Film Portrays Obama as Friend to Israel, The Forward The image portrayed by the smear-mongers is that Israelis must think that Obama is against them, whereas, in fact, a lot of Israelis think that Obama will be a great friend to Israel.
Obama and the Jews, Chicago Jewish News A look at why some Jews love Obama and why some don’t trust him; and at the key role Chicago Jews played in getting him to where he is.
Barack Obama, A True Friend of Israel, Jerusalem Report Obama has consistently said that the US must stand ready to help Israel achieve peace with its neighbors.
“BROADWAY FOR A NEW AMERICA”
Standing Up for Marriage Equality and a Progressive Agenda for Change
A Benefit for the Jewish Alliance for Change
Featuring a host of Broadway singers, performers and cast members from leading shows, plus prominent political leaders and activists
The concert will also include a live performance of Tony, Emmy and Grammy Award winning composer Marc Shaiman's internet sensation “Proposition 8 - the Musical.”
An unforgettable evening not to be missed!
Monday, March 2, 2009, 7:00 P.M.
Peter Norton Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York City
Directed by Sara Louise Lazarus, the award-winning theater and cabaret director who directed the highly successful Broadway for Obama concert & Produced by Barry Keating, co-producer of the original Broadway for a New America for Grassroots Democrats
Photo from Lazarus' Broadway for Obama, Oct. 20, 2008 which featured over thirty leading Broadway performers, including Tony-award winners and nominees, from the casts of Rent, In the Heights, A Chorus Line, The Little Mermaid, Wicked, The Color Purple, Jersey Boys, Mamma Mia! and Hairspray.
Click here to reserve advance tickets for Broadway for a New America – Mar. 2, 2009 in New York City at a discounted rate for the first 100 seats
Repeal Proposition 8 and Support Civil Rights for Same-Sex Couples
Watch this powerful video from Keith Olbermann to learn more about why we support repealing Proposition 8 and respecting the civil rights of gay couples throughout America.
Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, z"l–“Obama’s Rabbi”– A Remembrance by Doni Remba
Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, one of the great religious leaders of our time and a champion of peace and social justice, has passed away. Rabbi Wolf, whose synagogue is across the street from President-elect Obama's home, was among Obama's earliest supporters when he launched his political career over a decade ago, springing to Obama's defense during the presidential election. President-elect Obama issued a statement upon learning of his passing. In this remembrance of Rabbi Wolf, who served on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Alliance for Change, JAFC Executive Director Doni Remba, who has known him for three decades, pays tribute to the enormous contribution Rabbi Wolf has made to Jewish and American life.
Ain't Funny, a series of 3 short TV ads and a full-length web video produced for the Jewish Alliance for Change, brings together iconic Jewish and non-Jewish comedians to talk about the election and why they're voting Obama.
Vice President
Click here to help the Jewish Alliance for Change campaign to repeal Proposition 8, guarantee civil rights for all Americans and mobilize Americans to support President-elect Obama's agenda for change.
Go to our Videos page to watch the other two Ain't Funny videos, “Fear Tactics” and “Our Grandchildren.”
Our Ain't Funny series features Carl Reiner, Danny DeVito, Rhea Perlman, Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Valerie Harper, Garry Marshall and Larry Gelbart.
To learn more about the team that produced these TV spots visit www.AintFunny.org
Israelis for Obama make their voices heard in a new video
Israelis, both prominent and ordinary, step up to fight the Republican right’s deceptive ads and attacks against Barack Obama.
The Jewish Alliance for Change helped produce this video and distributed it throughout the American Jewish community. Directed by Alma Har'el, Produced by Boaz Yakin.
Retired Generals of the Israel Defense Forces and high-ranking Mossad officials praise Barack Obama.
“I would personally vote for Obama to help the State of Israel,” said Brig. General Giora Inbar, Former IDF Commander of Lebanon.
From the Jewish Council for Education and Research (JCER).
