Book Review: Zionism and the Biology of the Jews

The only genetic connection I am aware of that correlates in any respect is the drastic climb in rates among Ashkenazi Jews of the incidence of Crohn's disease as well as certain forms of rare blood cancer (polycythemia vera, e.g.). From my admittedly limited understanding of Jewish genetics (which have absolutely nothing to do with Zionism), Ashkenazi Jews have been studied because of the relative homogeneity of the gene pool. But I firmly agree that the positing of the question of genetics (race) and Zionism is wrong-headed but betrays a lack of understanding of the history of Zionism, especially of racial theories that spawned the first Zionist thinkers like Max Nordau, Herzl and Jabotinsky. Nordau especially was a magnificent example of a Social Darwinist. But to hold such fin de siecle racial theories as applicable today is just not understandable based on what we know about the Zionism as envisioned originally and what we know about its actual history as formed in 1948 - an artificial construct that did not put into practice the theory of a Jewish people in a Jewish nation. What we have now are Israelis, not necessarily Jews.

Randy Shiner

Book Review: Zionism and the Biology of the Jews, Raphael Falk

22.06. 2008 http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000575.htmlOriginal content copyright by the author Zionism & Israel Center http://zionism-israel.com/

Falk, Raphael Tziyonut vehabiologia shel hayehudim, Ressler, Tel Aviv 2006 (Hebrew Only)

Genetics and Zionism is a much abused topic. There is always room to create mischief by harnessing "science" to prove or disprove political ideas. Increasing attention is paid to questions such as "Are the Jews all genetically related, and are they all descended from Abraham and the inhabitants of ancient Israel?"

The question itself is wrongheaded. The goal of those who ask it is either to disinherit the Jews because we are not all descendants of Abraham, or to "prove" the validity of the Zionist claim to Israel by proving that we are all descendants of Abraham. Those who raised the issue are racists themselves, because no other nation has ever been asked to prove any such thing in order to qualify for self-determination. Those who try to defend the idea that every Jew is descended from Abraham are fools falling into a trap. We saw one such effort, in the hands of an amateur, when we considered the theories of professor Shlomo Zand about the origin of the Jews. Zand is primarily an ideologue, and invented facts to fit his fancy. He wove a fairy tale that can be believed by the ignorant to support intellectual impudence. The book before us is of an entirely different caliber.

Raphael Falk is an acknowledged expert in human genetics and a reasonably careful scientist. His careful reasoning brings sanity, logic and decency to counter the demagoguery of political argumentation. It is not a perfect book, but Hebrew readers will find it entertaining, informative and insightful. What a pity that Zand's book, but not this one, is being published in English!

Falk has a reputation for being an excellent science teacher. Apparently it is well-earned. The attentive non-scientific reader will learn quite a bit about the power - and the limitations - of scientific inference. Nobody who reads and understands this book will ever again fall for claims of "absolute proof" of this or that claim about human genetics and the Jews. Falk gives us two important principles that should always be born in mind. Mixing science and politics is perilous, and can result in bad science and worse politics. Scientific theories are always "underdetermined" - that is, there can never be enough evidence to establish a theory as "absolute truth." We can only say that evidence supports or contradicts a theory or prediction.

That is very unsatisfactory for demagogues, and it tends to make the bad "science" - the absolutist quack pronouncements - drive out the good science for audiences that seek certain knowledge to prove a point. The book consists of two parts. It is not always easy reading for enthusiastic Zionists. The first part of the book is devoted to a historical review of the role of race theories in 19th and 20th century European politics, and their influence on the Zionist movement, which is often embarrassing. Falk denies (in a single sentence) that Zionism was based on racist theories, or requires that the Jews be considered a "race," but the great bulk of his argumentation and evidence tends to leave a very bad impression. Falk set up a straw man, and then proceeds to knock it down. But it is not just his straw man. It is a straw man that many accept.

Falk is careful to note, but again only in one brief remark, that the early Zionists who held these theories were not racists, and that their notions must be viewed in the intellectual context of their times. Everyone, especially educated people, spoke of "race" in the 19th century, just as everyone believed in the electromagnetic ether. "Race science" was advanced by the most respected biologists and anthropologists and the terminology found its way into every day life. Nobody could foresee that the more or less harmless notions of the 19th century would degenerate into the driving force of genocidal Nazism, and few could understand that the racist notions underlying colonialism were pernicious in themselves. In fact, though some of their ideas may sound "racist" to modern ears, Zionists like Jabotinsky were among the first to understand that colonial peoples were the equals of colonizers and would demand their rights - and that is why he and a few others understood and foresaw the coming conflict between Arab and Jewish nationalism. Nonetheless, the material Falk has assembled is likely to be abused by the usual intellectual vultures who manufacture "Zionist quotes."

The second major part of the book is a fairly meticulous and conscientious presentation and examination of the modern genetic evidence regarding genetics of the Jewish people. The best evidence, as well as reconstruction of what must have happened, is that the ancient Jewish population represented a genetic matrix, not all descended from a single founder. We know that this must be true from the Bible and Jewish tradition as well. The current population of Jews in their different communities have a genetic makeup that reflects, to a lesser or greater degree, inheritance from this ancient community, which itself shared genes with other Middle Eastern groups, and genetic contributions from intermarriage in their various local Diasporas.

