Members of the Tribe (8 page)

“It’s a dying community,” said our host at dinner. The man, a local merchant who had lived for a few years in Israel, grew progressively more morose as he described the decline of Jewish life in his city.

“Believe me,” he said, “it’s a total disaster. The young people all move away, it’s very demoralizing. Even the ones who stay don’t have the same spirit, the same
‘ta’am.’
There’s such a thing as waking up in the middle of the night when Israel is in trouble and not being able to get back to sleep again. I don’t think the younger generation really feels that way anymore.”

In light of his pessimism, I was surprised by the turnout that night. More than fifty people showed up at the home of a wealthy businessman, and a good many of them were in their late twenties or thirties. When Lori passed her list around at the end of her presentation, two dozen people signed up.

That night, back at the hotel, Lori and I said good-bye. I was going on to Milwaukee, and she had to leave at dawn for Nebraska, on the last leg of the Great Plains Jew hunt. She would drive for hours through the bleak countryside to meet with one person, a key contact she had cultivated over the phone, and then drive hours more to Des Moines to catch a plane for Washington.

“Has it been a successful trip?” I asked her.

“Very successful,” she said. “I’ve already got more names than I expected. And tomorrow I might get one or two more. It’s slow work, but it’s necessary. If you want to build a coalition, you’ve got to build it with people. It’s the only way.”

AIPAC deals in political retail but there is another, mass market approach to Jewish political activity. Its improbable center is Fox Point, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb. There, in a blue hangarlike building, two jovial Jewish yuppies named Bruce Arbit and Jerry Benjamin have put together a company called A.B. Data that may eventually make the Jew hunter as obsolete as the blacksmith.

A.B. Data’s headquarters has the anti-architecture common to computer firms, from Cambridge to Silicon Valley. But it is a high-tech company with a difference. The coffee table in its waiting room is stacked with copies of the
Baltimore Jewish Times
and the
Jerusalem Post Overseas Edition
, and its walls are decorated with Israeli art posters. A.B. Data is a specialty operation, America’s leading Jewish direct marketing firm.

Like many successful ventures, A.B. Data came about almost by accident. It was founded by Bruce Arbit, a potbellied man in his early thirties who chain-smokes Kools and punctuates his conversation with frequent belly laughs. Arbit is a native of Milwaukee who was raised in a Labor Zionist home and moved to Israel after high school. He attended Haifa University and
intended to stay. Instead, he fell in love with an American girl who “dragged me home kicking and screaming.”

Back in Milwaukee, Arbit started a small Jewish publishing business. He wanted to sell books by direct mail, but he soon realized that there were no Jewish lists available. Slowly he began to assemble his own, using synagogue rosters and telephone books. By 1978, he had accumulated so many names that he began to sell his lists to organizations and politicians.

At about the same time he met Jerry Benjamin, a Harvard-trained educator and Jewish activist. Jerry was raised in a small town in Ohio, where he developed strong ideological passions—liberal in politics, conservative in religion. When the two met, Jerry was working as an administrator at the Maimonides Academy, a prestigious New England Orthodox school. Bruce convinced him to leave and join him in Milwaukee.

“In those days, A.B. Data was just a hole in the wall,” said Jerry. He is a plump, sandy haired fellow with a boyish, open manner and an obvious delight in his success. He and Bruce are business partners, but they are also close friends who trade genial insults, finish each other’s sentences, and laugh loudly at each other’s jokes. They could have been a borscht belt comedy duo; instead, they are the proprietors of a multi-million-dollar business that employs 225 people.

The reason for this growth can be summed up in one word—information. Jerry Benjamin and Bruce Arbit know more than anyone else about where American Jews are and how they can be reached. “Let’s say you want to get in touch with red-haired Jewish doctors who play golf,” Bruce said, bubbling with the enthusiasm of a magician about to perform a well-rehearsed trick. “Okay, first we pull our file on Jewish doctors, which is compiled from medical registries, phone books, and synagogue rosters. Then, for the red hair, we go to the motor vehicle registries—most states list hair color for driver’s licenses and you can get that stuff easily. And then, for the golf, you turn to the subscription list of
Golf
magazine. Lay one on top of the next until you come up with a list. Jewish doctors with red hair who play golf. Simple.”

