All this week you will hear Jewish voices lifted on behalf of Sonia Sotamayor as the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice. No doubt all the dozen or so Jewish senators will vote for her confirmation. Like other minority strivers before her, Sotomayor's story resonates for American Jews because it recalls our own struggle to come inside the American establishment. Republican Arlen Specter praised diversity yesterday and said that it was wrong that it took till 1967 for a president to name a black justice to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall. From the Times coverage of the hearing's opening day:
As he introduced her, Senator Charles E. Schumer,
Democrat of New York, choked up with emotion over her life story. Mr.
Leahy compared her to Louis D. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice, and Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice.
On NPR yesterday, Robert Siegel openly criticized Iowa Senator Charles Grassley for his criticism of President Obama's statement that he seeks judges with "empathy." The roles in the interview/encounter were clear. The Jewish journalist was siding with an African-American president on behalf of a Puerto Rican judge; on the other side was a heartland gentile, or as they used to say in postmodernist classes, a dead white male.
I've always been mildly cynical about the Jewish support for the civil rights struggle, though I have been engaged in that struggle myself. I have always wondered what portion of the large Jewish engagement was selfish: that blacks and Puerto Ricans, being far more numerous than Jews, might serve as our surrogates in our efforts to gain acceptance in American society. We could stand up for them without having to stand up so loudly for ourselves. All the Jewish lawyers serving Paul Robeson and other civil rights heroes–they were advocating for the Jews, too.
On the one hand the Sotomayor hearings lessen my cynicism. Jews are part of the American establishment; we're privileged, and still we affirm minority rights as a keystone of modern American society. That's great. I cheered Specter's statement as an expression of liberal, blue-state culture.
On the other hand, the hearings enlarge my cynicism. All this week we will be hearing empowered American Jews praising Sotomayor– from Schumer to Specter to Franken, to Brian Lehrer on WNYC to Nina Totenberg, to Robert Morgenthau and Michael Bloomberg. Many of these Jews are also big supporters of Israel. Does it mean anything to them that in Israel, Palestinians are second-class citizens? And that several million Palestinians live in Jim Crow conditions on the West Bank, or worse, in Gaza? What does it mean that Israeli society is infused with racism, that a Barack Obama could never become prime minister in Israel–no, the Arab parties are not even invited into the governing coalitions, even as Labor breaks bread with the Jewish far right, in precisely the way that Mississippi black voters were dealt out of the Democratic Party in 1964–and that a Sonia Sotomayor would never be treated as an equal?
I have faith. The new Freedom Riders in the West Bank are stirring us all. Younger American Jews are fully aware of this hypocrisy, and that they will want no part of it.
