James Earl Carter of Georgia was a riddle wrapped in an enigma
His longtime aide, Stuart Eizenstat, himself a traditional Jew, stresses Carter’s major achievements, with the long-lasting Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt as the jewel in the crown.
But Michael Oren, former Israeli ambassador to the US, writes that Carter disliked Israel and always favored the Palestinians over Israel’s claims.
The general street feeling is that Carter was not exactly a philo-Semite, but this is an oversimplification. If he were an anti-Semite, how can we explain the fact that he placed more Jews in high positions in his administration than any other 20th century president? And how can we explain that it was his personal intervention — rather than delegating the task to his assistants — that enabled many Iranian Jews to escape the tyrannical regime and be admitted to the US (a number of whom carried on their lives in Atlanta, Georgia)?
In the many years I knew him — over the course of my 40-year tenure as rav in Atlanta — I never sensed any aroma of anti-Jewishness about him. He especially respected observant Jews, and I remember seeing a notation of his on a White House briefing paper that said, “Clear this with Stu [Eizenstat, his domestic policy advisor] but do not call him on Friday nights unless extremely urgent.” On the contrary, he had one major complaint about Israel: as a religious Christian, he was very disappointed that many of the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob now living in the Holy Land did not strictly maintain Jewish tradition.
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