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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
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Nov. 19, 2009
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Nov. 18, 2009
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JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review May 5, 2009 / 11 Iyar 5769

Jack French Kemp, RIP

By Mona Charen


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Jack Kemp was supposed to read this column. A dinner in his honor was scheduled for next week and I had timed the column to appear just prior. The last his friends had heard, he was improving. Now it's too late.


Jack Kemp was deserving of tribute in so many ways — as a leader, as a thinker, as a family man, and as a Christian (are you still allowed to say that?).


In 1986, when the chessboard was being arranged for the 1988 presidential race, I chose to leave my post in the Reagan White House and go to work for the most exciting political figure in the Republican Party — Congressman Jack Kemp. A speechwriter for Jack Kemp learns many things — superfluity being first. I'm not sure why Jack ever hired speechwriters. We all had the same experience. You labored over a 30-minute address. He would go over it and suggest changes (he once corrected my prose by telling me that it "read like an article in Commentary" rather than a campaign speech) and we would proceed to the event. Jack would mount the podium, put the speech on the lectern, and talk for 30 or 40 minutes without once referring to the text in front of him. He would pull articles out of his jacket pocket or respond to something that he heard on the news that morning. His fertile mind was always working. When I was introduced to supporters, they would say "Oh, you write Jack Kemp's speeches!" and I would reply "I write them. He seldom delivers them."


But what Jack had to say would change the Republican Party forever. An autodidact, he had studied economics and history, and became a tireless evangelist for supply-side economics. He peppered his speeches with references to "capital" and "labor" — which this speechwriter found a little dry — but he also preached "opportunity" and "growth," which resonated. He recognized that capitalism, and the unique opportunities it can foster, was far more important for those in the middle and at the bottom of the economic pyramid than it was for those at the top. Jack truly and deeply wanted to give people the chance to improve themselves. He had seen how it could work close up. His father had started with nothing. He borrowed money to buy one truck and eventually developed his business into a profitable trucking company. Jack wanted to distribute that kind of opportunity as broadly as possible. As the author of the Kemp/Roth tax cutting legislation, Jack became the godfather of the Reagan domestic agenda.


The United States Congress is chock full of lawyers and other accomplished men and women. But no one read more avidly than the former quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. I remember Irving Kristol marveling over his first meeting with Kemp in the 1970s. Kemp had asked Kristol to suggest a reading list. Kristol politely, if skeptically, complied. A few weeks later, Kristol ran into Kemp again and was stunned to discover that Jack had read every book on the list and was ready to discuss them!


Even the fact that Jack became a winning quarterback was a tribute to his grit and buoyant spirit. Though he had been a college star, his pro career did not get off to an easy start. Nothing was handed to him. The AP described it this way: "Kemp was a 17th round 1957 NFL draft pick by the Detroit Lions, but was cut before the season began. After being released by three more NFL teams and the Canadian Football League over the next three years, he joined the American Football League's Los Angeles Chargers as a free agent in 1960. A waivers foul-up two years later would land him with the Buffalo Bills, who got him at the bargain basement price of $100." And yet, Jack Kemp led the Bills to the 1964 and 1965 American Football League's championships, and was voted the league's most valuable player in 1965. He co-founded and became the president of the AFL Players Association, and found time to serve in the Army reserves. He would later say that pro football was excellent preparation for politics: "When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy."


Kemp was more than a supply-side evangelist. He was also a serious student of foreign policy. While his hopes for mankind were expansive, his tolerance for dictators and tyrants was nonexistent. His love of capitalism was inseparable from his love of liberty.


Most of all when I think of Jack Kemp, I think of his tremendous devotion to his wife, Joanne, and to their four children and 17 grandchildren. Though he achieved great things in public life, he managed to do it without neglecting his family. That is a man in full. He will be greatly missed.

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