JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Political tidbits: Silverman talks about the “schlep,” new ads and more

By Eric Fingerhut · October 7, 2008

• Sarah Silverman talks to the New York Times about her video for “The Great Schlep.”
  
• The National Jewish Democratic Council’s new advertisement deals with energy independence, while the Republican Jewish Coalition’s latest is about Obama’s statement that he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions.”
• Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reveals that Barack Obama’s campaign returned $33,000 to two brothers in the Gaza Strip who had bought t-shirts in bulk from the campaign’s online store. They listed their addresss as “Ga.,” which the campaign thought was Georgia.
• Time’s Joe Klein asks “where’s the outrage” from conservative Jews over Sarah Palin’s church and Sean Hannity citing a “Jew-hater” as a source.
• The Cleveland Plain-Dealer explores whether Republicans can make inroads in the Jewish vote in Ohio.
• Joe Lieberman tells Chabad of Boca Raton, and the Palm Beach Post, that it’s OK to attack Obama’s associations, but that doesn’t mean McCain is trying to avoid issues.
• Lieberman introduces Palin at a big fundraiser in Palm Beach.
• Matt Littman, at the Huffington Post, wonders how many Jews Sarah Palin has met.
  
• Those pro-Obama videos from Israelis give a false impression of his support in the Jewish state, according to Shmuel Rosner in Commentary.

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Saperstein: O’Reilly owes Pelosi an apology

By Eric Fingerhut · October 3, 2008

Bill O’Reilly compared the body language of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to Adolf Hitler on his show earlier this week, and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism Rabbi David Saperstein thinks the Fox News host ought to apologize for such a “preposterous and insulting” analogy. Here’s his letter to “O’Reilly Factor” executive producers David Tabacoff and Amy Sohnen:

I write in response to commentator Bill O’Reilly’s recent statement comparing Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s presentation style and body language to that of Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler’s.

Although O’Reilly cynically claimed, “I’m not making any comparisons here,” his decision to equate Speaker Pelosi’s public speaking style with the very personification of evil in our time is, by definition, a comparison – a particularly preposterous and insulting one, at that.  Nothing in her manner or substance – nothing – resembled the hate-filled rants Hitler was so known for. Such an inappropriate, ill-conceived analogy represents a smear campaign designed to further divide an already politically polarized American public.

This is not the first time Mr. O’Reilly has used his television show as an outlet for drawing supposed parallels between Nazi Germany and those current-day politicians and media outlets with whom he disagrees.  In the past he has accused The Huffington Post of employing “the exact same tactics that the Nazis used … to demonize certain groups of people” and later called former Vice President Al Gore an “evil enabler” for speaking at a convention that he inexplicably compared to gatherings held by both the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party.

Such repeated comparisons by Mr. O’Reilly display blatant insensitivity to the far-reaching effects of the evil perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis. In repeatedly comparing respected political figures with Hitler and Nazis, he trivializes the distinctive evil that Hitler represents.

Mr. O’Reilly owes Speaker Pelosi an apology. I urge that you insist it be given as a requirement of the journalistic standards of the network and, should he refuse, that you act accordingly.

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Palin discussed her Israeli flag with Peres

By Eric Fingerhut · October 2, 2008

Sarah Palin told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that Israeli President Shimon Peres asked her about the Israeli flag she keeps in her office. She also spoke about her fondness for the Jewish state, saying “I do love that country.” Here’s the transcript:

Hewitt: Governor, let’s close with some foreign affairs. It is reported that you had an Israeli flag in your governor’s office. You wore an Israeli flag pin occasionally. One, is that true? And two, why your support for Israel?

Palin: Well, it is true, and I ran into Shimon Peres recently at a meeting, and he even pointed that out. He said I saw a picture of you on the internet, and you had an Israeli flag in your state government office, and I said I sure do. You know, my heart is with you. And all of those trials and tribulations throughout history that Israel has gone through, not only does that allow me to want to support that country, but Israel is our strongest and most important ally in the Middle East. And they are a democratic country who I believe deserves our support, and I know that John McCain believes as I do that Israel is our friend, and we need to be there to support them. They are there for us, and I do love that country.

