C.t Redmond Florida House of Representatives 1879 Nassau County

Eric Cantor, the departing House majority leader, is the last Jewish Republican serving in Congress.

Credit... Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Jewish Republicans know they are non many in number. But at a recent gathering at the St. Regis Hotel in downtown Washington, they pondered the meaning of an particularly alarming figure: zilch. As in cypher, bupkis, zilch.

The stinging defeat final calendar month of Eric Cantor, the Business firm bulk leader and the highest-ranking Jewish politician in American history, has created the possibility of Republicans having no Jewish representation in the House or Senate for the first time in more than a half-century.

"Sometimes, a Jewish person merely wants to be able to go to Congress and speak with a Jewish person," Beverly Goldstein, a Republican donor from Beachwood, Ohio, explained in the hotel anteroom subsequently a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

"And Chuck Schumer is not it for us," she added, referring to the Democratic senator from New York.

Excluding the soon-to-be-retired Mr. Cantor, there are at present 31 Jewish members of Congress — xxx of them Democrats and an contained senator from Vermont, Bernard Sanders, who generally votes with Democrats.

Decades later a Reagan era that was relatively rich in Jewish representation on the Republican side of both the Firm and the Senate, Republican Jews are grappling with what information technology means for a party that casts itself as the protector of State of israel to potentially not accept a single i of its children in Congress. Some Democrats, of course, depict Mr. Cantor's loss equally the removal of a final fig leaf from what has become a homogeneously Christian party with piffling room for religious and ethnic minorities. Others said the loss of Mr. Cantor, a bourgeois standard-bearer deemed insufficiently bourgeois by voters who preferred a Tea Political party challenger, revealed the Republicans' exclusion of moderates of any stripe.

"It is a very right-wing political party, more so than in the past," said Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York. "And by so doing it is alienating most of the Jewish electorate, and becoming an increasingly monochromatic political party without minorities of any kind."

Despite their overwhelmingly Democratic leanings nowadays, Jewish members of Congress have a varied political heritage. Early Jewish representation on Capitol Hill included Whigs and Know-Nothings. Florida sent David Levy Yulee, an inflammatory Whig-Democrat and secessionist known as the "Florida Fire Eater," to Washington as a territorial delegate in 1841 so equally a Democratic senator in 1845, co-ordinate to Kurt F. Stone, writer of "The Jews of Capitol Hill."

The same year Yulee came to the Senate, the outset Jewish congressmen were elected, including Lewis Charles Levin of Pennsylvania, a member of the Know-Nix Party, staunch nativist and anti-Cosmic. Mr. Levin argued for a limit to the cubic footage of ships from Ireland, accused the pope of plotting to build a tunnel to America under the Atlantic Bounding main and died in a mental hospital. His widow converted to Catholicism.

One of the first Jewish giants of Capitol Loma was Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, elected to the Senate as a Whig in 1853, before becoming a Democrat in 1859. A slave owner, but as well a celebrated intellectual, he was reluctant for the Spousal relationship to split but eventually joined the Confederacy, serving starting time as its secretary of war and ultimately as secretary of state.

Prototype

Credit... Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Afterward the Reconstruction era, which largely proved a wilderness for Jews of both parties, New York elected the country's beginning Jewish Republican congressman, Edwin Einstein, in 1879. Jewish Republicans consistently served in Congress from and then until the World State of war II period, when the 1941 and 1945 Congresses both lacked a Jewish Republican. In 1947, New York elected Jacob K. Javits, a Republican, to the Firm. His cursory absence in 1955 to serve as the state'south attorney general arguably left the last void for Jewish Republicans — depending on how one categorizes Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who served five terms and whose father was of Jewish descent.

Just as the number of Jewish members of Congress climbed to a high point of 47 in 2009, the number of Jewish Republicans had dwindled to two. The defection that yr of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania to the Democrats left Mr. Cantor equally the concluding human being standing.

