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making too much of it, I do get the feeling that Cole has decided this subject merits his attention.
    He continues: “About two months after I came back from the kibbutz, the Yom Kippur War broke out and I wanted to enlist. I felt this sense of connection and obligation. You don’t get many opportunities in life to do things that are important. And my kibbutz friends (by far the toughest I had ever known) were all in the military and would be fighting, and I felt I should be with them and not look for another shortcut.” Logistics prevented him from joining up. “The realities weren’t so simple,” he says. “The Israeli army had no interest in taking untrained seventeen-year-old Americans.”
    It sounds like his radical moment passed like so many youthful phases do, and he’s almost dismissive of it now. “In retrospect, that was more a Zionistic thing than it was a Jewish thing for me.”
    The “Jewish thing” was still dormant as his career took off, and as he drew so much attention in 1985 for his provocative advertising slogans, such as
“What you stand for is more important than what you stand in,”
which didn’t show shoes, but a shoelace in the shape of an AIDS ribbon. “The time to do something meaningful is often when others are less inclined to,” Cole says. “In my career, that’s what I’ve always done. I made a very public, emphatic commitment to AIDS research nineteen years ago because it was the right thing to do and nobody else was.” His ads would go on to address gun control, homelessness, and reproductive rights. For instance:
“We think women should have a choice when it comes to being pregnant. Barefoot
is another story.”
Or:
“Wearing protection is the new black,” “Not voting is so last
season,” “Gun safety . . . it’s all the rage,”
and
“Choice. No woman should be
without one.”
One ad,
“What’s wrong with shoeing the homeless?,”
asked buyers to donate shoes to the homeless in exchange for a discount on a new pair. He donates forty percent of his sales every year to AMFAR on World AIDS Day, and received the Amnesty International Media Spotlight Award in 1998, along with other honorees.
    But Cole is wary of suggesting that social activism is specifically a Jewish value. “It’s hard to say, ‘Jews are this way and gentiles are that way.’ And you stand a very real chance of it being misinterpreted.” He suggests Jews have been persecuted for centuries, in part because of their perceived smugness: “It’s so much a part of the plight of Jews for 3300 years, ever since Moses left the mountain and we said, ‘We are the Chosen People.’ Even though it is a cornerstone of much of what has driven us, it could be perceived as arrogant and something one probably shouldn’t share with others unless you know them to be Jewish. One could certainly make the case (and many do) that we’re
all
chosen people. Since most religions trace their roots back to that same moment.”
    Cole clearly wants to make sure his Jewish pride isn’t mistaken for self-importance. That sensitivity has to be born, in part, of having married a non-Jewish woman who is raising their children Catholic. Cole takes care not to undercut non-Jewish faiths, even going so far as to extol the worth of religion, period—no matter what brand. “So many people have improved their lives by finding faith,” he says. “It offers moral boundaries they may never have had. It provides a sense of purpose that may never have existed. And it constantly reminds them that they’re not alone.”
    He returned to Israel a second time with his two eldest daughters, then eleven and nine, to give them a slice of his history. “I wanted them to get a sense of the part of them that’s Jewish, to understand its richness and at the same time to