A Jew in Sheik's Clothing?

In New York City, politicians were asking this question: Can a bright, young, energetic, ambitious Jew get elected to Congress from a heavily Jewish district if he has an Arab name?

Some question! But it was one that last week confronted Democratic Candidate William Haddad. At 35, Haddad has been around. He was a merchant marine officer during World War II, an aide to Senator Estes Kefauver, a prize-winning investigative newspaper reporter, an assistant to Bobby Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign, and a top administrator in the Peace Corps. Further enhancing his political credentials among Democrats is the fact that he is married to Franklin Roosevelt's granddaughter Kate. Her parents, California's Democratic Congressman James Roosevelt and Betsey Gushing Roosevelt, were divorced when Kate was four; Betsey later married New York Herald Tribune Publisher John Hay Whitney, who legally adopted Kate.

Such Talk Can Ruin. All this would seem to make Bill Haddad a likely Democratic reform candidate in the June 2 primary against Congressman Leonard Farbstein, 61, a Tammany type who is seeking a fifth term in Manhattan's meandering 19th Congressional District. But, of all things, Haddad did not count on getting hurt by the district's Jewish vote.

Last week he complained that Farbstein, who likes to remind his constituency that he is the only Jew on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and is an ardent supporter of Israel, was spreading rumors all over the district that Haddad is an Arab. Not only that; people were sending around anonymous notes about him ("Can you trust an ARAB to fight for the interests of Jews and for Israel?"). Even worse, said Haddad, Farbstein was going about telling folks that Haddad was born an Egyptian, that he got married in the Protestant Episcopal Church and thus was a meshumad (an apostate from Judaism). In the 19th District, where 50% of the voters are Jews, such talk can ruin a politician.

All for Ethnics. Haddad, naturally, was outraged over the whispering campaign. He tried to catch up with the rumors by pointing out that his mother is a Russian-born Jew who keeps a kosher home, and that his father had the misfortune of having been born in Cairo to Egyptian Jews. He protested to the Fair Campaign Practices Committee, issued statements, got Jimmy Roosevelt to make a public statement on his behalf, and met with Yiddish-language newspaper editors in an attempt to convince them that he is just as Jewish as Farbstein.

Though he knows that he is a goner without the Jewish vote, he decried the necessity of having to defend his Jewish credentials. Said he: "If I have to be Jewish to win this campaign, it's not worth winning. I don't want the voters to elect me to Congress because I am a Jew. I hope they won't reject me because I am married to a Protestant.

And I don't want the Farbstein organization to brand me an Arab because my father was born an Egyptian Jew."

But unless Haddad can steer the campaign back to worthier issues, he probably does not stand a Chinaman's chance of winning--except perhaps in Chinatown, which is also part of the 19th District. In Manhattan neighborhoods, many foreign-born voters judge a candidate's ethnic background above everything else, care little or nothing about other considerations. As one woman on the Lower East Side said last week when she was asked if ethnic considerations should play any role in a candidate's campaign: "Ethnic-shmethnic, so long as he's Jewish."

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