For Jewish Women, Palin Fuels Debate

Feminist Blu Greenberg is still undecided but now “strongly leaning” toward Obama.

Feminist Blu Greenberg is still undecided but now “strongly leaning” toward Obama.

by Doug Chandler
Special To The Jewish Week

Until several weeks ago, Blu Greenberg considered herself completely and utterly undecided in this year’s race for the White House.

But that represented change for Greenberg, a prominent Orthodox feminist who originally favored Republican nominee Sen. John McCain. And although she still calls herself undecided, she’s much less so today, reporting, as she did last week, that she’s “strongly leaning” toward Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate.

“There are degrees of indecision,” said Greenberg, a resident of Riverdale, “but I’m in the process of clarification.”

Batia Lieberman, on the other hand, is still at a loss as to which of the two candidates will receive her vote on Nov. 4, she said in a phone interview this week. That places her awkwardly between her husband, who

supports McCain, and her three grown children, all of whom, she said jokingly, “think Obama is the Moshiach.”

“The bottom line is that I don’t think there are any good choices,” said Lieberman, an Israeli-born musician who lives in Forest Hills, Queens. “I’m tearing my hair out.”

Whichever choice Greenberg and Lieberman eventually make, one factor for both of them is Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice-presidential selection. As with many voters, neither woman regards Palin as qualified for the office, and each shudders at the notion of the governor possibly becoming president.

Indeed, while there’s debate over the role of gender in the 2008 race, there’s no question that Palin’s presence on the Republican ticket is sparking intense reaction among women in both camps, including those in the Jewish community.

Meanwhile, Greenberg and Lieberman also reflect the unusually high number of undecided Jewish voters in the current race, according to a survey released last month by the American Jewish Committee.
Conducted by phone between Sept. 8 and 21, the annual survey showed American Jews favoring Obama by 57 percent to McCain’s 30 percent. Those figures compare to the results of a similar poll conducted by AJC four years ago, in September 2004, in which Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) scored 69 percent and President George W. Bush, 24 percent. The number of undecided respondents in last month’s survey totaled 13 percent, as compared to only 5 percent in 2004.

Divided by gender, the annual survey showed Jewish women more likely to support Obama (60 percent) than were Jewish men (54 percent). Those favoring McCain totaled 25 percent among women and 35 percent among men, while the number of undecided stood at 15 percent among women, 11 percent among men.

Perhaps more tellingly, 64 percent of Jewish women called themselves Democrats as opposed to 46 percent of Jewish men, a difference of 18 percent. The Republican column included 14 percent of the female respondents and 21 percent of the male respondents.

While the survey revealed some differences between men and women, those differences are slight compared to the gap between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews, said David Singer, AJC’s director of research. Orthodox Jews, accounting for 8 percent of the respondents, went for McCain by 78 percent, as against 26 percent of Conservative Jews, 27 percent of Reform Jews and 26 percent of the “Just Jewish.”

On most issues, Singer said, Jewish men and Jewish women are quite similar.
Nevertheless, the story painted by AJC’s numbers takes on a different slant depending on who’s doing the interpreting.

To Jim Gerstein, a Democratic strategist based in Washington, the large number of undecided voters can only be good news for Obama. “We regularly see undecided voters break toward their party,” he said, pointing to the high number of Jewish women who identify as Democrats.

To McCain supporters, though, the poll “reinforces a lot of the things we’ve been hearing and saying,” said Suzanne Kurtz, spokeswoman for the Republican Jewish Coalition. “Barack Obama is having a problem with Jewish voters” — including women — “and he’s performing far below how Democrats normally perform in the Jewish community.”

Public opinion polls rarely measure the views of Jewish voters, whose percentage of the American population is considered too small to follow. But in the absence of much hard data, it’s possible to obtain snapshots — and perhaps build a larger picture — of how Jewish women in this election cycle are eyeing the race.

Esther Jungreis, for instance, represents many McCain supporters when she says that the issues that count in this election involve how to deal with terrorism, which she considers “the No. 1 threat to human survival.”

A Holocaust survivor and the founder of Hineni, a Jewish outreach organization, Jungreis said she’s especially concerned about “a resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world” and how, in her view, the world appears to be “sleeping.”

