Now: ‘Joseph Lieberman, 1942-2024’
Fear for the future: ‘The Lieberman Era’
The passing of Joseph Lieberman naturally and rightly evokes tributes, and the tributes are rich and long. We are proud to present particularly informed tributes by people who knew Lieberman well over many decades, or who followed his career carefully. But the passing of Joseph Lieberman also evokes a fear, at once academic and only too real.
As for the justifiably long tributes and retrospectives, we let them speak for themselves; they need no additional embellishment here. As for the fear, we hope it is not grounded, but only a temporary flight of panic connected to strong but passing moods of the moment. We hope we are wrong.
A period of history is often summarized by a single name. “Jacksonian Democracy.” “Thatcherism.” “Hitler.” “Camelot.” “Herzlian Zionism.” “Bismarck.” “Victorian England.” What might a “Lieberman Era” symbolize?
Lieberman, of course, is the only Jew to have been on the ticket of a major political party in America for president. When Lieberman was nominated in 2000, he symbolized the heights to which a Jew could rise. He symbolized a radical attenuation of anti-Semitism that plagued non-Jewish societies for hundreds or thousands of years. When Lieberman was nominated, he said, “Only in America.” Everybody knew what he meant: No other leading democracy would freely choose a Jew for such a high position, that is to say, would discount the fact that he was a Jew and instead judge him only on his merits.
Joseph Lieberman is the perfect symbol of the freedom, security and confidence that Jews in America came to feel by 2000. He became the culmination of the slow but gradual reduction in such barriers as Harvard admissions quotas, formal housing covenants and informal country club restrictions, anti-Semitic radio programs and extremist political sentiments (on both the right and the left) — all of the written and unwritten codes that prevented Jews from achieving full equality in the US.
“Only in America” could a man with the last name of Lieberman and with the known Jewish identity of a traditional Sabbath observer be nominated for vice-president. This is our fear: that this level of acceptance of Jews in America is receding. That the sands are shifting. That the legitimation in popular sentiment of anti-Semitic prejudice is reemerging, that the history of Judaism in free societies will be punctuated with an opening and a closing parenthesis — that the characterization of this era will naturally and aptly be deemed “The Lieberman Era.”
The Lieberman Era: The limited span of time when Jews actually felt fully comfortable in a non-Jewish society, when the barriers truly fell, when minds were changed, when the ways of the old world were, indeed, old, when Jews lived under a new and wonderful dispensation of equality. The era will be called “The Lieberman Era” because he embodied it at a pinnacle and in a public way that no other Jew achieved.
As we say, we hope that a “Lieberman Era” of this kind will never materialize as the convenient and natural way for historians to look back at a parenthesized, anomalous period in Jewish history. But we have to admit that when Joseph Lieberman died — against a background of fierce anti-Semitism emerging in so many quarters around the world on and after October 7 — this crossed our mind.
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