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Examining Clinton's Pillars
Of Religious Liberty

Don't you believe that if every kid in every dif-
ficult neighborhood in America were in a reli-
gious institution on weekends — a synagogue, a
church, a mosque, a temple — that the drug rate,
the crime rate, the violence rate, the sense of self-
destruction would plummet and that the national
quality and character would soar?
President Clinton asked this question in his
address to students and parents at a high school
in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., last week.
Instantly, we were poised to shoot down his
thinking as simplistic and treading on the cher-
ished principal of separation of church and state.
But then we gained some context. The memo-
randum to the departments of Justice and Edu-
cation, upon which the speech was based, were
meant to clarify the existing law and to head off
a constitutional amendment that seeks to make
practicing religion in public schools easier.
And we discovered that the president's re-
marks were based largely on a report from reli-
gious and civil liberties organizations (including
the American Jewish Congress and the Ameri-
can Civil Liberties Union). The speech was a chal-
lenge to advocates of a "religious equality"
amendment. They argue that the Supreme Court
has turned public schools into "religion-free
zones," which recent Court rulings seem to re-
fute.
In his memo to the attorney general and the
secretary of education, President Clinton specif-

ically addresses these topics: student prayer and
religious discussion; graduation prayer and bac-
calaureates; official neutrality regarding reli-
gious activity; teaching about religion; student
assignments; religious literature; religious ex-
cusals; released time; teaching values; and stu-
dent garb. And he interprets the Equal Access
Act.
It is an ambitious document set firmly on what
the president calls the "twin pillars of religious
liberty: the constitutional protection for the free
exercise of religion, and the prohibition on the
establishment of religion by the state."
But we fear that, in the end, that the broad-
er citizenry President Clinton was addressing
will never benefit from his nuanced argument.
From his speech, we worry, many will take a
boiled-down, headline-length interpretation such
as: "Troubled Clinton Backs Religion's Place in
Schools." The message, without repetition and
replication by state and local officials, will be but
another blur in the increasingly fuzzy imagery
of American politics.
We applaud President Clinton's reminder that
"our nation's founders knew that religion helps
to give our people the character without which
a democracy cannot survive." But we will return
to the specifics of his memorandum when would-
be amenders to the Constitution, which provides
prayer its rightful place, trumpet simplistic head-
lines and sound bites for their own purposes.

Successful Kosher Restaurant?
We've Got a Waft To Learn

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This is a challenging place to operate a kosher
restaurant.
Not our words, but those of Morris Goodman,
whose Sara's Deli is about to close.
Sara's lost for several reasons, some of it hav-
ing very much to do with the high costs of kosher
products and high number of days it couldn't do
business due to Jewish holidays.
But Sara's really lost because it couldn't at-
tract enough business outside of the Orthodox
or even the Jewish community. Successful kosher
restaurants in smaller communities than De-
troit have made it work by bringing in the gen-
eral public, because there is something attractive
about its menu, its quality of food, its ambiance,
its service.
Sara's catered largely to its 10 Mile and Green-
field clientele, and unfortunately, that wasn't
enough. Now, there are people wondering why
Detroit's Jewish community cannot maintain a
kosher restaurant.
May we suggest that it is not up to a Jewish

community to keep a restaurant in business. It
is instead the responsibility of ownership to keep
a restaurant fresh in customer service, not to
mention good food.
To suggest as some have that the closure of
Sara's is a poor reflection on this Jewish com-
munity is absurd. This is the community that
raises millions of dollars for local Jewish services
as well as Israel. This is the community that con-
tinues to produce some of the world's great Jew-
ish leaders.
Fortunately we're known more as the com-
munity that produced Max Fisher instead of a
fish sandwich.
To those who are contemplating a move into
the kosher restaurant business, why don't you
see what they're eating in some of the fine non-
kosher restaurants out there. Observe how they
vary the menus, decorate the interiors and smile
cordially at the customers. Then go out and get
a kosher certification.

Opinion

A Nation Like
All Others?

JANE SIEGEL MEDVED SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

ell, folks, it looks like
the robbers have been
really busy today,"
joked the radio disc
jockey. It was barely one in the
afternoon and the number of
bank robberies for the day al-
ready had hit four. "Guess
they've switched over to summer
hours," he chuckled.
But the recent phenomena of
Israeli homegrown bank rob-
beries and muggings is hardly a
laughing matter. For the past
few weeks, there have been an
average of three or four incidents
a day, usually non-violent but al-
ways with the presence of a gun.
The scenario already is pre-
dictable: a masked bandit enters
one of the hundreds of local bank
branches that dot this country.
They brandish an Uzi, grab a
few thousand shekels, jump on a
waiting motorcycle and disap-
pear into the sunset. The bank
tellers shrug their shoulders.
The banks get reimbursed by the
government. And life goes on as
usual.
Israeli banks, unlike their
counterparts around the world,
are completely devoid of any se-
curity apparatus. Tellers work
at open desks accessible to even
a moderately enterprising tod-
dler. Conspicuously absent are
video cameras, security guards,
bulletproof windows, intercoms,
buzzer systems or any of the
standard paraphernalia one usu-
ally associates with public places

at which large amounts of cash
are collected daily.
Israel was always the place
where — up until the late 1970s
— nobody even locked their front
door; where cab drivers
schmoozed with you in the front

seat and not behind an armored
security partition; where you
might worry about a Katusha
falling on your house but you
could stroll through the streets
at all hours without any concern;
where you were linked with your
fellow citizens in a common
struggle against enemies who at-
tacked from the outside.

And guns were something
people carried because they had
to, not because they wanted to.
Guns in Israel were never seen
as macho toys for cops and rob-
bers, but real weapons meant for
real wars. And everybody had
just about gotten their fill of
them.
It is an extreme irony that the
ultimate fulfillment of the Zion-
ist dream to be a nation like all
the others may prove to be Is-
rael's ultimate undoing. For the
new American-style Utopia, with
its rising level of affluence and
focus on materialism, is divid-
ing, rather than uniting, the so-
ciety.
As the gap widens between the
haves and the have-nots, people
are starting to care only about
themselves and their piece of the
pie. The common values and
lifestyles that once guided the
country — pioneering, self-sacri-
fice, singing around the commu-
nal campfire — have fallen out of
fashion and are quickly disinte-
grating into mere cliches.
What unsuspecting Israelis are
about to learn, however, is that
the American dream is a package
deal; that shopping malls, fast
food and cable TV don't exist in a
vacuum. Convenience and wealth
extract their own price from so-
ciety. And if you want Honda
dealerships, McDonalds and
quick profits on the stock market,
sooner or later you're going to end
up with the bank robberies, pet-
ty crime and general indifference
to one another.
It's obvious that Israelis liv-
ing in a suburban sprawl are go-
ing to relate to each other
differently than Israelis living
on a kibbutz. And maybe the
days of draining the swamps and
settling the land really have
come to a close. But the question
remains, what is Israel going to
do with its newfound prosperi-
ty, other than imitate the mis-
takes of the West? ❑
Jane Siegel Medved is a free-
lance writer living in Israel.