The Jewish people, like all peoples, are a cultural and social group, held together both by kinship bonds and by shared traditions and national feelings. Every human carries a pair of sex-determinant chromosomes. Women have two X chromosomes. Men have a Y chromosome and an X chromosome. The Y chromosome, for technical reasons, is also relatively easy to study. Had we all been descendants of father Abraham, and assuming that genes never mutate, we should all carry similar genetic markers in our Y chromosomes. But the studies do not show that. They show some common factors for many communities of Jewish men, including many Cohanim, who may be highly interrelated, but the kinship relation is very far from perfect. Ashkenazy Jews are more like each other than they are like Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews, and Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jews are more like each other genetically than they are like Welsh people or Khazars.

But for any individual, and for some groups such as Yemenites or Ethiopian Jews, we cannot say with certainty that they are Jews or not Jews based on genetic markers alone, or that they are definitely not Cohanim because they lack a particular allele. Consider where racial criteria and theories of Judaism would lead us. If it is definitely proved, for example, that every "real Jew" must have a certain allele (gene variant), do we exclude from Israel and the Jewish community all those who do not have this allele? What if it turns out that Jabotinsky or Maimonides or Ben Gurion did not have this gene? Do we exclude communities that suffered unspeakable horrors to uphold their Judaism because their Y chromosomes were born on the wrong side of the track?

And if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ismail Hanniyeh turn out to have the magic gene (and perhaps one or two million Palestinian Arabs or Africans or others who have no ties to the Jewish people also have this magic set of alleles), should they be given the right to become Israeli citizens and members of the Jewish people? Suppose Mahmoud Abbas has the genes of a Cohen, should we make him Chief Rabbi?

In a sense, Raphael Falk's project in writing this book violates his own dictum against mixing science and politics. He tells us that he was uncomfortable with genetic studies that appeared to be trying to give Zionism a genetic or "racial" basis, and wanted to find a way to reconcile his own Zionism with his understanding of genetics. The outcome, the proposition to be proved, is therefore known in advance. That is not a good way to do science. He needn't have bothered.

There is no way to prove a political thesis from biological science and no need to do so. Political theories and ideology must prove themselves in the realm of politics, ideology and history. Zionism appears to have done so, in a unique way that is not true of any other 19th century ideology except perhaps democratic liberalism. Zionism proved itself in the way that is accepted for scientific theories: by making and fulfilling a series of counter-intuitive and unlikely predictions: Assimilation in Europe is not possible, despite appearances.The Jews of Europe are about to suffer a catastrophe. The Jews are a people and can organize themselves as a people and an nation. It is possible to create a viable Jewish state. All of the above seemed improbable a hundred and ten years ago, and were bitterly contested.

Even today, anti-Zionists deny the evidence of their senses and insist that the Jewish state must fall apart because of internal divisions and that the only future for the Jews is in assimilation or in the most reactionary forms of religious practice. Whatever a nation must be, we are one, and we have proved it. Falk sees the genetic research from the perspective of an Israeli looking out.

He apparently missed the point that as much as some Israelis are trying to prove the impossible thesis that all Jews are literally brothers and sisters or their descendants, anti-Zionists are trying to disinherit us with absurd theories like those of Shlomo Zand and the Khazar hypothesis popularized by Koestler. While no theories can be absolutely proved or disproved, some can be shown to be highly unlikely based on the evidence. If it matters, there is not much evidence that modern Ashkenazy Jews are all descended from Khazars, nor is it possible to support the view that most Palestinian Arabs are the rightful genetic inheritors of the land from Abraham.

Research on Jewish genetics has important medical and scientific implications. Not all the studies of inheritance of "Jewish diseases" and other traits has been motivated by political considerations. Studies of genetics to trace migrations of populations in ancient times are also of interest. We all want to know about our human as well as our national roots. The same researchers who have been doing Jewish genetics studies have also been studying other populations with the same innocent and apolitical goals. We can all learn from this ongoing effort and watch it unfold, but it is wise to do so without expecting that it must have a particular outcome or provide a particular "correct" answer. The Jewish people cannot mortgage their birthright to some gel electrophoresis experiment.

Ami Isseroff

Original content is Copyright by the author 2008. Posted at ZioNation-Zionism and Israel Web Log, http://www.zionism-israel.com/log/archives/00000575.htmlwhere your intelligent and constructive comments are welcome. Disributed by ZNN list. Subscribe by sending a message to ZNN-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. Please forward by e-mail with this notice, cite this article and link to it. Other uses by permission only.

Obama's Candidacy Underscores Crosscurrents of Race and Politics

Obama's Candidacy Underscores Crosscurrents of Race and Politics
Poll Finds Four in 10 Think Obama's Candidacy Will Improve Race Relations
ANALYSIS by GARY LANGER
June 22, 2008—

Racial attitudes among white Americans show little if any net effect on Barack Obama's candidacy for president, an ABC News analysis finds, because negative views toward Obama among the least racially sensitive whites largely are balanced by pro-Obama sentiment among those with the highest racial sensitivities.

Three in 10 whites express less racially sensitive views, such as having some feelings of prejudice or believing that blacks in their communities do not experience discrimination; they hold generally critical views of Obama and favor John McCain for president by a 26-point margin. But an additional two in 10 whites are at the high end of racial sensitivity -- and they favor Obama by 19 points.

Click here for a PDF with charts and full questionnaire.

The middle ground, half of white Americans, favors McCain by 18 points. All told, he leads among whites by 12 points -- almost exactly the average for Republican presidential candidates in the last eight elections.

HOPES More broadly, this ABC News/Washington Post poll finds that while the milestone established by Obama's candidacy hasn't changed basic views of race relations, it's inspired hopes for improvement among blacks, as well as more positive responses than negative ones among whites overall.

