Barack Obama wins 77 percent of Jewish vote, exit polls show

[BurtWorm]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1034574.html

Last update - 15:02 05/11/2008

By Haaertz Service and News Agencies
Tags: israel news, Barack Obama

Despite the tense rift between Republican and Democratic Jews over the course of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, exit polls on Tuesday showed that Barack Obama received about 77 percent of the Jewish vote.

These numbers were higher even than the 2004 election, when Democratic candidate John Kerry received 74 percent of the Jewish vote. Al Gore received the highest percentage of Jewish votes in 2000, with 79 percent.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, executive director of the J Street lobby group on Tuesday called Obama's victory a sign that the campaign waged against him by Republican Jews comprised "baseless smears."

"American Jews resoundingly rejected the two-year, multi-million dollar campaign of baseless smears and fear waged against him by the right wing of our community," he said. "Surrogates and right-wing political operatives in our community stopped at nothing in their efforts to sway Jewish voters against Obama."

"We can only hope that these results put to rest for good the myth that fear and smear campaigns - particularly around Israel - can be an effective political weapon in the Jewish communit," he added.

...

[rockymountaindem]

1. Well done my fellow Hebrews

I knew that "Jews concerned about Obama" line was a bunch of hot air.

[Meshuga]

7. Yishar koach, indeed! n/t

[npincus]

13. right on... this Jew no longer bitter.

[Bicoastal]

2. Joe Lieberman got his ASS whupped by Sarah Silverman!

[DeposeTheBoyKing]

3. I would imagine he won close to 100% of the Muslim vote, too

We are Muslim, and everyone we know is supporting him. He really can bring people together, and I have high hopes that he will be the one to move the Middle East closer to peace than other presidents have managed.

[ej510]

4. Grandfather would be proud.

[Meshuga]

8. No kidding

I mean, the Muslim community was thrown under the bus by Republicans.

[immoderate]

9. Good, good , good!

Good for the Jews, and the Muslims too. I'm Jewish and I had to listen to smears coming from people who should have known better. If they told me Obama was a Muslim, I said, "So what? Our American system provides for the people to chose a president by election. Do you hate the American system?"

One woman told me she thought Obama was anti-Semitic. I told her his chief adviser was Jewish. I asked her to point to anything he had ever said or done that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic. Nothing. There's no getting through to some people.

--IMM

[Meshuga]

5. We are good with keeping with our tradition

People here worried a lot throughout the election but I was always expecting the usual 70 percentile. :-)

[SuperTrouper]

6. Sarah Silverman's The Big Schlep

[galaxy21]

10. Palin's anti intellectualism turned a lot of Jewish people off, I think

They pride themselves on things like education, and Palin's as dumb as they come and proud of it. I don't think those racists at the rallies helped. If they'll say horrible things about a black man, what will they say about a Jewish person?

[Scurrilous]

12. Yep...

Sarah Palin Hits a Nerve Among Jewish Women, But It’s a Raw One (Oct 16, 2008)

<snip>

"When Clare Kinberg, editor of a feminist Jewish magazine, set up her booth at an Ann Arbor Jewish community event, she didn’t expect to attract a parade of women eager to vent their rage against Sarah Palin. But woman after woman — perhaps noticing Kinberg’s Barack Obama pin —approached her to tell stories of how John McCain’s vice-presidential pick had galvanized them into becoming active in the Obama campaign.

"She really brought out some ire, fear, something personal,” said Kinberg, who edits the magazine Bridges. “It was almost a visceral reaction that she represented something anathema against Jewish values, something very deep in their identity.”

On a political level, it’s no surprise that liberal Jewish women don’t like Palin — they are liberals, after all, and Palin is an avowed and unabashed conservative, in a heated presidential race. But the Alaska governor also seems to strike a raw nerve on a symbolic level for many Jewish women, drawing far more indignation than a male candidate with similar views, almost as if she offends their sense of who they are.

“It was the place in their identity where they are Jewish women,” Kinberg said of the angry voters who dropped by her booth. “People didn’t bring up specific things about reproductive rights or abortion or separation of church and state, but it was all of those things wrapped up together.”

<snip>

"For some, the antipathy toward Palin is located even more closely at the intersection of feminism and Jewish identity. “She’s the anti-wonk, the anti-intellectual, someone who doesn’t want to brook differences of opinion,” said Susan Weidman Schneider, the editor of Lilith, another Jewish feminist journal. “She is certainly not someone with whom I or other Jewish women I know would identify. There’s a real sense of alienation.”

http://www.forward.com/articles/14403/

[Hieronymus]

11. Guess Jesse Jackson wasn't successful in causing a riff. What an ass he is.

[FUCK_BUSH]

14. so mush for FASCIST REPUBLICANS negative attack against him.

[surrealAmerican]

15. This is no surprise. Jews usually poll about 75% democratic...

...and a large proportion of us are life-long liberals.

[DeepModem Mom]

16. K&R