Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday September 5, 2008

Jews dig for details in vetting McCain’s VP

by ron kampeas
jta

A small Israeli flag propped up on a window frame. A Pat Buchanan button sported at a rally. A history of social conservatism.

Little about the frozen north is Jewish outside the realm of fiction (see Mordechai Richler, Michael Chabon, “Northern Exposure”), so when Republicans pitch Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, Sen. John McCain’s vice presidential pick, to the Jews, it’s not necessarily an easy sell.

Picking through the trivia and smears for substance, there’s this: Palin, 44, has genuinely warm relations with her Jewish constituents — 6,000 or so — and appears to have a fondness for Israel.

She also comes down on the strongly conservative side on social issues where Jews tend to trend liberal.

“Gov. Palin has established a great relationship with the Jewish community over the years and has attended several of our Jewish cultural gala events,” Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, the director of Chabad-Lubavitch in Anchorage, wrote in an e-mail.

He added, “Gov. Palin also had plans to visit Israel with members of the Jewish community, however, for technical reasons, the visit has not occurred yet.”

Palin is likable enough that she got props from Democrat Ethan Berkowitz, the Jewish former minority leader in the Alaska House of Representatives.

“I like her and this is an exciting day for Alaska,” Berkowitz said.

Republicans have been scouring the archives to uncover evidence of Palin’s outreach to Jews and to Israel.

Her single substantive act is signing a resolution in June marking 60 years of Alaska-Israel relations, launched improbably in 1948 when Alaska Airlines helped shepherd thousands of Yemeni Jews to Israel. However, she did not initiate the legislation: Its major mover was John Harris, the speaker of the Alaska House.

The paucity of material led the Republican Jewish Coalition to tout the appearance of a small Israeli flag propped against a window of the state Capitol in an online video in which Palin praises the virtues of hiking Juneau.

In an e-mail blast, RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks offered the screengrab as an answer for “those of you who have had questions regarding Sarah Palin and her views on Israel.”

In a seemingly equal bit of stretching in the other direction, some Democrats played up an Associated Press report that Palin — then the mayor of the small Alaska town of Wasilla — had sported a Buchanan button in 1999 when the Reform Party candidate visited there.

“John McCain’s decision to select a vice presidential running mate that endorsed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 is a direct affront to all Jewish Americans,” said an e-mail blast from the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, quoting Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), Obama’s top Jewish surrogate. “Pat Buchanan is a Nazi sympathizer with a uniquely atrocious record on Israel, even going as far as to denounce bringing former Nazi soldiers to justice and praising Adolf Hitler for his ‘great courage.’”

The problem was that Palin had corrected the record as soon as the AP report appeared, noting in a letter to a local newspaper that she wore the button as a courtesy. In fact, in the 2000 election, during the GOP primaries, she was an official with the Steve Forbes campaign.

The National Jewish Democratic Council chose to focus on one major difference between Palin and much of the U.S. Jewish community: her staunch social conservatism.

“For a party which claims it is trying to reach out to the Jewish community, McCain’s pick is particularly strange,” NJDC Director Ira Forman said in a statement. “On a broad range of issues, most strikingly on the issue of women’s reproductive freedom, she is totally out of step with Jewish public opinion.”

Palin backs abortion only in cases where a woman’s life is at risk, opposes stem cell research and believes creationism should be taught in schools alongside evolution.

Ben Chouake, who heads NORPAC, a New Jersey–based pro-Israel political action committee and one who is close to the McCain campaign, says he learned that McCain favored Sen. Joe Lieberman

(I-Conn.), but gave in to arguments that Lieberman would alienate the Republican Party’s conservative base.

“I’m not concerned because she is the governor, who is someone with executive experience,” Chouake said.

Greenberg, the Anchorage Chabad rabbi, suggests that she makes up in soul what she lacks in experience, referring to her fifth child, Trig, a baby with Down syndrome born just four months ago.

“I was personally impressed by Gov. Palin’s remarks of hope and faith when she gave birth to a child with special needs,” he said. “We all feel that the governor is a remarkable, energetic and good person.”

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.