Meanwhile, contributing editor Seth Lipsky’s New York Sun editorializes in favor of the ADL’s decision and credits prominent opponent Sarah Palin with having seichel (one of us, one of us?).

In its statement (which, as Bradley Burston notes, “sounds like unfiltered honesty”), the ADL justifies its stance with reference purely to the survivors’ interests. But whatever Abraham Foxman and the rest of the ADL’s decision-makers may believe as private citizens, the ADL’s mission is not to advocate for survivors’ rights; it is to advocate (as its mission statement says) for “democratic ideals” and “civil rights.” Given that the people behind the Cordoba House are, by the ADL’s own admission, private, law-abiding citizens going through the proper channels to try to achieve a private, Constitutionally protected goal, it is indisputable that those sworn to uphold “democratic ideals” and “civil rights” are obliged to take their side.

“Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational,” Foxman apparently said. Okay then: If the dictates of Foxman’s conscience compel him not to align the ADL on the side of Cordoba House, then one could muster respect for that. But then the solution would be to have the ADL say nothing at all—not to harness it to go precisely against its self-declared, century-old values. To continue to promote itself and accept donations on the basis of those values would border on dishonest.

Anti-Defamation League Rebuked for Opposition to Planned Mosque at N.Y.’s Ground Zero [Haaretz]
Earlier: ADL Comes Out Against Ground Zero Center

Now there would be an illuminating witness at the Sotomayor hearing. Guinier was a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania when Clinton, at the start of his presidency, nominated her to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. The nomination was greeted by a front-page dispatch in the Forward, of which I was then editor, quoting articles she’d written arguing that civil-rights law required the election of minorities.

Quite a tumult followed that story, particularly after The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece under the headline “Quota Queen.” It resonated because the new administration was being tested in respect of first principles. Word soon went out from the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was headed by then-senator Joe Biden and included Senator Patrick Leahy, now the committee’s chair, that Guinier was too controversial. Clinton withdrew the nomination, saying he’d been reading her writings and found them troubling.

At the Forward, we’d been troubled by her writings, too, though we favored giving her a hearing. I often wondered what the professor would have said had the Senate had the decency to give her one. Then, in 2004, I sat down to review a collection of political essays by Hendrik Hertzberg, an editor at The New Yorker. The volume contained several pieces that touched on the Guinier affair, and it advanced one of the ideas that caused her so much trouble—proportional representation.

This is a system in which a winning party doesn’t take all. Instead a legislature is divvied up proportionally among parties. Proportional representation is in use in various parts of Europe and in Israel. It hasn’t won a lot of admirers here in America, though it was tried in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. Its “main result,” I noted in a review of the Hertzberg collection, had been the admission of a communist faction onto the City Council. When proportional representation was repealed in New York in the late 1940s, the original New York Sun called it the communists’ worst defeat since they took over the American Labor Party.

Hertzberg promptly sent me a note expressing doubt that the elevation of the communists had been the main result of proportional representation in New York. “My impression,” Hertzberg wrote, “is that its results also included representation for other political minorities.” He mentioned, among others, Republicans. Hertzberg’s note, I wrote in a rejoinder, “caused me to sit up a bit straighter in my chair and stroke my chin, smiling at the thought of proportional representation as a way to elevate more Republicans to a City Council that is dominated by the left.”

Eventually I received an email from Guinier herself. My review had mentioned that the American Labor Party had followed up on the era of proportional representation by running Ewart Guinier, Lani Guinier’s father, for borough president of Manhattan. Lani Guinier wrote to tell me that proportional representation was not something she had discussed with her father, who had died in 1990 after a long bout with Alzheimer’s. In fact, she had not started writing about it until her father was well along in the disease.

Her interest in proportional representation, she wrote, was an outgrowth “of my concerns, after litigating cases in the South, that the single member districting strategy was not fulfilling its promise.” She said that when she became an academic, she “returned to explore further the questions that had haunted me from my litigating days. I also recalled learning about forms of PR in my corporations course at Yale Law School (since it is the way many corporations elect their board of directors).” She said that proportional representation had once been called by the head of the Citizens Union, Henry Stern—no leftist—the “golden age” of the City Council.

So one day I traveled to Cambridge and called on Guinier in her office at the law school. I was eager to ask her, among other things, about Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign for non-partisan elections. I didn’t share the mayor’s annoyance with parties, and The New York Sun, now revived under my editorship, campaigned against his scheme, which the voters defeated. But I was troubled that the Republicans had been for so long been unable to gain but a toehold in the New York City Council, not to mention the State Assembly in Albany.

