New Jersey Senate Candidate Cory Booker Knows His Torah. So What?

How the Newark mayor’s adopted Jewish identity—shaped by his Orthodox mentors—reflects his unique brand of politics

By Yair Rosenberg for Tablet Magazine

Last May, when Cory Booker, the 44-year-old mayor of Newark, N.J., got up to address the graduating class of Yale University, he warned them he was going to do something out of the ordinary. “Today, I want to do something a little different than you were probably expecting from this Christian man from Newark, N.J.,” Booker began. “I want to do something that has probably never been done before at this university. I want to stand here as a Christian goy in all of my non-Jewish self and give you all a d’var Torah.”

It was a bold statement from a politician who may be most famous for rescuing a constituent from a burning building. Jews are no strangers to public officials appropriating the particulars of their faith for the purposes of political pandering, whether it’s former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin flashing a Star of David pendant, Texas Gov. Rick Perry lighting the menorah, or Vice President Joe Biden crediting Jewish social-justice activists with an outsized “85 percent” of the changes in popular attitudes toward gay rights. But this wasn’t a speech to a local Jewish Federation chapter or the annual AIPAC convention in Washington, where such rhetoric would be expected. This was a commencement address at one of America’s premier secular institutions of higher learning. And yet Booker decided to deliver it with a Jewish inflection, for seemingly no reason other than the fact that he wanted to.

Booker is often compared to another charismatic African-American Democrat: Barack Obama. In fact, the first person to have drawn the parallel may have been Booker himself. “Cory was obviously someone who was identified early on as someone who may be the first black president,” recalled Booker’s friend Ben Karp. “I was in the car with him in 1999,” Karp went on, “and I said to him, ‘Well, who do you think your rivals are? Harold Ford or Jesse Jackson Jr.?’ And Cory said to me, ‘Yeah, but there’s this guy in Chicago and his name is Barack Obama, and he’s super-talented.’ ”

On paper, the two men share many attributes. Both have distinguished academic pedigrees—Obama’s law degree is from Harvard, Booker’s is from Yale. Both began their political careers as community organizers. And both were deeply affected by their early encounter with the Jewish community. But like many of their surface similarities, this last one proves superficial. Each man found his way to very different parts of the Jewish world—a distinction that points to very real divergences in their personal and political outlooks.

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