Only about half of all Americans, 51 percent, say race relations in this country are good, unchanged from an ABC/Post poll five years ago. But just over four in 10 think Obama's candidacy will improve race relations, nearly three times as many as think it'll hurt.

Those hopes peak among blacks: Sixty percent think Obama's candidacy will help race relations, while just 8 percent see it hurting. Far fewer whites, 38 percent, think Obama's candidacy will help, but still that's twice as many as think it'll do damage.

CURRENTS Beyond these views are deep crosscurrents in racial attitudes. On the positive side, a record number of whites and blacks alike say they have a friend of the other race  92 percent of blacks and 79 percent of whites, both new highs in polls dating back a generation. The growth of interracial friendships has been dramatic; in 1981 just 54 percent of whites, and 69 percent of blacks, reported a friend of the other race.

At the same time, three in 10 Americans admit to harboring at least some feelings of racial prejudice of their own  30 percent of whites, and about as many blacks, 34 percent. And nearly half of whites (48 percent) and more than half of blacks (54 percent) say blacks in their own community experience racial discrimination.

IMPACT As noted, an index based on these views finds that a significant group of white Americans  three in 10  can be described as less-sensitive toward racial issues. These are whites who don't have a black friend, and/or don't think blacks in their community experience discrimination, and/or have feelings of prejudice (at least two of the three).

There's a political impact: Whites in this group are much less likely than others to view Obama favorably, more favorably disposed to McCain on issues and personal attributes and less apt to say they'd vote for Obama if the election were today. These less racially sensitive whites favor McCain by a wide 58-32 percent margin  nearly 2-1.

Yet the views of these whites are counterbalanced by the preferences of the most racially sensitive whites, a smaller group (21 percent of whites) but broadly pro-Obama. These are whites who have a black friend, who think blacks in their area suffer discrimination and report no personal feelings of prejudice; they support Obama by 55-36 percent.

The middle group, half of all whites, fall between the low and high racial sensitivity groups; they favor McCain by 54-36 percent  not quite as broadly as the low-sensitivity group, albeit still by a substantial margin.

The classifications appear robust: Being a member of either the low- or high-sensitivity group predicts whether a white American will support Obama or McCain, even when other factors, such as partisanship, ideology, demographics and issue preferences are held constant. Being in the middle group independently predicts candidate support when compared with higher-sensitivity whites, but not compared with low-sensitivity whites.

Compared with the high-sensitivity group, low-sensitivity whites include more conservatives, Republicans, senior citizens and Catholics; the high-sensitivity group for its part includes greater shares of 18- to 29-year-olds, liberals and secular adults. While the low-sensitivity group is both larger and more pro-McCain than the high-sensitivity group is pro-Obama, these other factors are part of the reason, not racial sensitivity alone.

WHITE VOTE Obama's standing among whites overall is about average for a Democratic presidential candidate, although there's been quite a range. As noted, whites favor McCain by a 12-point margin, 51-39 percent. It's hard to attribute that to race; George W. Bush won whites over John Kerry by a broader margin, 58-41 percent, and over Al Gore by 54-42 percent.

Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush won whites by anywhere from 19 to 29 points in 1980, '84 and '88, according to exit polls.

That said, it's the Democrats who've done better with whites who've won presidential elections  Jimmy Carter, who lost whites by just 5 points in 1976, and Bill Clinton, who came within 1 point of Bush among whites in 1992 and within 3 points vs. Bob Dole in 1996. That's no surprise, since whites constitute a large majority of voters, albeit a shrinking one  77 percent in 2004, vs. 90 percent in 1976.

BLACK VOTE Blacks, meanwhile, remain fairly monolithic in terms of presidential preferences not because there's a black candidate, but because they're the single most loyal Democratic voting bloc. Ninety percent of blacks support Obama, just as 88 percent backed Kerry in 2004 and 90 percent voted for Gore in 2000.

A bigger question for African-Americans is not the direction but the size of their vote; they've accounted for 8 to 11 percent of voters since 1976, about their share of the adult population.

With a black candidate leading the Democratic ticket, black turnout might rise disproportionately in a show of affinity voting.

But it might not; indeed that did not happen during the Democratic primaries. Turnout was up across the board, and blacks, like other Democrats, increased their participation. But blacks did not vote in disproportionately greater numbers: They accounted for 19 percent of all Democratic primary voters, about the average for Democratic primaries in past years.

HISPANICS Another key group in the racial mix, Hispanics accounted for fewer voters than blacks in 2004  8 percent, well under their share of the adult population. One reason is the number who are ineligible to vote given their lack of citizenship.

In 2004 Bush made inroads among Hispanics, usually a Democratic group, and this year they favored Hillary Clinton over Obama by nearly a 2-1 margin in the primaries; that makes them a group to watch. On average in the last two ABC/Post polls, however, Obama's been supported by 71 percent of Hispanics, roughly the share Clinton won in 1996, the best for a Democrat since Carter's 76 percent in 1976.

WHITES/MORE VIEWS It's not just in vote preferences that racial sensitivity levels impact whites' views on the election. Among low-racial sensitivity whites just 48 percent see Obama favorably overall; that rises to 56 percent in the middle group and 67 percent among highly racially sensitive whites. And just 33 percent in the low-sensitivity group think Obama has the right kind of experience to be president, compared with 41 percent in the middle and 60 percent of high-sensitivity whites.

