Roy Moore's "Jewish attorney" is a practicing Christian
Former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore's wife named the "Jewish attorney" she mentioned in a speech in December, AL.com reported Thursday.
Kayla Moore emailed AL.com to identify the lawyer after some news sites, including CBS News, published stories which identified Richard Jaffe as a Jewish attorney who represented the Moores' son in a case years ago. Jaffe supported Moore's opponent in the race, Doug Jones, and was uncertain about whether Kayla Moore had him in mind when she mentioned the family's Jewish lawyer.
She explained in her note to AL.com why she had made the reference.
"We read where we were against Jews - even calling us Nazis," Kayla Moore wrote. "We have a Jewish lawyer working for us in our firm - Martin Wishnatsky."
Wishnatsky, 73, has characterized his upbringing as secular -- though he attended Hebrew school and went through a bar mitzvah -- and he told AL.com that he obtained his law degree at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. He also holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard. Wishnatsky clerked for Roy Moore when Moore was Alabama's state Supreme Court chief justice and then worked as a staff attorney for the court. According to AL.com, he went on to work as a staff attorney for the Foundation for Moral Law, which was founded by Roy Moore. Kayla Moore is the president of the foundation. There, he writes mostly friend-of-the-court briefs for cases related to abortion, religious freedom, LGBT and other social issues.
Wishnatsky told AL.com that he became a Christian when he was in his thirties. "I had an experience of the reality of God at 33," Wishnatsky said. "I knew God was real but I wasn't sure who he was." He initially converted to Mormonism, but he found its rituals "bizarre," and he concluded the religion was "a fraud." So instead, he become an evangelical Protestant Christian. Wishnatsky also then wrote a book excoriating the Mormon faith, "Mormonism: a latter-day Deception," which he self-published with Xulon Press, a Christian self-publishing company.
After a stint as a college instructor, Wishnatsky worked for about a decade for a consulting firm on Wall Street, a job he told AL.com that he lost when he was in jail for a conviction stemming from his participation in anti-abortion protests.
"I'm a Messianic Jew," Wishnatsky told AL.com. "That's the term they use for a Jewish person who has accepted Christ."