As has been traditional in The Chronicle’s coverage of major elections, we provide profiles of Jewish activists working for as many of the political parties and candidates as we can, and opinion articles and letters to the editor for and against the candidates and parties.
As non-profit organizations, The Chronicle and its publisher, the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, cannot and do not endorse candidates or political parties.
We at The Chronicle hope to present as many political opinions as we can and to promote the growth and well-being of the Jewish community. To that end, no outright anti-Semitic parties will appear in our pages. However, parties and views critical of Israel or Zionism will appear, provided we are convinced that such views — however controversial— are offered as good faith efforts to promote the growth and well-being of the Jewish community.
We here feature interviews with Jewish activists for the Democratic, Libertarian and Republican parties, in alphabetical order by party name. The Green Party, whose presidential nominee is former Democratic Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and the Wisconsin campaign for the Ralph Nader independent candidacy did not provide us with names of Jewish activists that we could contact by press time.
Leonard S. Zubrensky, Democratic Party
Retired Milwaukee attorney Leonard S. Zubrensky, 86, is one of those activists who wanted his profession to comport with his social and political views.
“From the day I was in law school, I decided I wanted to help poor people,” he said in a recent telephone interview. However, he found he couldn’t make a living that way, so he expanded to labor law. Ultimately, his firm ended up representing 32 labor unions.
These concerns also led him to become an activist for the Democratic Party, which he has been since 1950, “and I still am.” In fact, he recently wrote a book, “Let the Hi-Jinks Begin: The Memoir of a Democratic Activist,” about his efforts and the Democratic political leaders he has known and worked with and for.
(He will be speaking about his book at the Harry W. Schwartz Bookstore in Shorewood at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 14.)
He belongs to and works for the party because “I’m in favor of helping people who can’t help themselves,” he said. He contended that the Republicans advocate a “trickle down theory,” that “if you give the rich all the money they want, they will provide jobs for the poor. It doesn’t work that way.”
Zubrensky also contends that the Republican Party “has never been for universal health care” and the Democrats are “currently are nervous about coming out” for it. But, “if [Democratic nominee Barack] Obama becomes president, I believe he will come out for a universal health plan.”
On what may be the most emotion-grabbing social/cultural issue of the elections, abortion, Zubrensky denounced the Republicans for being “opposed to abortion even if a woman has been raped or is a victim of incest. Can you imagine that?… We want to limit abortion by education, not by stricture. Abortion should be limited, safe and available. Women should make that choice.”
But he is not concerned about what U.S. relations with Israel would be like after these elections. “I think both Obama and [Republican nominee John] McCain support Israel equally… I think both are 100 percent behind Israel.”
During the interview, Zubrensky often expressed pride that the majority of the U.S. Jewish community has voted Democratic over the years. “Most Jewish people I’ve known are liberal in thinking about tolerance toward others and believe in spreading the wealth around,” he said. “It’s a very peculiar Jewish characteristic. We are generous, kind, thoughtful people; we’re not selfish people who try to do nothing but rake in money.”
“To me,” he said, “it is a wonderful statement about Jews to know that between 70 and 80 percent of the Jewish vote in presidential elections is for Democratic candidates. Even though the Republicans are always favoring tax laws that favor the rich, and there’s a high percentage of rich Jews.”
Deborah Katz Hunt, Libertarian Party
“I grew up in this very politically thoughtful and active family,” said Deborah Katz Hunt, 55, of Oregon, a town due south of Madison. “That made me think hard about what I believed in.”
Her thinking led her to the conclusion that “the most important thing was the rights of the individual.” Moreover, “I very much believe in liberal democracy above all else.”
And that lead her to join the Libertarian Party, in which she has been active since about 1982.
In fact, she not only will be voting for its presidential nominee, Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. She said she will be the chair of the Wisconsin branch’s convention this coming April.
Her intellectual interests have also led her to hold three part time jobs — at the Wisconsin Center for the Study of Liberal Democracy, the Wisconsin Association of Scholars, and the Liberty Fund — which add up to more than one full-time job, she said.
When it comes to this election, “We’ve got to get both [the Democratic and Republican] parties out-out-out” of office, she said. “We’ve got to get a Libertarian president. I believe that’s what the future holds.”
Libertarians, she said, believe in “a limited state, a minimal state.” Citizens’ taxes should be spent on “defense and a legal system that protects individual rights” — and on nothing else.
