Even last week, the National Jewish Democratic Council had started an outreach effort to Jewish-American supporters to spread the good word. Activists and the like met with Sen. Harry Reid and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, as well as Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman and a Jew. (Wasserman Schultz was part of a post-election spin call with reporters yesterday, along with Sen. Chuck Schumer.) The administration’s main pitchman is actually turning out to be Joe Biden, which, Ron Kampeas notes, “underscored the president’s problem: The vice president has the better reputation on Israel.” The NJDC also touted Prime Minister Netanyahu’s praise for Obama’s important intervention in the embassy riot last weekend.

The time is ripe for this pushback because of the upcoming activity at the United Nations—where, among other things, the administration has expended real international political capital to pledge a veto of a Palestinian resolution in the Security Council. It’s also a crucial moment because the High Holidays, when Jews around the land gather in synagogues to listen to their rabbis lecture them about Israel, are right around the corner.

Also, the adminstration’s support for Israel is featured prominently on AttackWatch, a new campaign Website designed to rebut Republican talking points. It contains some complimentary words from Defense Minister Barak and President Peres. Conspicuously absent, however, is any praise from Netanyahu, and the quote from former Defense Secretary Robert Gates rings slightly hollow in light of contributing editor Jeff Goldberg’s scoop that Gates considered Israel an “ungrateful” ally. Still, Obama’s speech to AIPAC, linked to on the site, contains some useful boilerplate: “The bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable and the commitment of the United States to the security of Israel is ironclad.” Expect the administration to play up its military cooperation with the Jewish state, which by many accounts has been unprecedently robust.

Want a rebuttal to the rebuttal? Dan Senor, a former Bush administration adviser, argues that Obama’s problem is political because it is also substantial: he has explicitly sought to put daylight between his country and Israel, Senor argues, and has condemned settlements with unjustified harshness. Yet many of his charges seem strained. Obama’s Arab Spring speech “focused on a demand that Israel return to its indefensible pre-1967 borders with land swaps”? That wasn’t the speech’s focus; it wasn’t a demand; and the land swaps are what are supposed to make the borders defensible. Ah, I’ll save the argument for after the sermon.

Seeing Ripple in Jewish Vote [NYT]
Democrats’ Obama Outreach Starting with Fellow Democrats [JTA]
Israel and Middle East Falsehoods [AttackWatch]
Why Obama Is Losing the Jewish Vote [WSJ]
Related: The Ambassador Speaks [Tablet Magazine]
Republican-Jewish Coalition [Tablet Magazine]
Weprin: Israel ‘Certainly Was a Major Part of It’ [Washington Jewish Week]
Robert Gates Says Israel Is an Ungrateful Ally [Bloomberg View]
Earlier: Special Election Defeat Is Obama’s Loss
N.Y-9 Voters Think Obama ‘Not Pro-Israel’

On our final day, Dan Senor, co-author of Start-Up Nation, convened a panel of five of the key players in Israeli technology, all of whom had featured prominently in his book. The panelists included Meir Brand, who heads Google Israel; Scott Tobin, a U.S. venture capitalist and general partner at Boston-based Battery Ventures; and three Israeli venture capitalists: Chemi Peres, Eddy Shalev, and Tal Keinan. The discussion took place in the striking new Shimon Peres Peace House, overlooking the waterfront in Ajami, Jaffa’s mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood. “It’s not a book for Jews,” Senor told us. “In Barnes and Noble, it’s in the Business section, not Judaica.”

In keeping with the book’s emphasis on innovation, the authors have licensed its name to a travel agency which will run Start-Up Nation tours. They are also at work on a sequel. And Senor’s wife, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown, intends to produce a Start-Up Nation film. (Earlier in the week, our group was addressed by Stanley Fischer, governor of the Bank of Israel, and the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor whose policies many credit for the stability that has characterized Israel’s economy over the last decade. Even Fischer commented on Start-Up Nation, calling it “a little too enthusiastic, but essentially correct.”)

The discussion focused on what the “next big thing” to come out of Israel will be. Tal Keinan, an Israeli with a Harvard M.B.A., spoke of the coming boom in financial services. He pointed to recent changes in Israel’s securities laws that will allow government retirement funds more flexibility in where they can invest. “That move,” he stated, “will free up at least $400 million per month for equity investment.” In addition, he noted, tax laws have been liberalized for new immigrants, allowing them to avoid paying taxes on money earned outside Israel for up to ten years. “Israel is liberalizing while the U.S., Europe, and much of the rest of the world is tightening,” Keinan said, and he sees the day when Tel Aviv will compete with Hong Kong and Singapore as a world financial services capital. Already, he added, “traders from London and Paris are flocking here.”

Panelist Eddy Shalev added that people in the Asia-Pacific region have little of the negative baggage possessed by European and Middle Eastern investors. In those parts of the world, he argued, “Israel is on equal footing with America.”

Chemi Peres, a former air force pilot and founder of the Israel High Tech Industry Association, also spoke of the growing relationship between Israel and Asia. “A number of Chinese companies are setting up [research and development] centers here,” he reported. “Our ties are strong, and growing; they relate to the fact that there is an entire economy here that is based on innovation, and want to take advantage of it.” Scott Tobin added: “Israel has a culture of innovation. We are really good at what we do.”

