Waxman honored at UCLA Hillel

Dignitaries, students and Jewish community members gathered on Nov. 10 at Hillel at UCLA to celebrate the legacy of U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and the 40 years he has spent representing the area.

“Why do we here all love Congressman Henry Waxman?” his successor, Congressman-elect Ted Lieu, asked the audience during the event. “The reason we love him isn’t just because he fought for our issues and he was right. It [is] because he was effective.”

As Waxman, a giant whose name is synonymous with Southland Democratic politics, completes his final months representing of California’s 33rd District, voices across the broader political landscape have been reflecting on the importance of his political legacy. 

“His retirement is drawing more attention than any congressional retirement that I can recall, because of his historical record,” Burt Margolin, a lobbyist and former assemblyman who spent seven years as Waxman’s chief of staff, told the Journal. “There hasn’t been another lawmaker in the last 50 years who has accomplished more on behalf of progressive values than Henry Waxman.”

Waxman attributed his success, in part, to a compatibility between Jewish and American values. First elected to Congress in 1974 as one of the so-called “Watergate babies,” Waxman made his reputation sponsoring legislation unpopular with many of his colleagues. In particular, Waxman’s career-long efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of health care and to enact stronger environmental protections are now considered ahead of their time. 

“I was elected to Congress by constituents who, I felt, wanted me to go there and be a leader on national and international issues,” Waxman told the audience. “We were in Israel when [Egyptian leader Anwar] Sadat came to speak at the Knesset. We were in Israel when the Ethiopians were brought in. I remember being in Israel when we were struggling to get Jews out of the Soviet Union and it looked like it would never happen.”

Drawing a comparison between Waxman’s career and Moses’ leading of the Israelites across the desert, Hillel at UCLA’s executive director, Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, called the politician “the man of 40, our very own Moses.” He added that Waxman “carried the biblical legacy as he led the battle against the seemingly divine corporate forces that endangered our health and enveloped us with this smoky deceit.”

Of the many bills related to health care Waxman had an essential role in passing are laws improving the quality of infant formula, incentivizing pharmaceutical companies to develop and market drugs to treat rare diseases, facilitating the sale of less-expensive generic drugs, authorizing the Food and Drug Administration to require nutrition labeling on foods, and allocating money for treating people with HIV and AIDS. 

Waxman also aggressively pursued improvements to the Clean Air Act during his time in Congress. More recently, Waxman played a prominent role in passing the Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Throughout his four decades on Capitol Hill, Waxman was known as a tough negotiator and an ideologically consistent legislator. “This guy had a sense of discipline and a tenacity, and I think in some ways — most important of all — he was a legislator who could not be intimidated,” said former U.S. Rep. Howard Berman, a close friend of Waxman’s from their days as students at UCLA.

Former U.S. Sen. Alan Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, once famously described Waxman as “tougher than a boiled owl.” As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Waxman aggressively pursued investigations of the tobacco industry, Major League baseball and Wall Street, among many others. 

“He was never afraid to lose,” Margolin said. “Henry liked nothing more than taking on issues knowing that he had only a small chance of prevailing in the short view. He always fought with the long view — the sense that we might not win this year, but that two years, four years or six years down the road, we can prevail.”

Unwilling to allow his relative inexperience to be an excuse for not acting, Waxman early in his career challenged the seniority system entrenched in House committee politics. 

The UCLA Hillel event was also a
fundraiser for the establishment of the Henry Waxman Fellowship for Jewish Leaders at Hillel at UCLA. The fellowship, which will be awarded to 10 students per year, is intended “to prepare students for a career in public service and train them to emulate the organizing and political styles of Henry Waxman,” Seidler-Feller said.  

The nine-month fellowship will allow Jewish students to meet weekly with local leaders inside and outside of the Jewish community, and to take on greater leadership roles in Hillel and in UCLA more broadly. The fellowship, Seidler-Feller stressed, is shaped in Waxman’s image.

“I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that Henry the lawmaker embodies the classic Jewish-American impulse to establish a model society in our American homeland,” he said. “He has displayed the divine chutzpah to take on the giants and to defeat them … in the name of tzedek umishpat, of justice and righteousness.”