But why talk about this stuff when we can talk about the Jews?!

Polling pundit extraordinaire Nate Silver noted early on last evening that Jewish turnout was low last night in comparison to the primary four years ago: in 2008, three percent of GOP primary voters identified as Jewish; last night, only one percent did. This, Silver concluded, “might mean that Jewish Republican voters in the state are not terribly enthusiastic about this group of candidates.” The line was pondered. On Twitter, the battle was joined. (Pssst, Gal: don’t engage him! He’s very good!) At Commentary, Jonathan Tobin responded. The explanation? The Rudy phenomenon: “the man who drove that mini-surge in Jewish Republican voters was Rudy Giuliani,” argued Tobin. “Though he flopped in the Florida primary four years ago, the former mayor of New York was a big favorite of the Jewish and pro-Israel community.”

I don’t know if that carries water. We don’t know for sure who won Florida’s Republican Jewish vote, either last night or in 2008—the overall Jewish franchise was unfortunately not large enough for exit pollsters to glean meaningful data from it. (Maybe the best we can do is to look at the extremely Jewish counties of Palm Beach and Broward, where Giuliani got 19 and 17 percent of the vote, besting only slightly his 15 percent statewide figure; he did put up a slightly more impressive 26 percent in Jewish-but-also-idiosyncratic Miami-Dade.) Even granting a Giuliani Bump, Tobin is suggesting that Giuliani was single-handedly able to increase the percentage of the Jewish vote—by a factor of three!—in an electorate roughly the same size as last night’s (about 1.9 million voted in the 2008 primary; it looks like about 1.75 million voted in last night’s). That seems pretty far-fetched to me, especially when you remember that Florida’s is a closed primary, open only to registered Republicans, so Giuliani could not have drawn Democratic and independent Jews in to vote for him (and when you remember, as Shmuel Rosner reminds us, that Sen. Joe Lieberman had endorsed John McCain). It’s roughly as plausible to suggest that Jewish turnout was depressed because Jews were going to go for Romney until they heard a disembodied voice on the phone tell them the former Massachusetts governor hates kosher-keeping Holocaust survivors. It didn’t play no role, it’s not impossible it played a huge role, and nobody can prove it either way. But it’s very unlikely.

The Forward’s Josh Nathan-Kazis tentatively concurred with Silver’s suggestion: “Fewer Jewish voters in the primary,” he wrote, “could correlate to a lack of enthusiasm among Jews for the Republican field.” Unlike the rest of us, Josh was down there reporting on this, so I’m more inclined to listen to him. But I’m still not going to put too much stock into the three-versus-one-percent dynamic. Most likely, it’s a combination of lack of enthusiasm among Jews, statistical noise, and a generally less excited Republican primary electorate (and one where those most excited—in the Tea Party—tend not to be Jewish).

But this does leave an open question regarding Tobin’s argument. He contends that it is possible to acknowledge that the Jewish vote changed while explaining it not by reference to larger trends or specifically Jewish or Israel-related policies or platforms or records, but, rather, to the arbitrary inflation (“mini-surge”) caused by an anomaly (in this case, the unusual presence of a moderate, ethnic, strong-on-Israel former New York City mayor from Brooklyn on the 2008 Republican ticket). I completely agree. In fact, I and many others have long suggested that while it’s certainly possible that in November President Obama will see a drop in Jewish support, that drop needs to be more than a couple points to be significant because the 78 percent of the Jewish vote he captured in 2008—higher than John Kerry’s 74 percent in 2004—was anomalously high due to the decisive nature of Obama’s victory generally as well as Jews’ “hatred” for a certain member of the Republican ticket. Given Tobin’s sensible sympathy to such external whims’ influence on voting figures, I assume that he will take all of this into account when he analyzes the returns in November. I won’t say one percent is small; he shouldn’t say 74 percent is.

