USCJ Review - Spring 2007
Why I Am A Conservative Jew: Stuart Eizenstat
Stuart Eizenstat has had such a distinguished career that to list its highlights is to risk leaving important parts of it out.
Mr. Eizenstat was born in 1943; by 1967, a newly minted Harvard Law School attorney, he was a staff aide in Lyndon Johnson’s White House, and in 1968 he was research director for Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s hard-fought presidential campaign. As any potted biography can tell you, he worked for two other presidents as well – Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Mr. Eizenstat joined Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign in 1976 and worked for the Georgian throughout his presidency, becoming President Carter’s assistant for domestic affairs and policy and the executive director of the administration’s domestic policy staff.
(This interview with Mr. Eizenstat took place before the publication of President Carter’s latest book, the controversial Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. Because of the “close personal relationship between Mr. Eizenstat and President Carter, and the concerns he has with the book,” Mr. Eizenstat later emailed, he “will not comment publicly” on it.)
He served as President Clinton’s undersecretary of commerce for international trade, and then as his undersecretary of state for economic, business, and agricultural affairs, and finally as deputy secretary of the treasury. He was the United States representative for the European Union from 1993 to 1997 and negotiated property claims for Jewish and non-Jewish Holocaust survivors.
Those are just his governmental credentials. Mr. Eizenstat is a prominent lawyer, a member of the boards of many prominent institutions and major corporations, and the recipient of many honors, including seven honorary doctorate degrees for universities and educational institutions, the highest civilian awards from the governments of France, Germany, Austria, and Israel, and several major awards from the U.S. government, including the Foreign Affairs Award for Public Service and the Alexander Hamilton Award for Distinguished Service. He is the founding chairman of the American Jewish Committee’s American Jewish-Israel Relations Institute and recently completed a threeyear term as chairman of the Weizmann Institute of Science’s board of governors in Israel.
This is a remarkably impressive list of accomplishments, but it just skims the surface of what Mr. Eizenstat has done – and of who he is. Underlying this life’s work, giving it shape and definition, is his identification as a Jew. An American Jew. A Conservative Jew. And a proud one. Stuart Eizenstat was born in Chicago, but his parents moved the family to Atlanta when he was just a few months old; there is nothing of the Midwest and much of the South in his accent still. “I had a very strong religious upbringing in a Conservative environment,” he said.
“My father was a sort of lay scholar of Judaica. He had a rigorously Orthodox education in Atlanta, he sang in the synagogue choir, and he was fluent in Yiddish. Any time somebody couldn’t read the haftarah, my father filled in; he could do it with almost no notice.” His father owned a shoe company and traveled to sell shoes during the week, but Shabbat was different. “After Shabbat dinner, we’d go into the den and he’d take out his chumash, all in Hebrew, and he’d read the portion of the week to me, including the Rashi.”
The family’s synagogue, Ahavath Achim Congregation, then as now an Atlanta institution, left its Orthodox affiliation for a Conservative one, and the Eizenstats moved with it. Mr. Eizenstat holds an annual lecture series at Ahavat Achim, in honor of his late father and late uncle; speakers have included three Nobel Peace Prize winners, two former U.S. presidents, and two Israeli prime ministers.
Mr. Eizenstat went to a Jewish summer camp in North Carolina, to Hebrew school, and to a Jewish youth group. At the University of North Carolina he was a leader at the Jewish fraternity ZBT, and he participated in Hillel events. He worked on Capitol Hill and in the executive branch during his undergraduate and law school summers, and then came the year at the White House. In 1967, when Johnson declined to run and then Humphrey lost, Mr. Eizenstat went back home to Atlanta, clerked with a federal judge, and then went into private practice. “At the time, there were very few large firms in Atlanta that would take Jews,” he said. “I was Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, had a Harvard Law degree, and had worked in the White House, but still there were firms that wouldn’t take me because they didn’t take Jews.” Even in New York, even that late, there were still some firms that had quotas. “I am grateful that a prominent Atlanta firm, Powell, Goldstein, Frazer & Murphy, offered me a position. I spent 20 years there, between Atlanta and their Washington office, which I headed,” he added.
When Jimmy Carter went to the White House, he brought Mr. Eizenstat with him.
“During my time in the Carter White House, I would work 70, 75 hours a week; it was grindingly difficult, and also very exciting. I had a practice – which the president always honored – of leaving early for Shabbat dinner. It was our island of tranquility amidst the storm. We had the president and Mrs. Carter over for the seder right after the Camp David accords. It was a full seder, and the Carters participated fully. It was very emotional, reading about the Jews coming out of slavery from Egypt, and here we had the person who had achieved the first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.
The seder had a funny side too, he recalled. “The Secret Service told us that we couldn’t tell anyone, even our neighbors or our kids, that the Carters were coming. The Secret Service staked out the house. When it was time to open the door for Elijah I got up and was accosted by a Secret Service agency, who said, ‘You can’t open the door. I’ve secured the house.’ I told him that it was an ancient tradition, and he said, ‘You cannot under any circumstances open the front door.’” But Stuart Eizenstat is, among other things, a diplomat. “I negotiated opening the back door. We joked that this was the only time that Elijah came through the back door of our house.”
During their Washington stints, the family belonged to Tifereth Israel Congregation in Washington, and then Ohr Kodesh in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Both are Conservative synagogues; Mr. Eizenstat and his wife, Fran, continue to belong to Ohr Kodesh. Both are active in Jewish life. Ms. Eizenstat serves on the boards of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and of Mazon, a Jewish antihunger group. Mr. Eizenstat, who believes that it is important to be active in local as well as national and international Jewish affairs, was the president of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington from 1989 to 1991. He is now on the board of directors of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington.
