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Jewish groups don’t endorse Supreme Court nominees, at least not in writing.

The tears and choked sobs when Sonia Sotomayor accepted President Barack Obama’s nomination on May 26 told another story.

Packed into the room along with Sotomayor’s family, friends and colleagues were representatives of Jewish groups that have consulted with the White House about prospective replacements for David Souter.

The story of her life — the daughter of a Puerto Rican single mother from the Bronx, N.Y., whose ambitions knew no bounds — resounded with a community that has made the story of immigrant triumph over struggle a template of Jewish American success.

“It was impossible not to moved by her personal story,” said Mark Pelavin, the associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

It doesn’t hurt that Sotomayor, 54, is a poster child for strong Jewish-Hispanic relations. In 1986, when she was in private legal practice, she joined one of the first young leadership tours of Israel sponsored by Project Interchange, which is affiliated with the American Jewish Committee.

Sotomayor so enjoyed the country — its immigrant culture, its popular music influenced heavily by Jewish immigrants from Argentina and Brazil — that she made a return visit in 1996 when she was a federal judge, and recently joined a Project Interchange U.S.-Israel forum on immigration. In the process, she formed a lifelong friendship with Project Interchange founder Debbie Berger and her husband, Paul, who attended her swearing-in as a Manhattan appeals court judge in 1998.

Richard Foltin, the legislative director for the AJC, said Sotomayor’s background naturally played a role in how the Jewish community would welcome her.

“We must recognize the significance of the third woman and first Hispanic on the court,” he said. “And there’s no question of her impressive qualifications.”

However, while Foltin and others are billing Sotomayor as potentially “the first Hispanic on the court,” some scholars argue that Benjamin Cardozo, who served six years from 1932 until his death, was really the first Hispanic justice. Cardozo, though, never identified himself as a Hispanic; he was a descendant of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain) who immigrated to colonial America, and he took great pride in his Sephardic Jewish identity.

The Orthodox Union, which tends to stake out more conservative ground than other Jewish organizations on church-state issues, spoke positively about Sotomayor, citing several religious freedom-related cases.

In a 1993 case, she upheld the constitutional right of a rabbi in White Plains, N.Y., to display a menorah in a city park. In two other cases, in 1994 and 2003, Sotomayor upheld prisoners’ religious rights even though the practices in question did not conform with mainstream beliefs. And in 2006, she ruled that allowing federal age discrimination statutes to apply to a 70-year-old minister dismissed by the Methodist church would constitute unwarranted government interference in church affairs.

 Those decisions, OU said, were “very encouraging.”

 

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