Tablet Magazine: Jew for Sarah

Building a political home for conservative Jews who feel that no one speaks for them
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Tablet, an American Jewish general interest online magazine, has a rather balanced profile piece on our colleague Benyamin Korn, founder of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin. Excerpts:

Last weekend, before the nation’s attention was consumed by the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, was a busy one for Washington’s media society, and no one made more of it than Sarah Palin. First there was a stop with Greta Van Susteren at a power brunch in Georgetown, and later an appearance at a glitzy party hosted by MSNBC. In between the two, while her fellow maybe-candidate Donald Trump was getting skewered by President Barack Obama at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, Palin zipped up to a Marriott in suburban Maryland to headline a $250-a-plate fundraiser for a pro-life group, Heroic Media, best known for controversial billboards aimed at black women. By way of explaining why she had ducked out of the evening’s main event downtown, Palin reportedly told the crowd: “I choose life.”

At the end of Palin’s speech, an Orthodox rabbi named Robert Shechter stood up to give a closing benediction on behalf of a year-old group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, whose supporters had bought three tables at the 300-person dinner. Like Palin herself, the group piggybacked on Heroic Media’s event to stage its own Washington moment: a Shabbat retreat, or shabbaton, for Jewish supporters of Palin. Ten participants gathered at an Aish HaTorah center near the Marriott for a kosher dinner and lunch accompanied by freewheeling discussions about the Obama Administration moderated by the group’s founder, Benyamin Korn.

Korn—who is known to his oldest friends as “Buddy,” but sends his emails as “Bert,” short for Bertram, his English name—is a host on Philadelphia’s conservative WNTP talk radio station, an affiliate of the behemoth Christian broadcaster Salem Communications. At a Friday night service before the retreat, his rich baritone carried the uneven chorus of the regular Aish membership. Korn, who is 55, chanted from memory with his prayer book closed in his hands.

Korn appears to have few direct links to Palin herself—in public, he deferentially refers to the head of her political-action group, Michael Glassner, as “Mr. Glassner”—and he admits he has limited financial resources, though he says he has received support from Saul Fox, a Bay Area private-equity investor who donated last year to Tea Party candidates Sharron Angle and Tom Campbell. (Fox, en route to the Palin event from his California office, was not available for comment.) To the shabbaton participants, Korn insisted that he was not in the market for a job with Palin’s political-action group, or in a future Palin campaign. “I don’t need that tsuris,” he said. But over the past few months, Korn has become a go-to Palin soldier for cable news shows. Federal campaign records show he has never given money to Palin, but he runs a website devoted to aggregating news about her, which he says gets upwards of 10,000 hits a month, including a few dozen from Wasilla, Alaska. (“It could be Joe McGinniss,” Korn says self-deprecatingly, referring to the journalist who spent last summer living next door to the Palins while working on his book about them.)

[More]

- JP

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.

[...]

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

Benyamin Korn: Jews have nothing to fear from Sarah Palin's religion

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Benyamin Korn, director of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, has an excellent op-ed in today's edition of the New York Sun. Mr. Korn exposes how the media's gross misquoting of Gov. Palin's "Christian Nation" remark. Some excerpts:

Governor Palin’s Kentucky speech, to a group known as the Women of Joy, is being claimed by her critics as proof that she is too Christian. But a careful look at the speech reveals, in fact, how close to Judaism and the Jewish people she is.

To judge by some accounts in the major news media, it sounds like she made a Bible-thumpin’, foot-stompin’ appeal to the unwashed fundamentalist masses.

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Here’s the key sentence: “And then, you know, hearing any leader declare that America isn’t a Christian nation, and poking an ally like Israel in the eye, it’s mind-boggling to see some of our nation’s actions [in] recent days, but politics is truly a topic for another day.”

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In her speech to the Women of Joy, Palin included a few quotes from the New Testament. But Jewish scripture figured much more prominently. She quoted twice from Psalms, as well from Proverbs and Malachi. She spoke to Piper about how Esther, an orphan, overcame steep odds and difficulties in order to save the Jewish people. And she took issue with President Obama’s policy of “poking our ally Israel in the eye.”

Fear-mongers with political agendas want to drive a wedge between Governor Palin and American Jewry. Sometimes they do it with quotations that leave out key sentences. Sometimes they do it with distorted depictions of her religious beliefs.

Jews have nothing to fear from Sarah’s Palin religion. But we have plenty to fear from those political leaders who not only have no interest in Esther or Proverbs, or Sarah, but who think that poking Israel in the eye makes for good foreign policy.

Read Benyamin Korn's unedited commentary at The Sun.

- JP