To pray at the KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue, a striking tan brick building of Byzantine inspiration, one must first contend with the cops. They are stationed at either end of the two streets that abut the domed building, and they require a photo ID and a purpose to pass the metal barricades and cement dividers. In certain cities, the officers would be there to guard such a conspicuous site of Jewish worship from its gentile neighbors. In the Chicago neighborhood of Hyde Park, it is just the opposite.
Obama on the campaign trail.
Photo: AP
For across the street, behind its own layer of police protection, another brick building stands. This one is deep crimson, with a white colonnaded porch and pink impatiens along the walk. Its more conventional style belies most atypical residents: what might be the next first family of the United States.
The journey that has taken Barack Obama from Chicago to Washington, one that might lead from a red brick house to the White House, began in this integrated, eclectic neighborhood where he was close to Jews physically, professionally and politically.
Along this journey, Obama has encountered other Jews, people who don't know him personally and who repeatedly ask: Who is this guy? The Jews of Chicago say: We have the answer. Many who have employed him and fund-raised for him and voted for him are now trying to reassure those wary Jewish voters.
In doing so, they tell of someone who has at times been more welcome in progressive Jewish circles than in the black community, circles where he built lasting friendships and a political foundation that have helped propel him onto the national stage. Along the way, many of the liberal positions they once praised him for - or projected onto him - have been discarded, those on Israel included. That has left some dissatisfied and several dubious, but many excited at the thought that they might have to help their neighbor pack his bags come November 5.
TO TRACE the story of Obama's Chicago Jewish political connections, one needs to start in Boston.
The story, as long-time acquaintance and major Jewish philanthropist Lester Crown tells it, goes something like this: After graduating from Columbia University and working in Chicago as a community organizer in his early 20s, Obama left this Midwest metropolis to attend Harvard Law School. One day back in Chicago, Crown's good friend Newton Minow received a phone call from his daughter Martha, a Harvard law professor, telling him, "You ought to interview the smartest young man I've ever had in any of my classes." According to lore, when Minow called a partner in his firm to recommend he meet with Obama during a visit to Harvard, the partner told him he had already been hired for a summer internship.
Obama's experience at the Sidley Austin firm, where he soon got to know Minow, a former Federal Communications Commission chairman (as well as his future wife, Michelle Robinson), was crucial in introducing Obama to leading local Jewish figures like the billionaire Crown. Crown first became acquainted with the young associate after Minow suggested he meet this "special" guy who "is going places." And indeed, Crown describes him as "brilliant" and "a quick study," though he does not pretend to have pictured Obama sitting in the Oval Office during their early encounters.
These kinds of introductions proved key for Obama's construction of a network which would eventually support his political aspirations. The Crown family, for instance, have been major financial backers, with Lester's son James serving as Obama's Illinois finance chairman.
"He's developed very close relations with the Jewish community in Chicago. If you look at fund-raising, etc., the people who primarily support him are Jewish," says Crown. For starters, above his son in the fund-raising structure is Penny Pritzker, another local Jewish billionaire and the national campaign finance chairwoman. And along with Martha and Newton Minow, another of his earliest and most important mentors was former Chicago congressman and federal judge Abner Mikva, who ended up providing key political backing.
Obama turned down both Mikva's offer of a clerkship and Minow's offer of a slot at Sidley Austin, however, to take a full-time job with a different kind of Jew and a different kind of lawyer.
Traveling from the soaring skyscraper of Crown's General Dynamics office, with its panoramic city views, heavy furniture and carpeted hallways, to Judson Miner's perch in a cozy historic town house, complete with exposed brick walls and a cluttered fireplace mantel displaying a picture of himself with Obama, is to cross a different world. As opposed to political heavyweights and establishment types, Miner is scruffy, progressive, a religious skeptic.
Miner, in fact, made a bid to recruit Obama when he read in the Chicago media that the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review wanted to work in civil rights but was bound for what Miner termed the "silk stocking firm" of Sidley Austin. In turned out that was inaccurate, as was the press report that he had worked his way out of the Chicago ghetto to get to Harvard. (In fact, Obama was born in Hawaii and raised by his white mother and her family after his Kenyan father returned to Africa. He didn't come to Chicago until after college, and his lack of black bona fides would be a major obstacle when he later ran for the Illinois senate.)
Miner was a leading Chicago civil rights lawyer, one whom it turned out Obama had heard of because of the time Miner had spent as the corporation counsel for the city. Miner didn't know that when he called the Harvard Law Review trying to recruit the star student. He was told to take a number - in the high hundreds.
But to Miner's surprise, Obama tracked him down at home and after a series of conversations ended up taking a job at Miner's firm. He recalls Obama as "strikingly comfortable with who he was," someone who didn't feel the need to trumpet accomplishments such as heading the law review. "What was particularly impressive about Barack was that for a person with his credentials, he was happy to be an associate and do basic research and not take the lead." He stayed at the firm even after he won his state senate seat in 1996, though it greatly limited his hours there.
