NY Sun: Sarah Palin Celebrates Shabbat And Offers Echoes of Esther

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The day before the Restoring Honor rally, Sarah Palin attended a Shabbaton in Pennsylvania. Benyamin Korn, director of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, helped organize the event, and he wrote about it in a New York Sun op-ed. Here are a few excerpts:

Meeting Sarah Palin turns out to be not the kind of celebrity thrill one experiences by meeting, say, a member of the Rolling Stones. My wife and I found her unpretentious and gracious both, with an un-politician-like sincerity. She expressed gratitude for the work of Jews for Sarah. We brought a small gift for Mrs. Palin’s family, a video disc of "Praying with Lior," the film about the bar mitzvah of a Jewish child with Down's Syndrome.

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Although 65 years have passed since the Holocaust, the threat of genocide still hangs over the Jewish people — and again from Persia. Iran openly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Hamas, with its charter calling for the extermination of the Jewish State, fires rockets at Israeli schoolchildren. Syria races to build chemical and biological weapons to use against Israel. Mrs. Palin makes it clear that she recognizes these threats to America’s ally, Israel, and wants to end them. She minced no words in her remarks to the Pennsylvania Family Institute, criticizing the Obama administration for “coddling our enemies while abandoning our treasured ally, Israel.”

On her lapel, she wore a pin showing the American and Israeli flags intertwined.

As we enjoyed our Shabbat meal, we listened to Mrs. Palin’s references to "Judeo-Christian values" — a concept well understood by the deeply religious Christian audience with whom we shared the evening, including more than a few Amish ladies wearing their traditional bonnets. Mrs. Palin spoke of how the family is the building block of society and how strong families mean a strong nation. She did not suggest that Democrats do not share the attachment to family. But she warned that the most immediate threat to American families is the administration’s economic policies, which will burden our children’s generation with crushing, inescapable debt.

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But for the most part, our Shabbat with Sarah Palin transcended politics. It was a Salute to the American Family, an occasion for connection between conservative Christians and conservative Jews. It offered a chance to exchange a knowing look with the Hockey Mom from Wasilla, about our beloved special needs kids. And then she was gone, off with her “bodyguard Piper” to speak the next day before 300,000 at the Lincoln Memorial. For us it was a memorable and moving shabbat, full of songs and prayers, hearty food, and our plans and dreams for bringing back home the message of our American Esther.

Read Benyamin's full NY Sun article here.

h/t: roy y

- JP