Bruce and Jerry estimate that there are roughly 5.6 million Jews in America, or, as they prefer to count, between 2.3 and 2.6
million households. Their computers list the names and addresses of 1.7 million households—approximately two-thirds of the total. “There are no absolutely foolproof figures on this,” said Bruce. “The only thing we know for sure is that the number of Jews in this country is declining, mostly as a result of intermarriage. It’s interesting to note that fewer and fewer of the non-Jewish partners convert. That’s a trend.”

“How do you find Jews?” I asked, thinking of Lori Posin’s painstaking approach. Bruce and Jerry looked at each other and smiled. “Simple. It’s all a matter of names and probabilities,” said Bruce.

“Exactly,” said Jerry, breaking in to finish the thought. “Take the name Cohen, for example. What percentage of the Cohens in this country would you say are Jewish?”

A few weeks earlier I had been looking for Jews in a midwestern inner city and had come across the name “Glorious Cohen” in the phone book. When I called I was informed by an irate Mr. Cohen that he wasn’t a Jew and never had been.

“Not all of them,” I said, recalling that conversation. Jerry seemed disappointed that I had managed to evade his trap.

“Right. Eighty-six percent of Cohens in America are Jewish. But Cohen is easy. There are 80,000 common Jewish names, each with its own degree of frequency. We match them up with neighborhoods and professions, first names, and other indicators, and we get pretty close to the exact percentages.”

“Take the name Gordon,” said Bruce. “It’s a borderline name. Sheldon Gordon from Long Island is likely to be a Jew. Bubba Gordon from Tennessee, probably not. It’s a matter of probability and common sense.”

“Right. First names are very important,” said Jerry. “Only about half of all Jews have Jewish family names, so we look for Yiddish or Hebrew first names. It’s interesting that Jewish yuppies like Hebrew names for their children.”

Arbit and Benjamin not only find Jews, they try to find out about them, and they take a gleeful pride in the information they have accumulated. “What percentage of Jews have Christmas trees?” demanded Benjamin. “Come on, take a guess. Eleven percent.”

“And what percentage keep kosher?” asked Arbit, smiling broadly at his partner. “Bet you can’t guess that one, either. All right, twenty-two percent.”

“I’m a little skeptical about that one,” said Jerry. “The other day I saw a neighbor of mine who claims to be Orthodox at the drive-in window at McDonald’s. I think we should start a new category—people who eat McD.L.T.s only in the privacy of their own car.”

Both Arbit and Benjamin delight in this kind of speculation, but they haven’t built up their data bank to amuse visitors. They sell information about Jews, and to judge by their company’s rapid expansion it is a sellers’ market. They have two kinds of clients—Jewish groups and politicians—and their company is strategically located at the point where the two intersect.

Neither Arbit nor Benjamin is simply a technocrat. A.B. Data sells mailing lists to all the Jewish organizations, but its owners have their own agenda, and this poses a potential threat to the establishment. “Direct mail is the great equalizer,” Jerry said in a matter-of-fact tone. “We can enable Jews’ in Montana and Idaho and places like that to take part in Jewish life without an intermediary organization located on the eastern seaboard. We make it possible to bypass the gatekeepers of the Jewish community.”

The A.B. Data agenda is based on three principles: Zionism, traditional Jewish values, and American political liberalism. In the fall of 1986, the company was still promoting these indirectly, as a resource for politicians and mainstream Jewish organizations. But knowledge is power, and Benjamin and Arbit are potentially very powerful men. When I mentioned the possibility that they might someday create an independent Jewish power center in Fox Point, Wisconsin, they both smiled modestly, but neither one denied the possibility.

We interrupted our conversation to take a tour of A.B. Data’s facilities. At the heart of the operation are giant computers that contain the vital statistics of millions of Jews. I found the concentration of so much information disconcerting. “I bet the Klan or the PLO would love to get their hands on this stuff,” I said to Arbit, who was guiding me through the building. But he dismissed my concern as Israeli paranoia. “America doesn’t work that way,”
he assured me. “Besides, there’s nothing here you can’t get out of the phone book.”

Benjamin and Arbit, like the people at AIPAC, view America’s current philo-Semitism and political stability as natural and permanent. It is not dangerous to compile Jewish lists because there is no real threat to Jews; not presumptuous to organize Jews politically, because as Americans it is their right. Although Benjamin and Arbit consider themselves Zionists, they do not accept the Zionist notion that Jews are merely guests in America.

