s a knee-jerk liberal,” he said fondly. “I consider myself a moderate and I have no trouble working with candidates who are moderate if they are pro-Israel.”

  In fact, most of A.B. Data’s political clients are liberals: Cranston; Lowell Weicker of Connecticut; Barney Frank from Boston; Jim Hunt, who ran against Jesse Helms for the Senate in North Carolina; Carl Levin of Michigan; and Paul Simon of Illinois.

  “Most Jews are genetically Democrats,” said Bruce. “Jesse Jackson’s performance at the 1984 convention was perceived by Jews as the Democratic Party shitting all over the Jews, and they were freaked out by it. Believe me, it’s had an impact ever since. The worst response we ever got to a direct mailing was one we did to raise money to fight apartheid. Jews in America don’t support apartheid, but as long as Jesse Jackson is a major black spokesman they won’t give money on the issue. Still, in spite of everything, they voted for Mondale three to one. Why? Because Jews in this country, despite what they say, are still basically insecure, and their main fear is of right-wing Christian anti-Semitism.”