Guinier’s replies to me were off the record, but I don’t think it would be a violation of the ground rules to say that she struck me as not only exceptionally gracious but also extremely smart. I subsequently wrote a column in the Sun reprising all this and suggesting that Bloomberg invite her to lunch as he considered the next approach to charter revision in the city. And I invited Henry Stern of the Citizen’s Union to write a piece endorsing the possibility of proportional representation as a route to reform in the city.

Which leads me back to Sotomayor. She has just been overruled by the Supreme Court in the case of the New Haven firefighters, and we may be at the end of the era of affirmative action of the kind New Haven was using. But that doesn’t mean that the problems of racial bigotry—and other forms of exclusion—have been solved in our society. Not even conservatives like myself believe that. Guinier herself was quoted in The New York Times the other day as saying that the debate over Sotomayor’s nomination was, as the Times characterized it, “an opportunity for civil rights advocates to push back against the kind of criticism that had thwarted her own nomination.” I, for one, would be in a mood to hear what she has to say.

One of the items that historians have done a neat job of obscuring as irrelevant to the modern Jewish experience is the role of performance psychics in Jewish life. Legitimized as “prophets” in the ancient period, they have become, in subsequent eras, excused as products of their times or categorized as special “mystics.” But even by the time the Renaissance was in full swing, science and mysticism still mixed in weird and uncomfortable ways: mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton, for example, was a big fan of alchemy and divination, among other matters of the occult. (Apparently, rationality has never been beholden to the laws of motion and gravity.) In the modern period, where science and reason begin to edge out the occult, the terms “fraud” and “charlatan” are bandied about as terms to describe those who work as palm readers, phrenologists, and telepaths. But that didn’t make them disappear or make people any less interested in their abilities, including some with top flight educations.

Khokhmes hayad is an 1882 reprint of a 1799 reprint of a Hebrew palm reading manual that dates to the 16th century. This is just one of many examples of such Jewish occult manuals. The frequent reprinting of such manuals over many centuries is but one indication of their popularity.

Indeed, Jews have worked in the occult for as long as they have been Jews. Instances of necromancy and other occult activities are peppered throughout the Bible and the Talmud, as well as later rabbinical texts. Indeed, prophesying is hardwired in the tradition. Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 monograph, “Jewish Magic and Superstition,” for example, regales the reader with an excellent exposition of the history of Jewish occult activity.

With the advent of the Enlightenment and political and social emancipation it brought in its wake, Jews were expected to have abrogated this silliness. But shtetl superstitions simply migrated in variant form to cities, where—in an attempt to slap a veneer of sophistication on their ancient crafts—occultists often presented themselves as “scientists” or “professors.” They could be found in Jewish neighborhoods in Warsaw, Krakow, and New York City plying their trades.

One such specimen, a man named Abraham Hochman, came to prominence in mid-1890s New York, following the 1895 publication of Fortune Teller, a popular booklet reprinted several times—as were his subsequent Yiddish publications on astrology and fortune telling. Operating out of a building he owned at 169 Rivington Street, Hochman was a Lower East Side fixture who told fortunes, read palms and foreheads, and found lost spouses and kin for people in the neighborhood. He kept innocent men out of prison, found lost property and, occasionally, knew which horse would come in at the track. When business flagged, he contacted journalist friends and pulled stunts, most of which were reported upon assiduously in the Yiddish press, to attract customers.

Occasionally, when Hochman did something really dramatic, news of his exploits would appear in the general press. The New York Sun, among other outlets, reported on an episode in May 1904, when a bushy-haired Hochman waltzed into the Essex Market Police Court and inexplicably paid the bail for Abie Langener, who’d been arrested with seven other youths on a burglary charge. The magistrate asked why Hochman was paying bail for someone he didn’t know.

“I can read the future,” he replied. “I have read this man’s mind and know he is innocent. I can also read your mind. You will discharge him when the case comes up before you tomorrow. If he were guilty, I would know it and I would not bail him out. I will be here tomorrow to show you that my predictions come true.”

Hochman did, in fact, show up the following day. And, sure enough, when Langener and another suspect were brought before the court, the magistrate released them due to lack of evidence.

“What did I tell you?” said Hochman.

