by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

May 21, 2009

Ask Kenneth Kaplan why he is the Libertarian Party’s candidate for governor of New Jersey and he’ll tell you he’s a “child of the ’60s” who “believes in individual liberties.”

In the category-defying case of the Libertarian Party, those range from doing away with most taxes and opposing gun control to approving same-sex marriage and legalizing the medical use of marijuana.

“Most Republicans and Democrats would say they believe in individual liberties, too, but they really don’t,” Kaplan said as he sat in his real estate office in Parsippany.

“They believe in bigger government that controls more and more of what we do, and I don’t believe in that. I believe in voluntary relationships between individuals rather than relationships imposed by the government.”

The Libertarian Party’s State Committee unanimously selected Kaplan, president of KenKap Realty Corp., as their candidate last month. It’s an admittedly uphill climb: In the 2005 gubernatorial race, eight third-party candidates combined to claim just 3.5 percent of the votes cast.

Kaplan is realistic about his chances. Talking about his youth in West Orange, where he attended the Jewish Center of West Orange (now B’nai Shalom), he mentioned that he was president of United Synagogue Youth.

“It was one of the few elections I won,” he joked.

But Kaplan is serious about the positions his party represents, many of which, he said, are derived from his own Jewish and political roots.

Kaplan, 61, was born at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. His grandfather had emigrated from Romania, rented a pushcart, and eventually owned a store. It evolved into a family business, Milt Kaplan’s Men’s Wear in Orange, which Kaplan ran after his father’s death.

“My parents lived through the Great Depression. That shaped them and that shaped me. I am careful with a dollar,” the candidate said.

As he grew up in a family of New Deal Democrats, Kaplan said, he perceived Republicans “as a country club party that was not for Jews. I admired John Kennedy. I wanted to be elected president, and I thought it was important that a Catholic be elected if a Jew had any chance in the future.

“Then I admired Barry Goldwater, the ‘conscience of a conservative.’”

In his first year of college at Franklin and Marshall in Pennsylvania, Kaplan helped organize a chapter of Hillel and was active in the movement to support Soviet Jewry.

Currently he is a member of Temple Beth Shalom in Livingston and a board member of its men’s club.

“I have a long history of support of Jewish causes,” he said.

After Kaplan transferred to Brandeis University in Massachusetts, he became an opponent of the war in Vietnam. He campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, the Minnesota senator who ran in the 1968 Democratic primaries against President Lyndon Johnson.

But Kaplan said he became “very disillusioned” when the Democrats “abandoned the antiwar movement” that year.

‘The right thing to do’

Then, in 1973, he saw a Libertarian Party ad on television. It was for candidate Fran Youngstein, who was running for mayor of New York. “It was the fusion of everything I had ever believed in — the capitalism I got from Goldwater and the lifestyle liberalism I got from the Democratic Party,” Kaplan recalled. “I said, ‘Wow! That’s it!’ and I’ve been a Libertarian ever since.”

Among the “key issues” on his platform is a proposal to abolish local restrictions preventing single-family homeowners from dividing up their properties into two- and three-family units.

He would allow marijuana to be legally prescribed by a doctor for people with “cancer, multiple sclerosis, glaucoma, and other ailments. It is a humanitarian issue. I want the sick people who need it to get it.”

He said he believes abortion “is a woman’s decision between her and her doctor. However, it comes down to people’s own views as to where and when life begins. I think reasonable people can disagree on that, but I don’t think the state should be involved.

“But because some people do hold such strong views against it,” Kaplan said, “I would not use tax dollars to pay for abortions.”

And a strict believer in the Bill of Rights, Kaplan opposes gun control. “Religious freedom and freedom of speech and freedom of the press are all in danger if you start saying the Second Amendment is not an absolute. Then you can say, ‘The First Amendment only applies to Christianity, not to Judaism or Islam.’”

Kaplan, a divorced father of two, is strongly in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. He said he has “both an ideological and a personal interest in its passage. I think it is the right thing to do as a civil rights issue, and I have a son who is gay. Every Jewish parent can relate to the idea of wanting equality for their children, and I want equality for my son.”

His son, David, is an engineer in Baltimore. His daughter, Kimberly, lives in New York, where she is a staff member of ABC News’ Nightline.

When the subject turns to Jewish causes, Kaplan again demonstrated a Libertarian’s independent streak.

He suggested that the New Jersey-Israel Commission, which fosters trade and cultural relationships between the state and the nation, “isn’t necessary.”

“Commercial interests need to represent themselves,” he said.

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