To prove the point, the morning concluded with ten-minute presentations by some of Israel’s most promising start-up companies in the fields of medical devices, biotechnology, homeland security, clean tech, alternative energy, and robotics. Earlier in the week, we had seen a presentation by PrimeSense, a cutting-edge technology company founded five years ago by five Israeli army veterans. PrimeSense invented Kinect, a gaming technology that uses a patented 3-D sensor to capture human movement, enabling, according to its marketing director Adi Berenson, a “natural interaction with computers, freeing the user from reliance on pads, buttons, or paddles.” Microsoft licensed Kinect and incorporated it into its new Xbox accessory. It proceeded to sell over a million units in its first two weeks, becoming one of the “most successful hardware launches in the history of consumer electronics,” according to Berenson. Kinect’s potential extends beyong gaming, to robotics, automobiles, telephones, disabilities, and rehabilitation.

Surveying the Israeli high tech scene, Scott Tobin concluded the discussion by predicting, “In the next ten years, Israel will create it own Apple.” After being exposed to companies like PrimeSense and Better Place, the proud prophecy didn’t smack of hyperbole.

Earlier: Eating Blind
Flying the Unfriendly Skies
Driving to a Better Place

• Israeli officials warn that without an imminent peace deal, the Palestinian Authority could be replaced as the West Bank government by Hamas or other Iranian proxies. [WP]

• Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates argued that sanctions are working—dividing Iran’s leadership—and therefore military action is unnecessary. [WP]

• Where U.S. military aid to Lebanon has been notably controversial, Russia announced it would give an unconditional gift of helicopters, tanks, and more to strenghten the Lebanese army. [Haaretz]

• Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner chats with novelist David Grossman. [NYT]

• Former George W. Bush adviser Dan Senor is rumored to be mulling a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat for New York in 2012. [Page Six]

• The Monsey, N.Y., Beit Din investigating Rabbi Leib Tropper filed a civil suit to get him removed from one yeshiva’s bank accounts. [FailedMessiah]

• A Republican research document, apparently geared toward winning over Ohio’s (not insubstantial) Jewish community, is titled, “Buck-Oy State” and in one place reads, “Ohio Dems Are All Verklempt Thanks to Obama’s Meshugeh Health Care Experiment.” [Ben Smith]

• Paul Krugman notes that Israel’s central bank has, with great success, intervened in its currency in the way America fears China will intervene with its own. [The Conscience of a Liberal]

• Researchers want access to sealed records that, they say, prove that the Catholic Church aided Adolf Eichmann’s escape to Argentina. [JPost]

• Gawker takes down Dan Senor, the Jewish former Bush speechwriter who is considering a run for Kirsten Gillibrand’s Senate seat in New York. [Gawker]

• Could recent scandals in the ultra-Orthodox community—Tropper, Balkany, Dwek, et al—lead to a waning of the bloc’s political influence? [The Jewish Week]

• Dan Senor, one of the top Jewish foreign policy advisers in the Bush administration, is mulling a Senate run … for Kirsten Gillibrand’s New York seat, also (maybe) to be contested by Mort Zuckerman and Harold Ford. [NY Post]

• The number of anti-Semitic incidents in Canada rose over 11 percent from 2008 to 2009, reaching its highest figure in three decades. False reports alleging Jewish/Israeli organ trafficking were blamed in part. [JTA]

• The family of Rachel Corrie—the American pro-Palestinian activist who was killed by an IDF bulldozer in Gaza in 2003—is suing Israel in Israeli court. An army investigation found that her death was accidental, and that the bulldozers driver did not see her. [JTA]

• Ira Stoll: anti-Semite. (If you know who Ira Stoll is, you know how funny this is.) [JTA]

With Thanksgiving behind us, the Christmas juggernaut looms with all of its holiday-themed cinematic treacle, unavoidable musical kitsch, and inedible rum-soaked cakes. Joel Waldfogel, professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, concentrates on one aspect of the seasonal narishkeyt in Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays (Princeton, November). He argues that purchasing obligatory holiday gifts offends financial logic, as a $100 sweater worth, say, $30 to its recipient represents a colossal waste of resources—especially as that transaction repeats millions of times. Though it could be argued that Hanukkah, with its relatively recent tradition of eight nights of presents, offends in this respect even more than Christmas, Waldfogel notes that wasteful gift-giving was not a part of his childhood: “I’m Jewish,” he remarks, “and I first encountered Christmas through my wife . . . and her very generous family.”

* * *

Lee Eisenberg, former editor of Esquire, would call Waldfogel a “Buy Scold,” a curmudgeonly critic of American consumerism. In Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep on Buying No Matter What (Free Press, November), Eisenberg argues that people spend with reckless abandon because shopping satisfies their fundamental needs—”What we buy confers instant membership in a community or, more fashionably, a ‘tribe,’” he writes, and, by choosing particular brands, we “express our values”—and that’s fine with him. Does it make one a hopeless curmudgeon to suggest, though, that more lasting and satisfying means for building community and expressing values might be located in religion, art, or public service, rather than at the mall?