The psychic was mobbed outside the courthouse by hundreds of friends of the accused who, according to press reports, practically tore off his clothes. It’s not clear why this would be necessary and, in any case, the courthouse bailiffs came outside to rescue him from his demonstrative well-wishers.

But Hochman was usually surrounded by a mob, though typically of what they called “wildly gesticulating women.” The stoop of his Rivington Street studio was frequently crammed with flailing ladies, often accompanied by children all desperately trying to find missing husbands and fathers. These men ranged from immigrants who had conveniently “forgotten” about their families in the Old Country, to guys who couldn’t tolerate the cramped quarters of their 300-square-foot tenements and their half dozen screaming kids, to jerks who ran out of money and disappeared. The situation was so bad, the Jewish Daily Forward, the largest-circulation Yiddish daily in the world, began running the “Gallery of Missing Men,” a page full of mug shots and descriptions of these nefarious characters to help locate them and bring them to justice. (The National Desertion Bureau was also founded to help women and children whose husbands and fathers were on the lam.)

Forverts’ Gallery of Missing Men, 1909

Locating missing husbands was a Hochman specialty. He gained quite a bit of fame for this ability when, in 1903, the press reported on the predicament of Minnie Cohen, whose her husband went missing for a month. Minnie decided to avail herself of Hochman’s services. With a dollar in hand, she made her way through the labyrinthine snarl of panhandlers and pushcarts to Hochman’s office. He informed Minnie that her husband would be up to no good at the corner of Pitt and Grand Streets at exactly 10 o’clock that night. So sure was he of his prophecy that he promised to give her 50 dollars if he turned out to mistaken. With unshakable faith in the Hebrew Seer of Rivington Street, and hope in the possibility of getting a wad of cash if her runaway husband didn’t show, Cohen pulled a cop out of the Essex Street Station and told him what Hochman had said. When they got to the corner of Pitt and Grand, Minnie’s truant husband was there, scratching his back on a lamppost. Officer O’Grady arrested Cohen’s husband and brought him into the station, where he was held on a $100 bond and instructed to begin paying his wife Minnie two dollars a week alimony. “Venus is ascendant—husbands beware!” Hochman asserted to the women gathered on his stoop.

News of his exploits made Hochman realize that he could expand his psychic constituency further than the local Hebrews. He went straight for the top: one day in the spring of 1905, Hochman went chugging into the Grand Street clubhouse of Tammany Hall thug Florrie Sullivan, grabbed the local strongman’s hand, and told him that he dreamed that the horse King Pepper was going to come in first, paying eight to one. Sullivan, who forswore belief in the occult, nevertheless took a bet on Hochman’s advice. King Pepper won, making Sullivan a small fortune. Hochman’s gambit worked; he became the Sullivan gang’s official mind-reader and phrenologist. Hochman was so successful that his son Frank’s 1906 bris, which brought out a full police battalion and included performances by Yiddish theater actors, was besieged by thousands of well wishers, who devoured 320 pounds of chicken and six crates of fruit. On account of this sumptuous affair, an entire block of Rivington Street was closed down for two days.

Even The New York Times was not immune to the lures of Abraham Hochman. Tongue in cheek as it may have been, the Times still reported on the 1904 story of how Hochman’s psychic abilities helped to locate Jacob Greenberg’s (of the Essex Street Greenbergs) missing horse, cart, and load of grapes.
Unlike most clairvoyants, Hochman was happy to share his secrets, publishing his prophetic techniques in books and articles. He based his method on what he called his “Astro-biblical chart,” which anyone could use to answer questions like “will I fall in love?”; “should I take dance lessons?”; “does my husband know I’ve been bad?”; “should I get a job as a tailor?”; “is my landlord in love with me?” Determining the answer required readers to hold some herbs or nuts in the right hand, count backwards by sevens with the left hand, add whatever remained to the number of the question, and find the corresponding number on the astro-biblical chart, which provided the name of a Hebrew symbol and a natural element. Then, inquirers were to take the Hebrew symbol and the element and consult Hochman’s system of charts for another number which led to the answer chart, whereupon a person would punch in the original number subtracted after the initial step of nut-holding and backward counting. That is your answer. How could it miss?

Hochman disappears from the papers around 1910. Nobody seems to know what became of him, though Yiddish-speaking clairvoyants, palm readers, and psychics continued to hold Jews in their thrall. In 1933, for example, a dybbuk was exorcised in a Harlem tenement. But that’s a story for another time.

Eddy Portnoy, a Tablet contributing editor, teaches Yiddish language and literature at Rutgers University.