Now that Jimmy Carter has died, it is time for the American Jewish community to do some teshuvah.
Not in the sense of repentance but by taking a moment to reappraise a man who garnered such widespread suspicion and dislike among Jews during his presidency. In February 1978, when the magazine was just three years old, Moment asked readers to weigh in on Carter’s presidency. Some of the responses speak volumes:
“Carter is a ‘catastrophe’ as far as a secure Middle East peace is concerned. He is a captive of Sadat’s ‘shtick’ and Saudi Arabian oil control…”
“Between the Arabs and Mr. Carter, I feel like they’re stabbing me to death like I was the State of Israel…”
“It’s so difficult for me to understand how President Carter could surround himself with ‘young punks’ who could never possibly know anything about foreign policy…”
“President Carter has betrayed the trust that we placed in him by voting for him on the basis of his campaign pledges regarding the Middle East…”
Considering these and other responses from the Moment survey, conducted 15 months into what would be his only term as president of the United States, it’s clear that he wasn’t trusted by many in the Jewish community and beyond, one of the factors that would cost him reelection. Others include what Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor Stuart Eizenstat, whom I interviewed in a recent MomentLive! program, “Jimmy Carter: The Great ‘Jewish’ President,” calls the four “i’s”: inflation, Iran, inexperience and inter-party warfare—with the liberal wing of the Democratic party. But in the Jewish world, the refrain boiled down to just one thing: Carter wasn’t good for the Jews or for Israel. This led Jewish voters (including my mother, a lifelong Democrat) to abandon him in droves for Ronald Reagan.
Yet clearly, there was more to Jimmy Carter than met the eye at the time. As Eizenstat and other Carter biographers have pointed out, he may not have been a great president, but he was a good one, and his term proved pivotal to the future of Israel and of Jews in the United States.
Indeed, Jewish appraisals of Carter often leave out that he was the force behind the September 1978 Camp David Accords, forged just six months after the Moment poll. That cold peace with Egypt gave Israel breathing room to flourish and become the economic and high-tech miracle it is, and the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty and the Abraham Accords were built upon its foundation.
Nor should we forget that the founding of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum was a Carter administration initiative—one that helped transform the lives of survivors and their descendants and has made the history of the Holocaust accessible to all.
Also under Carter, the federal government first helped push Holocaust education forward, expounding the values of understanding and tolerance in America’s K-12 schools and college campuses. Every American who cares about standing up against prejudice and hate and building a democracy safe for minorities should be thankful for these initiatives. This work is fundamental to the fight against rising antisemitism today.
While admiration for Carter and the way that he lived his life grew after he left the White House, his occasionally outspoken efforts to amplify the Palestinian side of the Middle East conflict remained an irritation to many in the Jewish community and was viewed as proof he still couldn’t be trusted. This lack of trust and occasionally overzealous criticism of Carter has long troubled me, and I was delighted to discover that Moment cofounder Leonard “Leibel” Fein was already thinking about these habitual reactions to the ex-president in 1984. That’s when Leibel drove to Plains, GA, to interview the former president. It’s an excellent interview. Leibel asks incisive questions and Jimmy Carter’s answers are honest and thoughtful. But I was even more struck by Leibel’s prescient postscript to the interview:
“It has never been quite clear to me why Carter arouses such an antipathetic response among American Jews, unless the explanation is that his promise was so much brighter than his performance. Still, he was the engineer of Camp David, and every one of the participants in that historic negotiation acknowledges that it was Carter’s own force that finally pushed through the agreement.”
Leibel had arrived in Plains expecting a testy conversation with an angry, rigid ex-president, and he found instead that Carter was an “entirely engaging and intelligent and gracious man, as comfortable with himself as any person I’ve met in a long while.” He wonders about Carter’s well-known nervousness with public speaking and if “that nervousness had caused him to appear, in precise contradiction of his insistent claim to honesty—untrustworthy.” Leibel concludes that he found the post-presidential Carter dramatically more attractive and impressive than the presidential Carter.
Yet early impressions are hard to set aside, and in our polarized times, there will continue to be plenty of comments about what our 39th president said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do, during his long years in the public eye. But now that he’s gone, it is time to acknowledge the good that came from his presidency and to finally say out loud that Jimmy Carter was an honest man of exemplary character whose accomplishments deserve our gratitude.
Watch “Jimmy Carter: The Great ‘Jewish’ President”—with Stuart Eizenstat and Nadine Epstein
Opening image: President Jimmy Carter shakes hands with Holocaust survivor Vladka Meed, who had been a member of the Jewish resistance in Poland, during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in September 1979 at which Elie Wiesel presented the report of the U.S. Holocaust Commission, of which he was chair. (Photo credit: Jimmy Carter library)