A Remark from Mario Cuomo informed my life’s work

Sometimes, a remark you chance to hear prompts you to think in ways that change your life. So it was when, as a recent college graduate and disaffected Jew, I heard New York’s newly minted Gov. Mario Cuomo speak at a Democratic gathering at a riverfront restaurant in Haverstraw in 1983.

Since Cuomo died on Jan. 1, America has commemorated him as the ringing orator who thrilled the 1984 Democratic Convention with his keynote and the Aquinian philosopher who put Catholicism at the center of his politics.

But New Yorkers can conjure a more protean, intimate speaker who could gab for hours, loosing profundities about history, society and other faiths.

In Haverstraw, Cuomo stood in the middle of the floor, shedding his jacket, rolling up his sleeves and loosening his tie. After so many years I couldn’t tell you how long he spoke, but it was at length and without notes. A man at the peak of his instrument, he improvised like a trumpeter blowing jazz. The crowd surged around him, rapt.

During a disquisition on world history, Cuomo said: “The Jews are like the canary in the coal mine. You can tell everything about the health of a society by the way it treats its Jews.”

His remark struck me like a hammer.

As a child, I had attended synagogue and Hebrew school. I had heard the murmurs of relatives about our family murdered in Poland. But I had left all that behind as a college bohemian.

Or so I thought.

“That was the governor of New York?” I asked my parents, incredulous, after the speech.

In the years since, I often have thought about Cuomo’s observation, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that it has informed my life’s work.

About a year after his speech, I left for a year in Israel, coming home to earn an advanced degree in Middle East Studies. Later, I worked for several Jewish organizations, became a journalist and reported for 10 years for The Forward, the national Jewish weekly.

I’ve covered many political speeches, but I’ve never heard another one like his.

Some New York Jews are eulogizing Cuomo as a friend of the Jewish people who forged laws that helped the Orthodox. Others are remembering the liberal who, like the prophets, spoke out for the poor and dispossessed. Still others recall Cuomo’s rivalry with the greatest American Jewish politician of the day, Edward I. Koch.

For me, Cuomo will always be the virtuoso who touched my heart and inhabited my head.

As recent events show, his 1983 remark remains as relevant as ever.

A longtime journalist, E.J. Kessler now works in New York City government.