Clinton and Kasich Pander to Jews
Clinton to hold fundraiser in Tel Aviv; Kasich claims to have won “Jewish vote”; shows off “Biblical knowledge” to Orthodox Jews
THERE’S BEEN a lot of Israel news in the primary process lately, and I’m going to play catchup on it here.
First, this just in. Hillary Clinton is going to have a fundraiser in Tel Aviv. Her Jewish outreach director will hold it. Remember that Clinton has pledged Haim Saban to fight the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement aimed at Israel, so she’s putting her moneyraising where her mouth is.
Sarah Bard, Hillary Clinton’s director of Jewish outreach, will headline a fundraiser in Tel Aviv, Israel on May 17. https://t.co/CEa4UrFyi3
— Dan Merica (@danmericaCNN) April 21, 2016
Clinton has also been raising a ton of pro-Israel money in L.A. Haim and Cheryl Saban have just kicked in another $2 million on top of $5 million they gave last year to her SuperPac, Priorities USA Action. Yahoo:
Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg have each given $1 million to Priorities, and Katzenberg has been lining up donors to the group….
Saban, Katzenberg and Spielberg were all co-hosts of a fundraiser featuring Hillary Clinton at the home of George Clooney on Saturday.
All these men (Clooney excepted) are ardent Zionists. Katzenberg has said that Israel “is a jewel. It’s this amazing beautiful gem that exists in a place where there are not a lot of gems.”
The big giving is a reminder that Jewish “weight” in our politics, as the Forward’s JJ Goldberg said last weekend, is chiefly through the checkbook and not at the polls, and that Bernie Sanders may reduce that weight through his populist model of raising money from individuals at $27 a pop on average.
On that note, Bernie Sanders did far better in upstate New York than he did in New York City on Tuesday during his loss of the NY primary. He won an overwhelming majority of New York counties, just not the big urban ones around Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, NYC. His overall loss in the state was 58-42; in NYC he fell to 63-36.
It would seem that Sanders paid a price among Jews, though not a huge one, for saying that U.S. policy should be evenhanded and that Israeli attacks on Gaza have been “disproportionate.”
JTA has a piece by Uriel Heilman analyzing the numbers in the New York city vote and saying that Jews helped Clinton, but not all that much. Her overall margin in the city was 63-36, and in Orthodox neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Clinton beat Sanders by about that ratio.
Clinton did much better on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and Upper West Side, where plenty of Jews live and where she took about 80 percent and 71 percent of the vote, respectively. But it’s hard to surmise anything about the Jewish vote in those neighborhoods because the Jews are mixed in with non-Jews.
On the Republican side, Ted Cruz seems to have swept the haredi Orthodox vote. …
The John Kasich campaign is also trumpeting his victory in the 12th Congressional District, which includes the Upper East Side and parts of Queens, as evidence that Kasich won the Jewish vote because that district is the second-most Jewish in the country. But while the 12th district has many Jews, the proportion of Jews to non-Jews there makes it impossible to draw any conclusions about how the Jews voted.
Here’s the little we know for certain: Among Orthodox Jews, Clinton and Sanders did about as well as they did among New Yorkers generally, while Cruz was the clear favorite of Republicans.
Speaking of Kasich and Jews, Jewish Insider posted the video above of Kasich being somewhat dry/waspish on biblical stories, with some Orthodox Jews. …
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Source: Mondoweiss
For further reading:
The editorial comment above states that “Kasich claims to have won ‘Jewish vote’; shows off ‘Biblical knowledge’ to Orthodox Jews.” One wonders whether Kasich’s “Biblical knowledge” entailed prostrating himself and licking the feet of Jews, in accordance with Isaiah 49:23: “they shall bow down to you with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of your feet.”