In the 1950s, the future of observant Judaism in America appeared to be so precarious that leading sociologists were predicting its imminent demise. But, like an animal that has been taken off of the endangered species list, it made a remarkable recovery. By the 1990s and 2000s, it was beginning to thrive to such an extent that sociologists had to amend their prognostications: The data now show that by 2050, the United States’s Jewish population will likely be majority Orthodox. In the past several decades, observant Jews, once confined to the shadows, began to attain increasingly prominent positions in public life. The most prominent of them all was Joe Lieberman, the four-term Connecticut senator and first-ever Jew on a major party’s presidential ticket, who died on March 27 at the age of 82.
Lieberman was a great source of pride (or “nachas,” as we say) for American Jews, and for American Orthodox Jews in particular. I vividly remember the excitement I felt as a Yeshiva University High School student in 2000 when Al Gore chose him to be his running mate. When my classmates and I heard that an Orthodox Jew had been chosen to be on a presidential ballot, we realized that a new day had dawned for observant Jews in America: Henceforth, we would no longer feel that we would need to leave our Judaism at home to participate in American life in the public square.
Throughout Lieberman’s 24 years in the U.S. Senate, he observed Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath, which begins Friday night at sundown and concludes Saturday night after nightfall), walking instead of driving to the Senate on Saturday if a bill was scheduled to be voted on that day. And, although he did not always wear his kippah (head covering, or “yarmulke”) in public, he was known to have observed many of the central Jewish rituals not only in private but in public as well.
Lieberman was also a great source of pride to us New Englanders. If anyone from this past generation deserves the sobriquet “Mr. Connecticut,” it is Joseph I. Lieberman, who was born in Stamford, attended college and law school in New Haven, and served in the Connecticut Senate for 10 years. In between his tenures in the Connecticut State Senate and U.S. Senate, Lieberman served for six years as Connecticut attorney general. My mother, who was working as a local news anchor at the time in Hartford, interviewed Lieberman for Channel 3 (Connecticut’s CBS affiliate) and recalled Lieberman as being very affable (or “heimish,” as we would say) and outgoing. His superior people skills would be an asset to him in his political career, which transitioned from local to national when he defeated three-time incumbent Lowell Weicker to win his first U.S. Senate election in 1988. Although Lieberman thereafter would need to spend a substantial amount of time in Washington, he continued to be as involved as possible with his community in New Haven, only moving out after he retired from the Senate in 2013.
One day in 2016, while walking out of a little grocery store in Riverdale, New York, with a bag of kiwis, I passed by a person wearing jeans and a sweatshirt who looked awfully familiar. “My gosh,” I said to myself, doing a double take. “That guy looks just like Joe Lieberman. … It can’t be! … Can it?” It was! Lieberman had moved to the same community I had been living in for about five years and, in his retirement, had started teaching at Yeshiva University, my alma mater. In the Riverdale synagogue that I attended, I marveled at how Lieberman carried himself as just another Jew in the pew. With his preternatural good-natured demeanor and everyman-modesty, if you were visiting from Uzbekistan and had no knowledge of U.S. politics or recent American history, you never would’ve known that this person who just shook your hand and wished you a “Good Shabbos” was one of the most prominent figures in politics in the past two decades, as well as someone who came within 537 votes of being the 46th vice president of the United States.
Lieberman, a bipartisan who placed principle over expediency and country over party, leaves us with an important political legacy. But his greatest legacy may be cultural: the self-confidence he gave to observant Jews, and to any person of faith of any religious affiliation, that there is a place for us here, too.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. His latest book, Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America, was published last summer by the University of Alabama Press.