A modern-day Hitler needs only to “push a button. ... We can’t afford to ignore a man like [Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad,” the Iranian president who has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.”
“The answer [to those threats] is not negotiations,” said Jungreis, who made clear she was speaking for herself and not for Hineni. “You can’t talk to people like that. You have to make parameters.”

Some Orthodox Jews have supported — and even identified with — Palin’s conservative views on social issues, such as abortion, school prayer and the teaching of creationism in public schools. Jungreis, 72, made no effort to do so, but she did say that elevating those issues in the current atmosphere is “ridiculous. The world is burning. Those are not the issues today.”

Naomi Mark, though, is a reminder that no segment of the Jewish community is monolithic.

A family therapist and a supporter of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, Mark believes that views like Palin’s have every chance of being adopted if the Republicans win the White House.

The next president is likely to appoint one to three Supreme Court justices, said Mark, 49, “and the fact that Sarah Palin would have a voice in that process frightens me.”

Mark, a resident of the Upper West Side, is also troubled by the overall Republican philosophy on economic issues, like health care, taxation and deregulation. Their position is essentially one of “individualism and taking care of oneself” — in direct opposition to the Jewish attitude, which, she said, favors communal responsibility and caring for the vulnerable.

Others calling attention to Palin’s social views included Gloria Feldt, 66, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “I can’t imagine voting for a ticket that would take away my freedoms as a woman,” said Feldt, who often blogs about her views on her Web site (www.GloriaFeldt.com).

But the belief that a McCain-Palin victory would doom abortion rights in most of the country was dismissed by Elisia Abrams, 31, a Manhattan lawyer who supports that ticket.

Even if the Supreme Court were to overturn Roe v. Wade, the opinion establishing a national right to abortion, “very few states” would revoke the right for their own residents, Abrams said. “I think a lot of Jewish women have a knee-jerk reaction to the abortion issue.”

Despite the debate, Nancy Ratzan, president of the National Council of Jewish Women, said that, if pressed, she’d say that “gender isn’t playing a factor in this election.” The issue, instead, is “whether or not you’re progressive.”

But a number of women remain angry at Obama for what they believe was the insensitive manner in which he treated Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primaries. In California last weekend, Shelly Mandell, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women, introduced Palin at a McCain-Palin rally, where she endorsed their ticket and called Palin a “feminist” who cares about women’s rights and equal pay. That drew rebukes from one blogger, who said McCain recently voted in the U.S. Senate against fair-pay legislation, and from the president of California NOW, who said Mandell was misusing her title with the group.

On the other side of the spectrum, Jewish women are among the backers of a new effort, Women Against Palin, that began when an e-mail, written by the group’s two founders, spread virally on the Internet. Lyra Kilston, one of the group’s founders and the granddaughter of a German refugee, said she and her colleague were offended during the vice-presidential debate when Palin made comments about Iran, Israel and the Holocaust — remarks they saw as pandering. “She was obviously tutored to pass those off as deep conviction,” Kilston said.

Meanwhile, Greenberg — “a Democrat by genetic makeup” — said she originally favored McCain because she believed he had a “gut feeling” for Israel. She also doubted Obama’s willingness to use force against Iran. Although she’s “always in favor of negotiations,” Greenberg said, she hopes our next president would convey to Iran “that we won’t allow an abuse of power and we won’t tolerate idle threats.”

In the past few months, however, Greenberg said she has learned that Obama, like McCain, “has the support of Jewish leaders who are as concerned about Israel as I am.” She also believes the country’s economic shape is a component of national security and that the crisis of the past few weeks has created an entirely different landscape.

Finally, of course, there’s Palin, who, though “charming and personable,” has left Greenberg “underwhelmed” with the extent of her knowledge. “She doesn’t have the breadth or scope of the issues,” Greenberg said, “and where she’s taken a stand on the issues, they’re pretty primitive.”
In Queens, Batia Lieberman remains torn by what she considers Obama’s inexperience, on the one hand, and her disagreement with McCain on a variety of domestic issues, including health insurance.

Nor does she like Palin’s ideas on education or raising children, both important issues to her.

She may make up her mind after discussing the election with her three children, Lieberman said. “I’m willing to entertain the thought that maybe I’m missing something — that they see something I don’t.”