But presidencies are not judged on legislation alone. Obama’s status as the first African-American president will surely help shape his legacy. But an equally powerful, if less talked-about, aspect of what will be the historical judgment of the Obama presidency is his relationship with various American constituent groups—including American Jews. As a candidate, Barack Obama successfully courted much of the American Jewish community, in which concerns about the appearance of racism may have served to keep many American Jews in Obama’s camp. But upon becoming president—notwithstanding his success in garnering Jewish support—Obama undertook actions and implemented policies that run the risk of losing him significant Jewish support.

As a longtime resident of the Chicago area, and as a Jew, I have had the opportunity to see how Obama relates to the Jewish community here. My synagogue is right across the street from the Obamas’ house, which helps in perceiving the nature of the president’s connection with the Jewish community. The president seems to feel close to our synagogue—or at the very least, he puts on a good show of feeling close to us. When my beloved rabbi—and a strong Obama backer—Arnold Jacob Wolf died, Obama sent a letter of condolence to the synagogue. He did the same after the death of Leon Despres, the longtime dissident Chicago alderman during the reign of the first Richard Daley. During High Holiday services, our rabbi mentioned that she was recently on a conference call with the president, and with other Jewish religious leaders, in which the president spoke fondly of our congregation and of hearing the shofar emanating from our services while at his home. “Nice shout-out,” another conference call participant remarked to our rabbi, she told us.

Obama sought to win Jewish support for his political campaigns by joking that his name could have been “Baruch Obama,” a clever, if obvious, way to try to identify with the Jewish people. During the 2008 campaign, I saw any number of people with lapel buttons and yarmulkes with Barack Obama’s name spelled out in Hebrew. Rabbi Wolf’s enthusiastic support for Obama, and his strong standing in Chicago’s Jewish community, helped protect Obama from suspicion about his politics and policies in general and about his support for Israel in particular. All of this was essential in helping cement good and productive ties between Obama and American Jews.

Absent this political cover, there certainly was plenty in Obama’s record that might have caused American Jews to view him and his candidacy skeptically. There are, of course, various claims that Obama has been uncomfortably close (from a Jewish, pro-Zionist perspective) with figures like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, and that his closeness to such figures said something negative about the level of Obama’s support for Israel. Whether these charges are fair or not is almost beside the point when contemplating the amount of damage that they might do to a political candidate in a city with a substantial and politically active Jewish population.

In addition to getting significant Jewish religious and political figures to vouch for him, Obama also sought, while plotting his political ascent, to back away from past positions and statements that would not be well-received by the Jewish community. Ali Abunimah, the Chicago-based founder of the Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to advancing the political rights of Palestinians and detailing what it perceives to be Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, detailed how Obama initially expressed strong sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people and deep aversion to Israeli policies toward the Palestinians but began to backtrack from his statements in 2004, when he ran for the U.S. Senate seat in Illinois. “Hey, I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race,” Abunimah says Obama told him when they saw each other while Obama was trying to capture the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat. Obama assured Abunimah that “when things calm down I can be more up front.” As Abunimah describes it, Obama was only doing what was necessary to ensure that he wouldn’t face electoral problems at the hands of a politically active American Jewish community.

Other actions on the part of the Obama campaign served to keep American Jews on board. Throughout the 2008 campaign, and indeed throughout the Obama presidency, there has been the not-so-subtle implication on the part of Obama supporters that a significant number of those who oppose the administration do so because they cannot stand the presence of an African-American president. We have seen the charge of racism regularly issued against members of the Tea Party movement, and while some in that movement have certainly expressed objectionable statements on the issue of race, it is unfair to ascribe those objectionable statements to the entire group, which seems to be mainly exercised by a more generalized anger about the failing economy. Nevertheless, supporters of the Obama Administration have shown little hesitation to accuse detractors of racism, which causes constituent groups in American politics to carefully calibrate their actions in response. Since no one wants to be tarred as racist by a charismatic president who is a gifted orator, it makes sense to assume that opposition to the president and his administration might have been chilled in certain quarters, including among segments of the American Jewish community.

