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Mike Pence and the Jews: What to know as he begins a presidential campaign

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Until the Jan. 6 insurrection, Mike Pence made sure to stay on the same page as Donald Trump — except, sometimes, when it came to the Jews. 

Both men delighted the pro-Israel establishment — Trump by fulfilling a long wishlist of Israel’s right-wing government, Pence by proving himself as a stalwart Christian Zionist through years in elected office. But just weeks after Trump assumed office, the difference in how each man approached Jewish anxieties was already stark. 

Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions were getting bomb threats, and a Jewish journalist asked the president what he planned to do about antisemitism. Trump lashed out, accusing the reporter of lying and quipping, “Welcome to the world of the media.”

A week later, Jews in St. Louis were reeling after a vandal knocked over over 150 tombstones in a Jewish cemetery. Pence was in town and took the opportunity to condemn the bomb threats and the vandalism as “a sad reminder of the work that still must be done to root out hate and prejudice and evil.” Then, he headed over to the cemetery, picked up a rake and helped clean up the mess.

Pence’s bid is the longest of shots. He polls in the low single digits, while Trump leads in the polls. The former president routinely depicts Pence as a traitor for not trying to hand him the election when Pence presided over the certification of the electoral vote on Jan. 6, 2021. Pence, meanwhile, has said Trump’s behavior that day endangered his family. If Pence does succeed in unseating his old boss, it will be because he’s tapped into a deep thirst among some Republicans for a more conventional candidate to wean the party off Trump. 

No matter how he does in the race, here’s what you need to know about Mike Pence and the Jews.

He has been pro-Israel from the get-go

First elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as an Indiana Republican in 2000, Pence made clear from the outset that defending Israel was among his priorities.

“My support for Israel stems largely from my personal faith,” he told Congressional Quarterly in 2002. “God promises Abraham, ‘those who bless you, I will bless, and those who curse you, I will curse.’”

In his autobiography published last year, “So Help me God,” he credits his interest in Israel and in Jewish issues to his late sister-in-law, Judy, “an elegant, sophisticated young woman from a prominent Jewish family in Milwaukee” who married his brother, Thomas, “a pickup-driving, dirt bike-riding, banjo-playing country boy from southern Indiana.” Pence wrote, “She made him a better man.”

For years, he has placed a quote from the Biblical book of Jeremiah above the fireplace in his personal and then his official residences — in the governor’s mansion in Indiana and then in the vice president’s residence in Washington, D.C: “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to prosper you, and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope, and a future.”

“They’re words to which my family has repaired to as generations of Americans have done so throughout our history, and the people of Israel through all their storied history have clung,” Pence told a conference of Christians United for Israel in 2017.

In Congress, Pence took the lead in advancing pro-Israel legislation, especially in defending the barrier Israel built cutting through portions of the West Bank to shield Israel and some of its settlements from terrorist attacks. Together with Rep. Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat, and the late Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who was the only Holocaust survivor elected to Congress, he co-founded the House’s antisemitism task force. 

Lantos, Pence said in his autobiography, had a profound influence on him. “He and I almost always disagreed on politics, but I was always inspired by his moral clarity and courage,” he wrote. Klein now chairs the Jewish Democratic Council of America.

As Indiana governor in 2016, Pence enacted the first state law banning state business with firms that support the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel, known as BDS. The bill also applied to businesses that boycott Israel’s settlements — one of the first pieces of legislation to erase the line between Israel and the West Bank.

Later that year, the Republican Jewish Coalition effusively praised Pence’s selection as Trump’s running mate, calling him “a critical leader and important voice regarding Israel during his time in the House and as governor.”

He attended every policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee during the Trump administration; Trump avoided all of them.

His evangelical beliefs shape his domestic policy

One of the most prominent issues of the 2024 election will be abortion, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade last year. The decision gave states the authority to determine reproductive rights and led to the swift narrowing of abortion access in many states. On abortion and other issues including LGBTQ rights, Pence departs from most of the Jewish community, where support for abortion access and LGBTQ issues are high. 

A number of Republicans — chief among them Trump — believe that the party should take the win and not pursue further abortion restrictions, arguing that the decision last year contributed to Republican losses in the midterm elections.

Not Pence: he wants to ban abortion nationwide. “Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land,” he said after the court’s decision.

Pence also has a long career of opposing LGBTQ rights. When he was governor, he sought to exempt Indiana from a Supreme Court ruling recognizing same-sex marriages. As a congressman, he opposed funding for outreach to HIV patients that he said promoted gay lifestyles. (His handling of an HIV outbreak in Indiana is understood to have worsened it.)