Romney Wins Big in Florida Primary, Regaining Momentum [NYT]
Jewish Turnout Low in Florida [NYT FiveThirtyEight]
Low Jewish Turnout in Florida Doesn’t Help Obama in November [Commentary Contentions]
Florida Exit Polls Suggest Fewer Jews Vote GOP [Forward]

With the potentially decisive Florida primary less than a week away, that same phenomenon appears to be playing out among Jewish party heavyweights. A Tablet review of campaign-finance records for 175 major Republican Jewish donors shows that, according to the most recent campaign filings, more than 55 percent have yet to give to any primary candidate. Of that 55 percent, nearly two-thirds—64 donors—had already given to a candidate by this time in the 2008 presidential cycle. Among them, more than a dozen have not repeated their support for Romney this year, a group that includes high-profile figures like Richard Fox, a Pennsylvania developer who co-founded the Republican Jewish Coalition; California real-estate mogul Fred Sands; and Ronald Krancer, an heir to the Annenberg fortune who has been a major Republican player in Pennsylvania.

“I like him, but I’m just not sure which Romney’s going to show up, and I think that’s a problem a lot of voters have with him,” said Joel Hoppenstein, an attorney in Miami Beach and Republican Jewish Coalition board member who was among Romney’s earliest donors in January 2007. Hoppenstein said he only recently made what he described as “a very insignificant” donation to the campaign. “Most people are looking for a Reagan figure who can bring social conservatives and fiscal conservatives together, and Mitt Romney is supposed to be that person today—but the public electorate hasn’t embraced him.”

That reality appears to have given some big donors pause. There certainly are major donors who are sitting out the primaries because of other commitments—among them, James Tisch, the CEO of the Loews Corporation and an early Giuliani donor, who is now on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. But others who gave early and generously in 2008—not just to Republican primary candidates, but to the party—have yet to emerge from the wings. Sheldon Kamins, the Washington developer who chaired Gingrich’s PAC in the late 1990s—and who gave to Romney in the 2008 primaries—declined to comment on his lack of involvement this year because he has relationships with too many of the candidates. When I asked whether that was also why he had so far declined to give, he replied: “That would be a good surmise.”

The difference between this primary campaign and the last is striking. In the 2008 cycle, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was the early favorite among the Jewish donors reviewed by Tablet. Giuliani won primary support from nearly as many of the donors as Arizona Sen. John McCain and Romney combined—partly because of his hometown status among Republican Jewish donors from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, but also because he seemed like a credible candidate from the outset. “There were more clearly viable candidates in 2008 than today,” said Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, who has attended fundraising meetings between Republican presidential candidates and potential Jewish donors. “So, people had a choice between people who had a real chance, rather than four or five people who might have a chance.”

In June, Gingrich’s campaign imploded with the mass resignation of his staff, in part because the former speaker had decided to go on vacation in Greece instead of heading to Iowa. It seemed, briefly, that he might not make it into autumn. But as former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, and Texas Gov. Rick Perry faded out, Gingrich re-emerged as a popular favorite in the final weeks of 2011. People who might have been ready to plump for Romney before the primary season now had another option.

So far, Gingrich’s main benefactor has been Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who gave $5 million to the pro-Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our Future earlier this month. (Adelson is also a generous backer of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, like so many of the Jewish donors we reviewed, was a Giuliani supporter in the 2008 primary.) He has also enjoyed the backing of Lawrence Kadish, a Long Island real-estate investor who was also a founder of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Gingrich wasted no time canvassing for support once his star began to rise after restaurant mogul Herman Cain dropped out of the race in December. Before Christmas, Gingrich attended a meeting of Jewish leaders in New York and reportedly won backing from another key figure: George Klein, an investor and a Republican Jewish Coalition board member who had been expected to back Romney.

On Monday, following the speaker’s South Carolina win, Adelson’s wife Miriam ponied up another $5 million for the same pro-Gingrich super-PAC her husband had supported. Abetted by the Adelsons’ largesse, Gingrich’s persistence has inspired donors who had been on the fence to take a second look. “I’ve given a contribution to Romney, but I intend to give to Gingrich,” said Kenneth Bialkin, a partner at Skadden, Arps in New York who has been chair of the Conference of Presidents. Last fall, Bialkin gave to Texas Gov. Rick Perry—the price of attending a private meeting, Bialkin said—but he was loath to commit. “I think Romney is a fine candidate, and if he were the candidate, I’d cheerfully vote for him,” Bialkin told me. “I also think the same of Gingrich,” he added.