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RJC continues ads; Jewish Dems fight back

By Eric Fingerhut · September 29, 2008

The Republican Jewish Coalition has released the latest in its series of ads that are making lots of Jewish Democrats mad. This one entitled “Barack Obama’s Advisors: Pro-Palestinian, Anti-Israel, Even Hostile to America,” attacks the Democratic nominee for his longtime relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as well as others with whom the group says Obama “surrounds” himself. (The RJC uses an expansive definition of “surrounds,” considering, for instance, one of the advisors named in the ad, Robert Malley, says he was never an adviser to the campaign and only offered informal advice.)

At last week’s National Jewish Democratic Council Washington Conference, former congressman and Obama campaign adviser Mel Levine charged that the RJC is “weakening Israel” and damaging the tradition of bipartisan support for the Jewish state with such advertisements.

“They are denigrating strong friends of Israel, starting with Barack Obama,” said Levine. “They are interested in tearing apart someone for purely partisan reasons. It is very harmful to Israel.”

Democrats were planning to fight back, though. Levine noted that the Obama campaign is distributing talking points to rebut some of the issues raised by the RJC, and others on the panel, entitled “Israel: Bipartisan Consensus or Partisan Wedge Issue,” suggested that there was nothing wrong with raising legitimate questions about McCain on the Middle East – his mixup of Sunni and Shiite Muslims earlier in the campaign, for instance – as long as it is done “respectfully.”

Ira Forman, NJDC executive director, drew a distinction between the RJC’s ads and the Democratic argument that the Bush administration had made Israel “less safe” – saying his party is not calling Republican friendship with Israel into question.

But RJC executive director Matt Brooks objected to the NJDC attacks, saying he was reminded of the “old adage” that “when there’s a bad set of facts, change the subject.”

“We’re not in any way trying to harm bipartisan support for Israel,” said Brooks, but arguing there is a “big difference between Sen. Obama and Sen. McCain, a lot of issues and ideas” that require “vigorous debate.”

“That is what a campaign is all about,” he said.

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Interfaith Alliance counters campaign to endorse from pulpit

By Eric Fingerhut · September 23, 2008

The Interfaith Alliance is countering an effort to get clergy to endorse candidates from the pulpit. More than 150 religious leaders have signed a six-point pledge to uphold “certain standards” during the election and prevent partisanship or candidate endorsements in their houses of worship.

The nationwide campaign is a direct response to the Alliance Defense Fund’s Pulpit Initiative, which “seeks to restore the right of each pastor to speak Scriptural truth from the pulpit about moral, social, governmental, and other issues without fear of losing his church’s tax exempt status.” The organization is hoping to spur lawsuits from the IRS, expecting to win and “restore the right of pastors to speak freely from the pulpit.”

Among the religious leaders who have signed the Interfaith Alliance pledge are Rabbis Janet Marder of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, Calif., Toba Spitzer of West Newton, Mass. and Peter Rubenstein of Central Synagogue in New York, Sayyid Sayid of the Islamic Society of North America, and prominent evangelical Rev. Joel Hunter of Longwood, Floa.

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This Buchanan thing won’t die

By Ron Kampeas · September 23, 2008

Over at Politico, Ben Smith runs down a list of McCain campaign plaints about press coverage. One has to do with inadequate attention paid to the fabrication, promulgated by the Obama campaign almost as soon as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) named Sarah Palin as his running mate, that the Alaska governor had once endorsed Pat Buchanan, the Holocaust diminisher, for president.

According to Smith, McCain campaign honcho Steve Schmidt said Obama surrogate U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) “went out and accused her of being a Nazi sympathizer.”

Berated Schmidt: “Where is the outrage to that aspersion on the part of some of the biggest newspapers in the country?”

Ben does a good job of gutting this one: Wexler accused Buchanan - never Palin - of Nazi sympathies. So it was sympathies once removed, as it were.

Something else kinda bugs me: We (as in JTA/Jewish media) pretty much nipped this one in the bud. What do you need major papers for, Steve? Ya got the folks who count (at least as far as this issue goes.)