As Indiana governor in 2015, Pence signed one of the most far-reaching state laws allowing businesses to decline to serve LGBTQ customers. Businesses threatened to boycott the state, and he soon signed modified legislation that increased protections for LGBTQ people. 

Months later, Pence was facing questions about why he pushed through the law from the Republican Jewish Coalition, a group that trends moderate on social issues and whose director said members had “a lot of questions” about the legislation. His tone was apologetic. “Ultimately we adopted a few reforms and made it clear this was a shield, not a sword,” he said of the bill.

He was the Trump administration’s top trauma whisperer for the Jews

During his time as vice president, Pence was often the favored spokesman when tragedy befell the Jews. 

In 2018, at a Trump administration religious freedom event, Pence singled out the threats of violence faced by Jews in Europe, including in countries seen as allies by Trump.

“While religious freedom is always in danger in authoritarian regimes, threats to religious minorities are not confined to autocracies or dictatorships,” he said “They can, and do, arise in free societies, as well — not from government persecution but from prejudice and hatred.”

The same year, he said he was “sickened and appalled” at Nazi graffiti on an Indiana synagogue he knew well. 

In 2019, he and his wife visited the Chabad synagogue in Poway, California, after a deadly attack by a white supremacist. “We had to come,” he told the rabbi.  

The same year, he toured Auschwitz and the next year, he attended the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial.  

Some efforts to mark Jewish tragedy went awry. In 2018, when Pence marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jewish figures chided him for imbuing Christian imagery in his celebration of Israel’s founding in the wake of the Holocaust. “A few days ago, Karen & I paid our respects at Yad Vashem to honor the 6 million Jewish martyrs of the Holocaust who 3 years after walking beneath the shadow of death, rose up from the ashes to resurrect themselves to reclaim a Jewish future,” he said on Twitter.

It was not the last time a Pence event would bring Christian themes into Jewish mourning. Pence was scheduled on Oct. 29, 2018, to campaign in Michigan for a Jewish Republican running for Congress, Leah Epstein. 

Two days earlier, a gunman massacred 11 Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, the worst-ever attack on Jews in U.S. history. Epstein invited a Messianic Jewish leader to deliver a prayer. Messianic Jews, who call their spiritual leaders rabbis, believe in the divinity of Jesus, and Jewish groups took offense. That led Pence’s folks to scramble to tell reporters that he was unaware that the rabbi was not, in fact, Jewish.

Pence was not among the many Trump administration figures and supporters who urged the president to walk back his “very fine people on both sides” equivocation after a neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017 in which a counter-protester was killed. The vice president defended his boss: “I stand with the president,” he said when asked about Trump’s statements.

Trump-Pence vs. Trump

Pence, increasingly at odds with his former boss since their Jan. 6, 2021, falling-out, has a unique way of distinguishing Good Trump from Bad Trump: He portrays the administration’s wins as “Trump-Pence” policies, while the not-so-salutary stuff is Trump’s alone. 

That dynamic was in evidence last November at the annual conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, when Pence was among an array of presidential prospective candidates to speak, including DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Trump himself.

Moving the embassy to Jerusalem? “Trump-Pence.” “It was the Trump-Pence administration that kept our word to the American people and our most cherished ally, when we moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, the eternal capital of the state of Israel,” Pence said.

As for Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election? Pence didn’t directly name the former president, but differentiated himself from him.

“The American people must know that our party keeps our oath to the Constitution even when political expediency may suggest that we do otherwise,” Pence said then. “We must be the leaders to keep our oath even when it hurts.”

Will he get Jewish funding?

Until filing papers on Monday, Pence’s main vehicle for fundraising has been a 501(c)4, a political advocacy group that is not required to reveal donors or extensive financial information. Advancing American Freedom has said its aim is to raise tens of millions of dollars to promote Pence’s favored conservative causes.

Now that he’s in the race, it will be interesting to watch where Pence draws Jewish support. One clue may be in a plane ride: Last year, Pence went on a campaign style tour of Israel and Ukraine. Loaning him the plane was Miriam Adelson, the widow of casino magnate and Republican kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. 

Adelson has since said she’s not planning to get involved in the GOP primaries.

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AUDIO: Scholar Ruth Wisse describes her collaboration with songwriter Leonard Cohen

אין אַ גאָר אינטערעסאַנטן אינטערוויו אויף דער ייִדישער ראַדיאָ־פּראָגראַם „דאָס ייִדישע קול“, גיט די אָנגעזעענע ייִדישע ליטעראָטור־פֿאָרשערין רות ווײַס איבער אירע זכרונות פֿון אַ צאָל באַקאַנטע ייִדישע פֿיגורן.