Still, Romney has received steadfast support among some formidable Jewish donors, including Mel Sembler, a Florida shopping-center developer who chairs Romney’s Florida finance committee, and Sam Fox, a George W. Bush Pioneer who helped underwrite the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004 and gave $90,000 to Restore Our Future, the super-PAC supporting Romney, last spring. He has also won significant backing from Boston philanthropist Ted Cutler, one of Sheldon Adelson’s original business partners, who has given $100,000 to the pro-Romney super-PAC in the past year.

And while Romney might have preferred to be the crowd favorite from the outset, he has steadily won support by attrition, beginning in August when Pawlenty departed the race. In December, Roger Hertog—initially a Pawlenty backer and a major donor to Jewish causes—held a $2 million fundraiser for Romney in Manhattan with hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a partisan of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who declared in October that he would not run for the presidency this year. Pawlenty backer Bernard Marcus, the Home Depot founder and Republican Jewish Coalition board member, recently agreed to give to Romney’s campaign after spending months declining to engage with the remaining candidates, according to Fred Zeidman, a Texas oilman and former McCain finance chairman who is spearheading Romney’s Jewish outreach.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the overriding consideration is that we have to beat Obama,” said Zeidman. “So, there has to be a kumbaya moment at some point, because this can’t go on.”

Divided Assets
Which candidates are Jewish Republicans supporting? A sample of 20 prominent donors.

List includes major donors and board members of the Republican Jewish Coalition; campaign donations as reported by the Federal Election Commission as of Jan. 24, 2012, via OpenSecrets.org.
*Does not include donations not yet reported in Federal Election Commission data provided by OpenSecrets.org as of Jan. 24, 2012. Adelson and his wife have given an additional reported $10 million to the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super-PAC.

The family has long given generously to American politicians—more than $900,000 over the last two cycles, according to OpenSecrets. As is relatively common for canny businesspeople, they give across partisan lines, supporting both national committees as well as individual candidates who are diametrically opposed to each other. This year, for example, Jerome Falic, CEO of Duty Free Americas, maxed out his giving to Rep. Eric Cantor, a Republican and the House Majority Leader, and to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee.

But when it comes to presidential politics, the family has consistently gone Republican. In 2007, several family members supported former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s primary bid, and then ponied up for Sen. John McCain in the general election. And, now, Perry. The erstwhile Texas governor raised $20,000 from two generations of the family last September, and, so far, remains the only presidential candidate to win their support. This despite the fact that he has not been considered a seriously competitive candidate since about October.

It’s not clear that their enthusiasm has had any effect on Bibi’s affections. Only a few days after their donations cleared Perry’s accounts, Bibi went on CNN to criticize a member of his own party, Deputy Knesset Speaker Danny Danon, for appearing alongside Perry at a pro-Israel campaign event in New York. “When I get to the point that I can control Knesset, including in my own party, it’ll be a good day,” Netanyahu told Wolf Blitzer. His donors, though, not so much.

One U.S. Family is Responsible for Half of Netanyahu’s Donations [Haaretz]
Earlier: The Company Rick Perry Keeps

Sarah Palin to Visit Israel, Meet Netanyahu, Danon [JPost]
Related: The GOP’s Israel Primary [Politico]

Edward Irving Koch was born in the Bronx and raised in Newark, New Jersey, as a Conservative Jew. He represented New York City in Congress from 1969 to 1977 and served as its mayor from 1978 to 1989. Now 86, he is a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave, where the windowsill of his office, overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, is decorated with a silver-colored Hanukkiah and dozens of pictures of himself shaking hands with celebrities. Koch is vague about what he does there, beyond building buzz. He has never been married and has no children, and he neither confirms nor denies persistent rumors of homosexuality. “What do I care?” he told New York magazine 13 years ago. “I find it fascinating that people are interested in my sex life at age 73. It’s rather complimentary! But as I say in my book, my answer to questions on this subject is simply: Fuck off.”