Having secured the support of American Jews in his quest for the White House—support that has traditionally been given to politicians from the Democratic party—the president went about implementing policies that seemed designed to lose that support as quickly as possible. Snubs great and small were dished out against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which served to needlessly alienate the United States’ chief ally in the Middle East and damage America’s role as an honest broker in the Middle East peace process. While American and Israeli interests certainly diverge at times, and while friends must be prepared to speak fully and frankly with one another, the Obama Administration allowed its disputes with Israel to take on a public, melodramatic, soap-operaesque quality that did nothing to advance the cause of peace. While slamming Israel, the United States engaged in a renewal of diplomatic ties with Syria—without any concessions on the part of the Syrian government, which is brutal toward its citizens and a consistent destabilizing force in the region.

It comes as no surprise that Democrats like Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a likely contender to lead the Senate Democrats if Harry Reid loses his re-election bid, has taken the White House to task for its treatment of Israel, calling Obama’s Israel policy “counter-productive.” Schumer’s stance on this issue likely reflects the stance and beliefs of a great many American Jews in assessing the Obama Administration’s Mideast policy. While a significant case can be made that the administration’s policy concerning Israel and the Mideast peace process does not fundamentally differ from policies undertaken by past American administrations, the atmospherics of the administration’s actions appear to be causing a significant rift with the American Jewish community.

The Obama Administration’s Iran policy does little to inspire confidence either. The administration does not appear to be willing or eager to use military force to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear weapons program. To be sure, the Iranians have learned much from Israel’s 1982 attack on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear power plant and have taken measures to prevent any military strike from halting, or even significantly slowing, their drive toward nuclear weapons, but the administration’s bark on the issue of Iran appears to be worse than its bite, which does little to reassure either Israel or American Jews with deep connections to Israel that an existential threat against the Jewish state is being effectively dealt with. Obama lauds as “unprecedented” the sanctions that his administration has sought to impose on Iran, but the Iranians are used to sanctions, and there is no evidence that economic pressure applied by America and its allies is doing anything to halt Iran’s effort to make itself a nuclear power.

The administration might have used the popular uprising against the Iranian government’s acts of electoral fraud in the country’s 2009 presidential elections, and the Iranian government’s subsequent and bloody violations of human rights, to push for the Iranian government’s ostracism in the international community, to pressure the Iranian government to reform and liberalize, to support the Iranian opposition movement, as many young Iranians called for, and to force significant concessions from the Iranian government as a price for helping Iran to once again be a member in good standing of the international community. Instead, Obama gave, at most, pro forma support to the Iranian opposition movement; issued, at most, pro forma condemnations of the actions of the Iranian government; and did nothing to isolate the Iranian regime or wring concessions from it in return for helping end the regime’s isolation.

The inability or unwillingness of the Obama Administration to forcefully speak out against instances of anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party should also be a cause for concern. The demagoguery of Democrats like Rep. James Moran, who has stated that an “extraordinarily powerful” pro-Israel lobby—with “the strong support of the Jewish community”—was responsible for causing the United States to go to war with Iraq, is well known, but the Obama Administration has not decided to challenge him, or other Democrats like him, for seeking to profit politically from the popularization of anti-Semitic tropes. Nor has the administration taken on members of the liberal blogosphere for engaging in reflexive anti-Israel hatred and general anti-Semitism and for potentially causing a serious rift between liberals and American Jews, a rift that would harm the president’s political prospects and the Democratic Party’s electoral future.

Some might say that a lone Congressman or a handful of lefty bloggers are beneath the attention of the president of the United States. But while no American president wants to engage in rhetorical overkill, there are disturbing trends developing within the base of the Democratic Party that ought to concern the president and certainly concern the American Jewish community. A shocking 2009 poll revealed that 18.4 percent of Republicans blamed Jews for the recent financial crisis. That’s appalling enough, but even worse, the poll revealed that nearly a third of Democrats also blamed Jews for the near-collapse of the American economy. As the administrators of the poll wrote, this statistically significant difference was surprising “given the presumed higher degree of racial tolerance among liberals and the fact that Jews are a central part of the Democratic Party’s electoral coalition.” It would be in the president’s interests to fight against anti-Semitism in the liberal community, if only to prevent the defection of American Jews from the Democratic Party. But he seems to be unwilling to do so. If American Jews are not alarmed by this lack of action on the president’s part, they should be.