זי דערציילט ווי אַזוי זי האָט געזאַמלט געלט פֿאַר אַ בוך שריפֿטן פֿונעם קאַנאַדער לידער־שרײַבער און זינגער לענאַרד כּהן, מיט וועמען זי איז געבליבן גוטע פֿרײַנד ביזן סוף פֿון זײַן לעבן, נישט געקוקט אויף די גאָר אַנדערע ריכטונגען פֿון זייערע קאַריערעס.

ווײַס גיט אויך איבער אירע זכרונות פֿון צוויי ייִדישע שרײַבער: איציק מאַנגער, וואָס האָט אָפֿט זיך אויסגעדריקט אַ סך בעסער בײַם רעדן מיט אַ גלעזל משקה אין דער האַנט, און יצחק באַשעוויס, וואָס האָט געדינט ווי דער כּהן בײַ איר זונס פּדיון־הבן.

זי לייענט אויך אויסצוגן פֿון איר בוך (אויף ענגליש), „פֿרײַ ווי אַ ייִד“ וועגן אירע שמועסן מיטן פּאָעט אַבֿרהם סוצקעווער און דעם גרינדער פֿון ייִוואָ, מאַקס ווײַנרײַך, ווען זי איז נאָך געווען אַ סטודענטקע. ביידע האָבן זי געפּרוּווט איבערצײַגן צו ווערן צווישן די ערשטע דאָקטאָראַנטקעס פֿון דער ייִדישער ליטעראַטור אין קאָלאָמביע־אוניווערסיטעט.

צו הערן דעם אינטערוויו, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ. איר קענט עס אויך הערן אויף „ספּאָטיפֿײַ“ אָדער אויף „עפּל פּאָדקאַסט“

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A little‑remembered Gilded Age millionaire helped make milk safe for American kids through his ‘retail giving’

The 1844 edition of the widely used schoolbook written by William H. McGuffey, “Newly Revised Eclectic Fourth Reader,” includes a dialogue about the difference between “true and false philanthropy”:

Mr. Fantom: I despise a narrow field. O for the reign of universal benevolence! I want to make all mankind good and happy.

Mr. Goodman: Dear me! Sure, that must be a wholesale sort of a job: had you not better try your hand at a town or neighborhood first?

As the discussion continues, the lesson becomes clear. Mr. Fantom’s approach is too ambitious to accomplish much, while Mr. Goodman’s, if narrower in scope, was likely to be more useful in practice.

Donor with mundane objectives

Andrew Fisher’s biography of a Gilded Age New York department store magnate, “Nathan Straus: From Macy’s Magnate to International Humanitarian,” suggests that Mr. Goodman would likely have applauded Straus’ approach to philanthropy.

This black and white photo is a portrait of a man in an old-fashioned suit.
Nathan Straus made his mark in philanthropy after a successful career running the Macy’s department store. Library of Congress Image by

Many of Straus’ contemporary philanthropists were setting lofty goals for their giving. In oil magnate John D. Rockefeller’s case, it was promoting “the welfare of humanity throughout the world.” For steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, it was “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”

Straus pursued more mundane objectives that included championing milk pasteurization. Although his efforts are not as well known today as those of his more ambitious – and wealthier – counterparts, they accomplished a lot and showed that what might be called “retail giving” can have far-reaching effects.

Successful immigration story

The Straus family came to the United States from Germany in the 1850s during the first big wave of Jewish immigration. Lazarus Straus, Nathan’s father, followed a familiar path for Jewish immigrants at the time, beginning as a peddler and eventually establishing his own store in the small town of Talbotton, Georgia, where the members of his family were the only Jews.

He prospered, became a respected citizen and saw that his children received good educations, including in their religion.

Then the Civil War upended the family’s life, first by reviving antisemitic prejudices and then, eventually, by destroying the family’s business.

Starting anew in New York City, Lazarus and his older sons, Isidor and Nathan, began to sell imported china, glassware and other crockery to retailers in the Northeast and South. One was Rowland H. Macy, who had founded an eponymous store that was on the cutting edge of what Fisher calls a “retailing revolution.”

Macy’s innovations included stocking large inventories of many kinds of merchandise, competitive pricing, extensive advertising and providing a variety of services like public restrooms and a cafeteria to make shoppers’ experiences more pleasurable.

Aided by the rapid urban and economic growth of the late 19th century, the model flourished. Department stores displaced smaller, specialty shops. Other retail powerhouses, such as Bloomingdale’s and Lord & Taylor, soon competed with Macy’s.

