Could it be the diverse Anti-Osama campaigns were helpful? e.g. Obama = Osama & all the dirt along the racism and closet Muslim lines? A German documentary I saw yesterday showed me that this is often the first thing associated with Obama.

Was there anything comparable targeting HRC? I am only aware of the story below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_State_Digital

Iran: US vs Israeli Intellegence; wasn't there already a certain amount of cooperation concerning the intelligence on Iraq?

http://www.rogerlsimon.com/mt-archives/2008/02/mossad_vs_the_c.php

From this point of view Obama may indeed feel like an appeaser:

http://www.jta.org/cgi-bin/iowa/news/article/20080205obamamuslim.html

Links collected by:
link to groups.yahoo.com

The other day I saw a 'Save Darfur' banner on a synagogue. Is it cynical to wonder whether the fairly prominent Jewish interest in Darfur is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns, or possibly by other objectives, such as using Darfur as a smokescreen to deflect attention from the humanitarian disaster in Gaza (one which they could do much more to solve)?

The neocons' attention to Darfur now is as puzzling as their push for intervention in Kosovo a decade ago. What are they up to, anyway?

That means continuing bar/bat mitzvahs, seders, days of awe, shabbat, study, ethics on the basis of Jewish principles. (Those principles are as broad and profound as any other tradition, and are a good vehicle for spiritual life, if practised and inquired into sincerely and commitedly.)

That split between assimilation and commitment, is as it should be, and stimulated by different needs and goals.

When growing up, I had a very strong attraction to social change, both political and personal/spiritual. I expressed it through dedication to a yoga practise, over decades, including prominently a system of ethics that did not conflict with my Jewish upbringing and identity.

I had relationships with non-Jewish women, and could have married one, and brought up children with the gradual assimilation.

But, I also had relationships with Jewish women, and eventually married one (even though we met at a yoga center in Calcutta).

She is the child of holocaust survivors, and in getting to know her mother, uncle, aunt, and the very few on her father's side that survived, my Jewish identity is MUCH more defined than if I had just proceeded as a Jewish yogi/hippie.

Its important and not dismissable by statistics. Absent a distinct religion and culture, assimilated Jews are only that temporarily. Soon their children are just assimilated.

I'd rather be a carrot in a soup, than just a soup.

When I was at Vad Vashem's Holocaust museum there was a rabbi who led a group of young American Yeshiva students and explained the exhibits to them. I was listening in. At one point he said about German Jewry: "You were a Jew at home and a German in the street." I have come across this sentence in the literature also and have been wondering what it means. Is it just a description of a factual situation or is it a norm?: 'Be a Jew at home, be a German in the street!' – anyway, there is some inbuild ambiguity of identity.

When I left Yad Vashem I passed by the group that was standing outside and I overheard the rabbi telling them: "We have a mission in the world." I have also been wondering what that mission was.

BTW, these students were friendly. One of them had come up to me to ask who I am. When I told him I was German he was not taken aback (in the middle of the German horror exhibition), to the contrary. He said their rabbi had studied a couple of years in Hamburg and I should talk to him in German.

The Eternal Dilemma of the Authoritarian Jew

http://www.judeofascism.com/2008/02/eternal-dilemma-of-authoritarian-jew.html