Many Jews still support the president despite his recent actions and those of his administration. Part of the reason likely has to do with the fact that whatever the shortcomings of the president and his administration on issues important to the American Jewish community, the longstanding ties between American Jews and the Democratic Party make it difficult for an abrupt break between the two to take place. The longstanding view of many Jewish Democrats is that the political philosophy of the Democratic Party is close to the philosophical teachings espoused by Jewish religious laws, and as a consequence, it would come as no surprise to find out that many American Jews believe that being Democrats is equivalent to being on the side of right and good, as right and good are defined by Jewish laws, customs, and teachings. But despite the longstanding ties between the American Jewish community and the Democratic Party the Obama Administration, through its policies, runs the risk of putting the relationship asunder.

As the midterm election approaches, Obama’s relationship with American Jews stands at a crossroads. It is entirely possible that the relationship may improve as the president and his political team prepare for his re-election effort in 2012 and seek to increase support and enthusiasm in the American Jewish community. But American Jews now have had time to take the measure of the 44th president and are now well-suited to make an informed decision as to whether he cares about issues that are of special concern to our community. Chances are that the American Jewish community will remain largely loyal to the Democratic Party. But no one should be surprised if, as a result of the Obama Administration’s policies and practices, the Democrats’ hold on the American Jewish component of its base is permanently damaged by an approach that evokes precious little of the enthusiasm that the community showed for him in 2008.

Pejman Yousefzadeh is an attorney and writer in Illinois. He blogs at A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days.

But we actually ended up with Facebook. It is perhaps the dominant Website for the most people on the globe; it boasts 500 million users; the company is probably worth $33 billion. The barricades of privilege that its creator overcame were not run-of-the-mill, but the ultimate: Facebook was not created at a Harvard manqué; it was literally created at Harvard. And the outsider? He is not a random, one-type-out-of-many outsider, but the ultimate type of outsider: He is not a Jew manqué; he is literally a Jew. So is his co-founder (Eduardo Saverin), and one of his two first employees. I can’t prove this isn’t coincidental, but the circumstantial evidence is on my side. Chiefly: We were going to end up with something very like Facebook, but we actually ended up with Facebook, where everyone is the president of their own elite club of one—the Platonic embodiment of the indelibly Jewish alloy of self-hatred and striving.

The Social Network does not need to prove this coincidence: An independent work of creative art, merely based on reality, it is free to impose the Jewish-outsider-takes-on-Harvard narrative, and it does so thrillingly. Zuckerberg, played curly-haired and runt-ish in a hooded sweatshirt by Jesse Eisenberg, is driven by many things—the girlfriend who breaks up with him in the first scene, the excitement of his own genius—but top among them is the slight he feels at having never gained entrée to Harvard’s elite final clubs. (Crucially, Facebook was intially open only to Harvard students, and pretty soon solely to students at elite schools; its present democratic phase is comparatively recent. In the film, Zuckerberg gets off at this exclusivity.)

Zuckerberg can’t stand that Saverin, his best friend, was “punched” by one of the clubs. He can’t stand the Winklevoss twins—the hunky specimens of entrenched WASP masculinity who first approach him with the idea of a Facebook-like site—who, as per house rules, will not admit him past the “bike room” of their club’s house. On the night that he came up with the idea, he and Saverin were attending a supremely tacky Caribbean-themed party at—as he tells the others seated around the table at one of his depositions (both the Winklevosses and Saverin are suing him)—“Alpha Epsilon Pi.” “What’s that?” a lawyer asks. Zuckerberg is almost too mortified to say the words: “A E Pi. It’s the Jewish fraternity.” (Zuckerberg was a member in real life.)

Yet I have to wonder whether The Social Network’s narrative of Jew-against-all is not a bit dated. After all, long gone are the days when Jews were true outsiders at Harvard and (nearly) everywhere else. In 1969, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy could have parents who marveled at their son’s invitation to Gracie Mansion; today, we live in Gracie Mansion (or, rather, we host parties there, and live in a $30 million townhouse in a better neighborhood). One of my favorite lines from my favorite movie, 1978’s Animal House (set in 1962), is: “Bad news: I just checked with the guys at the Jewish house, and they say all our answers to the Psych test were wrong.” Today, you’d make that joke about the Asian house, or the Indian house—the Jewish house is just another house. At Harvard, I can personally attest, there are Jews in even the most elite final clubs. (Myself, I’ve been inside one of them, The Fox, because my oldest friend was a member. I obviously was not allowed upstairs, but I didn’t particularly care.)

