The Wall Street Journal piece on Sheldon Adelson is just OK. It says he’s the cash cow for the Republican Party and says he’s religious on Israel in a neoconservative kinda way. The piece doesn’t move the ball down the field much from Connie Bruck’s piece of two weeks back in the New Yorker (though it’s better about Freedom’s Watch), but together the pieces represent progress. At last the press is looking at the Israel agenda of the money behind politics.
Two large questions arise from the Adelson coverage: 1, Why don’t Dems get the same scrutiny? Where is the piece about Lester Crown or Haim Saban? (In Jerusalem, that’s where: As Haaretz got to Adelson a long time ago, they got to Saban too.) 2, More important, when will the press start to pull apart the different agendas of Jews in politics? How far apart are Adelson and Obama’s man Lester Crown? They are both absolutists on Israel, but what does that mean? Who is for dividing Jerusalem?
Who is for a two-state solution, and on what terms? What is the Brit Tzedek position, the Peace Now position, the AIPAC position? The Joel Kovel/Tony Judt position? How much real variation is there? What does it mean that 58 percent of American Jews are against dividing Jerusalem, and is that why Obama took such a hawkish stance on J’lem at AIPAC? I don’t know the answers here. Though I suspect that among leadership Jews, the differences are fairly finite. That Connie Bruck’s husband, Obama’s LA rainmaker Mel Levine, is not all that different from Joe Lieberman.
Look at it this way. Last night on “Hardball,” Chris Matthews teed up the sensitive issue of where do blacks stand on Obama’s calls for greater responsibility on the part of the black male. He had on two black guys, one of whom, a Rev. Rivers (I’ll try and get this right later), asserted that blacks are at a special moment in history, philosophically and materially, what with two Secretarys of State in the stamp collection and a lot of economic progress. So they can’t play the “grievance” and victimization card any more. The other guy didn’t differ. And both those black guys are for Obama. But Jews are in play. I can’t wait for Matthews to have a panel of Jews on to talk about the differences between them, such as they are, and what role Jews are playing in the presidential campaigns.
Look, Matti Friedman of AP in Jerusalem is talking about Adelson and dual loyalty. And Harvey Morris of the Financial Times is writing about the real divide in Jewish attitudes right now.