When I asked Koch about the importance of Judaism in his life, he called out to his secretary. “Jody! Bring him the tombstone!” She handed me a copy of Koch’s pre-written epitaph: “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved the people of the City of New York.” The headstone also quotes Daniel Pearl’s last words—“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish”—and notes that these words were spoken “immediately before his beheading by an Islamic terrorist.” Koch believes in God but describes himself as secular.

You came into office in the wake of New York’s financial crisis of the 1970s.

I said, “Whatever it takes, no matter what bricks are thrown at me, I will do to bring New York back to its great past.” And that means sacrifice. You know you’re hurting people. But if you want to keep the city from going in bankruptcy, which would injure even more, there’s no other way out. Now, everybody understands it. Now, guys like [New Jersey governor] Chris Christie—they applaud him. He’s doing what I did. Jerry Brown in California—he’s doing what I did. When I did it, it was unique.

When I ran for a fourth term, I got 42 percent of the vote [in the Democratic primary], and David Dinkins won. What is interesting is that I’m Jewish, but my biggest supporters were Catholic. Italian and Irish Catholic. I generally, over the years, would get 81 percent of their vote. With Jews, I would get 73 percent. People say, “How is that possible? You’re a Jewish boy!” And the answer is that the liberal wing of the Jewish nation doesn’t find me liberal enough. Because I’m a liberal with sanity.

What are some specific issues on which you clash with liberal Jews?

Well, for example, the death penalty. I have supported the death penalty from the beginning of my professional life, when I ran for Congress. I believe it’s liberal, if you believe that protecting society is liberal.

Do you think you’ve moved to the right over the course of your career?

When I was in the Congress, I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I went to Canada and talked to American young men who had left the United States to avoid the draft. And I came back and proposed that American soldiers who resisted the draft, evaded it, be given amnesty; and in addition, American soldier deserters—this is in the middle of the Vietnam War—be given amnesty. People said, “Are you crazy?” President Carter, six months later, gave amnesty to draft resisters and deserters. So I believe, on social issues, I’m as left as you can get. On fiscal issues I’m moderate. I hope I’ve changed over the years, but I certainly don’t believe you could say I’ve moved from the left to the right.

Do you ever feel that American Jews are afraid to support Israel?

I know there was a dearth of support when Obama changed the policy of the United States towards Israel not very long ago. I’m very proud that I aroused the Jewish community and the Christian pro-Israel community and Obama changed his anti-Israel position, most illustrative of that being when he insulted Bibi Netanyahu. As you undoubtedly know, when George Bush ran for reelection—not election—when he was running against, what’s his name—John, Massachusetts …

Kerry.

Kerry, right. Kerry was not good on Israel, in my judgment. So I supported Bush. And I said at the time, publicly, “I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue. But on the issue of fighting Islamic terrorism”—which, to me, is more important than any other issue, not just because of Israel; it is because Islamic terrorism is seeking to destroy Western civilization. I said, “The Democratic party doesn’t understand that.” The Republican party did. I was shocked when I saw a poll which said that of Democrats, 48 percent supported Israel. 48 percent! Republicans, 70 percent. So I stood up and supported Bush. I have no regrets.

So why didn’t you support John McCain in 2008?

Well, because I’m a Democrat, and I believed that Obama was as good as McCain.

And now you feel you were misled?

I don’t say misled. I misjudged.

Do you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are good for the Jews?

No. They’re not good for America, which is more important. We are spilling American blood for nothing. We are having American treasure looted by Karzai in particular in Afghanistan. We should pull out today.

So how does that mesh with your take on Islamic terrorism?

I don’t believe that we should fight them the way they want us to fight them. I believe we should bomb them with drones. Afghanistan—it’s not a country.

So you’re supportive of the drone attacks in Pakistan?