The Torah repeatedly instructs us to care for the “widow, orphan, poor, and the stranger.” It is fundamental to Judaism that those who are blessed with “more” have an obligation -- not a choice -- to help those who have less.… How then could I support McCain, who has voted against the minimum wage at least 10 times? How could I support someone who believes in the privatization of Social Security? Can you imagine what would be happening today as the economy lurches toward implosion to people who depended on private Social Security accounts? Social Security is a contract a society makes with its citizens: We will help you when you are old and needy. How could I support a candidate, McCain, whose health-care program would leave millions uninsured and tax the health insurance benefits we now receive from our employers? How could I support someone who supports more tax cuts for the very wealthy and almost nothing for the middle class or the poor?
Obama: Wall Street Crisis Caused by McCain-GOP Policies
We are witnessing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Conservative deregulation is the culprit. Since the Reagan years—and especially during the current Bush Administration—regulators in Washington have torn down or allowed banks to get around the financial rules and protections that were established as a result the Great Depression.
Barack Obama's new running mate praises Israel in 2007 interview with 'Shalom TV'
Senator Joe Biden called Israel “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East,” and revealed a Jewish family connection in an interview last year.
“You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq,” said Senator Obama. “You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice - but it is not the change we need.”
Vilifying Barack Obama’s name has become a favorite blood sport in the 2008 presidential campaign. The lineage of Obama’s name, however, extending back to a revered biblical namesake, befits his status as a Christian of rich ancestral influences.
Biden Blasts Bush Comments in Israel on Obama: “Outrageous!”
Watch the video:
“He [Bush] is the guy who has weakened us,” he said. “He has increased the number of terrorists in the world. It is his policies that have produced this vulnerability that the U.S. has. It's his [own] intelligence community [that] has pointed this out, not me.” Biden noted that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have both suggested that the United States ought to find a way to talk more with its enemies. “If he thinks this is appeasement, is he going to come back and fire his own cabinet?”
“We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage...and then sit down and talk with them...." The US should construct a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran, and may have missed earlier opportunities to begin a useful dialogue with Tehran, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said.
Senator Biden has a sterling voting record on pro-Israel issues and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has helped shepherd through key pro-Israel legislation. Biden's longstanding relationship with the Jewish community should reassure Jews who still feel anxious about Obama, said Cameron Kerry, Senator John Kerry's Jewish brother
A war with Iran would be “disastrous on a number of levels,” according to U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. In an article appearing in the latest issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College quarterly, Gates wrote that with the army already bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, “another war in the Middle East is the last thing we need.”
Hebrew University political scientist Yehezkel Dror, a strategic expert of the realpolitik school, wrote this week in the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot that the “probability is very low” that either a U.S. or Israeli [military] operation would force Iran to abandon its nuclear program.
One hundred and eighty one scholars in Jewish Studies have signed a statement supporting Barack Obama for president. The signers, who include some of the most prominent people in the field, argue that “Senator Obama shares many of the values and positions held by the majority of American Jews.” They point out that his positions on domestic and foreign issues, including Israel’s security, are in agreement with those of most Jewish voters.
John McCain's positions on Israel and the Middle East promise a continuation of George Bush. To my friends in our community who continue to argue that George Bush has been a good friend to Israel, my answer is to ask whether Israel is stronger or weaker today...Israel cannot afford any more years of such “friendship.” We know what the future will be like if our country chooses McCain/Palin: They promise us more years of the same failed Bush foreign policies, more years of being bogged down in Iraq. They promise us an evangelical administration that will attempt to impose right-wing evangelical Christian beliefs on our laws and institutions. If they are elected, I fear for the country and world in which my four children are growing up.
I was with Obama in Israel and in Europe, and I saw how he focused on the urgency of the Iranian threat. I saw how he used his discussions in Israel to remind the European leaders that Israelis are justified in seeing Iran with nuclear weapons as an existential threat -- and that for Israel's sake and our own we must put far more pressure on Iran if we are to stop it from going nuclear. Obama understands that weak sticks and weak carrots -- the current policy -- can't work. We need strong sticks to concentrate the Iranian mind on what they stand to lose, and we need strong carrots, conveyed directly, to show the Iranians they have something to gain by giving up their nuclear weapon pursuit. And, if in the end diplomacy fails, the fact that we engaged directly and Iran was unwilling to alter its behavior creates a very different context for tougher options.