Thirty-one percent in the low-racial sensitivity group think Obama would do "too much" as president in terms of representing the interests of African-Americans; that drops to 16 percent in the middle group and 11 percent in the high-sensitivity group. Just 29 percent in the low-sensitivity group see Obama's candidacy as helping race relations; that grows to 36 percent in the middle group and 54 percent of more highly racially sensitive whites. And 43 percent in the low-sensitivity group say the race of the candidate has any importance in their vote choice; that falls to about three in 10 in the middle- and high-sensitivity groups.

On other measures it's whites with the highest levels of racial sensitivity who stand out. Only 38 percent in this group see Obama as a "risky" choice, compared with 53 percent in the middle group and 60 percent of less racially sensitive whites. Those with higher levels of racial sensitivity also are much more likely to be enthusiastic about Obama's candidacy overall.

All told, just 21 percent of whites say the race of the candidate is very or somewhat important in their vote  and Obama's support is essentially the same among those who say race matters and those who say not. The index of racial sensitivity digs deeper into these views, but still suggests that, given the differences between more and less racially sensitive whites, Obama's race shows little if any net effect on vote choices overall.

METHODOLOGY This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone June 12-15, 2008, among a random national sample of 1,125 adults, including an oversample of African Americans (weighted to their correct share of the national population), for a total of 201 black respondents. The results from the full survey have a 3-point error margin. Sampling, data collection and tabulation by TNS of Horsham, PA.

The index of racial sensitivity was constructed using affirmative responses to three questions: having an interracial friendship, believing African-Americans experience discrimination in their community and not harboring feelings of racial prejudice. High sensitivity was defined as positive responses to all three questions (21 percent of whites), medium sensitivity as affirmative responses to two of three questions (50 percent) and low sensitivity as positive to only one or none of the three questions (29 percent).

A regression analysis to predict vote choice using the racial sensitivity index controlled for demographics (including sex, age, education, income, marital status and region of the country), partisanship, ideology and candidate preference on issues and attributes.

Click here for a PDF with charts and full questionnaire.

What He Overcame

I, too am old enough to remember when some guy named George Wallace stood a chance to be President of the United States. I remember singing "We Shall Overcome" and the rest of the marchers' songs in the bus on the way to the Bernard Horwich JCC Day Camp on Touhy Avenue in Chicago. I was young enough not to understand why he didn't like black people. I was raised by a Black Woman, my Gramma Van (Vahness Duncan, obm) while my mother was at work trying to pay the bills. When someone shot Wallace in 1972, I don't have a memory of feeling particularly bad. Kind of like he got what was coming to him for hating people just because of the color of their skin. Look at what has happened since. This is history, no matter what happens, and it's all good. We are rid of Bush, rid of Clinton and can move on, finally, with our job of repairing the world. Charity starts at home.

Randy Shiner



What He Overcame

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, June 6, 2008; A19



There will be plenty of time to chart Barack Obama's attempt to navigate a course between the exigencies of the old politics and the promise of the new, between yesterday and tomorrow, youth and experience, black and white. For now, take a moment to consider the mind-bending improbability of what just happened.

A young, black, first-term senator -- a man whose father was from Kenya, whose mother was from Kansas and whose name sounds as if it might have come from the roster of Guantanamo detainees -- has won a marathon of primaries and caucuses to become the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party. To reach this point, he had to do more than outduel the party's most powerful and resourceful political machine. He also had to defy, and ultimately defeat, 389 years of history.

It was in 1619 that the first Africans were brought in chains to these shores, landing in Jamestown. That first shipment of "servants" did not include any of Obama's ancestors; it's impossible to say whether some distant progenitor of his wife, Michelle, might have been present at that moment of original sin. Ever since --through the War of Independence, the abolitionist movement, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the great migration to Northern cities and the civil rights struggle -- race has been one of the great themes running through our nation's history.

I'm old enough to remember when Americans with skin the color of mine and Obama's had to fight -- and die -- for the right to participate as equals in the life of the nation we helped build. Watching Obama give his speech Tuesday night marking the end of the primary season and the beginning of the general election campaign, I thought back to a time when brave men and women, both black and white, put their lives on the line to ensure that African Americans had the right to vote, let alone run for office -- a time when Democrats in my home state of South Carolina were Dixiecrats, and when the notion that the Democratic Party would someday nominate a black man for president was utterly unimaginable.

Tiresome, isn't it? All this recounting of unpleasant history, I mean. Wouldn't it be great if we could all just move on? Bear with me, though, because this is how we get to the point where, as Obama's young supporters like to chant, "race doesn't matter." No one will be happier than I when we reach that promised land, and we've come so far that at times we can see it, just over the next hill. But we aren't there yet.

This is a passage from an e-mail I received in April from an Obama volunteer in Pennsylvania: "We've been called 'N-lovers,' Obama's been called the 'Anti-Christ,' our signs have been burned in the streets during a parade, our volunteers have been harassed physically, or with racial slurs -- it's been unreal."

Yet the amazing thing isn't that there were instances of overt, old-style racism during this campaign, it's that there were so few. The amazing thing is that so many Americans have been willing to accept -- or, indeed, reject -- Obama based on his qualifications and his ideas, not on his race. I'll never forget visiting Iowa in December and witnessing all-white crowds file into high school gymnasiums to take the measure of a black man -- and, ultimately, decide that he was someone who expressed their hopes and dreams.

When historians and political scientists write books about this extraordinary campaign season, surely they will seek to assess what impact Obama's race had on his prospects. But they will also devote volumes to exploring how he put together a fundraising apparatus that generated undreamed-of amounts of cash, and how his organization drew so many new voters into the process, and how his young supporters made use of social-networking Web sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and how his delegate-counting team managed to consistently outthink and outhustle everyone else. It will be written that Obama's nomination victory owes as much to adroit management as it does to stirring inspiration.