The Straus family sold their wares at Macy’s. After Rowland H. Macy died, the Straus family became partners with its new owners. By 1896, the Strauses owned the store outright. And Macy’s was expanding: It bought another department store in Brooklyn and created a flagship building on Manhattan’s Herald Square, which Macy’s still occupies.

The big Macy's store in Manhattan is seen in a black-and-white photo.
The landmark Macy’s department store in New York’s Herald Square opened in 1902 while Nathan and Isidor Straus ran the retailer. Library of Congress Image by

His philanthropy journey begins

While Isidor Straus oversaw the store’s internal operations, Nathan focused on the company’s external activities, such as purchasing, marketing and dealing with government and business leaders.

A third brother, Oscar, pursued a career as a politician and diplomat, eventually becoming secretary of commerce and labor under President Theodore Roosevelt and the first Jewish member of a presidential cabinet. Perhaps inevitably, this led to a series of public appointments for Nathan Straus.

However, as they became wealthier, Nathan and his wife, Lina, increasingly devoted their attention to a series of philanthropic projects.

In 1893, the U.S. entered a four-year economic depression, its worst until the 1930s. As unemployment in New York City rose, Nathan Straus used his merchandising skills to address the needs of the jobless and poor.

He created a number of “depots” near tenements and boarding houses that sold coal, food and fuel at discount prices. Fisher, Straus’ biographer, rightly calls these early examples of what is now known as “social entrepreneurship”: the application of business principles to solving social problems.

Making milk less deadly

As these efforts were getting away, Straus also launched what would become his major preoccupation: promoting pasteurized milk.

In New York City in the early 1890s, Fisher writes, “the annual mortality rate among children under five was about 15 percent,” or 18,000 infants and toddlers per year. A main cause was consuming raw milk, which, unless certified by inspectors, was likely not only to contain a variety of pathogens, such as tuberculosis bacteria, but spoil easily going from farm to table.

Although scientists had long known that heating could make milk safer, doctors and public health officials worried that sterilizing milk might also destroy its valuable nutrients.

Straus, who had lost one of his own children to what he believed was a milk-borne infection, built on his projects for the unemployed by working with New York social service agencies to develop pasteurization plants and infant-milk stations near low-income neighborhoods.

They sold sterilized and refrigerated milk at below-wholesale prices, or donated it to those who could not afford to pay. Businesslike efficiency kept costs low, as did donations. Multilingual ads publicized the product’s availability, doctors and nurses advised parents on child-rearing, and careful recordkeeping aimed at assessing the program’s health benefits.

Straus and his wife devoted much of their time and money to this work. In addition to establishing 297 milk stations in 36 cities, they also spoke and wrote widely about the merits of pasteurization.

By 1908, their efforts paid off when the U.S. Public Health Service endorsed pasteurization and state and local governments began requiring that milk sold in their jurisdictions be pasteurized. Raw milk remained available in many states, and debates over its safety continue to this day.

As a result of this and other Progressive Era measures, New York City’s health commissioner estimated that infant deaths dropped by two-thirds
during the first two decades of the 20th century, with similar declines elsewhere in the country.

A beachfront city has some tall buildings.
The coastal Israeli city of Netanya was named after philanthropist Nathan Straus. Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images Image by

Other causes

While most of Nathan Straus’ efforts occurred in the U.S., he used his trips to Europe for Macy’s to promote pasteurization on the continent.

During a 1904 visit, he toured the Mediterranean and stopped in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Impressed by the early Jewish settlements and holy sites he saw, Straus became an ardent advocate for creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, an unusual position for a Jewish businessman of that era, according to Fisher.

On a subsequent trip, a broken leg kept Straus from returning to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic; his brother Isidor and sister-in-law Ida were not so fortunate.

In the U.S., Nathan Straus led Zionist organizations, while in Palestine, his chief contributions involved supporting a variety of health care and economic development activities, including Hadassah, the women’s health and community development organization founded by Henrietta Szold.

The Israeli city of Netanya is named in his honor.

No foundation to be remembered by

Nathan Straus’ achievements as a philanthropist are not widely known today because he did not create a grantmaking foundation that outlasted him, as Rockefeller and Carnegie did.

Instead, by the time of his death in 1931, Straus had donated much of his fortune. Fisher writes that Straus used to invoke an old Hebrew proverb: “Money given in health is gold. Money given in sickness is silver. Money given after death is lead.”

He also didn’t donate heavily to the burgeoning network of communal organizations set up to assist the growing population of Jewish immigrants, as did the financiers Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg, who were also affluent Jewish immigrants from Germany.

