Gabby Deutsch
Jewish Insider, Mar. 29, 2024
“The good news is that Sen. Lieberman will be the best boss you will have in your career and the bad news is that you will never have another boss as good as him.”
As the first Jewish person on a major party presidential ticket, Joe Lieberman made history for American Jews, and for America, when Al Gore tapped him as his running mate in 2000. The announcement sparked widespread excitement and emotion within the Jewish community.
“Though it’s become sort of axiomatic that Jews have great difficulty agreeing on just about anything, this contentiousness, this diversity of opinion, this absolute delight in mixing it up, was almost nowhere to be found last week when Senator Joseph Lieberman was picked to be Al Gore’s running mate,” the journalist Craig Horowitz wrote in New York magazine in 2000.
The universal pride in Lieberman mirrors the widespread outpouring of grief for the longtime Connecticut senator after his death, at 82, on Wednesday from a fall. Now, American Jews old and young, left and right, have joined together to honor the memory of a man who maintained his Shabbat observance through decades of service in public office and who stood firmly by his beliefs, even when they made him an outcast in a changing Democratic Party. … [To read the full article, click here]