“They need to know he feels it in his kishkes,” he said. (The word means “intestines,” but as an idiom it translates somewhere between “heart” and “balls.”)
I knew I couldn’t write a better economic address than Favreau, or a better eulogy than Cody. But I didn’t sit through eight years of Hebrew school for nothing. My kishke credentials were unmatched.
After Favs gave me the go-ahead, I spent a week putting together a draft. I talked to rabbis. I included a reference to the weekly Torah portion. Ben and Terry, the foreign-policy writers, added a section about Israel. A few minutes before the speech, as POTUS prepared to take the stage at a Maryland convention center, Jarrod asked if he needed any last-minute coaching.
“Nah,” he said, “I’ve got this.”
He was right. Addressing the crowd of five thousand, POTUS read a line about his daughter Malia, a fixture on her school’s bar and bat mitzvah party circuit. There was a pause, almost imperceptibly brief. He cocked his head to one side.
“There is quite a bit of negotiation around the skirts that she wears at these bat mitzvahs,” he ad-libbed. “Do you guys have these conversations as well?”
The crowd roared with laughter and applause. The president fed off the audience’s enthusiasm, and the audience fed off the president’s in turn. A quote from Abraham Joshua Heschel. A paean to the uniquely American success story so many Jewish immigrants had shared. A firm defense of our alliance with Israel.
OBAMA SPEAKS JEWISH, read the next day’s headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. REPUBLICANS DON’T.
That’s what presidential speeches could still do. They couldn’t persuade the unpersuadable. But they could remind the rest of us why we believed, renewing our faith despite frustration. Watching from the wings of the ballroom, I couldn’t help but imagine my great-grandparents arriving in America, bewildered and penniless, a century before. Now here I was, helping the most powerful person on earth tell their story, and the story of so many others like them.
By the time the president delivered his satisfied thump to the podium, I had my first White House niche. I continued writing for Valerie, Bill, and the rest of the senior staff. I continued to take the POTUS speeches no one else wanted. But I also knew that if something kishke-related came up, I was the go-to guy.
THAT’S HOW I FOUND MYSELF STANDING IN THE WHITE HOUSE library, next to my favorite men’s room, on a Friday evening in April 2012. The president’s Passover message was the final item on his schedule, the only thing left between him and the weekend. And on this particular Friday, POTUS was especially in need of a break. He had just finished a trip through Asia, a weeklong odyssey of tedious summits and brutal jet lag. Now he was running two and a half hours late, which was two hours late even for him.
As we waited for the president to arrive, I made nervous small talk with the other White House staffers in the room. Jarrod was there, clutching his pocket Haggadah the way a vampire hunter might hold a cross. Luke, one of the most buoyant and upbeat members of the A/V team, sat behind a laptop to control the prompter. Hope Hall wasn’t there that day, which I didn’t think would matter.
It did. From the moment President Obama entered the library, the look on his face made it clear he would rather be anywhere else. Ordinarily this was when Hope would cheer him up. She would remind him he was almost through with the schedule, or recall some silly detail from earlier that day. Without her, however, POTUS remained grumpy.
“All right,” he said. “One take.”
He was moving through the script, the weekend so close he could taste it, when he came to a line I had cribbed from the Passover liturgy. “In every generation, there are those who have tried to destroy the Jewish people.” He got halfway through it. Then he grimaced.
“Okay, wait, stop. I didn’t read this on the plane. Isn’t that line kind of a downer?”
“Well . . .” I stammered. But it was too late.
“I mean, this is supposed to be a party, right? What’s the deal? Like, ‘Everyone’s out to get us, have some matzo.’”
In fact, that was exactly the deal. POTUS had summed up five thousand years of Jewish history in just eight words. Jarrod tried to explain this, paging valiantly through his Haggadah in a search for sources, but the president’s patience had run out.
“Look, just—does anyone have a pen?”
I had never heard of POTUS rewriting anything on the spot before. I would never hear of it again. But there, pen in hand, he scrawled something on the draft I had printed. He began to dictate to Luke, who was typing into the old-timey word processor that controlled the prompter.
“There are those who have targeted . . .”
“There are those who what?”
Luke’s struggle to keep pace only left POTUS more irritated. Standing from his chair, he stalked over to the laptop.
“Move.”
With his notes in front of him, the president extended his fingers like he was about to conduct a symphony. Then, pecking deliberately, he made his edits.
In every generation, there are those who have targeted the Jewish people for harm.
I was both embarrassed and impressed. POTUS recognized that my script might, unintentionally, cause controversy. In just five minutes, he rewrote it to express the same idea, but in far more measured tones. He did so on no sleep, ravaged by jet lag, after traveling tens of thousands of miles across the globe.
This, I thought, is why he gets to be the president.
POTUS resumed filming, racing through his revised draft. Jarrod, Luke, and I stood perfectly still. We were almost finished—just seconds away. Then the president hit the words happy holidays in Hebrew (chag sameach) and everything went to crap.
Except for Spanish, which POTUS insisted he could pronounce flawlessly without phonetics, it was our job to spell out all foreign words. [Bon-JOOR]. [DAHN-keh SHANE]. [ah-ree-vah-DARE-chee ROW-muh]. The system worked well, unless we encountered a sound unused in English, in which case it broke down completely. Take, for example, the hard ch in Hebrew. This is not the soft, gentle sound from the beginning of child. It’s the harsh, throat-clearing one from the end of blech. Unless you practiced it growing up, it’s nearly impossible to get right.
“Thanks, and cog somatch,” said POTUS. He looked at Jarrod and me, wondering if he could leave now, but we stopped him.
“It’s kind of a chhhh,” I said, making a noise like a lawn mower in need of repair.
“Chhh,” Jarrod repeated, phlegm building in his throat. “Chhhh, chhhhhhhh.” Looking deeply unhappy, the president gave it another try.
“Chawg Samayah.”
“Chong Semeeyuh.”
“Hagg Sommah.”