Will Americans take the final step and elect Obama as president? Should they? Is this first-term senator up to the job?

We'll find out soon enough. At the moment, to tell the truth, I don't care. Whether Obama wins or loses, history has been made this year. Maybe there's more to come, maybe not; but already -- after 389 long years -- it's safe to say that this nation will never be the same.

eugenerobinson@washpost.com

Many Florida Jews Express Doubts on Obama

These alta kockers should just stay home and continue to live in the past. That Jewish people who were witnesses to the Civil Rights movement and Jim Crow could possibly harbor these ridiculous doubts about Barack Obama is just ludicrous and ultimately sad for our country. If these people get to vote, it seems to me that our kids, in whose name we are voting -- for it is their future that is at stake -- should vote, too. The AKs are not invested in the future. They are invested in waking up in the morning, which for many of them is a doubtful proposition, unfortunately. That is no basis upon which to make a decision about others', especially childrens', futures. I am curious as to how Jodi Kantor, the writer of the piece from the Times, could have held her tongue from saying "are you kidding me?!" to some of the stupid thoughts expressed by some of these people. It frightens me that the future of the world seems to be riding on Florida and Michigan. Jews who only vote because of a candidate's position(s) on Israel are giving lie to the notion that Jews have dual loyalties. The first responsibility of an American Jew is to take care of America. Israel will take care of Israel when all is said and done. Look at what is happening between Egypt, Turkey, Israel and Syria. The Americans are nowhere to be found, because we are irrelevant in world affairs at this moment in time.

Randy Shiner

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Many Florida Jews Express Doubts on Obama



Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Shirley Weitz, right, talking to Ruth Grossman in Boynton Beach, Fla. The Jews she knows will not vote for Senator Barack Obama, Ms. Weitz said, because of “his attitude toward Israel.”

Jewish voters are vital to Barack Obama’s hopes, but among many older Jews, he has become a conduit for anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.'

JODI KANTOR
Published: May 22, 2008
BOYNTON BEACH, Fla. — At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama.

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.

“They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said.

Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning.

“They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz.

But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said.

On Thursday, Mr. Obama will court Jewish voters with an appearance at a synagogue in Boca Raton, Fla. A longtime Democratic constituency with a consistently high turnout rate, Jews are important to his general election hopes, particularly in New York, which he expects to win; in California and New Jersey, which he must keep out of Republican hands; and, most crucially, here in Florida, where Jews make up around 5 percent of voters.

This is the most haunted state on the electoral college map for Democrats, the one they lost by hundreds of votes and a Supreme Court decision in 2000, and again in 2004.

“The fate of the world for the next four years,” mused Rabbi Ruvi New as his Sunday morning Kabbalah & Coffee class dispersed in East Boca Raton.

"It’s all going to boil down to a few old Jews in Century Village,” he added, referring to a nearby retirement community.

Jews, of course, are just one of the many constituencies Mr. Obama must persuade: Latinos, women, working-class whites and independents are vital as well. Thanks in part to enthusiasm from younger Jews, he won 45 percent of the Jewish vote in the primaries (not counting the disputed ones in Florida and Michigan), a respectable showing against a New York senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

But in recent presidential elections, Jews have drifted somewhat to the right. Because Mr. Obama is relatively new on the national stage, his résumé of Senate votes in support of Israel is short, as is his list of high-profile visits to synagogues and delis. So far, his overtures to Jews have been limited; aside from a few speeches and interviews, he has left most of it to surrogates.
American Jews hold two competing views of Mr. Obama, said Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington. First, there is Obama the scholar, the social justice advocate, the defender of Israel with a close feel for Jewish concerns garnered through decades of intimate friendships. In this version, Mr. Obama’s race is an asset, Rabbi Saperstein said.

The second version is defined by the controversy over his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., worries about Mr. Obama’s past associations and questions about his support for Israel and his patriotism.

“It’s too early to know how they will play out,” Rabbi Saperstein said.

Alan M. Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School, said he had been deluged with questions from Jews about the race, especially about what to think of Mr. Obama. “I have gotten hundreds of e-mails asking me, ‘Who should we vote for?’ ” he said. Mr. Dershowitz. who supports Mrs. Clinton, says he tells voters that Mr. Obama, Mrs. Clinton and Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, are all pro-Israel and to reject false personal attacks on Mr. Obama.

Because of a dispute over moving the date of the state’s primary, Mr. Obama and the other Democratic candidates did not campaign in Florida. In his absence, novel and exotic rumors about Mr. Obama have flourished. Among many older Jews, and some younger ones, as well, he has become a conduit for Jewish anxiety about Israel, Iran, anti-Semitism and race.
Mr. Obama is Arab, Jack Stern’s friends told him in Aventura. (He’s not.)

He is a part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community, suspects Mindy Chotiner of Delray. (Wrong again.)

Mr. Wright is the godfather of Mr. Obama’s children, asserted Violet Darling in Boca Raton. (No, he’s not.)

Al Qaeda is backing him, said Helena Lefkowicz of Fort Lauderdale (Incorrect.)

Michelle Obama has proven so hostile and argumentative that the campaign is keeping her silent, said Joyce Rozen of Pompano Beach. (Mrs. Obama campaigns frequently, drawing crowds in her own right.)