One of the best and most telling moments in a movie stuffed with great and telling moments is a line from one of the few characters in the movie older than 22. Saverin notes that, when Facebook launched, Zuckerberg became the Big Man on Campus at a place filled with Nobel Prize winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, a president who had been the Secretary of the Treasury (by the way, the Larry Summers scene is hilarious), and countless other celebrities, including “a movie star.” “Which movie star?” Zuckerberg’s middle-aged lawyer asks with gossip-y curiosity. Zuckerberg and Savarin, by now mortal enemies, nonetheless share the same grimace.

In my personal experience, elite institutions like Harvard have been democratized such that our parents are much more fascinated by the fact that we are friends with a senator’s son or classmates with a movie star than we ourselves are. At Harvard, the final clubs’ upstairs/downstairs dynamic is a relic, and everyone knows it, and so almost nobody cares. (At Columbia, where I matriculated, the closest thing to a final club is St. A’s, which is known mainly for cocaine and the cover of Vampire Weekend’s first album.) So I am tempted to lend greater credence to psychological portraits of Zuckerberg that downplay his Jewish aspect (incidentally, he identifies as an atheist), and the larger “The final club didn’t let me in” story-line (which Zuckerberg explicitly rejects). As I say, I don’t believe Facebook’s overwhelmingly Jewish origins are pure coincidence: There is surely something left over from our ancestors that, like a line of computer code, commands a greater proportion of us to be more boldly innovative than any other people. But I think this explanation can only take us so far.

The lawyer’s question about the Harvard movie star is also, I’m pretty sure, meant as an in-joke: A young attorney taking notes in the deposition room is played by Rashida Jones, a famous actress who graduated in 1997 from, yup, Harvard. In fact, the inaugural cover of 02138, a magazine for Harvard alums, famously declared, over a picture of Jones, “She’s Harvard. So Are You. (Discuss.)” In fact, even as a student Jones was a celebrity, of a sort: Her father is the legendary music producer Quincy Jones.

Of course, her mother is a Jewish woman. She’s Harvard. So’s Zuckerberg. So are many, many other Jews. There is not much else to discuss.

• The United States and Russia agreed to a mutual nuclear arms reduction pact. [JPost]

• Rumors have surfaced that White House economic adviser Larry Summers will depart by the end of the year. [Fox Business]

• A store in Montreal’s Mont Royal neighborhood is selling what it claims is actual Nazi soap made out of actual … Nazi victim. [CBC/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Sink the matzo ball in the hoop. Do it! [Ultimate Matzoh Balls]

• iPesach.

Paul A. Samuelson, Economist, Dies at 94 [NYT]
Remembering Paul Samuelson [WSJ]

Related: Something Old, Something New

As she worked, though, New found herself playing a part in an entirely different chapter of the American Jewish story—as the girlfriend and then wife of Larry Summers, Harvard’s first Jewish president, who is now Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser. “Wedging a wedding canopy into this bastion of WASP gentility might turn out to be my greatest contribution to Jewish civilization,” New wrote of their wedding ceremony at Elmwood, Harvard’s official presidents’ residence, held just 65 years after Summers’ uncle, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson, was denied tenure at the university because he was Jewish.

The result of what people who know New describe as the dramatic “scene changes” in her personal life—from her quiet academic’s existence in Brookline to being a political wife, of a sort—is a book that, despite glancing past the details of Summers’ sometimes controversial and highly public career, and of her own adult life, is billed as “a memoir in five generations.” It is the intricately detailed tale of how her Lithuanian great-grandfather Jacob Levy became a successful textile manufacturer in Maryland, and how his own sons wound up running the storied Carreras tobacco company in London. “For a long time I wanted to tell the story of these three places, and for a long time I didn’t understand that the only thing that connected them was my family,” New explained over coffee one recent morning in New York as she passed through on her way to join Summers in Washington for the weekend. “So I feel like I’ve done something meaningful for my family, and as a Jew.”

