Jews Open Website for Palin

Opposition to Obama is coming from all sides, and Palin's popularity is gaining much faster than anyone thought.

Jews for Sarah Palin Website Launched

With American Jews concerned about President Barack Obama’s stance on Israel, a new Jewish group has been formed to express support for Sarah Palin, an outspoken backer of Israeli policy.
While Obama has protested Israel’s construction in annexed East Jerusalem, Palin has said she opposes a freeze on settlement growth.

“I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand,” the former Alaska governor told Barbara Walters.
Now Benyamin Korn, a former editor of the Jewish Exponent, has founded Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, “and his efforts are part of some recent Jewish support that has been trickling in the direction of the hockey mom from Wasilla,” the Jewish publication Forward observed.

Korn has also launched a website, JewsforSarah.com. According to the site, “Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin is an independent group of academic, religious, and political leaders, dedicated to promoting consideration of Sarah Palin’s political positions in the wider Jewish community.”
The site went live in mid-April, shortly after Obama suggested the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian dispute was endangering American troops in the Middle East.

Jewish support for Palin is gaining traction. Shortly before the 2008 election, Republican vice presidential candidate Palin garnered an approval rating of just 37 percent among Jewish voters in one poll. But Forward observes: “Even though American Jews have repeatedly disapproved of her in large numbers in poll after poll, giving her abysmally low approval ratings, her recent high-profile jabs at the president have earned her support from some of the most prominent Jewish conservatives today.”

One of those conservatives, Norman Podhoretz — former editor of Commentary — went so far as to say in a March Op-Ed piece for The Wall Street Journal that he would “rather have Sarah Palin sitting in the Oval Office than Barack Obama.”
Korn faces a tough challenge in gathering support for Palin among American Jews, considering that she has referred to the United States as a “Christian nation” and questioned the separation of church and state.

But Forward notes that “with an increasing number of American Jews anxious about what they see as the undue pressure that Obama is applying to Israel, Korn thinks that more of them will come to see Palin’s value.”