Absolutely. Pakistan is not a friend anymore. These are not countries you can depend upon. We shouldn’t have people there, and we shouldn’t give them the billions that we’re giving. With respect to that area, India is our true ally, not Pakistan.

Do you have views on Israeli politics?

Sure I do. I believe in a two-state solution. I believe that Bibi Netanyahu should throw out Lieberman and all those arch right wingers and form a broad cabinet with the center, and that you can have an Arab capital in Jerusalem along with a Jewish capital in Jerusalem. You should have boroughs in the Arab area and the Jewish area where they elect their own local leadership. It’s doable!

Do you think New York Jews stand up for Israel?

I don’t think [they do] enough. I think young people no longer understand the meaning of the Holocaust. Young Jews don’t understand that when Hitler offered to let the Jews out of Germany, there was no nation that would take them—including the United States. And all you have to do is remember the U.S.S. St. Louis, which was turned away. So I think that somehow or other the Jewish community has to educate, and say, “We’re Americans. But we also are like any other people that love our ancestry and our traditions.” And in our case it’s even more important, because there’s never been an effort to exterminate a people, a whole people, as was the case with Hitler and the Jews. Jews who think they’re not included in that extermination effort, should it ever occur again, they’re dead wrong. And we know the nation of Israel will stand up to the best of its ability. It will use its armed forces to protect Jews, as it did at Entebbe.

How did Judaism influence your life growing up?

I’m a secular Jew. I believe in God, I believe in the hereafter, I believe in reward and punishment, and I expect to be rewarded. That’s a partial joke. But I identify as a Jew. And I think when I was mayor, I made that clear. As a result of just being up front about it, I think I was helpful in changing relations vis-a-vis the Jews and making them more positive. I hope so.

Was being Jewish a big part of your life?

No. I go to synagogue twice a year. Park East Synagogue. It’s Orthodox, but that’s only because I like Rabbi Schneier. It has nothing to do with me. I would consider myself a Conservative—the reason I say Conservative, not Reform, is that I am very unhappy to be in a synagogue without a yarmulke. I feel naked.

I wanted to be buried in Manhattan. Near a subway stop, to make it easy to get there. So I got the last burial plot at the Trinity Church up at 155th Street. My tombstone is up there, and it has the Shma Yisroel, in English and Hebrew, and it has the last words of Dan Pearl: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I’m Jewish.” Now, they probably made him say that as they cut his throat on television. Doesn’t make any difference. I think that should become a prayer on Saturday.

There was a forum recently in New York magazine debating who was the best mayor in New York history.

Oh, I saw that. Those were liberal—the historians who were there were all very liberal. They don’t like me. On the other hand, there was just a book out by a liberal historian [Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, by Jonathan Soffer]. He says, when he announced to his confreres, who are all liberal, “I’m going to do a book on Koch,” they said, “Go get him.” But in his book he says that I was better than LaGuardia. He said the problems that I confronted were greater than LaGuardia’s and my responses were better. That’s what he says; I’m not saying it. I don’t mind others saying it, but I’m not saying it.

What do you think makes LaGuardia so popular today?

’Cause he’s dead.

You recently defended Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel.”

Fairness! Don’t you think we should have fairness? What they were trying to do, some of the talking heads, was to blame her for the shooting of the Congresswoman in Tucson. In fact, she sent me a response—Jody! I’d like to give him the Sarah Palin response, her comment to me.

Sarah Palin’s email:

Mr. Koch: I hate to bother you through a personal email account but I wanted to send a “thank you” for your encouraging words. Thank you, sincerely, for sticking your neck out in such a public manner. My family and I appreciate your boldness!

My best to you,
Sarah Palin

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Koch’s response:

Dear Governor:

Thank you for your e-mail. I was delighted to speak out because I believe you were being unfairly attacked by some who wish to politicize the tragedy in Arizona. I believe in spirited political debate, and so do you. Yes, we disagree on many public issues, and that debate is good for America. I wish you and your family the very best in your own pursuit of happiness. God bless America.