* * *

Perpetuating a community built upon values is a lot more difficult than building one around a brand of sneakers or handbags, though, because disagreements crop up so frequently among members of the former sort of tribe as to what exactly it is that unites them. As he discusses with Vox Tablet this week, Yale computer scientist David Hillel Gelernter sees this as a Jewish problem: “Unless the essence of Judaism is written down as plainly as can be,” he proclaims, rather dramatically, “the loosening grip most American Jews maintain on the religion of their ancestors will fail completely, and the community will plummet into the anonymous depths of history.” Hoping to prevent this, and speaking from the perspective of Orthodoxy—which he refers to as “normative Judaism”—Gelernter offers up “four theme-images,” each of which “captures all of Judaism from a certain angle,” in Judaism: A Way of Being (Yale, November).

Ask a different Jew, get a different “Jewish essence”: Esther Benbassa, an eminent French scholar of Sephardic Jewish history, proposes in Suffering as Identity: The Jewish Paradigm (Verso, November) that victimhood has perniciously become the thematic core of Jewish personal and communal identity in modernity. That writers and scholars produce such reductions of Jewish diversity to a putative Jewish essence regularly, and in doing so contradict one another, suggests that maybe the sage Shammai got this one right: Jewishness and Judaism just cannot be summarized while standing on one leg.

* * *

Waldfogel notwithstanding, Americans’ irrational holiday spending has some beneficiaries: the young Israelis without work visas, for example, who staff kiosks in middle American malls during the holiday rush, hawking tchotchkes 13 hours at a stretch, six days a week. Hank Stuever’s Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November), which tracks the holiday rituals of Frisco, Texas, includes a brief profile of one such Israeli, Eitan, who admits he’s shocked by the reception a certain bearded gentleman receives at the mall: “I have never seen a Santa Claus,” he remarks. “He is like Paris Hilton here.” As much as the vitality of the contemporary Israeli economy owes to the country’s compulsory military service and a regular influx of Diaspora Jews and their money—as Dan Senor and Saul Singer explain in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle (Twelve, November)—the extraordinary work ethic of guys like Eitan, willing to take awful gigs to save up for their post-military R&R trips through South America and India, explains some of it, too.

* * *

Jews’ dislike for Christmas runs deeper than an objection to the holiday’s cheap sentimentality and lousy aesthetics: at times—for example, in Warsaw in 1881—Christmas has served as a pretext for vicious pogroms against alleged Christ-killers. That such Christian enmity could be stirred up against Jews over the centuries is even more of a shame than we tend to think, or so suggests Adiel Schremer’s Brothers Estranged: Heresy, Christianity and Jewish Identity in Late Antiguity (Oxford, November). Schremer argues that rather than defining themselves in opposition to Christians, as has often been assumed, Jews in the first century CE concentrated more on their enmity for the Romans. Early Jews and Christians, in other words, clashed less than their descendants have.

* * *

For all those Jewish parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles unwilling to follow Waldfogel’s counsel and eschew gifts, publishers provide plenty of children’s books as potential Hanukkah presents. Among the new offerings this year, a few charmingly bring the holiday spirit to the animal kingdom. The teddy bear protagonist of Don Freeman’s 1968 classic, Corduroy, encounters the holiday in a board book, Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy (Viking, October, ages 0-2), while rabbits devour latkes in Hoppy Hanukkah! (Albert Whitman, September, ages 2-5), and, in Menorah Under the Sea (Kar-Ben, September, ages 5-9), a marine biologist constructs a hanukkiya out of sea urchins. These are certainly more child-friendly than the violent, apocryphal Books of the Maccabees.

* * *

Finally, here’s a stocking stuffer for folks who’d love to take the Christ out of Christmas: Greg Epstein, a Humanist rabbi, former rock-and-roller, and director of the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, insists that you don’t need God to enforce morality. In Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe (Morrow, November), Epstein reaches out to progressive people of all faiths as well as to confirmed atheists, insisting that instead of Christopher Hitchens’ and Richard Dawkins’ anti-religious acrimony, atheists can emphasize the values and beliefs that bind them together. And, by the way, he’s all for Hanukkah: “Celebrating holidays is a natural, welcome, necessary part of human life,” he observes, “and a Humanism or atheism worth its salt does not callously or humorlessly dismiss this need.” Who’s up for some oily HumanLight latkes?

Indeed, even (or especially) Arab businessmen are getting curious, Singer said: “Whenever I go to the Gulf, it’s all they want to talk about, they’re so intrigued by the Israeli model. But everything about the economic strategy of these Gulf countries is about spending money.” American Jews, too, are starting to catch on. “For the longest time, American Jews would not invest in Israeli start-ups. They would give to UJA and they’d give to all these philanthropic organizations, but they kept a firewall up between their business activities and their philanthropic activities. I think for the last three to five years you are, for the first time, really seeing American Jewish investors investing in Israel.”

The Origins of Israel’s Tech Miracle [Atlantic]