Second Opinion / COMMENTARY FROM OTHER MEDIA : THE JEWISH JOURNAL : Boxer and Feinstein: Two Familiar People

Editor’s note: The San Diego County town of Alpine was in the news in recent months because of an apparent vigilante attack on a group of migrant workers following an accusation of rape (which the district attorney later declined to prosecute) against a migrant. The following editorial indirectly concerns issues raised by the attack and its aftermath.

Purely and simply, an ambitious Jewish woman still is a separate case, a special threat if you will. Ask Bella Abzug or Liz Holtzman. The shelf life of an American Jewish woman in political life is amazingly short. One false gesture, one harsh retort coming like the snap of chewing gum, and she finds herself, as Dianne Feinstein did during the senatorial primary, being criticized as the next Leona Helmsley. Jewish men are expected to be abrasive and hard-hitting (though ethical). That’s why the American public elects them, in ever-increasing numbers--to get the job done. But Jewish women have not yet found a way to speak to the larger American public in a way that does not throb with nervous agitation or grate with the whine of the ghetto. Despite decades of behind-the-scenes effort for the right causes, we still have trouble speaking for ourselves.

That’s why these California senatorial victories are so crucial, marking an opportunity to come of age. Feinstein and Boxer, now probably the two highest-ranking Jewish women in American political history, have shown us something we might otherwise have missed: the double agenda of the American Jewish woman. Some of us are obsessed, like Dianne Feinstein, with “making nice,” in being conciliatory and finding out which way the wind blows before we act. And others of us are, like Barbara Boxer, Emma Goldman-style liberators, fighting first and explaining later. Together the two senators will indeed fight for a new national agenda, on education, on choice, on the environment. One without the other wouldn’t be quite as effective.