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The Mark Wallace connection

By Ron Kampeas · September 18, 2008

At MSNBC’s First Read, Matt Berger, former JTA star, examines the role that Mark Wallace, who is reportedly advising Alaska Gov. and GOP Veep pick Sarah Palin, has in the Iran rally from which she and other elected officials were uninvited.

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Dems, Jewish leaders takin’ it to the streets? (UPDATED)

By Ron Kampeas · September 17, 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post included anonymous criticisms that should not have been published. The post has been revised to reflect JTA’s standards.

Five years or so ago, top Democrats convened an emergency session: How do we get Jews back into the Democratic fold?

The panic was premature, and predicated on the ephemera of President Bush’s post-Sept. 11 popularity, soon to diffuse with the failures of the Iraq war. John Kerry won 75 percent of the Jewish vote, and for Dems all was right in the world.

No longer, but this time it’s the Jews who might want to convene a meeting on how to get Dems back into the fold.

The most recent fashla (Hebrew for Snafu) is the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’ failure until the last minute to invite someone from the Obama campaign to attend its rally Sept. 22 to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s attendance at the U.N. General Assembly. (So says the Obama campaign.)

The seriousness of the upset was underscored by the unsolicited call I got Wednesday morning from an Obama campaign official: “The Obama campaign was not called until this morning, after the debacle with Sen. Clinton.”

Them’s fighting words, and unusually strong ones at that.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) had been invited, separate from the camapign; she pulled out Wednesday when she learned that Alaska Gov. and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin was to attend. (Palin has not confirmed, according to the latest reports.)

The Dems logic is as follows: A senator is not the same as someone on the ticket. As soon as the Conference of Presidents got Palin (last week apparently) they should have called Obama’s folks, is how the thinking goes.

Additionally, there’s nothing the campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) would love more than a Clinton-Palin pairing (the real kind, as opposed to the Saturday Night Live version): it would lend credibility to the campaign’s claim to the women voters who felt shunted by Clinton’s loss in the primaries.

Dem insiders say that fits a pattern of what they claim is a rightward tilt at the conference, under the leadership of executive vice chairman Malcolm Hoenlein. We’re trying to reach Hoenlein for a reply, but in his defense it must be said that he recently gave Howard Dean, the party’s chairman, free rein at a conference session this summer. Not to mention that some of the conference’s right-wing members have been know to grumble that, despite some liberal claims to the contrary, Hoenlein is not one of them.

It’s Hoenlein’s second to-and-fro with the Obama campaign. In February, he expressed concerns about the “change” tone of the election: Obama campaigners thought that was directed at their candidate, who has most emphasized change, but Hoenlein said he was talking more broadly about campaigns within both parties. Whether it was related or not, weeks later Hoenlein was touting the bipartisan credentials of the conference’s 60th anniversary of Israel committee.

Scrambling to kiss and make up might not do it this time, though: Dems are not afraid to say, on the record, that they perceive a pattern of some Jewish establishment leaders allowing themselves to be used by the Republicans, whether it’s because of shared neoconservative values, or because there’s a longstanding tradition in Washington of, well, fearing Republican retribution more than the Democratic kind.

Ira Forman, the director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said Hoenlein has to explain more than just this incident because it’s not his first time in the hot spot. “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, there’s a good chance it is a duck,” he said of his suspicions of Hoenlein’s Republican sympathies.

UPDATED FROM HERE:

There have been occasions in recent years when similar tensions have arisen between Democrats and major Jewish groups, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Congressional Democrats were furious last summer when AIPAC failed to excoriate Republicans for voting against the foreign assistance package. AIPAC has long made support for the package the sine qua non of getting into its good graces, partly, of course, because of its Israel component; but also because the organization sees an overall American commitment to global foreign aid as a pillar in perpetuating support for Israel. It’s made mince meat in the past of Democrats who have voted against the appropriation in the past (to protest perceived Republican underfunding of overseas aid) but was silent in 2007 when the GOP whipped against the bill in a bid to depict Democrats as overly generous overseas and as committed to programs that fund abortions.

