Too Jewish?

Americans made "Seinfeld" one of the most popular TV shows ever. But are they ready to put a Jew in the White House?

By Jake Tapper

Aug 9, 2000 | In 1989, the late Brandon Tartikoff sat down with two fellow NBC executives to watch a pilot for a new sitcom, then called "The Seinfeld Chronicles."

"Too Jewish," he assessed.

The other two executives, both gentiles, didn't agree. But Tartikoff, a Jew, gave the show a thumbs-down.

Soon after, Tartikoff ran into Rob Reiner, the co-founder of the company that produced the pilot. Reiner "was yelling and screaming that I had made the biggest mistake of my life," Tartikoff later told Esquire magazine, in one of his last interviews before he died. "So I thought about it, and I decided to order the show. But I gave it the smallest order in TV history -- four shows."

Eventually, of course, the show, possibly the most culturally Jewish in television history, also went on to become one of the most successful and popular shows of all time.

The lesson, according to Abraham Foxman, president of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith: "A lot of us underestimate America."

Foxman and I are talking about Al Gore's selection of Connecticut senator -- and proudly observant Jew -- Joe Lieberman as his running mate.

It makes me, as a Jew, kind of uncomfortable. I don't like the fact that people are talking about whether or not America will vote for a Jew. There are a whole lot of voters out there, I think, who simply don't like Jews, even if they haven't met any. But also, sometimes, after they have. And anti-Semitism isn't restricted to the right wing; it's alive and well in black America -- not just fringe characters like Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad, but in "mainstream" black liberals like the Rev. Al Sharpton and the Rev. Jesse "Hymietown" Jackson, who will speak at the Democratic National Convention next week. The ADL has also reported that black Americans are three times more likely to hold anti-Semitic views than whites.

Whether it's white or black voters, I don't know that America is fully ready to accept a Jew in the White House, and that idea makes me uncomfortable, so I'd rather change the subject.

Lieberman's nomination is causing plenty of Jews discomfort, Foxman says. "There's a lot more insecurity in the Jewish community than I thought there was two days ago," he says. "A lot of people are very troubled by what this will mean."

If Gore-Lieberman loses, will Lieberman be blamed?

What ugly rhetoric -- already alive on the Web and talk radio -- will we be forced to confront?

But other Jews argue that this is just so much, er, paranoia. On the whole America accepts Jews, they say.

"I don't buy all the anti-Semitic arguments," says William Kristol, editor and publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard, who's also Jewish. "That's a small chunk of America, and they'll probably be voting for Pat Buchanan anyway."

Last Saturday, Ed Rendell -- the former mayor of Philadelphia, present chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and a Jew -- told reporters, "I don't think anyone can calculate the effect of having a Jew on the ticket. If Joe Lieberman were Episcopalian it would be a slam dunk."

But Kristol thinks Rendell didn't mean that. "I think that was tactical so that Gore would get the credit for picking a Jew," he says.

I don't know about that. Rendell has said before that he thinks his Jewishness would be held against him if he ran for state office, even though Pennsylvania has elected Jews before. And I didn't necessarily disagree with him.

My mother, who grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., was raised Presbyterian. But she converted to marry my father, a Chicago Jew. I went to Jewish schools, camps and am more knowledgeable about Judaism -- if not more observant -- than most Jews I know. But, perhaps because of my mom's Christian roots and my Christian grandparents, I've always had a slightly outsider view of my people.

One reason is fairly simple: My mother's Scotch-Irish DNA has meant that I can frequently pass as a gentile. My private-detective name helps, too. And that means that sometimes people let their guard down and say things that imply ... well, not anti-Semitism, really. That conjures images of "Schindler's List" and skinheads. But something. A distaste. An acknowledgment that Jews are different, and not necessarily in a good way.

"I'm certainly the last one to tell you that there's no anti-Semitism in this country," reassures Foxman, whose career is built around the finding and decrying of bigotry in all its many forms. "But at the same time, America is a lot more tolerant today."

Foxman's basing his assessment on polls the ADL's conducted for years, which ask respondents various questions to see if they hold latently anti-Semitic attitudes -- whether they agree with statements like "Jews have too much power" or "Jews are more loyal to Israel than America." In 1964, 30 percent of the populace was assessed to be latently anti-Semitic. In 1992, it was 20 percent. Now, Foxman says, it's down to 12 percent.

Of course, he acknowledges, "that's still 25 million Americans ... But it's not like they get up in the morning and say, 'How can I hurt the Jews?' It's more like they get in his way, they're annoying, he just doesn't like them. But voters like that have other interests -- abortion, gun control, healthcare, who knows? People vote based on a basket of issues."

But those are polls, I say. Polls told John F. Kennedy in 1960 that his Catholicism wasn't going to be held against him as it was against Al Smith, that he was going to defeat Richard Nixon with 56 percent of the vote. Kennedy, it turns out, beat Nixon by only .16 percent -- a mere 120,000 votes. African-American elected officials go through this all the time; pre-election polls indicate support for them at a rate much higher than the vote ends up being, because voters don't want to admit (maybe even to themselves) that they're not voting for the black guy. Couldn't that be the case here?

"Sure, people tell you in polls what they think you want to hear," Foxman says. "But even if you discount that, the news is good. There was a poll that indicated that 92 percent of the American people would vote for a qualified Jew for president. Even if you discount 20 percent of that, it's still 70 percent, which is pretty good."

Foxman points out that the Senate has 11 Jews, a "minyan" -- a reference to the term meaning the minimum of 10 adult male Jews needed before a public Jewish prayer service when the Torah is read.

Next Page: Jew-baiting push polls and other anti-Semitic acts

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