Living together with political differences

If ever two people in love had irreconcilable differences, they are David Hyman and Farah Jimenez.

Hyman is a white Jewish Democrat.

Jimenez is a black Cuban American Baptist Republican.

Go ahead. Take your time. Read that again. Let it sink in.

This couple make James Carville and Mary Matalin look like a computer-generated perfect match, complete with piña coladas and getting caught in the rain.

And here's the thing. They are not just casually associated with their labels. Political apathy and religious indifference would make their solid 10-year marriage a lot easier to understand.

Hyman, managing partner at the Philadelphia law firm of Kleinbard, Bell & Brecker, is a synagogue-attending, moderately kosher-keeping Jew, and former chairman of the local American Jewish Committee. He donates serious money and gets personally involved in helping liberal Democrats running for office.

Jimenez, executive director of the nonprofit development group Mount Airy USA, goes to church and celebrates Christmas for the religious significance, not the presents. She idolized Ronald Reagan, voted for Rick Santorum, and served on George W. Bush's state steering committee in 2004.

Even now, when Bush has one of the lowest approval ratings of any president in U.S. history, Jimenez rises to his defense.

"I believe that history will show he was a better president than what people are saying now," she says.

Hearing this, her husband doesn't roll his eyes. He doesn't groan.

Instead, he gazes thoughtfully out the window at the Germantown Cricket Club, where they have gone for Sunday brunch (he plays tennis and is a member, she ice skates and is not). Then he says he understands.

"I feel the same way about John Street," he says. He wholeheartedly supported the former mayor and says he served the city well. But it will take time, years perhaps, he says, for Street to receive the credit he is due.

She smiles. He smiles. They hold hands. The trick, they say, is not to battle over differences, but to find common ground.

On March 12, Hyman received the Judge Learned Hand Award, an honor given annually by the AJC to recognize a local attorney for his philanthropy and social conscience. One of the good deeds on his list was Operation Understanding. Hyman cofounded the program that sends groups of high school students to Israel and Africa. The objective is to foster better relationships between the African American and Jewish communities.

"It's not called Operation Agreement," Hyman explains during an interview in his skyview corner office on the 46th floor of One Liberty Place. "The goal is to share experiences so that we better understand one another's perspectives."

For Hyman, the project is not some idealistic spitball aimed at the twin bullies of racism and anti-Semitism. It's a formalized version of his life. Every day, he and Jimenez are living their own personal Operation Understanding.

They met in 1994, when Hyman, then 40, was representing his firm at a job fair at his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, and interviewed Jimenez, who was then 25 and in her second year of law school. He noticed on her resume that she'd worked in the 27th Ward as a committeeperson.

"So," he said, "you must have worked with my friend Kevin Vaughn," the ward's Democratic leader.

"I don't know him," she said.

Hyman couldn't understand. A minute later, he realized she was a . . . Republican.

Three months later, they ran into each other at the gym. He invited her to a fund-raiser for Carol Moseley Braun. Throughout the next three dates, all politically themed, she thought he was trying to be her mentor.

Eventually, she caught on.

Two years later, they were engaged.

Ed Rendell officiated at the civil ceremony, flanked by Hyman's rabbi and a friend of Jimenez's who is a minister.

Aside from the divergence in age, race, faith and politics, there are other disconnects. Hyman starts his days at 5:30 a.m. and Jimenez often doesn't get to bed until 2 a.m. He watches CNN. She likes American Idol. But they say their connections far outweigh their differences.

Both grew up in central New Jersey. Hyman's father was a dentist, his mother a teacher and later a stay-at-home mom. Jimenez's parents are both Cuban immigrants. Her father was an engineer who switched careers to become a pastry cook. Her mom was an ob-gyn doctor and recently quit to run a doggie day-care center.

"We shared a nerdish youth," Hyman says. He was a psychology major, politically involved early on. She was voted "most serious" in high school. They both did community service long before it was cool.

Neither cooks. They like to travel and hate to fly. They don't have children. And they both love dogs.

Someone should extract whatever pacific corpuscles are riding through their veins and create a vaccine for use at the next Israeli-Palestinian peace summit.

"The place where I probably am most volatile is on the State of Israel," Hyman says. His position, he says, is "left of center." "If she had a different viewpoint on that, it would have been more difficult," he says.

Both in philosophy and in practice, their religious differences have been harder to reconcile, they say.

"Religion is home," Jimenez says. "When you mourn a loss, there are rules around it."

A few years ago, when Hyman's father died, he sat shiva. "But in Christian tradition, it's a home-going. You are reunited with God. . . . Those are the greater challenges. They're more at the root of who one is."

Hyman jokes with Jimenez that he'd be willing to become a Republican if she'd become a Jew.

Although they have been through numerous elections at all levels of government, Jimenez says the current presidential race has been the hardest.

"Early on, I was a Huckabee fan," she says. "Until I realized how someone in the Jewish community would feel. You want someone who speaks on behalf of all Americans rather than a subset."

Now she's squarely behind McCain. "I'm focused on issues of national security," Jimenez says, and neither Democrat seems "palatable." "Maybe because I feel more vulnerable than ever before."

Hyman's first choice had been Joe Biden. Now, although he has contributed to both Clinton's and Obama's campaigns, he's leaning more toward Obama.

Perhaps, he says, if they were both in the same party, they might get a cathartic thrill railing about the opposition's fools and villains. But out of love and respect, they say, they don't allow themselves to get worked up.

It helps that neither has the kind of volatile personality, or emotional investment in political issues, that make some people apoplectic when they're challenged. Theirs is more of a Tracy-and-Hepburn repartee.

"We could argue all day and night," he says. "We're not going to get each other to change our minds any more than she could convince me to be Baptist and I could convince her to be Jewish."

"It wouldn't be useful," she says. "What we both strive for is understanding. I'm not looking to pick a fight with David and poke holes in the way he looks at the world."

"What counts are the things you do on the ground," he says. "Farah works in community development and on the Fairmount Park Commission. I chaired an association that provides services to the mentally ill."

"We both want to have a positive impact on the world," she says, "and we're not waiting for politics to make a difference."

He nods. "Amen."