Personally speaking

Hillary's no bigot

by Seth Gitell

Last Saturday I walked into the 7-Eleven at Cleveland Circle to buy a copy of the New York Post. By the time I walked out, I had already called three people on my cell phone. The reason for my excitement? The wood of the Post screamed HILLARY BOOK BROUHAHA: FUROR OVER CLAIM THAT CLINTON USED ANTI-SEMITIC SLUR.

The story inside provided the details. In a new book called State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton (HarperCollins), onetime National Enquirer reporter Jerry Oppenheimer recounts a 1974 campaign spat between the Clintons and an aide during which Hillary Clinton allegedly used the phrase "fucking Jew bastard." The Post reporter confirmed the account independently with the couple making the accusation. The Post story also referred to "anti-Semitic feelings" held by Hillary Clinton's mother, Dorothy Rodham, "toward Max Rosenberg, her Jewish stepfather." On Sunday, fearing that her campaign was at the beginning of an Al "Putzhead" D'Amato-style meltdown, the first lady held a press conference to deny the allegation. Later that same day, President Clinton took a break from the grueling Mideast peace talks to telephone the New York Daily News from Camp David.

The reason for my interest is that I've devoted a lot of thought to Hillary Clinton and her attitudes toward Jews. Last summer, while working at the Forward, a New York-based Jewish weekly, I broke the story of her Jewish roots. Before I began poring through birth and marriage certificates from Cook County, Illinois, no one had ever heard of Hillary's step-grandfather, Max Rosenberg. When the piece came out, it caused a firestorm in New York politics. And everyone, especially writers at the Post, believed the story had been leaked to me by Hillary's campaign. The fact that it had grown out of a vague, unsubstantiated tip -- a tip that turned out to be false -- was of interest to no one. Nor was the fact that I had written highly critical pieces on Hillary Clinton in the Forward as well as the New Republic -- in other words, I wasn't carrying Hillary's water.

Still, there was one person who was interested in how I broke the story. A few weeks after the Max Rosenberg piece ran, I got a call from a Washington woman who wanted to know where the story had come from and how I could detail it. Her name? Judy Oppenheimer. She's married to the author of State of a Union. I explained that a New Jersey reader had sent me an odd typewritten letter saying that Hillary Clinton was Jewish because her mother was Jewish, and that I had painstakingly followed it up with the help of a Chicago genealogist. I even gave her the number of my Chicago-based colleague. Soon afterward, I moved to Boston, and that was the last I heard of the matter. Until I walked into that 7-Eleven and picked up a copy of the Post.

In his new book, Oppenheimer relies heavily on the documents and events I referenced in the original story -- from the ugly divorce between Hillary Clinton's grandparents, Edwin Howell and Della Murray, to Max Rosenberg's attempt to adopt Dorothy Rodham. Oppenheimer had the good luck to locate another Rodham relative who could relate memories about the family. But the hottest detail in the book is the business about Hillary Clinton's having called a campaign aide a "Jew bastard."

Although I'm grateful that someone has followed up on work I began and given me credit for it, I have serious doubts about this latest allegation. It's not that I have any soft spot for Hillary Clinton. In fact, Clinton's two great Mideast-related blunders have left me cold. Her call -- in advance of American foreign policy -- to create a Palestinian state threatened to disrupt the peace process. And her embrace of Suha Arafat, immediately following Arafat's libelous charges that Israel had poisoned the water of Palestinians, was an unconscionable error.

But Hillary Clinton is not a bigot or an anti-Semite. To have called someone a "Jew bastard" would seem wildly out of character for her. Consider the case of Steve Rabinowitz, a former aide to President Clinton. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Rabinowitz earned the affectionate nickname "Rabbi." Almost everyone referred to him in this manner -- except Mrs. Clinton. Once she began to refer to Rabinowitz as "the Rabbi" and then stopped herself. She is the only person Rabinowitz recalls ever doing this. "I always assumed she didn't know if it was appropriate, ethnically pejorative or somehow not right," he told me.

Further evidence also suggests the Arkansas account is not true. During the same period when Mrs. Clinton is alleged to have uttered the incriminating statement, she rented an apartment from a Jewish woman, Sara Ehrman. Ehrman remains a close friend, adviser, and confidante to the first lady to this day.

On a personal level, in fact, it appears that Hillary Clinton scrupulously avoids even the hint of personal prejudice. I've seen her deliver numerous speeches to Jewish groups. She unfailingly invokes human-rights and tolerance concerns. Speaking to the American Jewish Committee at the height of the war in Kosovo, Mrs. Clinton invoked the example of Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and asked the audience to support the Balkan effort as a human-rights imperative. She was one of the first public voices to call on Iran to free 13 Jews imprisoned on spying charges in Shiraz. Face it: Hillary Clinton is an uptight, politically correct liberal. I'm willing to believe many things about her, but I can't believe that she's ever referred to anyone as a "fucking Jew bastard."

Even if Mrs. Clinton did say what's she's accused of saying, so what? The alleged statement took place almost three decades ago, in the heat of a lost election. It was not accompanied by any underlying program of anti-Semitism. There are times when anti-Semitic statements carry political import: for example, when a leader such as David Duke or Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan uses such language to build a following. In those cases, Jews and other good people must be concerned. But a lone comment, in the context of Clinton's broader record, is not one of those cases.

There's something wrong when the question of whether Hillary Clinton once called somebody a "Jew bastard" gets more attention than America's Mideast policy in general. Decisions are being made at Camp David that could mean the difference between peace and war. What does Hillary Clinton think about that? Let people vote for or against her on that issue -- not a comment she may or may not have made 26 years ago.