Vote, Schmote

Courting the never-elusive Jewish vote.

by Liz Spikol

Ringo Rosseman, a Philadelphia bartender, likes the online cartoon character Strong Bad, feels that light beer is synonymous with communism and is, according to friends, quite cuddly.

At least that’s what you glean from Roseman’s page on Facebook, the online gathering place for the Great Schlep, a political movement designed to get young Jewish voters to talk to their grandparents about voting for Obama. At 28, Roseman falls into the Schlep’s target demo, which is why it was a clever gambit on the movement’s part to utilize Sarah Silverman.

In a promotional video, Silverman tries to persuade, cajole and offend kids into talking to their relatives: “Explain to them that we’re all the same inside. You know, you could compare an elderly Jewish woman like Nana to a young black man. They may seem totally different, but on paper, they’re the same. I mean, think about it. Track suits. Let’s start there. They both love track suits. They can’t get enough of them. What else? Car of choice: the Cadillac. They’re both crazy about their grandkids. What else? They like things and bling and money and jewelry and stuff. They both say ‘yo’ all the time, or Jews go right to left—‘oy.’”

For Roseman, Silverman proved hilariously persuasive. “I’ve been a huge fan of Sarah Silverman’s since 1995,” he says. “Her video made me realize how important it is to impress upon my grandmother certain facts about the election and the direction of our country. She’s a pretty smart lady, so I think it’s working pretty well.”

After their Schlep-inspired conversation, Roseman’s grandmother, who lives in Winston-Salem, N.C., went to the library and checked out an audiobook about Obama. Their phone dialogue is going so well, Roseman says, he doesn’t think he’ll need to schlep to North Carolina. “But I will admit I used some reverse Jewish grandmother guilt on her, in reference to visiting, to help get her interested.”

“The best way to persuade someone and to have real honest conversation is via a loved one,” says Ari Wallach, 33, co-executive director of the Schlep’s sponsoring organization—the federal PAC Jewish Council for Education & Research. “And there’s no one grandparents love more than their grandkids.”

The Schlep website and its Facebook group are intended, Wallach says, to encourage intergenerational dialogue. The Schlep team gives kids and relatives the tools—talking points, FAQs—and what Wallach calls a “passport” to have the conversations. “We open up a little portal to have a kitschy conversation and then move into serious issues.”

And getting serious is important, says Wallach, given the smear emails that have been sent to elderly Jewish residents in retirement communities, like the one that said Obama took his Senate oath on the Koran.

“[Older Jewish people] are totally online and they forward things like it’s nobody’s business,” says Wallach. “They’re very savvy critical thinkers but we’ve seen emails where people are taking bylines from newspapers and putting their own copy into it so it looks like it’s from The New York Times.”

Wallach is especially sensitive to rumor mongering. “I’m a first-generation Holocaust survivor. My father fought in World War II with the Jewish underground as a teenager in Poland. My grandparents faced pogroms. Peel back the innuendo of what’s been said about Obama and it cuts very close to home for me.”

Wallach cites Silverman’s comment about Obama’s name as part of the Schlep’s effort to contextualize rumors within Jewish history: “Yes, Barack Hussein Obama,” Silverman says, tilting her head. “It’s a super fucking shitty name. But you’d think that somebody named Manischewitz Guberman might understand that.”

Since Franklin Roosevelt, Jews have voted overwhelmingly Democratic. Even when registered as independents, they’ve tended to respond to “liberal” issues like healthcare, gender and racial equality, the separation of church and state, and civil liberties. As Silverman puts it, “Jews are the most liberal, scrappy, civil rightsy people there are.”

This perception comes, in part, from the large number of Jews who fought alongside blacks during the civil rights movement. The famous photograph of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching with Martin Luther King Jr. in the streets of Selma represents that tie. Heschel famously wrote, “Even without words, our march was worship. I felt my legs were praying.”

Voting Democratic and being liberal has so forcefully been associated with Judaism that it’s inspired countless assumptions and wisecracks, like the old (and uncomfortable) class-based crack that Jews live like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. This continues to translate in the voting booth today.

But the Jewish vote is not a monolith.

Numbers suggest there’s more opportunity than ever before for Republican candidates to gain traction—an opportunity worth taking given the high registration and turnout in the Jewish community.

In 2003 the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs’ Steven Windmueller wrote: “Where once the Democratic Party could count on a 90 percent Jewish turnout for its candidates, these numbers are now generally 60-75 percent.”

Indeed, a Luntz Research Poll showed 48 percent of Jews surveyed said they’d consider voting for George Bush in 2004. And the latest numbers in this election cycle show Obama slightly behind where Kerry was at this time.