That and other rifts have led Democrats to more outspokenly carpet AIPAC when they think its steering wrong – listen to Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Obama’s running mate, blow a gasket when I asked him about his pro-AIPAC voting record earlier this month. (Some close to the situation say that the Obama camp has said that Biden mistakenly thought I said that AIPAC itself had criticized him, when in fact I had cited attacks fro the Republican Jewish Coalition.)

The latest manifestation – unrelated to the Clinton-Palin-Hoenlein contretemps – was today (Wednesday) when J Street, the dovish pro-Israel lobby aiming to undercut the pro-AIPAC consensus on the Hill, hosted a “strategy session” on the Hill with its endorsees. At first, establishment Jewish leaders mocked the J Street endorsee list as marginal, but it now includes Jewish pro-Israel heavyweights, including U.S. Reps. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and Bob Filner (D-Calif.) Schakowsky and Filner both spoke at the event, and said they welcomed the opportunity to be perceived as pro-Israel beyond the traditional Jewish establishment constraints. Schakowsky said debate on the peace process is more robust in Israel than in Washington, a trope that was once unimaginable from a Jewish lawmaker.

Filner agreed, telling J Street: “You give us the option to vote the way we should be voting.”

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Political tidbits: Jews for Jesus head says he was misinterpreted

By Eric Fingerhut · September 10, 2008

• The head of Jews for Jesus in Israel tells NBC’s First Read his speech at Sarah Palin’s church last month was misinterpreted. The ADL points out he made a similar remark in March.
  
• Writing in the Wall Street Journal, noted Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami says Barack Obama’s candidacy is “the sharpest break yet with the national consensus over American foreign policy after World War II.”
• Sarah Palin used the biblical Queen Esther as a role model when she became Alaska governor. The Huffington Post’s Jon Wienter says this gives a hint as to what Palin’s policy might be on Iran.
• Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times blogs about Michelle Obama’s rabbi cousin, Capers Funnye. An Obama spokeswoman says the two are “not close.”
  
• Jewish conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel says she doesn’t care about Michelle Obama’s cousin or any other Jewish family member of the candidates – and is tired of hearing about them.
• Beliefnet’s Steven Waldman says Ed Koch’s endorsement of Obama yesterday is evidence that Sarah Palin is hurting McCain among Jews, and speculates he could lose Florida because of it.
  
• Abe Greenwald of Commentary says Koch’s endorsement was “meaningless” since he doesn’t name one policy position where he disagrees with McCain, nor does he give any specific evidence why Palin would “scare” him.
• Writing in the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg argues that the next president’s most important job is to keep Al Qaeda from detonating a nuclear device in the United States, and compares the candidates’ views. Max Boot at Commentary takes exception to Goldberg’s critique of McCain’s position.
• Ultra-Orthodox rabbis are getting out the expatriate vote in Israel, according to the Forward.
  
• Robin Maxwell of The Huffington Post is shocked and outraged that elderly Jews may not be voting for Obama because he’s black.
• A Jewish high-schooler says media coverage has been too favorable to Obama during a teen panel at the University of Mississippi, reports the Memphis Commercial-Appeal.
• Jonathan Mark of The Jewish Week blogs that Sarah Palin reminds him of Chabad.
• And a photo of some Republican Jews davening Mincha at last week’s convention in St. Paul.

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Political tidbits: Exodus from Lieberman’s Senate office is underway

By Eric Fingerhut · September 9, 2008

• Sen. Joe Lieberman’s legislative director Joe Goffman quit yesterday, and Politico says it was a protest against his boss’ endosement of John McCain – and notes a half-dozen other recent defections. Here’s Goffman’s farewell e-mail.
  
• Bradley Burston in Haaretz compares the language in the Democratic and Republican platforms on Israel-related issues.
  
• In another piece, Burston writes that Israel has “disappeared” as a campaign issue, but offers seven ways it could return to “haunt” the campaign.
• Mark Silk at the blog Spiritual Politics predicts Palin’s nomination will help Obama among Jews and predicts a 70-28 breakdown in the Jewish vote for the Democrat.
• Jewish comedienne and performance artist Sandra Bernhard starts a month-long run at the Washington DCJCC’s Theater J tonight and tells a D.C. gay weekly that John McCain is “hypocritical and stupid” for pointing fingers at celebrities.

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