12 | AUGUST 12 • 2021 C arl Levin was more than Michigan’s longest-serving senator in Washington — and the longest-serv- ing Jewish U.S. senator in American history. He was truly a “Giant of the Senate. ” Ironically, another senator who was also Jewish, Minnesota’s Al Franken, once wrote a book with the satirical title, Al Franken, Giant of the Senate. Like Franken, Levin was a man who could laugh at himself. But that phrase would be anything but satire if it were used to describe Carl Levin. He really was all that — and more. Levin, who left the Senate in 2015 after serving six terms and 36 years, died July 29, 2021. He was 87 years old. But he is unlikely to be soon forgotten. Levin won near-universal acclaim for the work that he did as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he became famous for rooting out examples of waste and bloated and unnecessary spend- ing. In his role as chair of the Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee, he fought hard and often successfully to hold Wall Street firms accountable, nota- bly Goldman Sachs. He tried to limit the amount of surveillance intelligence agen- cies did on the communications of private American citizens. Levin, perhaps more than any other con- temporary senator, was a master of some- times mind-numbing detail on virtually every topic that came before his committee. “You have to really know a subject if you are going to examine or cross-examine a witness, ” he once told the National Journal, and woe could come unto anyone who tes- tified before him without having done his homework. Yet, though he had a strong profile on national issues, he was a Detroiter — and a Jewish Detroiter — to the core. Born in the city on June 28, 1934, he was the third of three children of Bess and Saul Levin, and grew up mainly on Boston Boulevard. All went to Roosevelt Elementary and Central High School in the city. JEWISH VALUES Earlier this year, when Sen. Levin’s book Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36 Years in the U.S. Senate was published by Wayne State University Press, he told me that he had been heavily influenced by being Jewish. “It surely did. I think the values in Judaism are important — the values of being charitable, of thinking of others, the important Jewish values, which I learned early in life. ” The history of antisemitism, he said, “has made me very sensitive to others who are victims of prejudices and discrimination. ” In the late 1970s, the senator and his wife, Barbara, and 10 other families formed a new congregation, T’ chiyah, a small Reconstructionist congregation. But besides Judaism, politics and pub- lic service were in Carl Levin’s blood. His father was a lawyer in practice with his brother Theodore “Ted” Levin who later became a highly respected U.S. District Court judge, the one for whom the federal courthouse in Detroit is now named. Carl’s brother, Sander, three years older, preceded him into politics, serving as Michigan Senate majority leader before losing two close elections for governor and finally serving 36 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, matching his brother’s time in the Senate. “Sandy was always my hero, ” Sen. Levin told this writer earlier this year; the brothers remained close all their lives. Following high school, the future sena- Carl Levin, the people’s advocate who confronted the powerful. A Lifetime of Service JACK LESSENBERRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER THE PEOPLE’S ADVOCATE SEN. CARL LEVIN (1934-2021) From Detroit to D.C.