Monday, January 16, 2006

Bad Jew Jew

It's bad enough that disgraced, crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff is a Jew, but did he have to be a Brandeis Jew?

Churches have ex-communication. Is there a way for the Jews to collectively disown someone? Like, Hebraic Disown-a-ment? If so, I nominate Jack Abramoff for official Hebraic Disown-a-ment from the Jews. And Brandeis.

I guess ol' Jack never bothered to read any of Justice Louis Brandeis' actual writings or heed the University's motto: "Truth even unto its innermost parts."

Maybe Jack will have some extra readin' time on his hands now and he can familiarize himself with Justice Brandeis' words in the clink...

PS: "Innermost parts" sounds dirty.

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From the Boston Globe:

Roots of a lobbyist
Conservative identity took shape at Brandeis University

By Michael Levenson, Globe Correspondent January 15, 2006

Long before he became a Washington lobbyist and convicted felon, he was a freshman at Brandeis University with a 1976 Mercury Cougar and a taste for blasting Queen's ''We Are The Champions" on his all-male hall.

Jack Abramoff, class of '81, resident of Deroy Hall, hated David Bowie, loved ice cream, and was always up for a trip to TGI Friday's on Newbury Street. Stocky and tan, he favored sweat pants and baseball caps.

But this passionately liberal campus is where the young Abramoff found his identity as a conservative firebrand who was not afraid to confront student protesters, hang banners for Ronald Reagan off Route 128, and cook up political hijinks in the name of God and country.

And the story of his four years on this hilltop campus in Waltham, 9 miles from Boston, reveals some of the qualities that shaped his rise in Washington: his discipline, loyalty, and unshakable confidence in his beliefs.

These days, as the class of '81 prepares for its 25th reunion, classmates are digging out yearbooks and ducking calls from reporters as scandal swirls around the onetime English major from Beverly Hills. The classmates who once viewed him as a mere campus irritant now look with scorn, bemusement, and sadness at the disgraced lobbyist driving the country's biggest corruption case.

At the school, which prides itself on promoting the social justice values embodied by its namesake, Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, there is embarrassment.

''We're ashamed of him," said Michael T. Gilmore, longtime chairman of the English and American literature department at Brandeis.

In the fall of 1977, Abramoff, a recent adherent to Orthodox Judaism and son of a wealthy businessman, arrived at Brandeis, with the campus roiling.

Students were agitating for divestment from South Africa, nuclear disarmament, and exit visas for Soviet Jews, turning the concrete plaza in front of the sprawling student center into a stage for left-wing speeches and protests. Feminist author Betty Friedan, antiwar activist Abbie Hoffman, and writer Norman Mailer were welcomed as heroes when they visited.

But Abramoff admired another figure -- Ronald Reagan -- an idealistic Californian like himself who was ''the most pro-Israel candidate in the presidential campaign," Abramoff told the student newspaper, The Justice, in September 1980, his senior year.

Enthralled, Abramoff made his mark on campus, organizing parties, softball games, and movie nights for the Brandeis College Republicans, which elected him chairman. Targeting freshmen, he turned the club from a laughingstock into a formidable movement of 150 young Reaganites by the fall of 1980, as Reagan headed toward his election win.

Selected the lead student organizer for Reagan in Massachusetts, Abramoff hung ''Reagan '80" banners off bridges over Route 128, helped register 3,000 students to vote, schmoozed men in South Boston social clubs, and accompanied Maureen Reagan, the candidate's daughter, on a trip to Brookline to persuade the Bostoner Rebbe, a national Hasidic leader, to endorse Reagan, a nod that was believed to be worth thousands of Orthodox Jewish votes.

''This guy was a raging Republican and it was like, what are you doing here?" said Adam Gaffin, 46, a computer magazine editor from Boston who was an editor at The Justice. ''Brandeis was not the same school it was in the 60s, but it was still a liberal Jewish school."

After Reagan won, claiming Massachusetts by a few thousand votes, The Justice filled with laments about the country's shift to the right, and the paper begrudgingly credited Abramoff, dubbing him ''Ronnie's Secret Helper."

After the election, Abramoff became president of the Massachusetts College Republican Union and, on trips to Harvard and other campuses, increased its membership from 300 to 5,000. Reagan's victory, he told The Globe in 1981, had increased student enthusiasm for the GOP ''spectacularly."

In the spring of 1981, Abramoff sought a bigger platform. He campaigned across the country with a friend from the Reagan campaign, a Harvard Business School student named Grover Norquist, and won election to the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee.

''He was good, he was serious, and he wanted to change the world," said Norquist, now a national conservative leader and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an antitax group in Washington, D.C. ''There was a real sense that you could turn the world around with Reagan."

Back on campus, Abramoff escalated his campaign.

When 100 sign-toting students took to Yakus Plaza in front of the student center, protesting US military aid to El Salvador and chanting ''one, two, three, four, US hands off El Salvador," Abramoff crashed the demonstration, waving American flags in students' faces and belting out ''God Bless America." Disgruntled students wrote that week to The Justice, denouncing Abramoff and the Republicans who had joined him as brutes.

"He was going against the grain even back then," said Jay Rovins, 46, a New Jersey retailer who was one of Abramoff's roommates. ''For Jack, it was him and his inner circle and then everybody else, and that wasn't in a negative way so much as that was his world view."

Abramoff also charted his own course socially. At parties, he rarely drank and would leave the room when students smoked marijuana, friends said. He dated the same woman, a quiet pre-premed student, all four years. He prayed before classes in the morning, stayed home on Fridays to observe the Sabbath, and kept a kosher kitchen in his dorm.

Abramoff was generous, too. He loaned Rovins the Cougar for a first date with the woman who would become Rovins' wife, and he took his friends with him to Anthony's Pier 4 in Boston when his father visited. All the while, Abramoff grew more dedicated to activism.

"There was no doubt that when Jack left Brandeis he was on his way to Washington to continue the work that he had started with the Brandeis Young Republicans," said Stuart Chanen, 46, a lawyer from Chicago who was senior class speaker. ''It was clear he was dedicated to the cause."

Far different causes animated most of Abramoff's fellow alumni. Brandeis, founded in 1948 by American Jews seeking to create a university free from the quotas Jews faced at elite colleges and dedicated to the social welfare of the world, has sent graduates on to distinguished careers in politics, academia, and the arts. Graduates include columnist Thomas L. Friedman of '75, magazine editor Martin Peretz of '59, and actress Debra Messing of '90, from the television show ''Will & Grace."

But the news this month that Abramoff, 46, who had built one of Washington's most lucrative and GOP-connected lobbying empires, had pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud, and tax evasion brought memories flooding back to the graying class. Was that really the same student from Deroy Hall who walked out of a courthouse in Washington, looking like a heavyset Hollywood villain in a trench coat and fedora?

"The person that I knew was smiling and laughing much more readily than the scowling images that you see on television now," Rovins said. ''This is a guy that loved to laugh and loved to joke more than anything."

For their reunion in June, class members will gather at the Westin Waltham-Boston, take a Duck Tour, hold a barbeque, and tour their old campus haunts. No one expects Abramoff to show. The last time they heard from the one-time agitator was when he submitted a tidbit to the alumni notes last year. Abramoff mentions he is married with five children, helped start two schools in Washington, is lobbying Congress, and has fond memories of his years at Brandeis.

"It was a great experience and I learned a lot!" he wrote.