Promoting a Domestic Jewish Agenda
New Coalition Seeks Candidates' Responses to Web Survey of American Jews' Concerns

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, June 9, 2007

More than 20 Jewish organizations -- including many new, Web-based groups -- have launched a campaign to get presidential candidates to pay more attention to the domestic concerns of American Jews, saying politicians wrongly view Jews as primarily concerned with Israel and other foreign issues.

The groups' premise is that the large, older, established Jewish advocacy groups -- that have more clout on Capitol Hill -- focus too much on foreign issues and don't speak accurately for the majority of American Jews, who care as much about health care and the environment as anti-Semitism in Europe or Israeli politics.

The coalition's effort focuses on a survey, conducted online ( http://www.jspot.org) during the past few weeks, in which people were asked to pick their top five domestic issues. Nearly 9,000 people, who were required to include their names, responded, according to results announced yesterday. The top issues picked were health care, the environment, education and civil rights. The coalition will solicit responses to the poll from presidential candidates.

"There is a significant disconnect between the priorities of Jews in this poll and the issues many Jewish groups are working on," said Mik Moore, spokesman for Jewish Funds for Justice, the New York-based group organizing the effort. Coalition members include popular blogs, a record company, labor and environmental groups and others.

But some longtime Jewish advocates and historians say the campaign is as much about a new generation of activists trying to gain influence and inject their style of social justice work as it is about anything else. The new crop of groups is trying to spread influence through cultural efforts, such as JDub Records and the Jewschool blog, as well as through such traditional grass-roots groups as Jews United for Justice, which focuses on issues such as housing and labor in the D.C. area.

"It's true that established groups haven't spoken with one voice on domestic issues, but they have advocated for those things," said Pamela S. Nadell, professor of history and director of Jewish studies at American University. "What's happening is these new groups -- which are very exciting -- are trying to band together to exercise larger political clout."

And such groups have grown in size and number in the past 10 or 15 years, activists agree. What's unclear is what effect they will have on the political work of American Jews. Will the bulk of advocacy become more domestic? Or do they bring mostly a different style of advocacy?

Some longtime activists disagreed with the campaign's premise: that such influential groups such as the American Jewish Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations are too foreign-oriented, thus misleading political leaders about Jewish priorities.

"I think most political leaders know what the accurate balance is, what Jews care about, but they know where they can go wrong in terms of the Jewish vote is over survival issues," such as Israel's existence and the rise of anti-Semitism, said Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the public policy arm of Reform Judaism. The movement is the largest of U.S. Jews.

Some of the biggest American Jewish groups, such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, focus by definition on foreign issues. But most of the broad national organizations also advocate on domestic issues -- including immigration, civil liberties and energy independence. Groups involved in the new campaign, however, say it's a matter of emphasis.

"I don't think anyone thinks Jews don't care about these issues, but we want to send a message that we in an organized way care about these issues," said Lori Leibowitz, director of Jews United for Justice.

Nadell said some established Jewish groups work on foreign issues -- such as Iran-Israel relations and anti-Semitism in Europe -- because they think they have limited clout with politicians. Jews can work on a variety of domestic concerns through other non-Jewish organizations, she said.

"They know there are other ways of getting the word out on a liberal political agenda; they don't have to do that only through Jewish groups," she said.

A May 16 editorial in the Jewish Week, one of the largest national Jewish newspapers, said that "too many candidates seem to miss the fact that we are fully engaged in a wide range of other issues" -- not just support for Israel. The editorial said the major organizations aren't to blame, but rather politicians, who think "our votes can be swayed solely by a few well-chosen talking points" about Israel.

The discussion is not completely unlike the one underway among American evangelical groups, that have been debating in recent months whether to expand their agenda from core social issues to include such concerns as Darfur and global warming.

"There is a tricky question here when you're trying to create a Jewish agenda," said Moore of Jewish Funds for Justice. "What is a Jewish issue?"