Mr. Obama might fill his administration with followers of Louis Farrakhan, worried Sherry Ziegler. (Extremely unlikely, given his denunciation of Mr. Farrakhan.)

South Florida is “the most concentrated area in the country in terms of misinformation” about Mr. Obama, said Representative Robert Wexler, Democrat of Florida, the co-chairman of the Obama campaign in the state. His surrogates can put these fears to rest, Mr. Wexler said, by simply repeating the facts about Mr. Obama — his correct biography, his support for Israel, his positions on other important issues.

But the resistance toward Mr. Obama appears to be rooted in something more than factual misperception; even those with an accurate understanding of Mr. Obama share the hesitations. In dozens of interviews, South Florida Jews questioned his commitment to Israel — even some who knew he earns high marks from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which lobbies the United States government on behalf of Israel.

“You watch George Bush for a day, and you know where he stands,” said Rabbi Jonathan Berkun of the Aventura Turnberry Jewish Center.

Many here suspect Mr. Obama of being too cozy with Palestinians, while others accuse him of having Muslim ties, even though they know that his father was born Muslim and became an atheist, and that Mr. Obama embraced Christianity as a young man. In Judaism, religion is a fixed identity across generations.

“His father was a Muslim and you can’t take that out of him,” said Ms. Chotiner, 51, who said she would still vote for Mr. Obama, out of Democratic loyalty. “Do I have very strong reservations?

Yes, I do,” she said.

Several interviewees said they had reservations about Mr. Obama’s stated willingness to negotiate with Iran — whose nuclear ambitions and Holocaust-denying president trigger even starker fears among Jews than intifada uprisings and suicide bombings.

American Jews are by no means uniformly opposed to negotiations with Iran, the leaders of several Jewish groups said, but there is no consensus, and everyone fears that the wrong choice could lead to calamity.

Israelis fear Iran “could be the first suicide nation, a nation that would destroy itself to destroy the Jewish nation,” Mr. Dershowitz said.

Some voters even see parallels between Mr. Obama’s foreign policy positions and his choice of pastor — in both cases, a tendency to venture too close to questionable characters.

“The fundamentals of meeting with Iran are the same as the fundamentals of meeting with Rev. Wright,” said Joe Limansky, 69, of Boca Raton.

Other voters called Mr. Obama’s endorsement by the Rev. Jesse Jackson problematic, because Mr. Jackson once called New York “Hymietown” (even though he later apologized) and has made other comments offensive to Jews.

Some of the resistance to Mr. Obama’s candidacy seems just as rooted in anxiety about race as in anxiety about Israel. At brunch in Boynton Beach, Bob Welstein, who said he was in his 80s, said so bluntly. “Am I semi-racist? Yes,” he said.

Decades earlier, on the west side of Chicago, his mother was mugged and beaten by a black assailant, he said. It was “a beautiful Jewish neighborhood” — until black residents moved in, he said.

In speeches to Jewish groups, aides said, Mr. Obama will stress the bonds between the two groups, noting how Jewish civil rights workers were killed alongside a black one in Mississippi in 1964. But the relationship between the two outsider groups whose fortunes took different turns has also been bitter, said Hasia Diner, a professor of history at New York University.

Jews, who have long considered themselves less racially prejudiced than other Americans, have been especially wounded by black anti-Semitism, she said, which may help explain why so many Florida voters were incensed about Mr. Obama’s membership in a church whose magazine gave an award to Mr. Farrakhan.

Jack Stern, 85, sitting alone at an outdoor café in Aventura on Sunday, said he was no racist. When he was liberated from a concentration camp in 1945, black American soldiers were kinder than white ones, handing out food to the emaciated Jews, he said.

Years later, after he opened a bakery in Brooklyn, “I got disgusted, because they killed Jews,” he said, citing neighborhood crimes committed by African-Americans. “I shouldn’t say it, but it is what it is,” said Mr. Stern, who vowed not to vote for Mr. Obama.

As in nearly every other voting group, support for Mr. Obama is divided by age — and Jews in Florida are on average older than Jews in other states Half of Broward County’s Jews are over 59, and half of those in Palm Beach County are over 70, said Ira Sheskin, a demographer at the University of Miami.

Toting a chaise lounge to Delray Beach on Sunday, Samantha Poznak, 21, said that, like her friends, she would vote for Mr. Obama. As for Jewish leaders, “I never really follow any of those people anyway,” she said from behind dark sunglasses.

“Aunt Claudie will kill you!” hissed her mother, Linda Poznak, 47, who said she would vote for Mr. McCain.

Younger Jews have grown up in diverse settings and are therefore less likely to be troubled by Mr. Obama’s associations than their elders, said Rabbi Ethan Tucker, 32, co-founder of a Jewish learning organization in Manhattan and the stepson of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. Rabbi Tucker said he had given money to Mr. Obama and would vote for him in the fall. . “If association was the litmus test of identity, everyone would be a hopeless mishmash of confusion, or you’d have no friends,“ he said.

Senator Lieberman is expected to spend plenty of time in front of Jewish audiences, in Florida and elsewhere. A Democrat turned independent, an Orthodox Jew and one of Mr. McCain’s closest friends, Mr. Lieberman will promote Mr. McCain’s strong national security résumé and centrist stances.

Until now, Mr. Obama’s efforts to win over Jewish voters have been low-profile. He made a speech to Aipac, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, shortly after declaring his candidacy, but for months afterward, he concentrated his energies on Iowa and New Hampshire, not exactly hotbeds of Judaic life. Even as the primaries in New York, New Jersey and California approached, Mr. Obama left most of his outreach to intermediaries who met with small groups of community leaders.