Mr. Cantor'south startling fall has, however, been a approval for a scattering of Jewish Republican candidates who are suddenly being showered with attention from donors.

"Jewish Republicans are for better or worse panicking that there is going to be no representation," said Adam Kwasman, a Jewish Tea Political party candidate for Congress who has Leviticus 25:10 tattooed in Hebrew on his right shoulder ("Proclaim freedom throughout the ends of the earth unto all its inhabitants") and script from the Declaration of Independence on his left. "There has been a priority shift in the heart and soul of Republican Jews across the country," he said. "They were far more than relaxed before Cantor lost."

Mr. Kwasman, a 31-year-old Arizona state representative, was speaking terminal month after the donor-rich consequence at the St. Regis. Subsequently schmoozing with high-powered "machers" who are worried virtually the scarcity of Jewish members and a growing isolationist streak in the Republican Party, he unfolded the Menorah Psalm, with commentary, that his mother had given him to read on the flight to Washington.

"Apparently King David used to have that psalm on his shield," Mr. Kwasman said. "To give him ability and force."

The current ingather of Republican Jewish candidates need all the strength they can get. Bruce Blakeman, who is running to succeed Representative Carolyn McCarthy in New York's Nassau Canton, benefited from being deemed "on the radar" by the National Republican Congressional Committee's "Young Guns" program, which identifies up-and-coming talent. In liberal Los Angeles, Elan Carr, an Iraq war veteran who lit the Hanukkah menorah in Saddam Hussein'south Baghdad palace and features a picture on his campaign website of his family unit posing before Jerusalem'due south One-time City, is hoping to replace Representative Henry A. Waxman, a Jewish Democrat. And in the Democratic-leaning Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., Micah Edmond, an African-American who converted to Judaism equally a teenager, is viewed equally a long shot to succeed Representative James P. Moran, a Democrat.

Mr. Kwasman, a product of Jewish day schoolhouse in the Tucson suburbs who says he tries to brand Shabbat dinners with his parents whenever possible, is the Jewish candidate most affiliated with the Tea Party, opposing gun command and any form of amnesty on immigration and talking nearly bringing "Kosher Tea" to Congress. He was endorsed by Joe Arpaio, the Maricopa County sheriff who has been the subject of a Justice Department investigation considering of his crackdowns on undocumented workers. Business firm analysts consider Mr. Kwasman the underdog against a more moderate Republican in the August main.

The Jewish Republican candidate that congressional analysts requite the best shot at winning is Land Senator Lee Zeldin of New York, who is taking on Tim Bishop in Suffolk County, Long Island. On a recent afternoon, Mr. Zeldin, a babe-faced Iraq state of war veteran, sipped java beyond the street from Trick News's studios in Manhattan, where he had simply finished a brief appearance on television in which he criticized President Obama'southward foreign policy. His confront rendered fifty-fifty smoother past the television receiver makeup, Mr. Zeldin said he had come to capeesh how vital a bridge Mr. Cantor had been to "Jewish organizations, pro-Israel, philanthropists." Since the majority leader'southward defeat, he said, those organizations were looking for another strong connectedness to Congress.

"I haven't spoken to everybody," said Mr. Zeldin, who met recently with the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee. "But the people I take spoken to are disappointed, they are very emboldened to want to help us. They are request themselves if they could accept done more than to ensure that Cantor didn't lose in the first place. It's certainly on the elevation of everyone'south mind equally far as the Jewish community goes."

While concern for Israel drives much of the eagerness to elect Jewish Republicans, there are intangibles, too. Michael Goldstein, who is married to Ms. Goldstein, the donor from Beachwood, acknowledged at the St. Regis that his viewpoint was well represented by conservatives in Congress. "Then why do nosotros demand Jews?" he asked. "It makes me feel ameliorate. You want your own people there."

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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/12/us/politics/republican-jews-alarmed-at-the-prospect-of-a-void-in-the-house-and-senate-.html

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