Much of A.B. Data’s work is done for politicians who want to appeal to Jews for support and financial contributions, and Benjamin and Arbit have been exceptionally effective in helping them do it. I mentioned to them that during the Iowa Jew hunt, Lori Posin had asked her audiences if they had been contacted by Alan Cranston. The question always elicited good-natured groans from people who had been inundated with appeals. “My children should write me as much,” one woman had said in Waterloo. “They should send that much money, too,” laughed Benjamin. “We raised four million dollars for Cranston in twenty-dollar checks.”

A.B. Data is picky about its clientele. “We have two conditions for working with politicians,” said Jerry. “They have to be pro-Israel and they have to be liberal on American issues.”

Bruce readily agreed with the first principle. “There is no single Jewish community in this country,” he said. “There are different groups with varying ideologies. The only thing that unites them is support for Israel.” But he disagreed with the second. Like Jerry, he is a political liberal and Jewish conservative; but he is the less doctrinaire of the two, and it wouldn’t be surprising if he occasionally slipped into the McD.L.T. line. “Jerry’s a knee-jerk liberal,” he said fondly. “I consider myself a moderate and I have no trouble working with candidates who are moderate if they are pro-Israel.”

In fact, most of A.B. Data’s political clients
are
liberals: Cranston; Lowell Weicker of Connecticut; Barney Frank from Boston; Jim Hunt, who ran against Jesse Helms for the Senate in North Carolina; Carl Levin of Michigan; and Paul Simon of Illinois.

“Most Jews are genetically Democrats,” said Bruce. “Jesse Jackson’s performance at the 1984 convention was perceived by
Jews as the Democratic Party shitting all over the Jews, and they were freaked out by it. Believe me, it’s had an impact ever since. The worst response we ever got to a direct mailing was one we did to raise money to fight apartheid. Jews in America don’t support apartheid, but as long as Jesse Jackson is a major black spokesman they won’t give money on the issue. Still, in spite of everything, they voted for Mondale three to one. Why? Because Jews in this country, despite what they say, are still basically insecure, and their main fear is of right-wing Christian anti-Semitism.”

I mentioned to them that my next stop would be Washington, D.C., where I was scheduled to meet with Ben Waldman. Jerry Benjamin searched his encyclopedic memory of American political operatives and brightened when he recalled the name. “Ben Waldman did Jewish political organizing for Reagan in ’84,” he said. “What’s he up to these days?”

“He’s in charge of Pat Robertson’s Jewish campaign,” I said, happy to be one up on the A.B. Data whizkids. They looked at each other in amused wonder. “Pat Robertson’s Jewish campaign,” said Benjamin. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

In political circles, Ben Waldman is known as Pat Robertson’s Jew. It is a common usage—I heard other people mentioned as “George Bush’s Jew” or “Jack Kemp’s Jew,” as if Jews, like chartered airplanes, are standard issue for presidential candidates.

Actually, Jews are intensely involved in virtually every aspect of American politics. In 1986, there were eight Jews in the U.S. Senate—many from states with very small Jewish populations (one, Edward Zorinsky, has since passed away)—and twenty-eight in the House of Representatives. And in twenty-seven of the thirty-six Senatorial races, at least one of the candidates (and often both) had a Jewish campaign manager or finance chairman.

Many of the Jews in politics are professionals who happen to be Jewish and have no particular connection with the Jewish community and its concerns. On the other hand, there are political people who specialize in being Jewish. Some, like the AIPAC activists, lobby for Israel. Others work directly with candidates, as fundraisers or Jewish issues experts; Ben Waldman is that kind of political Jew. In the fall of 1986, there were dozens like him
in Washington, but none of them was working for Pat Robertson; I went to see him because I wanted to find out what that was like.

We met in a restaurant not far from Capitol Hill. Waldman looks like the kind of Jew Pat Robertson could relate to, a handsome, fair-haired man in his mid-thirties, with startling blue eyes and the reasonable, patient manner of someone who expects not to be believed. As a boy, growing up in Claremont, California, he wanted to become a Conservative rabbi. Instead, he went into conservative politics.