Throughout his career, Mr. Obama has enjoyed close ties to Jews, including various employers, law school buddies, wealthy donors on the north side of Chicago who backed his early political career, and the many Jews in the Hyde Park community where he lives. This may account for some of Mr. Obama’s apparent incredulity at the way some Jewish voters view him.

“I’ve been in the foxhole with my Jewish friends, so when I find on the national level my commitment being questioned, it’s curious,” he said recently in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg on theatlantic.com.

Now the half-Kenyan-by-way-of-Hawaii candidate, who only recently completed a beer-and-bowling tour to impress blue-collar Midwesterners, has committed more fully to showing off his inner Jew. He recently made a surprise speech at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and, in the interview with Mr. Goldberg, he told stories about a long-lost Jewish summer camp counselor who taught him about Israel and recalled reading Leon Uris and Philip Roth, arguably opposite poles of American-Jewish fiction.

Aides say Mr. Obama will spend as much time in South Florida as possible in the coming months.

His aides believe that the negative rumors floating around about him are mere “noise,” as one put it, and have had little impact.

His aides also expressed confidence that when Mr. Obama officially becomes the nominee, the Democratic Party, including its many prominent Jews, will put their full force behind his efforts in Florida.

In anticipation, Mr. Obama has lined up surrogates like State Representative Dan Gelber, the House minority leader, and Mr. Wexler, both of whom are Jewish. Mr. Wexler said he would try to convert voters one mah-jongg table at a time, with town-hall meetings in the card rooms of high-rise condominiums and articles in community newspapers.

“Many of the political leaders in Palm Beach and Broward County were at my son’s bris,” he said.

Mr. Wexler said he had constituents who voted for Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential nominee, in 1928, “and they’ve never voted for a Republican since.”

“They are not going to vote for Senator John McCain,” he added.

Still, Mr. Wexler admits, he has not yet been able to persuade his in-laws to vote for Mr. Obama.

Don't Monkey With Houghton

Wednesday May 14, 2008
Don't Monkey With Houghton
In Marietta GA, Mulligan Food & Spirits owner, Mike Norman was selling "Obama in '08" t-shirts depicting Curious George eating a banana on them. According to the AJC:
Norman acknowledged the imagery's Jim Crow roots but said he sees nothing wrong with depicting a prominent African-American as a monkey. "We're not living in the (19)40's," he said. "Look at him . . . the hairline, the ears -- he looks just like Curious George.""This isn't the first time Curious George has been dragged into the current presidential race," reports the Boston Herald.

"Earlier this year, loudmouth radio jock Rush Limbaugh apologized on air for laughing at a caller's comment that her daughter thought Obama looked like Curious George."

Houghton Mifflin, which owns the rights to Curious George finally issued this official statement on the racial debacle:

"We have seen the news reports of a local bar owner in Marietta, GA allegedly selling T-shirts that depict the Curious George character in a racially insensitive manner. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is the owner of copyright and trademark rights associated with Curious George, did not, nor would we under any circumstances, authorize or approve such a use, which we find offensive and utterly out of keeping with the values Curious George represents. We are monitoring the situation and weighing our options with respect to possible legal action."

While I don't see any pending Obama children's books, there are over a dozen adult titles coming up between now and election including my favorite sounding title: Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle: 366 Ways He Really Cares by Mathew Honan

Photo Cred: Frank Niemeir/AJC

Race and American Memory

salutary

Main Entry: sal·u·tary
Pronunciation: \ˈsal-yə-ˌter-ē\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle French salutaire, from Latin salutaris, from salut-, salus health
Date: 15th century
1 : producing a beneficial effect : remedial
2 : promoting health : curative

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/salutary
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 17, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Race and American Memory
By ROGER COHEN
ATLANTA

I was wandering through the King Center here when I stumbled on a movie clip of an indignant African-American woman saying: “If we can’t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me.”

That seemed a good, plain summation of the central conflict that has roiled American life since the nation’s foundation, through slavery and segregation and their bitter legacies. When this anonymous woman spoke, less than a half-century ago, she was an unfree American. How she was schooled, where she could sit and whom she could marry were matters determined by her race.

This “something’s the matter with something — and it isn’t me” is a big subject, the nation’s “original sin,” in Barack Obama’s words. It’s also a painful one that sees American ideals and practices at some remove from each other in ways of which Abu Ghraib was a reminder.

For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or “the politics of history.” It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race.

The King Center is a fine institution. But it’s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation’s most divisive subject. Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let’s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

I lived in Berlin for three years, a period spanning the Bundestag’s decision in 1999 to build a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The debate, 54 years after the collapse of Hitler’s Reich, was fraught. It takes time to traverse the politics of history, confront guilt and arrive at an adequate memorialization of national crimes that also offers a possible path to reconciliation.

Germans have confronted the monstrous in them. In the end, they concluded the taint was so pervasive that Degussa, which was linked to the company that produced Zyklon-B gas, was permitted to provide the anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating.

America’s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race. The decision, approved by Congress in 2003, to build the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, to open in 2015, reflects a desire to plug this hole in the nation’s memory. But what this $500 million institution will be remains to be invented.

“The Holocaust is a horribly difficult subject, but the bad guys are not Americans,” Lonnie Bunch, the museum’s director, told me. “Race, however, is the quintessential American story and one that calls into question how America defines itself and how we, as Americans, accept our own culpability.”