Katz Hunt agreed the assessment that most American Jews tend to believe in personal freedom, but in government regulation of the economy. It is in the latter subject that she breaks with most of the Jewish community. “I don’t believe in any economic regulation. I believe in the free market.”
Katz Hunt was born in Minneapolis and grew up in Los Angeles, one of five children of a Conservative father and a Reform mother, she said. “We argued politics when I was growing up from the time I was very little.” She began her political activism when she was in high school, she said.
Her family affiliated with the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, the oldest Reform synagogue in Los Angeles, and she attended its “Sabbath School” on Saturdays. But unlike some of her siblings, she didn’t have a bat mitzvah ceremony because “I became an atheist when I was 12,” she said.
Even so, she visited Israel with her family when she was about 12 and thought of moving there when she was 16. And when she was an undergraduate at the University of California in Santa Barbara, her political activities included leading a campaign against the United Nations “Zionism is racism” resolution. “I’m very sympathetic to Israel in my heart.”
Nevertheless, she agrees with the Libertarian Party in opposing foreign aid from the U.S. government to any country, including to Israel. “Why not private donations?”
And she expressed gratitude to The Chronicle for contacting her and representing the Libertarian Party, the largest of the country’s “third parties,” in its election coverage.
“That’s the Jewish tradition; let’s hear all sides,” she said.
Nathaniel Sattler, Republican Party
Electrical engineer Nathaniel Sattler, 28, of Mequon credits his father, who owns a home maintenance business, with being “a mentor in terms of political ideas. He turned me on to being a news junkie and got me interested in politics at a young age.”
So he has been interested in politics since grade school and middle school, he said — and has always been a Republican. Today, he is president of the Republican Jewish Coalition’s Wisconsin chapter.
“For my own personal philosophy, I tend to call myself conservative,” Sattler told The Chronicle in a telephone interview. And “conservative” primarily means to him “small government and fiscal conservatism … as well as a strong foreign policy.”
In fact, when asked about why he believes the Republican Party and its candidates would better serve U.S. Jews’ interests and concerns, he first mentioned foreign policy problems “that I think Republicans have better methods of addressing than the Democrats do.”
“For me right now, the number one thing is the Iranian nuclear program,” Sattler said. “In my opinion, the Democrats aren’t really willing … to use force or threaten the use of force” to prevent the militantly Muslim regime from developing nuclear weapons.
“We really have to be wary of our enemies and be willing to confront them when necessary,” Sattler said. “I’m afraid of the threat” that Iran would pose to the U.S. and to Israel if it had nuclear weapons, and “we have to be willing to do anything to prevent that occurrence.”
Domestically, Sattler believes “there’s a mood in this country among the middle class, myself included, of economic anxiety” because of “inflationary pressures” on food and energy.
To address these matters, Democratic nominee Barack Obama “is proposing higher taxes, more government redistribution of wealth, bringing health care fully into the government fold, that sort of thing, which strikes me as a little scary,” Sattler said. “Low taxes are important to having a strong economy, in my opinion, especially a strong middle class.”
Sattler also thinks the Republican have a better approach to making the U.S. less dependent on foreign oil for energy.
“In my opinion, the best solution is to do everything,” including drill for more U.S. oil, build nuclear power plants, and investigate and develop alternative energy sources and alternative forms of transportation.
He thinks the Democrats too narrowly focus on wind and solar power, which are “great, but limited” and “can’t be running 24 hours a day,” and are too skeptical of nuclear power.
Sattler said that he, like most Jewish Republicans, is more interested in these kinds of policy issues than the apparently more emotion-grabbing “culture war” issues.
Though he is pro-life on the abortion issue, he contends that “each side has legitimate arguments” and “the real issue” is judicial appointments.
“My personal opinion (I am not speaking for the RJC) is that judicial conservatives are the way to go.” Even if the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion were reversed, “each state would have the ability to set abortion policy” and it would be easier to “reduce the intensity” of the controversy and “find a compromise,” Sattler said.
Sattler admitted that the topic of the influence of the religious right on the Republican Party is “an issue that’s one of the toughest to overcome” in speaking with other Jews.
But “it is my belief,” based on many meetings with Christian conservatives, “that the Christian right is very friendly to the Jewish community.”
“These are people who have real religious beliefs and that’s a part of who they are, and that informs their political activity in the same way that Judaism for a lot of people informs their political activity,” Sattler said.
“It’s not something to fear; it’s something to be respected.… Some of them would like us to convert, but they’re not overbearing about it, they’re respectful. And if you’re strong in your own faith, it shouldn’t really be a threat, in my opinion.”
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