Barney Frank, the Jewish progressive congressman behind landmark finance bill, dies at 86 |
JTA — Barney Frank, the irascible longtime progressive who strove for equal rights for LGBTQ Americans and who coauthored the last major finance reform bill, has died at 86.
The former Massachusetts congressman died in hospice care at home in Ogunquit, Maine, where he lived with his husband, Jim Ready, close family friends said.
Frank was the apotheosis of a Jewish American type that now seems quaint: A Zionist whose support for the Jewish state dovetailed with his progressive values. He liked to tell people — at least until the US Supreme Court dramatically advanced gay rights in a series of decisions — that he would enjoy greater freedoms as an out gay man in Israel than he would in the United States.
Frank “represented a generation of public servants who combined sharp intellect, moral conviction, and an unmistakable voice,” William Daroff, the CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a statement. “He broke barriers as one of the first openly gay members of Congress, shaped financial policy for decades, and remained proudly and unapologetically Jewish throughout his public life.”
A onetime aide who wrote Frank’s biography in 2009 titled it with the phrase Frank used to describe himself: “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman.”
In 2006, while “don’t ask, don’t tell” was still the policy for gays in the US military, he told Haaretz that he held Israel up as an example to Americans to belie claims that gays in the military undermined morale.
“The IDF is clearly an effective fighting force,” he said then. “This undermines the argument that there is something corrosive about serving in the military.”
A liberal Zionist with Mafia family ties
Raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, in a household infused with Labor Zionism, Frank in more recent years — like many other progressive Zionists — had grown disillusioned with the bears of right-wing rule in Israel. One of his final calls was for the United States to cut off defense assistance to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“I guess I held on longer than I should have to, ‘Well, we can work with them,” he said of the Netanyahu government in an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency less than two weeks before his death. “But it’s become clear to me, particularly due to what they’re allowing to happen in the West Bank, that it is important morally and politically to repudiate the policy of supporting Israel’s military activity.”
Frank was born in 1940 to a family with Mafia ties – his father ran a truck stop. “Because Bayonne was such a sleazy place, nobody knew whether Barney was going to wind up in Congress or in jail,” Alan Dershowitz, the famed constitutional lawyer who knew Frank in his teenage years, told The New Yorker in 2009.
Instead of the mob, Frank made it to Harvard University (although he said his father’s Mafia friends were “very helpful” when he took a year off from university to settle his father’s estate). He graduated from Harvard Law School after spending a summer in 1964 in Mississippi to register Black voters.
There, he worked on........