He continued: “I am confident that the U.S. public can now do that. My challenge is to express not only the lynching, but also the resiliency and spirituality that are part of the core American identity.”

I also think America’s ready, a half-century after the civil rights movement, for this painful memorialization. But it won’t be easy. The aborted International Freedom Center museum at ground zero, conceived to showcase liberty but dismissed by some as camouflage for a liberal agenda, shows how explosive the politics of history are.

“Memory,” the French historian Pierre Nora noted, “is life.” As such, it’s subject to violent swings.

It’s striking how the three contenders for the presidency offer different self-images for America. John McCain comforts the classic heroic narrative. Hillary Clinton breaks the male hold on that narrative and so transforms it. Obama transfigures it in another way by personifying America’s victory over its most visceral blemish.

The world is weary of the narrative of American exceptionalism. Something’s the matter with something. Guns and God, Hillary’s latest mantra, won’t set America right. Nor will 100 years in Iraq.

It’s time for the country to ask itself some hard post-jingoistic questions and allow the memorialization of its darkest chapters. To demand truth commissions of other nations, while evading them at home, is unhelpful.

In committing to a major museum of African American History, and propelling the first serious African-American presidential candidate, the United States is recasting the psychology of its power. That’s scary. It can also be salutary.

Blog: www.iht.com/passages

What’s the Real Racial Divide?

What does this say about me? You?

RS


March 16, 2008
The Way We Live Now
What’s the Real Racial Divide?
By MATT BAI

When old-time Democrats in Washington reminisce about the days of brokered conventions — floor fights and frantic early-morning calls, deals cut under the haze of cigar smoke — they talk about them the way a paleontologist might describe the hurtling stride of a velociraptor: an awesome spectacle, to be sure, but not one you would really want to see up close. Last week, Democrats woke up to find that the unthinkable may be upon them. There might still be an unforeseen turn in the titanic clash between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, but the way it looks now, the outcome will probably rest with the party’s nearly 800 superdelegates, many of whom will no doubt expect to be bribed and beseeched by both campaigns. If that’s the case, there is about as much chance of settling the issue before the convention as there is of, say, Obama waking up one morning and deciding that “hope” is kind of a dumb slogan after all.

You can already discern the outlines of the argument that Clinton will make to the superdelegates: The contest is basically a draw, and now it’s time to choose the candidate who can be elected. Sure, Barack’s won all those little states like North Dakota and Idaho, but what does that really get you? I’m the candidate who has won all the big states, and that’s what matters in November. In fact, Clinton has already declared that Democrats will never carry states like Idaho and Alaska, which sided with Obama — an argument that has to rankle Howard Dean, the party chairman, who has been pouring money into rural states as part of his “50-state strategy” for expanding the electoral map.

Clinton’s argument highlights the most vexing contrast of this Democratic campaign. Obama, fueled by overwhelming African-American support, has trounced Clinton in most big cities, while Clinton has pounded him in outlying areas. In Ohio, for instance, Obama won only the four largest urban areas in the state, while Clinton took 70 percent of the vote in smaller cities and towns; if you took only a passing glance at the electoral maps of states like Ohio, Missouri and Texas, you would think you were looking at one of those stark red-and-blue maps from recent general elections, with Obama cast as the Democrat and Clinton as the Republican. And yet, oddly, it is Obama who has emerged as the preferred candidate of sparsely populated rural states that are thought to be more conservative, and it is Clinton who has taken the larger, industrialized states. (Obama did carry his home state, Illinois, and neighboring Missouri, but he won the latter by only a single percentage point.) To put this simply, Obama wins in major urban areas but can’t seem to win in urbanized states, while Clinton wins in rural communities but consistently loses in rural states. Why?

One relevant fact, as many Clinton supporters have pointed out, is that rural states often hold caucuses rather than primaries, which require the kind of local organizing at which Obama’s team excels. It might also be that the economic downturn has had a more traumatic effect in bigger states, making the voters there responsive to Clinton’s more pragmatic message. It is also possible, however, that the disparity between Obama’s performance in urban primaries and rural caucuses tells us something larger — and counterintuitive — about race in America.

The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so. The growing counties an hour’s drive from Cleveland and St. Louis are filled with white voters whose parents fled the industrial cities of their youth before a wave of African-Americans and for whom social friction and economic competition, especially in an age of declining opportunity, are as much a part of daily life as traffic and mortgage payments. As Erica Goode wrote in these pages last year, Robert Putnam and other sociologists have, in fact, found that people living in more diverse areas evince less trust for others — no matter what their race. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that while white Democrats in rural states are apparently willing to accept the notion of a racially transcendent candidate, those living in the shadow of postindustrial atrophy seem to have a harder time detaching from enduring stereotypes, and they may be less optimistic that the country as a whole would actually elect a black candidate.

For Obama, no matter what social currents may be at play, the issue is hardly academic. At two critical junctures in the past six weeks, he has been on the precipice of securing the nomination only to fall frustratingly short in primaries in the most populous states. For this reason, the contest next month in Pennsylvania, the last of the big battleground states to hold a primary (aside from possible do-overs in Florida and Michigan), may carry a significance beyond the delegates themselves. There is no question that Obama could lose to Clinton in that state and still go on to give the acceptance speech in Denver. But this may also be his last chance to reassure his supporters — and maybe even himself — that he can break through whatever barriers have limited an otherwise stellar and historic campaign. Obama holds himself out as the candidate whose own life and lineage embody the nation’s new racial complexities. The question is whether he can win the sprawling states that embody them too.

Matt Bai, who covers politics for the magazine, is the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.”