Becoming bipartisan is a positive development, says Scott Feigelstein, regional director of the Pennsylvania/South Jersey chapter of the RJC. “We try to persuade the Jewish community that they’ve had their political eggs in one basket—and it’s the wrong basket­—for years,” he says.

Feigelstein sees movement especially among young people. “They’re far more open to hearing a Republican message than their parents and grandparents,” he says, “who are still wedded to marching in lockstep—just by habit—of voting for Franklin Roosevelt over and over again, not realizing he’s no longer with us.”

But there have been many elections since Roosevelt, and it’s not clear older Jews are unthinkingly voting the straight ticket. Nor is it clear they’ll continue to do so.

“When I was growing up,” says Robin Schatz, director of government affairs at the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia, “it would be unusual to find Jewish Republicans. Now it’s more common.”

Schatz, who worked for Rendell in his first term and for City Councilman Frank DiCicco for eight years, says Jews are often fiscally conservative, even though—with the exception of the Orthodox community—they’re more socially liberal. But it’s complicated.

“Republican candidates are seen as more friendly to Israel,” Schatz goes on to say. She gives the example of Rick Santorum who, despite his contrary positions on LGBT issues and, well, everything else, did have a following in the Jewish community.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow of Philadelphia’s progressive Shalom Center thinks the move rightward has to do with income. “At the Passover seder Jews want to see themselves as runaway slaves, not as slave masters,” he says. “But as the tug of wealth becomes stronger than the values expressed in the seder … ” Waskow seems to shrug over the phone. “The American Jewish community is a very prosperous community. It undercuts traditional Jewish values. But voting patterns are still more skewed toward supporting the poor than you would think from checking the bankbook.”

There are roughly 250,000 Jews in the Philadelphia region. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, a division of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, 2.3 percent of Pennsylvania’s residents are Jewish. This puts it among the top nine states in the country in terms of Jewish density. (The other eight are New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Connecticut, California and Nevada.)

photo by steve agee

It’s hard to gauge how important Pennsylvania Jewish voters will be to the presidential election, but it’s curious that while the Republican Jewish Coalition has a well-organized and financially oiled machine here, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) does not.

Aaron Keyak, press secretary of the NJDC, says Philadelphia just doesn’t have a big enough base to justify hiring an area director. “We do have some strong supporters in Philadelphia and there are plenty of Jewish Democrats there,” he says. “It’s certainly a place where we’d like to have a chapter. It’s something we’re looking to do.”

That might not be a bad idea given that of the roughly 280,000 Jews in swing-state Pennsylvania, the vast majority live in Philly.

Pennsylvania State Rep. Josh Shapiro is the chair of Sen. Obama’s Jewish Community Leadership Council in Pennsylvania, and he sees Philadelphia as an important cog in the electoral wheel. “It’s one of the key areas around the country in terms of the size of the Jewish vote, the significance of the Jewish vote and in terms of the importance of Pennsylvania in the general election.”

To that end, Shapiro and his colleagues have a strong grassroots effort going in the Jewish community. When diplomat and Mideast specialist Dennis Ross came to Lower Merion a few months ago, 700 people showed up. They have dozens of house parties across the region. In fact, Shapiro was speaking at three of them on the weekend I spoke to him.

Feigelstein’s RJC is working overtime in the community with events and fundraisers as well. “We clearly believe [the Philadelphia area] is a key opportunity for us and that our message is being well-received,” he says.

But Keyak isn’t worried. “Seventy-some percent of the Jewish community voted for John Kerry last time. We’re pretty confident Obama will be able to carry 2-to-1 or higher and maybe even achieve John Kerry’s numbers.”

So who’s right? Are Philly Jews such a given that the NJDC doesn’t need to be here? Or is the RJC making headway?

We asked Jewish Exponent Editor Jonathan Tobin, who’s just been named editor of the conservative publication Commentary. He’s less sanguine than Feigelstein about Republican prospects in the Jewish community.

“The long anticipated big shift in the Jewish vote has not arrived and may never arrive,” he says. “Jews are still predominantly identifying with Democrats and still think of themselves as liberals or center liberals. They’re certainly not identifying as conservatives or Republicans.”

Tobin says there may have been an opportunity for John McCain to leverage a portion of the Jewish vote based on foreign policy and the Israel issue—“though it should be specified that the vast majority of Jews are not single-issue Israel voters.”

Israel. The land of milk and honey. The homeland. The kibbutzes, the Wailing Wall, Masada. The suicide bombings and geographic vulnerability and the existential threat.

Last year the American Jewish Committee (AJC) came out with an inflammatory paper called Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism by Alvin Rosenfeld, a Holocaust scholar.

Rosenfeld alleged that left-leaning Jews, in critiquing the Israeli government and Zionism, are anti-Semitic. He cited Tony Judt, who writes for The Nation, The New York Times and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz; playwright Tony Kushner; and poet Adrienne Rich, among others.

