During the past 30 years, Israel and Egypt have waged war. But for the past 16 months, these same two great nations have waged peace. Today we celebrate a victory, not of a bloody military campaign, but of an inspiring peace campaign.
-President Jimmy Carter at the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty Signing Ceremony
There may be no American president in the modern era whose relationship with Israel and the Jewish community was more complicated than Jimmy Carter. His signature foreign policy achievement, the 1979 Camp David Accords, have miraculously held for more than 45 years. President Carter appointed numerous Jews to fill senior roles in the administration including four in his cabinet, the most in American history until that point. Philip Klutznick, who served as Secretary of Commerce, had led both B’nai Brith and the World Jewish Congress prior to his appointment.
The prominent role Jews would go on to play in the Carter Administration was not a fait accompli. The peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia likely did not meet a Jewish person until his interview at the United States Naval Academy with Admiral Hyman Rickover, Father of the Nuclear Navy. The hard-charging Rickover was known to shave one leg of the applicant’s chair shorter than the others to test how they reacted in unexpected, uncomfortable circumstances.
Ensign Carter passed Rickover’s exam leading to his selection as a submarine offer. The grueling training schedule led Carter to remark that he at times hated Rickover because ‘he demanded more from me than I thought I could deliver’ which was said with grudging respect and ultimately reverence. On assuming the presidency, Carter protected Rickover and kept him on active-duty decades past his mandatory retirement date.
Except maybe for Israel, the issue most front and center for American Jews in the late 1970s was the plight of Soviet Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain. The number of Jews permitted to leave escalated significantly during the Carter Administration in what was termed the ‘Jews-for-Grain’ deal. Looking not only forward but back into history as well, Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel, which in 1979 set into motion the building of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
All these accomplishments did not lead to success at the ballot box. In 1980, Carter narrowly won the Jewish vote by only six points, the closest margin for a democrat since 1920 and almost unfathomable today. But memories of stagflation and malaise did not harm Carter’s legacy in the Jewish community nearly as much as his controversial 2006 book ‘Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid’.
Longtime Carter confidante Stuart Eizenstat urged the president, without success, to change the title. Embers of the firestorm set off by its publication still burn today as evidenced by the tortured statements leading American Jewish organization put out after Carter’s death last week.
On a lighter note, pun intended, Jimmy Carter is remembered more fondly for participating in the inaugural kindling of what would become known as the National Menorah in Washington. It took another 42 years for a president to participate again. In 2021, Joe Biden ascended the rostrum for the second time having lit the menorah in 2014 as vice president.
At the 1979 lighting, less than two months into the Iran Hostage Crisis, Carter centered his remarks on the plight of his countrymen being held by the Ayatollah. Carter shared a message on the holiday of Hanukkah that remains tragically poignant today. “These commitments to live and to be free are ever present these days in the minds and hearts of all Americans, because we know that 50 of our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, are not free and they want to live. We pray that this will prevail, this desire to be free and to maintain life.”
May Jimmy Carter’s prayer on the Ellipse that 1979 evening be fulfilled once again for our brethren today.
Shabbat Parshat Vayechi
Candle Lighting: 4:28pm
Havdala: 5:28pm