(RNS) — “We don’t need another hero.”
Those were the words of the late Tina Turner.
Except, she was wrong. We do need another hero. And another one.
In America today, we are experiencing a courage deficit. In the last month since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, at a time when we wonder what the outrage du jour will be, few people have stood up to him. It has truly been the winter of our discontent.
It is not only that America needs moral heroes right now. I write as a Jew, and we Jews need them as well — if only for our young people to witness. As a Jewish moral detective, I am constantly in search of Jewish morally talented individuals who will shake and stir people.
It happened some decades ago, when Elie Wiesel stood up to then-President Ronald Reagan when he was about to visit the German military cemetery in Bitburg, which contained the graves of SS members. But since then, there has been far too little public chutzpah from Jewish leaders.
Now, we have one.
Here is how it went down. The U.S. Justice Department essentially offered New York City Mayor Eric Adams a quid pro quo. It would drop corruption charges against him if he agreed to enforce the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
In late January, Danielle R. Sassoon, who was serving as the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, had a meeting with Adams’ lawyers and Emil Bove, the Justice Department official who ordered her to drop the case.
She refused and wrote a remarkable letter, in which she explained why the prosecution of Adams was justified. The order to dismiss the case was “inconsistent with my ability and duty to prosecute federal crimes without fear or favor and to advance good-faith arguments before the courts,” she said.
Instead of complying with the order, she resigned her position, as did the officials who oversaw the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller. Now, it is up to a Manhattan federal judge whether to drop the corruption case against Adams.
Sassoon is not only a moral hero for America. She is a modern Jewish heroine as well.
She grew up Orthodox and is a product of the Ramaz School in New York City, where she excelled in Talmud. Studying at Harvard University, she held a leadership position with Harvard Students for Israel, according to a profile in The New York Times. From there, she went on to attend Yale Law School.
Sassoon is a conservative, with about as impeccable a set of conservative credentials as you can get. She clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and is a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group. She was put into her position by the Trump administration just a few weeks ago.
I admire Sassoon, as, for many years, I have admired anti-Trump conservative thinkers such as George Will, Bill Kristol and Peggy Noonan. These conservative thinkers and other non-Trumpers on the right realize Trump is not a true conservative. Rather, he and his buddies are nihilists. They are pyromaniacs, who take a childlike glee in burning down institutions and programs that have truly made this country great.
As a conservative, and as a Trump appointee, Sassoon might have been expected to remain mute and simply follow orders. She did not.
In her decision, she relied on American legal precedent. But she did so, consciously or not, by drawing on her Jewish background. “I have always considered it my obligation to pursue justice impartially, without favor to the wealthy or those who occupy important public office, or harsher treatment for the less powerful,” she said.
In her heroism, she channeled the words of this week’s Torah portion: “Do not take bribes, for bribes blind the clear-sighted and upset the pleas of those are in the right” (Exodus 23:8). Liberal Jews love the phrase from Deuteronomy 16:11, “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” But we rarely have seen justice pursued as effectively as we did this past week.
Sassoon is truly the moral descendant of two women in the first chapter of the Book of Exodus whose ethnicity is unclear but whom I always believed to be Egyptians. I am speaking of Shifra and Puah, the midwives who stood up to Pharaoh’s decree and refused to kill Israelite children. They invented civil disobedience.
That is precisely what this country, and this democracy, needs.
A historical note about Sassoon: Her surname is that of one of the oldest and most distinguished Jewish families in the world. The family’s origins are murky, but some historians say they are from Baghdad; others say Aleppo. The family would migrate to Mumbai, and then to China, England and beyond. The oldest codex (written manuscript) of the Hebrew Bible is the Codex Sassoon.
My own genealogical fantasy: Perhaps her remote ancestors were not only in Baghdad, Iraq (Babylonia). Perhaps they were also in ancient Persia. Perhaps they witnessed the moral heroism of Queen Esther and Mordecai, who stood up to Haman’s evil plans.
Back when I was in fourth grade, my religious school teacher showed our class a photograph of a middle-aged man with blood running down his face. It was Rabbi Arthur J. Lelyveld of Cleveland, whom segregationists had beaten with a tire iron while he was helping Black Americans register to vote in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer in 1964.
“This, boys and girls,” our teacher said, “is a Jewish hero. I want you to take a look at him, and remember him.”
I did. In fact, I carry that photo in my iPhone, lest I ever forget what Jewish courage looks like.
We can be grateful that Jewish civic courage does not require a concussion at the hands of Southern racists. But, this week, I hope Jewish religious school teachers are showing their students photographs of Danielle Sassoon.
We will need many more like her.
