Campaign ’96 / PROFILE : Tale of a Rabbi Who Champions Buchanan : Yahuda Levin says GOP candidate’s ideas make it worthwhile to ignore his comments about Jews.

Yahuda Levin has been called “the loneliest Jew in America.” He doesn’t dispute it.

As one of four national co-chairmen of the Buchanan for President campaign, the little-known and underemployed 41-year-old Orthodox rabbi is one of very few Jews willing to publicly support the belligerent political commentator.

Levin admits that his embrace of Buchanan, whom many prominent Jews consider to be anti-Semitic, hasn’t won him many friends in the Orthodox Jewish community of Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lives. In fact, it has made him an outcast and an oddity.

“Right now, I wouldn’t win any popularity contests,” he says. “An overwhelming number of people in my community just don’t understand Buchanan. They see him as a Nazi.”

But there is a logic to Levin’s support for Buchanan, although it requires the rabbi to set aside the candidate’s often-hostile, frequently skeptical comments about Jews, Israel and the Holocaust.

Levin says that Buchanan’s opposition to abortion, pornography and full civil rights for gays and lesbians--views Levin shares--far outweighs any misgivings he might have about Buchanan’s views of Jews and Israel. And he dismisses the distaste for Buchanan among fellow Jews as a product of both knee-jerk political liberalism and a hypersensitivity to perceived slights.

Sure, Levin says, Buchanan has at times been guilty of “insensitivity” to Jewish opinion, such as when he complained of Jewish “wallowing in the atrocities of a dead regime,” referring to the Nazi Holocaust. Buchanan’s description of Adolf Hitler as “an individual of great courage, a soldier’s soldier” was also perhaps excessively provocative, Levin avows.

But none of that is evidence of hatred toward Jews, Levin says. Rather, it’s just Buchanan’s way of being heard above “the clamor and din of the Beltway crowd.”

“He’s an equal opportunity insulter,” Levin proceeds, speaking at roughly 120 words a minute. “He’s a pugnacious Roman Catholic, Latin Mass guy, a traditionalist, stubborn. His faith doesn’t change with the times. He’s used to brawling intellectual give-and-take, no holds barred, no prisoners taken. He still hasn’t realized the difference between writing a column and running for president. But this does not an anti-Semite make.”

Levin says his attraction to Buchanan and his ideas rises naturally from his conservative faith and tradition. He was reared in an ultra-Orthodox family in Brooklyn and Queens and was educated and ordained at an Orthodox yeshiva in Brooklyn.

He is married to a daughter of Holocaust survivors, who, Levin says, finds his role in the Buchanan campaign a bit perplexing. She does not participate in Levin’s political activities; she has her hands full rearing their eight children in their rented home in Flatbush.

Levin briefly held a pulpit at the small Beth Jacob synagogue in Queens in the late 1980s and still officiates at High Holy Day services as an itinerant rabbi.

He also serves as unofficial spokesman for Jews for Morality, a conservative group that opposes abortion and promotes what Levin calls “traditional values from a Jewish perspective.” He can give no estimate of the group’s size and says it has no office or telephone.

But it is his political, rather than his religious, activities that have won him some notoriety.

In 1984, he changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican to run against Rep. Stephen J. Solarz, the Democratic incumbent, winning a surprising 35% of the vote. The next year, running as the candidate of New York’s Right to Life Party, he challenged Democratic Mayor Edward I. Koch but earned only an asterisk in the record books.

His relationship (“if you want to call it that,” Levin says) with Buchanan dates to the fall of 1992, when he met the firebrand columnist at a GOP gathering in New Jersey and told him that the two agreed on “a whole smorgasbord of social issues.”

In spring 1995, Buchanan’s sister and campaign manager, Angela “Bay” Buchanan, called Levin and asked if he’d be willing to serve as a national co-chairman of the campaign.

“When I accepted that, I had no illusions that Mr. Buchanan would be the next president or even win the nomination,” Levin says. “I did this and I’m doing this because he champions a lot of issues that I believe he ought to receive our support for.”

Levin says he’s given up much hope of reaching fellow Jews. His goal, for now, is to convince Christian conservatives that Buchanan has at least some support among Jews.

“I’m telling them that there are, like me, a small group of people who appreciate that while he doesn’t have the best bedside manner, to put it mildly, he’s not a Jew-hater.”

Most mainstream Jewish leaders, however, are not convinced. Rabbi Marvin Hier, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, said that Buchanan has had numerous opportunities to explain or apologize for his remarks and has never taken them.

Hier added that Levin would have a hard time finding enough Jewish supporters of Buchanan to put together the 10 Jews required by religious custom to conduct a prayer service. “It’s an extremely small group he represents. Despite the best efforts of Rabbi Levin to enlarge it, I think he would be lucky if he found a minyan.”