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Some in Britain have been surprised by the news coverage given to the death of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia last weekend. They shouldn't be. Scalia was arguably the most effective conservative in America over the last quarter-century.
He was as inclined to right-wing bluster as any radio talk-show host, but he was also a powerful jurist who reframed discussions of law, placing them within a conservative template.
Scalia, a son of Sicilian immigrants, had a very interesting series of relationships with Jews and the Jewish community. Not only was he the first justice to use Yiddish in one of his written opinions, but having grown up in the melting pot of the New York borough of Queens, he had a street-level understanding of Jewish culture.
This ideological conservative's closest personal relationship in the court was with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the most reliably liberal of justices. The pair shared a love of opera and a mutual respect for each other's intellects.
The judge, a devout Roman Catholic, was an assertive friend of Israel and especially popular among Orthodox Jews. He spent much of his career trying to change the general interpretation of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which contains the establishment clause: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…" This is the basis for separation of Church and State in the US. Over the past 50 years, as part of the never-ending culture wars in the US, the clause has been invoked in cases involving state payments to religious schools for teaching secular subjects and the use of government property for religious displays.
Scalia's guiding principle was "originalism". All constitutional questions should be decided by judging what the authors' "original intent" was. His view was that not having an established religion did not mean no religion in the public space.
A few years after he was appointed to the court in 1986, a case came before him involving the establishment clause, which concerned placing a Chanuciah on government property. He voted, with the majority, to allow it. These days, it is not exceptional to see menorahs in December outside municipal buildings.
But he was not an ideologue when it came to Jewish rights. At a meeting at New York's Yeshiva University in 2013, Scalia was asked a hypothetical question. There had been an attempt in San Francisco to ban circumcision in 2011. It failed. But if the ban had been voted in and if the law was challenged and came before the Supreme Court, how would he have voted?
Scalia said: "If the practice is something that society does not want, and it's not intended to discriminate against Jews in particular, I think the law is perfectly valid." The audience, as you can imagine, was a little confused.
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