It caused much controversy, with scholars and thinkers from the other side defending the right of American Jews to criticize the Israeli government, much the way Jews in Israel do. Rosenfeld said it couldn’t be done.

Yet how important is Israel to the average American Jew? In 2007 the same American Jewish Committee did its Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion and asked respondents which issue would be most important to them when considering a presidential candidate. Only 6 percent said Israel.

The 2008 version of the AJC survey was conducted just a few weeks ago, and this time Jews were asked what they’d like to hear the presidential candidates discuss. Three percent said Israel.

The results of J Street’s National Survey of American Jews, released in July, states: “Israel is actually in the bottom tier of issues [of political import], and only 8 percent of Jews identify it as one of the top two most important issues in deciding their vote for president.”

Yet the perception that Israel is the primary variable for Jewish voters frustratingly dominates conversation about the so-called Jewish vote.

And despite the fact that AIPAC has given McCain and Obama the same rating, some small percentage of Jewish voters do continue to be nervous about Obama’s stand on the issue.

“McCain has a good record on Israel,” says Tobin. “The one issue he seemed to be able to speak with passion about is the struggle against Islamist terrorism and seeing the world in terms of a civilizational struggle. He’s not the most articulate candidate, but he’s very articulate about that, and it’s an issue that speaks to the sensibilities of many Jews.”

Robin Schatz agrees: “McCain has a strong background in counterterrorism and foreign affairs that plays well with the Jewish community,” she says.

Comcast exec David L. Cohen, Mayor Ed Rendell’s chief of staff from 1992 to 1997, is vice chair of the Board of Directors of Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia. He’s uncomfortable with the whole notion of a Jewish vote—or a black vote or an elderly vote, for that matter. But when it comes to Obama and Israel, he says, “I don’t think that concern was based on anything Obama’s ever said or any vote he’s ever taken. He’s always been a 100 percent supporter of Israel.”

So what’s the real issue?

“For some limited segment of the community,” says Cohen, “there was a suspicion based on his name and on the amazingly widely held perception—I saw a poll that said 13 percent—that Barack Obama is Muslim.”

It’s just another hill to climb for Josh Shapiro.

“We’ve spent so much time having to combat the rumors rather than just provide the facts, instead of a traditional campaign where you provide the facts first,” says Shapiro. In fact, the Obama campaign has a website, www.fightthesmears.com, devoted entirely to debunking the rumors promulgated by his opposition—perhaps a good move given the Swift Boating of Kerry.

To underscore the obvious: Obama is not Muslim. He is not pro-Hamas. He has an American birth certificate. Also, Zbigniew Brzezinski is not an advisor to the campaign. Sen. Chuck Hagel is not Obama’s Mideast advisor. Nor is former U.S. Rep. David Bonior. And his voting record on Israel is identical to John McCain’s.

The Shalom Center’s Rabbi Waskow was so distressed by the rumors, he joined Rabbis for Obama to fight lashon hora, literally evil tongue, or gossip. That group’s cute tagline—which every Jewish political group needs, apparently—is, “When 500 rabbis agree on anything, you know something is going on.” The website features a photograph of Obama in a kippah putting a note into the Wailing Wall.

Waskow felt it was his duty to the Jewish people to say, “Five-hundred rabbis have looked into Obama’s history and concluded he was not anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.”

Cohen, meanwhile, was struck by something he saw on TV. “I was watching a cable news show and they had [Congressman] Rahm Emanuel there. He said, ‘I’m Jewish. I fought in the Israeli Army.’ If you’re a Jewish person who doesn’t know all that much about this, and you see [Emanuel endorse Obama], it at a minimum makes you catch your breath and makes you wonder what you’re basing your concerns on. Because there’s nothing specific out there.”

Recently a colleague came to me with a wrinkled print-out that had a photo of Robert Kennedy and a quote: “There’s no question about it … In the next 40 years a Negro can achieve the same position that my brother has.” My colleague was delighted. “He predicted it,” she said.

“I felt a sense of the holy”: Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (second from right) marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma in 1965.

Robert Kennedy would certainly be proud of an African-American presidential candidacy. But is the country ready to go through with it in the voting booth? Are Jews ready?

Maybe that seems like a strange question, but it’s one of the first things a fellow writer said to me when I told him I was writing about the Jewish vote: that the reason Jews are nervous about Obama is because he’s black—a fact that would be especially lamentable given the historical cooperation between the two groups.

There is, of course, the vaunted “black-Jewish tension.” There’s black-Asian tension, black-Irish tension, black-Italian tension and black-Polish tension, too. They just don’t hit the radar in the same way. Perhaps that’s because many people think Jews should be on higher ground when it comes to black Americans.