All the best.
Ed Koch

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in New York, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

As the Israelites begin building the Lord’s Tabernacle, we are informed that God imbued those among them who labored in the construction of that most sacred edifice with “wisdom of the heart”: Every “wise-hearted man,” reads the parasha, “into whom God had imbued wisdom and insight to know how to do, shall do all the work of the service of the Holy.”

A wise-hearted man, of course, is a paradox worthy of Chesterton. The heart feels, the mind thinks; the heart, according to most of our acceptable metaphysical edicts, is no more capable of being wise than the mind is of being swept by currents of emotion. And yet artists, the parasha suggests, differ from the rest of us in that they somehow succeed in reconciling the twin titans of human motivations, feeding feelings and thoughts both into the furnace of artistic creation.

It’s a difficult concept to comprehend without a concrete example to observe. Luckily, we’ve just the man: one of America’s greatest forgotten artists, the sculptor best known for blasting the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt into the rock of Mount Rushmore, the monomaniacal Gutzon Borglum.

Next week marks the 70th anniversary of Borglum’s death. He was born in Idaho, trained in Paris, and lived for long spells in New York. His fame was great: He was the first living American sculptor to witness his work displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and among the first to appear in newspaper ads endorsing consumer goods. By 1923, the year Doane Robinson, a South Dakota historian, came up with the idea to erect some sort of mountainside monument to America’s presidents, Borglum was the obvious choice.

What made Borglum great? An easy answer is available merely by looking at his work: Stand in front of Roosevelt’s stony mug, glance at the ever-so-nuanced lines carved to suggest that the Rough Rider wears eyeglasses, and the sculptor’s genius is in full evidence. But Borglum’s stature exceeded his skill—he was wise at heart, a quality illuminated by his complicated and little-known relationship with his Jewish friends.

Those he had aplenty—among his closest companions were Dr. Isidor Singer, editor of the Jewish Encyclopedia; Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter; and the financiers Bernard Baruch and Jacob Schiff. When they needed his help, he rapidly and enthusiastically rose to their defense, organizing, for example, a fund-raising campaign to assist the impoverished Singer. These remarkable friendships were made more remarkable by the inconvenient fact that Gutzon Borglum was a raging anti-Semite.

In a paper from the 1920s titled “The Jewish Question”—cited in Six Wars at a Time, Borglum’s biography—the sculptor tried to express his misgivings about the Hebrew race. “Jews,” he wrote, “refuse to enter the mainstream of civilization, to become producing members of the world community. They do not share or create, but choose instead to clannishly hold onto their old ways and with mere money buy and sell the efforts of others.”

There is nothing surprising about this text; scores like it were written during the same period by thinkers and artists and public figures great and small. What’s surprising is what Borglum chose to do with his hateful screed: He shipped it over to Dr. Singer, asking his friend for his thoughts.

“Dear friend Gutzon,” the Jewish scholar replied with good humor, “reading what you write someone would think you were an anti-Semite, when in reality you are a philo-Semite.” Borglum’s response was immediate. “Dr. Singer,” he wrote, “if you were not a bigger man than you are a Jew, I would throw bricks at you.”

This mercurial temper got Borglum in trouble throughout his life. When Jacob Schiff died, in 1920, a committee of New York’s most prominent Jews approached the sculptor to erect a monument to his late friend. Again, Borglum’s response was quick to arrive: “I have never met a man who exemplified all the characteristics of George Washington as Jacob Schiff,” he wrote, but he refused to accept the commission, arguing that as a Christian he could not honor a Jew. The same mad temerity was frequently on display when the Mount Rushmore project made Borglum an international celebrity. When President Calvin Coolidge, responding to Borglum’s request, sent a brief history of the United States to be included in the statue’s design, the sculptor liberally altered the president’s words, sending his edit to the press without informing the White House of the changes. Furious, Coolidge abandoned his support for the project. But nothing could stop Gutzon Borglum from accomplishing his life’s dream: Once he’d set foot on the mountain, he was consumed by the challenge and single-mindedly committed to the project.