Next, the Eizenstats went to Brussels, where he represented the United States at the European Union – and presided over what he thinks was the first fully kosher embassy in U.S. diplomatic history. During that time, he was the administration’s leader in negotiating huge Holocaust-era settlements settlements for both Jews and non-Jews. It was emotionally and legally complex and enormously necessary work.
His Jewishness affected his career, although not necessarily in visible ways. On the one hand, “I’ve said that if you’re an advocate in a senior position in government, your influence will be limited,” he said. “You’ll bring a Jewish agenda, like someone else might have a black or a Hispanic or a labor agenda. I never felt I was the Jewish advisor to President Carter. I was the domestic advisor, who was Jewish.”
But, he continued, “If you are Jewish, your background, your Jewishness, affects your worldview. I am influenced by the ethics of our ancestors, the Ethics of Our Fathers, the principles of the Bible. We learn to feed the hungry, to take care of the strangers in our midst. We learn from the prophetic vision of Isaiah. This background motivated me to a more liberal view of a lot of domestic issues. And then there is my strong attachment to Israel. I frequently weighed in on Israel, but always in the context of what was best for the United States.”
A prime example of Mr. Eizenstat’s being influenced by his background was his work on Holocaust restitution. “I got a call from Dick Holbrooke in early January 1995, when I was ambassador to the European Union,” he said. Richard Holbrooke, then President Clinton’s assistant secretary of state for Europe and Canada, asked Mr. Eizenstat to take on a second simultaneous job, overseeing restitution of community property lost during the Holocaust.
Although the task was immense and the challenges daunting, Mr. Eizenstat felt compelled to accept it. His staff at the U.S. mission unanimously opposed his decision. They worried about his taking on a second full-time job, particularly given how uncertain the chance of its success was. But Mr. Eizenstat thought himself to have no choice. “In 1968, when I was working on the Humphrey campaign, I had a co-worker named Arthur Morse, who had just written a book called While Six Million Died.” That work, first published that year, was a scathing indictment of the Roosevelt administration’s inadequate response to the Nazi genocide. “The book was a burning memory for me,” Mr. Eizenstat said. “When Holbrooke called, I thought, ‘How can I turn this down?’ It was supposed to last a few months, but it lasted the full remaining six years of the Clinton administration, and it morphed from restitution of communal property in central Europe to investigations of Swiss banks accounts and slave labor. It ended up with eight billion dollars of recovered funds, thousands of pieces of art returned, and thousands of dormant bank accounts paid. Clearly, if I hadn’t had a Jewish background I wouldn’t have been asked about the job and if I had been I wouldn’t have taken it. But I wouldn’t have been successful in negotiations if I was just a Jewish negotiator with Jewish interests. I had to look out for U.S. interests as well as the interests of the Holocaust victims. And I have as many lashes on my back from the representatives of the Jewish groups as I do from the foreign governments I was dealing with.
“I was a special representative of the U.S. president, not the Jewish representative, but I brought to that job my acute sensitivity of the Holocaust. It’s part of your skin, it’s in your pores, it’s the way you look at life. I was fortunate to have a president and a secretary of state who back me 100 percent. I was doing the president’s work, but with a commitment and dedication that I might not have had if I had not had the background I have.”
Mr. Eizenstat’s connection to Israel is deep, almost primal. His father’s father had moved from a town in what is now Belarus to Atlanta around the turn of the twentieth century. In the early 1950s, his grandfather, then in his 80s, announced to his three children that he was going to make aliyah. “Everyone tried to dissuade him – they told him that he was too old, that he spoke Yiddish, not Hebrew, that hadn't ever been there” – but his wife was dead, his ties fraying, and his mind made up. He moved to Israel.
“I saw him in 1965, during my first trip to Israel,” Mr. Eizenstat said. “He was in an old age home in Petach Tikvah. It was about six months before he died. His English had never been great, but we were able to talk in a combination of pidgin English and Yiddish. It was a very emotional reunion.”
In 1981, after the Carter administration ended, Prime Minister Menachem Begin officially invited Stuart and Fran Eizenstat to be his guests in Israel. “I wanted to see my grandfather’s gravesite,” Mr. Eizenstat said. He had learned that his grandfather’s father also had gone to Israel and the two men might have been buried in the same cemetery. They were. He found both graves – they were just one row apart – and was able to put stones and say kaddish at both. Now he knew exactly why his grandfather had insisted on making aliyah. “Without telling anyone, my grandfather had gone to be buried next to his father,” he said.
“That gives me a powerful identification with the state.”
When he is in Israel, Mr. Eizenstat visits United Synagogue’s Fuchsberg Jerusalem Center. “I think that the Fuchsberg Center is a tremendously important institution in the Conservative world – and in the Jewish world,” he said. “It’s the focal point for teaching, for seminars, for outreach to the young people visiting Israel who are the future of the Conservative movement. I’ve watched the new building with great admiration.”
The Conservative movement has much to offer, both in Israel and in North America, Mr. Eizenstat believes. “I consider myself and am considered by others to be a moderate, someone who is tolerant of differences of opinion. I think that’s what Conservative Judaism is about. It’s halakhic, and it also tries to live within the context of the modern world, to accommodate different views and attitudes, and to be respectful of them. That’s part of my religious attitude, and my political attitude as well.
“The Conservative movement is growing in Israel. It’s really very difficult, because Israeli society is highly secular, much more so than we are in the United States. And when they do go to shul, they go to an Orthodox shul, even though most of the time they don’t go at all. But I think the Conservative movement has got a good foothold in Israel, and I think that it will be more and more attractive to a younger generation, who want something other than a purely secular life but do not want to be Orthodox. I think the movement has a good future. It requires a lot of good and hard work and leadership.”