As Fisher notes, this pattern of philanthropy resembles that of Straus’ friend – and pallbearer – Julius Rosenwald, the longtime head of Sears, Roebuck and Co. Both supported Jewish causes as well as major initiatives aimed at helping others: In Rosenwald’s case, it was schools for African American children in the South, while for Straus, it was milk pasteurization in New York City and beyond.

During and after World War I, they worked together to assist Jewish refugees in Europe. Fisher might have added that neither Straus nor Rosenwald sought much recognition for their work.

His thorough account should help give Straus the credit he deserves for his philanthropy. It should also show that donors do not have to aspire to “make all mankind good and happy” to make an important difference.

In many ways, Nathan Straus was an old-fashioned do-gooder, responding to the needs he saw with innovative solutions. As a result, he wound up accomplishing a lot of good.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Many Americans are moving away from congregations, but not necessarily from religion

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

“Emma,” a young Jewish woman who we met in 2019, didn’t belong to a synagogue. She didn’t have a Jewish partner. She didn’t observe Jewish rituals regularly. On most surveys about religion, she would not seem very engaged with Judaism.

But as Emma talked about what she did in her free time, a very different picture began to emerge. She visited Jewish websites and enjoyed listening to Jewish music. She read books about Jewish topics and had recently attended a retreat for young Jewish adults to learn Torah while also doing yoga.

She was highly invested in learning about Judaism, but she explored her identity without joining traditional institutions.

Most major surveys about religion ask whether someone belongs to a congregation, how often they attend services, whether they pray regularly and whether belief is important in their lives. Those measures help identify broad shifts, like the growing percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated: the “nones.”

But many Americans’ religious lives, like Emma’s, are not disappearing; they are moving away from membership of traditional institutions. To understand what religion looks like in 21st-century America, researchers may need to ask different questions.

Learning through art

As scholars of Judaism and education, we have been exploring how people learn about religion beyond traditional places like synagogues, Jewish schools and summer camps. Between 2019 and early 2023, we spoke with hundreds of people and explored different leisure time activities to discover what people learn about Judaism and Jewishness through cultural arts.

We interviewed dozens of audience members at Jewish-themed shows on Broadway, such as “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade.” We attended Jewish concerts and asked attendees what they learned. We explored how social media communities offer spaces to talk about different Jewish topics, like what fans learned about ultra-Orthodox Judaism from watching the television show “Shtisel.”

‘Shtisel,’ an Israeli series about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem, ran for three seasons.

Our research revealed that there is a vibrant ecosystem of people learning about religion in their leisure time. Through the arts, both Jews and non-Jews encounter Jewish history, Jewish religious practices and representations of Jewish communities.

Screen and stage

Most people we spoke with told us that they felt meaningful connections to Judaism during activities that would rarely appear on a standard religion survey.

“Joan,” an unmarried woman in her 50s from Connecticut, told us that she was deeply invested in Judaism, but felt that synagogues and Jewish community centers were not welcoming to single people without families. Instead of joining a Jewish institution, she watched Jewish-themed TV shows and movies on Netflix, and joined social media communities to chat with other fans.

“Luis,” who lived in Boston but was born in Argentina, was a Sephardic Jew, a group that traces their ancestry and traditions to Jewish communities who once lived in Spain and Portugal. His wife was Ashkenazi, meaning her ancestors came from Central and Eastern Europe. She considered herself secular, and so the couple joined the Worker’s Circle, a nonreligious Ashkenazi institution rather than a synagogue.

Yet Luis loved deepening his knowledge of Sephardic culture, and he often attended concerts of music in Ladino, a Sephardic language related to Spanish, with other Sephardic immigrants.

American singer Sarah Aroeste writes and performs in Ladino.

For Joan and Luis, these activities were not peripheral to their Jewish lives. Rather, they were central avenues for learning and community. We interviewed hundreds of Jews who told us that cultural experiences were opportunities to reflect on Jewish practices, explore questions of belonging, connect with family histories and find friends with common interests.

New questions

Some aspects of these patterns were distinctive to Judaism. Historically, many Jews have understood Judaism to be a cultural world, and not only a theological tradition. Learning about cultural dimensions of Judaism has long been part of Jewish education.

The broader phenomenon of informal learning, though, extended far beyond a single tradition. Across America, increasing numbers of people learn about religion through media, cultural productions and digital networks. Christians may study biblical themes through podcasts, online discussion groups or religious influencers. Muslims may participate in online learning communities that connect believers across the world.

The challenge for religion researchers, then, is not simply to determine whether engagement with religion is rising or falling. Rather, it is to develop more nuanced ways of understanding how people explore religious themes and practices, beyond traditional institutions. Only then can we more fully understand how contemporary Americans actually live their religious lives.The Conversation

 

 

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