“I don’t understand how Jews in America can be Democrats first and Jewish second,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said in an interview on March 20.
King’s remark brought a chuckle to Rabbi Jonah Pesner, the new director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the movement’s social justice body. He then denied that King’s comment was true, at least for the RAC.
Pesner has held his position since this past January. He was in Milwaukee on March 27 to speak at the Metropolitan Council of Reform Congregations Shabbat, held that evening at Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun.
“The reason why our positions seem to line up the way they do is not because we’re Democrats first,” Pesner said in a conversation with The Chronicle on the afternoon before the service. “It’s because a plurality or a majority or a near consensus of our base has some things in common.”
These include beliefs that “women should have control of their bodies,” that “gay people should have the right to marry,” that “every citizen of the United States should have the right to vote” and that “we have to stop climate change,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean all Reform Jews are Democrats or even liberals, or that Pesner has no contact with politically conservative Jews.
“I speak with self-described Jewish conservatives all the time,” Pesner said. “It’s very important to me. I surround myself with people whose positions and politics tend to be different from mine. It’s one of the most exhilarating parts of my job.”
“There are dissenting voices” in the Reform Jewish community, and they “should be honored and affirmed as authentic Jewish voices,” Pesner said.
“And we also have to keep checking ourselves that the way we came to our priorities and positions actually was a democratic process where different voices are heard and we can say we didn’t start with the Democratic Party platform, which we don’t,” he added.
In fact, Pesner said that the skills he brings to the RAC include experience in working with Republican as well as Democratic politicians.
He was a congregational rabbi and social justice organizer in Massachusetts for many years, before taking RAC leadership, he said. During that earlier time, he worked with Republican Gov. (and later presidential candidate) Mitt Romney on health care access.
“I learned first that if the religious community actually organizes and raises its voice, it can bring out elected officials’ best selves [and help them] transcend the narrow partisan interests,” said Pesner.
“It also taught me not to be ideological about what particular approach [to take in] problem solving,” Pesner continued.
While both sides wanted people to have improved access to health care, one favored a government option while Romney said he wanted the approach “market-driven,” and “we weren’t ideological” about that, Pesner said.
Pesner has done “grassroots organizing” in places besides Massachusetts. In fact, he said that two years ago he was in Milwaukee doing such work.
He said he worked with a Milwaukee coalition of groups called Common Ground. Pesner told The Chronicle that during his recent Milwaukee visit he met with leaders of the group who told him about “two really big victories that I’m very excited about and actually connect to my work in Washington.”
One had to do with foreclosure of homes on Milwaukee’s west side. “Hundreds of homes have been rehabilitated in the neighborhood now because the homes have gotten out of foreclosure,” Pesner said.
The other had to do with health care access. Common Ground “built a health care co-op” that has provided health care access to some 37,000 local people, Pesner said he learned from Common Ground leaders.
Pesner’s arrival at RAC closed a biographical circle for him. He said he grew up in “a loving, wonderful Reform Jewish community in New York City” that helped support Pesner’s family after his father died when Pesner was a teen.
“I’m a rabbi probably because of the way the rabbis took care of me,” Pesner said.
But during Pesner’s adolescence, his predecessor at RAC, Rabbi David Saperstein, decided to bring a group of Reform Jewish teens to Washington. (In December, Saperstein became the first non-Christian to hold the post of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.)
Pesner was in that group, “and it blew me away, changed my life,” Pesner said. “It lined up all of the values I had grown up with.”
(This youth endeavor has become the RAC’s L’Taken [from Hebrew “to repair”] Social Justice Seminar, which brings some 2,000 teens a year to Washington.)
Pesner was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in 1997. He served congregations in Massachusetts and Connecticut and worked as a local community organizer before becoming RAC director.
“For me now to actually take over as director of that entity is profoundly meaningful,” he said.
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