Which brings us back to this week’s parasha. Those entrusted with erecting our most sacred and celebratory monuments, we are told, are not only masterful artisans but also men and women who approach the task with wise hearts. And Borglum, for all of his vile ideas, was a wise-hearted man. When Hitler seized power in Germany, tossing around some of the same language and ideas that Borglum himself was known to express, the sculptor was horrified. It was one thing, he realized, to write inflammatory screeds and send them to Jewish friends in the hope of extracting a drop of outrage; it was another altogether to set up concentration camps. In the last years of his life, Borglum became a fierce critic of Hitler, often releasing outspoken anti-Nazi statements designed to goad the Führer into a war of words. Hitler said nothing, but his deeds spoke loudly: When his armies swept Poland, he ordered his henchmen to remove the sole statue in that country created by Gutzon Borglum, a statue of Woodrow Wilson the sculptor had erected in Poznan in 1931. Where the statue had once stood, Hitler had put up a sign: “The American sculptor,” it read, “made the legs too short, the body too long and the head too large. Such an artistic eyesore cannot continue to stand in the city.”

But Borglum hardly noticed this petty slight. He was, at the time, suspended with his men in midair, attacking the granite of Mount Rushmore with chisels and jackhammers and sticks of dynamite, removing 450,000 tons of rock to create one of our most majestic monuments. He was moved by far more than the force of the technical challenge: The monument, he believed, would serve as an everlasting tribute to America’s greatness, proof set in stone of its divine election. To that end, he planned to blast an 80-by-100 foot vault next to the four presidents; this, the Hall of Records, would, he hoped, one day house the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and any other document pertaining to America’s glorious founding.

On March 6, 1941, Gutzon Borglum died of coronary sclerosis in a hospital in Chicago. Shortly before his death, he wrote to a friend, Montana Sen. Burt Wheeler, to advocate once again for a decisive American strike against Germany. “There is one single human obligation now before all decent fathers, mothers, governments—Stop Hitler and his cutthroats,” he wrote. He never lived to see Berlin taken by Allied troops, or to witness his son, Lincoln, complete his work on Mount Rushmore.

The nearly 15 million people who visit the site each year can judge more than Borglum’s artistry; they can judge the quality of his heart. Like Bezalel, Oholiab, and the other men tapped by Moses to build the Tabernacle, he was moved by a higher power. On his deathbed, he penned a letter to a friend, citing Victor Hugo. “Where the soul awakes,” he wrote, “there and there only your spirit is born.”

Messinger, who now heads the American Jewish World Service—a kind of Jewish peace corps that runs humanitarian projects in developing countries—went on to argue that the ever-expanding array of volunteer programs designed to build Jewish identity through community service can only succeed if they provide concrete benefits to needy people. In other words, they have to be authentic service programs, and not make-work designed to foster a fuzzy tikkun olam experience. “I want, as Jewish service grows, to be sure that it pays respect to the Jewish notion that we have responsibility to others,” Messinger told the audience. “We have to focus on beneficiaries’ needs, not on the need of the volunteers to feel Jewish, or to get something on their college applications.”

Berman Jewish Policy Archive [BJPA]

The comment, delivered as it was among Orthodox rabbis and Jews old enough to remember the black-Jewish Crown Heights riots of the mid-’90s (and to remember that Giuliani’s predecessor as mayor was David Dinkins, who, like Bloomberg challenger Bill Thompson, is black), drew the expected fire from Thompson’s campaign, but also from Brooklyn City Councilman Bill de Blasio, who told the New York Times that Giuliani was on the “verge of race-baiting.” Even Giuliani’s admiring biographer, the conservative historian Fred Siegel, was appalled. “It’s smart to have Rudy out there, but not in this way,” Siegel told the New York Observer. “You want a positive appeal to draw ethnic voters to the polling place. But the overtones here are double-edged.” Siegel also said that Bloomberg’s follow-up to Giuliani’s remark—to compare New York to Detroit, where “gains are always in danger of being turned around”—was neither “neither morally defensible nor politically sensible.”

Stumping With Mayor, Giuliani Stirs Old Fears
Siegel: ‘Neither Morally Defensible Nor Politically Sensible’