Many young people understand well that the environment and its preservation is the most urgent cause of this new century. Unless we do something drastic about the way we humans use resources, all the rest of our dreams for the future will stand little chance of fulfillment. This is the most essential reason why educated young people, including the vast majority of Jewish college–age and post-college students, are fervent supporters of the Obama campaign.
The key issue dividing the candidates is their position on choice. A woman’s right to choose to bear or not have a child, a couple’s freedom to decide when to start or expand a family, and the composition of the Supreme Court for years to come—all hinge on which candidate wins.
A new independent study projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based health insurance would lose it under the McCain plan. The whole idea of the McCain plan is to get families out of employer-paid health coverage and into the health insurance marketplace, where naked competition is supposed to take care of all ills. We’re seeing in the Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch fiascos just how well the unfettered marketplace has been working.
Bush Administration has neglected key measures to thwart nuclear and biological terror attacks on U.S. cities, a government task force warned. Bush-McCain policies have sparked growing anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world, fueling the efforts of violent extremists.
John McCain has explicitly embraced President Bush's economic policies. This means that McCain is running on the worst economic track record of any president since the Great Depression.
If you take away those votes, by any fair reading, the court would move significantly to the political right…Jurisprudence on abortion, a variety of civil rights, affirmative action, environmental protection and the whole question of federalism as well as the limits of executive power could change with new justices.
Economists say that lifting the ban on oil drilling off our coasts would do nothing in the short term and almost nothing in the long term to reduce gas prices.
Barack Obama’s detractors have made a game out of finding anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material on Obama’s social networking site, and using it to smear Obama. In part 1 of our response, we discuss the motives behind it and what its architects don’t tell you about the offensive content. In part 2, we discuss how anti-Semitism within the Republican party should be of much greater concern to Jewish Americans than offensive content on Obama’s community blog site.
Both candidates for president have proposed tax plans. But they are starkly different in their approaches and their economic impact. Sen. Obama is focused on cutting taxes for middle-class families and small businesses, and investing in key areas like health, innovation and education. He would do this while cutting unnecessary spending, paying for his proposals and bringing down the budget deficit. The McCain plan represents Bush economics on steroids. It has $3.4 trillion more in tax cuts than President Bush is proposing, largely directed at corporations and the most affluent. The McCain plan would lead to deficits the likes of which we have never seen in this country.
Because of the policies Mr. Bush has pursued and Mr. McCain would continue, the entire Middle East is more dangerous. The United States and our allies, including Israel, are less secure.
Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit—the cabinet minister responsible for the Mossad espionage agency, the Shin Bet security service, the Atomic Energy Commission and Military Intelligence—said that Israel must not attack Iran, but only defend itself if attacked. “And if we do attack, I am not sure it will scuttle the project, or even delay it. I doubt we will be attacked [by Iran with nuclear weapons]. Every country will fully understand the consequences of such an attack.” Many senior Israeli military figures share his opinion, he says.
At almost every turn along the way, the Bush administration was warned that whatever the short-term benefits of its extralegal approach to fighting terrorism, it would have tragically destructive long-term consequences both for the rule of law and America's interests in the world.
Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, one of the great religious leaders of our time and a champion of peace and social justice, has passed away. Rabbi Wolf, whose synagogue is across the street from President-elect Obama's home, was among Obama's earliest supporters when he launched his political career over a decade ago, springing to Obama's defense during the presidential election. President-elect Obama issued a statement upon learning of his passing. In this remembrance of Rabbi Wolf, who served on the Board of Advisors of the Jewish Alliance for Change, JAFC Executive Director Doni Remba, who has known him for three decades, pays tribute to the enormous contribution Rabbi Wolf has made to Jewish and American life.
“You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq,” said Senator Obama. “You don't protect Israel and deter Iran just by talking tough in Washington. You can't truly stand up for Georgia when you've strained our oldest alliances. If John McCain wants to follow George Bush with more tough talk and bad strategy, that is his choice - but it is not the change we need.”
“We need to figure out a way to develop some leverage...and then sit down and talk with them...." The US should construct a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran, and may have missed earlier opportunities to begin a useful dialogue with Tehran, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said.
John McCain has explicitly embraced President Bush's economic policies. This means that McCain is running on the worst economic track record of any president since the Great Depression.
BOOK OF THE WEEK: