Defender of the faithless
Week after week, column after column, Frank Rich is giving Jewish secularism a good name.
I’ve written before about how Jewish columnists have emerged as a new leadership class, 
having broken from the past in their willingness to write as Jews on Jewish issues. And in recent talks, I have described how the four main Jewish columnists at The New York Times — Rich, Thomas L. Friedman, David Brooks, and, until his retirement from the punditry game earlier this year, William Safire — seem to embody four distinct streams in American-Jewish political thought. Friedman is the left-leaning Zionist willing to criticize the Israel that he loves. Brooks is the new Jewish conservative, comfortable with Republican economics and groping for an accommodation with the Christian Right. Safire was conservative before conservatism was cool and on Israel admits he is to the right of his good buddy “Arik” Sharon.
Brooks, Safire, and Friedman are comfortable around a synagogue and each has written about his religious life. Only Rich seems to represent the kind of Judaism that demographers tell us is on the wane: ethnic, secular, and universal. From his perch on the arts pages and now back on the Sunday Opinion pages, Rich has been waging a counterattack on the Right’s assault on evolution, civil liberties, gay rights, and free expression. And despite his own admittedly assimilated background, no writer has written as passionately on the latent anti-Semitism he detects on the Christian Right, beginning with but hardly ending with The Passion of the Christ.
In his most recent column, he wrote about efforts by the Family Research Council and Republican allies like Bill Frist to paint Democrats as enemies of what they call “people of faith.” Rich writes that “people of faith” is merely a “code word” for “only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity.” That code was made explicit by one of the major participants in this week’s Justice Sunday broadcast, R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Mohler told NPR that “any belief system” leading “away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil.”
For Rich, theological triumphalism and political triumphalism are one and the same. As he wrote last year about the hysterical “assault on Christmas” controversy, “The idea is to intimidate and marginalize anyone who objects to their efforts to impose the most conservative of Christian dogma on public policy.”
When Rich writes about how Jewishness has shaped his ideas, he doesn’t talk of the synagogue or religion. In his memoir Ghost Light, he writes about growing up in suburban Washington, DC, the great-grandchild of Russian immigrants on his mother’s side and early German-Jewish immigrants on his father’s. “It would have been hard to guess that the Riches were Jewish, since they spoke no Hebrew, ate pork chops, and, in further defiance of their nominal religion’s practice, named their firstborn sons after their living fathers: I was Frank, Jr.,” Rich writes. “As my Rich grandparents refused to acknowledge their Jewishness, so they never spoke of anti-Semites or pogroms or Nazis.”
But a dearth of Jewish religious traditions does not mean Rich wasn’t shaped by the American-Jewish experience, and anti-Semitism remains one of the recurring themes of his writing. When fellow journalist Jack Newfield asked why, Rich explained: “I’ve thought a lot about where my motivation comes from because I’ve certainly not been a victim of anti-Semitism. It’s a larger cultural issue, which is typical of things I address in my column. Certainly, in this century, anti-Semitism has been a strain of the far Right in this country. The clue to it, to me, is that it’s not so much about anti-Semitism itself but the relation of anti-Semitism to all kinds of bigotry, including racism and homophobia.”
That is a classic gambit of 20th-century Jewish political involvement — a civil rights agenda that combines both parochial self-interest and a universal call for justice. Like the Jewish kids who rode south during Freedom Summer, Rich is apparently moved by the injustice he sees being inflicted on gays and artists and non-Christians. And like many of the mainstream Jewish organizations that supported those kids, he senses his personal stake in the battle. This is a Jewish ethic articulated by Lutheran minister Martin Niemoeller, who wrote the chilling Holocaust parable “First They Came for the Jews.”
Rich sees a straight line between the segregationists of the ’60s and today’s intolerant Right. “It’s part of the same syndrome to me,” he told Newfield. “In some cases it’s the same people who once were publicly racist about black people and are less likely to be so, or to show that, now.”
Again, this is a sort of Jewish political universalism that demographers tell us is on its last legs. A previous generation of Jews was shaped by ethnic values — the inescapability of the Jewish neighborhoods they grew up in, the institutionalized anti-Semitism that defined them in academia and the workplace. Jews born after the Second World War, by contrast, have choices their parents and grandparents could barely dream of. A Jew can live anywhere, marry anyone, and work at anything, making all of us “Jews by choice.” The result is the triumph of what writer Sam Freedman has called the “Orthodox model” — an assertive Jewish identity based in religious expression. According to this model, Judaism will survive on the basis of those making the most proactive Jewish decisions — about day school, about synagogue attendance, about marrying other Jews.
But Jews like Rich continue to defy these predictions, demonstrating that an ethnic Jewish ethos is still a powerful force in the 21st century. As long as assimilated Jews retain their strong presence in the arts, journalism, academia, and politics — and as long as they consider their fields to be under assault — they will continue to be motivated not by the synagogue but by the strong undercurrents of Jewish history. And as long as powerful Americans use code words like the “East Coast elites,” we write off these kinds of Jewish thinkers and activists at our own peril.