4 .0

41%

honored Saperstein, with President
Bill Clinton seizing the opportunity to
joke about Saperstein's loquacity.
"When I first met him, I thought, this
guy is some talker," said Clinton.
"Even by the high standards of rabbis,
he can talk."
Others hailed Saperstein's 25-year
tenure, remarkable in a city where
anything more than two years is
counted as a long-term job commit-
ment.
But his true achievement isn't sheer
endurance; it's the persistence of his
particular vision of Jewish social and
political action.
"Torah study, worship and spiritu-
ality and social justice, the three his-
toric pillars of Jewish life, are not sep-
arate," said Saperstein. "Two-thousand
years ago the rabbis debated: what is
more important, study or action?
They concluded that the essential
thing is study that leads to action."
Indeed, since its creation in 1959,
the RAC has been a powerful voice of
Jewish progressivism on every major
civil rights battle. It fought attacks on
the First Amendment by the Christian
right even before it was called the
Christian right.
Even activists from the other side of
the Jewish political spectrum praise
the hyperactive but effective machine
Saperstein has created.
In many cases I have looked at the
way David and the RAC have imple-
mented programs and strategies as a
model," says Nathan Diament,
Washington representative for the
Orthodox Union. "His energy and his
drive are infectious, and he's intellec-
tually honest; that's something else
that sets him apart."
Yet, critics say Saperstein's RAC is
one of the last outposts of liberal
political correctness. The RAC, they
say, noting its activism on everything
from minimum wage to the
Endangered Species Act, is out of step
with today's Jews.
Saperstein has a sharp response.
"The Jewish community is where it
has been for 70 years," he said. "It
remains one of the most liberal groups
in America in its attitudes on issues
and the most liberal in its voting pat-
,,
terns.
He notes that the last four presi-
dential elections have seen between 70
and 85 percent of American Jews vote
Democratic and "they've averaged over
70 percent for Democratic congres-
sional candidates."
At the same time, he said, social
action programs at the congregational
level — efforts to feed the hungry,

house the homeless and help the
elderly — are burgeoning.
Saperstein's parents were promi-
nent civil rights activists; his father
was the longtime Reform rabbi in
Malvern, Long Island. After college,
Saperstein opted for a dual career as
a rabbi and a lawyer "because I
decided those were the institutions
most capable of helping people in
need and transforming society for
the better."
He spent several years as a rabbi
in a Reform congregation in
Manhattan. "We did some ground-
breaking work," he said about the
hot lunch program it operated for
370 elderly poor and organizing a
rabbinical protest of the bombing of
Cambodia.
Saperstein went to the RAC in 1974.
Now he has a unique veteran's perspec-
tive of the nation's political wars.
You work on an issue for
months, stopping a bad piece of leg-
islation or passing a good one. Or
you work for years, and when you
finally get something done, you real-
ize you've just touched the lives of
millions of people who will never
know who you are, who probably
never heard of the Religious Action
Center. That's something extraordi-
nary," he said.
Over the years the details come
and go, but the RAC's core focus —
church-state separation, health and
welfare programs, civil rights, Israel
— remains.
In recent years the Reform
Movement itself has focused more on
spirituality and ritual. Saperstein
insisted that the shift does not
detract from the movement's political
focus. "It would be a catastrophic
mistake if our efforts at Jewish conti-
nuity segregated the different parts
of Jewish identity," he said.
He attributes much of the RAC's
success to its ever-changing team of
legislative assistants — young Jews
who take a year off between college
and graduate school to work at the
RAC. He also credits the active back-
ing of rabbis and congregants in 900
Reform congregations, who often
respond strongly to RAC action
alerts.
"One of my most satisfying
moments was when then-Sen. Pete
Wilson's chief of staff called just
before a school prayer vote and
pleaded: 'Stop the phone calls; your
people in California are clogging our
switchboard.' That's the kind of
thing that tells you you've really
made a difference." Er

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