“Over the last 10 years,” says Zack Stalberg, executive director of the voting advocacy group Committee of Seventy, “the old Jewish-black alliance has broken up. I think it has a lot to do with Jews becoming part of an established American scene. Some of it probably has to do with a perceived threat of non-whites getting a leg up over a tiny minority.”

Yet Jews will typically vote in large numbers for African-American candidates—more so than other ethnic groups, as the RJC’s Scott Feigelstein points out. In fact, he’s offended by the notion that Jews are reticent about Obama because he’s black.

“The lack of enthusiasm in some quarters of the Jewish community is clearly not racially based,” he says emphatically. “It’s based on policies, positions and experience levels. The only ones looking at this through a racial prism, frankly, is the Democratic Party.”

Jonathan Tobin says he sees no evidence that race is a serious issue in the Jewish vote. “Race has been, you could argue, the ongoing theme of American history, so to say it plays no role in this election would be disingenuous. But if you’re going to put it in the context of black-Jewish relations, that’s not a hot-button issue.” He says if any group were going to disregard race in this election, in fact, it would probably be Jews.

In Philadelphia, the vote will come down to demographics. Neil Oxman, a longtime political consultant and president of the Campaign Group, sees age, not race, as the deciding factor. Across the board, in all the polls, he says, age is making the difference, and this is bound to be reflected in the Jewish community.

The older, less affluent, less educated Jews will vote McCain, he suspects, while the younger, upscale, educated Jew will vote Obama.

Here’s an example: You’re 25 years old. You live on 15th and Spruce. You just graduated Penn Law and you’re an associate in a firm on Market Street. You’re voting for Obama.

Your 75-year-old grandmother lives in a rowhouse on Fulmer Street in the 58th Ward. She used to have a grocery store on 60th Street in West Philadelphia. Despite her history with union organizing and supporting the civil rights movement, she’s having doubts about Obama. So she’s undecided.

But is she undecided because of Obama’s race? Or are older voters, in general, undecided?

My fellow writer wasn’t wrong in saying that some Jews aren’t voting for Barack Obama because he’s black. There are lots of white people who won’t vote for a black man. It’s just that racism seems much uglier when it comes from another oppressed minority.

“My grandmother, who was born in Poland, came to the U.S. in 1906,” says Rabbi Waskow. “One day she came in from the grocery store very upset. She had been standing in line at a bakery to buy challah on a Friday afternoon and heard two of the women in front of her talking about ‘schvartzes.’ She told them, ‘In Europe that’s the way they talk about us!’”

It may have seemed as though the McCain campaign got a shot in the arm—at least initially—with the choice of Sarah Palin.

But not with Jewish voters.

While a lot of Americans saw her and found someone they could relate to, Jewish voters felt the opposite.

Much of what makes Palin work for white working-class voters hurts her chances with more educated centrists and liberals. This week Salon’s Tristram Korten wrote about Sarah Palin and the Jewish vote in Florida. In the piece a woman at a Boca Raton retirement community says, “I was leaning toward McCain, but after he selected her, I’ve ruled him out completely. I find her offensive.”

She’s not the only one. Marciarose Shestak, long active in the Jewish community in Philadelphia, told me she always thought Mr. McCain, as she called him, was a decent man—until he chose Palin. “It was the height of irresponsibility,” she said. “It may have been strategically smart, but it’s patriotically irresponsible.” But Shestak’s disapproval didn’t come from being Jewish, she said. “She holds to opinions that horrify me as an American, not as a Jew.”

Last week Florida Democratic Congressman Alcee Hastings made a PR blunder when he said in a panel discussion sponsored by the NJDC, “If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you [Jews] to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks.”

He later apologized, though said he still thought her policies would be anathema to both groups.

“I don’t think some of the Jewish people voting for McCain realize how conservative the McCain/Palin ticket is,” says the NJDC’s Aaron Keyak, referring to Palin’s positions on abortion, Supreme Court justices, and teaching creationism or intelligent design.

Maybe that’s why the Obama campaign sent in the cavalry: former New York Mayor Ed Koch. He flew to Florida to emphasize Keyak’s point, reminding Jews in retirement communities of their long-held values: women’s rights, LGBT rights and social justice. He found that most people were receptive.

Not everyone believes these values are important for today’s Jews, but there are Talmudic justifications for advocating against unnecessary war, protecting the poor and circulating abundance to all levels of society. “The whole notion of human rights and civil liberties is a crucial piece of what it means to be Jewish in America,” says Rabbi Waskow.

According to polls and studies and pundits, that’s still true. Obama will win a majority of the Jewish vote here in Philly. But by how much? We might as well just go by one of those great Yiddish proverbs that you have to read seven times to understand: “You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time, nor can you sit on two horses with one behind.”

In other words, you have to make a choice. So? What’s it gonna be?