Jacob’s Cane is named for a walking stick embossed with the cities inhabited by the Levy brothers on their way out of Lithuania, which an elderly cousin casually offered to unearth from a closet for New’s inspection in 1998, inspiring her to start looking into the family’s history and to make a “roots trip” to Eastern Europe the next year. But the project has its origins in a paper New wrote as a freshman at Brandeis for a class on the history of the family. Armed with a tape recorder, New asked her three great-aunts to tell her the story of how the family had worked its way up from New York’s tenements into genteel, white-glove Maryland society. “They looked at me and said, ‘Oh, no, honey! New York was where we went to have dinnah—we weren’t just anyone! We were from Bal-tee-mewer,’” New, now 51, said, imitating the high-pitched singsong cadences of an earlier generation. “It was confusing, because I had this idea that everyone came from the shtetl and went to New York. I thought we were aberrant Jews.”

It turned out that, in fact, they weren’t. Jacob Levy was born in 1867 in the commercial town of Shavli, outside Riga, part of the first generation of completely emancipated European Jews. As a young man, he followed his older brother, Paul, to Riga, and then accepted an invitation from Paul’s girlfriend’s brother, Bernhard Baron, to join his fledgling tobacco company in Baltimore, which Baron had started after starting as a cigar-roller on New York’s Lower East Side. Like many Jews from the trading towns of the Baltics, all three men grew up familiar with the world of international commerce and were part of the emigration of entrepreneurial Jews to as far afield as Shanghai and the Amazon. And, as it happened, there was a good backstory, too: New’s great-uncles betrayed her great-grandfather by following the family patron, Baron, to London and adopting his name to become heirs to his sizeable fortune, which they then squandered. And, of course, there was a branch of the family that stayed behind in Lithuania, who were liquidated by the Nazis—except for one cousin, Riva, whom New tracked down in Israel through the Yad Vashem archive.

New, ever the scholar, spent years poring over turn-of-the-century credit ratings reports and city directories from Baltimore to New Haven amassing a trove of loose clippings and items, all correlated with footnotes and citations intended to underpin a detached documentation of those German-speaking Jews who established themselves in bourgeois, turn-of-the-century East Coast society. “For my whole career I’ve had a double life—I started out as a poetry scholar who had an interest in things Jewish,” New explained. “I’m attracted to the austerity and coolness of Protestantism but I love the hotness and rowdiness and anxiety and urbanism of Jewish writing.” As a graduate student, she published papers on the Jewish poet Delmore Schwartz and the links between classic Midrash and deconstructionist literary theory, and while her professional reputation was made on her work linking the work of poets like Emerson to their Protestant backgrounds, she also teaches undergraduate classes on American Jewish literature, from Emma Lazarus to Philip Roth, whom she describes as “the greatest living American writer.”

As it happens, it was Roth’s close friend—and New’s book editor—Charlotte Maurer who suggested refashioning the chronicle of Jewish traders into a family memoir. Growing up in Washington, where her father was a physicist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and her mother worked as a party planner, New hated the pedantry of her Reform Hebrew school, but she was always fascinated by Jewish texts and traditions, and spent stints living in Israel after high school and as a doctoral student. She embarked on her research into the history of Jews in Shavli, Baltimore, and London as a family effort, taking her oldest daughter, Yael, along, first as a bat mitzvah present and later because Yael, having learned to speak Russian fluently, could act as an interpreter. (She now works for a Russian television channel in New York.) “For a long time I wanted to tell the story of these three places, and for a long time I didn’t understand that the only thing that connected them was my family,” New said. “It took a bunch of years before I realized that it was the story of my family, that Yael was in it, and not to think it was narcissistic.”

The book, as New’s Harvard colleague Louis Menand put it, “is a memoir only an academic could have written,” full of detailed archival references and organized around the idea of the fancy walking stick as a metaphor for the journey the Levy family made. “It’s really what an English professor would produce if you told her to write a memoir,” Menand said.

It’s also a book that, New says, she could not have written without finding “general happiness and serenity” in her marriage with Summers, with whom she rarely appears in public, despite her regular commutes down to Washington. “His thing is not my thing, and my thing is not his thing,” explained New, who contrasted her penchant for unfolding complicated ideas through language with his economist’s “bottom-line, what-is-the-point” focus. “There is a joy in having a spouse who regards what you do with bemusement.”