• Gideon Rachman on why the time is simply not ripe for the peace process. [Financial Times]

• Peace Now, which previously had never advocated a boycott, today called for one in response to the anti-boycott law. (Got all that?) [JPost]

• Outspokenly liberal former Rep. Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, is running again. [Ben Smith]

• Anti-Semitism envoy Hannah Rosenthal fights an uphill effort to get Arab countries to change their filthy textbooks. [JTA/Forward]

• A Moscow synagogue was firebombed, although the bombs, fortunately, didn’t actually go off. [JTA]

Jerusalem, in Imax! Well, once you go see it in theaters.

Jerusalem | Filmed in Imax 3D from JerusalemGiantScreen on Vimeo.

Rosenthal also condemned state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Muslim world, citing by name Sheikh Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a popular television personality and spiritual adviser to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. She accused Qaradawi of whipping up genocidal fervor against the Jews in the Middle East, pointing to his appearances on Al Jazeera in which, she said, he “calls for a new Holocaust, Allah willing, let us be the perpetrators to finish the job.”

Rosenthal spoke to Tablet Magazine at the State Department in Washington following a lecture on the Eichmann trial by the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, whose The Eichmann Trial was released by Nextbook Press March 15. The event was attended by nearly 200 State staffers, guests, and diplomats, including representatives from Turkey, Morocco, Lithuania, and Israel.

Rosenthal had much to say on the Middle East, from Saudi textbooks (“They’re still teaching children that Jews and Christians are children of apes and pigs”) to Iranian human rights abuses. She also accused the United Nations of a “complete obsession with Israel.” However—as in November 2009, when she first took the State Department job—Rosenthal seemed most passionate about anti-Semitism in its historic breeding ground and the site of its greatest crime: Europe. “I have been amazed—almost paralyzed—by the degree to which I hear anti-Semitic statements like blood libel in Spain, or blood libel morphing—instead of Jews killing Christian children to use their blood for baking matzoh, Jews kidnapping children to steal their organs—in Ukraine, or Sweden,” she said.

As an example both of the prevalence of extreme views on Israel in Europe and how her office addresses them, Rosenthal talked at length about Spain—once, she noted, a site of fruitful co-existence that included Jews. “Our ambassador to Spain, Alan Solomont—a great guy, a proud and activist Jew—said to me, ‘I’m not concerned about rank-and-file, I’m not concerned about graffiti, I’m concerned about the elite—the editorial writers and the public artists, and the insensitivity they have,’ ” she said.

Rosenthal is only the second special envoy on anti-Semitism—the post was created in 2004—and so is still in a position to shape the job. During a recent trip to Spain, Rosenthal and Solomont organized several roundtables, including one that brought together Jewish leaders and editors of major news outlets. “For the first time, they talked to each other,” she remembered, sounding optimistic. “While I do not believe that, for instance, El País will change its editorial view of Israel and the wrongs they believe Israel is doing to Palestinians, do I think they’ll have more sensitivity in their cartoons and in some of the language they use? Absolutely,” she said.

Rosenthal is a vivacious woman who seemed most at home hugging and glad-handing her guests; she wore a flowing tunic that happily contrasted with the trim gray suits that clung to several official-looking men sitting in the front row. But Rosenthal turned bulldog-serious when discussing European anti-Semitism in the emptied-out George C. Marshall Auditorium. She said she sees Holocaust denial in Europe as only one manifestation of a larger trend that disturbingly recalls a time the world should hardly wish to revisit. “One is Holocaust glorification,” she said. “Just last week, there was a parade in downtown Riga, in Latvia, for the Waffen SS—they proudly marched.” She linked such pro-Nazi and neo-Nazi movements to the rise of more mainstream anti-immigrant politics throughout Europe. “I think that the rise of the neo-Nazi parties that we’re seeing throughout Europe, and frankly the hatred of the other, the anti-immigrant stuff that is happening throughout Europe, should catch our attention, and does,” she said. “Because, one, whenever there is hatred of the other, it is not good for the Jews; and secondly, the fact that we have political parties running on hatred, and winning, and gaining seats in parliaments, is something extremely disturbing—it can be Hungary, it can be the Netherlands, it’s out there.”

Rosenthal’s office condemns anti-Semitism every chance it gets, she said, and recorded some of the most worrisome instances in a human rights report released last week. She praised the Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for raising the profile of Rosenthal’s position by moving the anti-Semitism office from a satellite building to State headquarters and integrating its findings into the department’s annual human rights report. “I’m an activist, not a career diplomat,” she said. “They brought in somebody who has a lot of experience dealing with the Jewish community and organizing advocacy, and I think that’s a statement.”

Though careful to preserve substantial space to question Israel, Rosenthal seemed to define criticism of specific Israeli policies that meets, and leads to, anti-Zionism as unacceptable. “To come to the conclusion that because Israel is doing X, Y, and Z, therefore it shouldn’t exist—I know of no other country on the globe, and we’ve got human rights abusers like you couldn’t believe, from Burma to Sri Lanka to Vietnam to China, and it goes on, where the conclusion is the country shouldn’t exist,” she said. “[Israel is] the only country where that is the policy of some governments and certainly the rhetoric of more. And that’s the ultimate delegitimization.” Rosenthal estimated that she spends about a third of her time on Israel-related issues.

Which is not to say her office polices all criticism of the Jewish state. “Israel is an imperfect country—I don’t know of a perfect country,” she noted. “When rabbis told the Israelis not to rent their apartments to Muslims, we condemned it.” And she was very careful to note that “criticism of the state of Israel, it does not make someone an anti-Semite.”

A Knesset committee recently held hearings into whether certain groups, most prominently J Street, the Washington-based lobby, are sufficiently pro-Israel. Rosenthal, a former J Street board member, provoked controversy within her first two months in her State Department job when she chided Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren for his criticism of the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” organization, which has a knack for igniting arguments and instinctively attracting Jews to a pro or con position. (Oren later apologized.) When asked about the group, Rosenthal bridled—mainly, one sensed, because she considers the topic inside baseball, and minor league at that (she had, after all, been discussing Holocaust denial and Sheikh al-Qaradawi). But she stood her ground. “We have diverse groups in this country, I think that’s what makes us strong,” she said. “And an organization that is pro-Israel and pro-peace should be welcomed by all tables.”

Israel, anyway, was an obvious subject. Introducing Lipstadt Monday, Rosenthal talked of watching the historic event on television as a 10-year-old girl with her father, a German-born survivor of Buchenwald. “I can almost smell his cigar smoke,” she’d reminisced in that introduction. Later, she argued, “I don’t appreciate dueling victimhood and dueling atrocities—it’s not helpful. But never before and never since the Holocaust have we seen a government use its creative and high-educated assets to build efficient killing factories.”

“The Holocaust has to continually represent the possible,” she added.

• Residents of Ghajar, the disputed town on the Israel-Lebanon border, want the IDF, which is set to vacate, to stay. [Haaretz]

• Breaking: Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America likes to second-guess the behavior of teenage Jewish boys during the Holocaust. [JustASC]

• An interesting quote from Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy, on the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. [Goldblog]

• The fall-out from Wire creator David Simon’s speech at the General Assembly, in which he complained that Jewish institutions are not doing enough to halt the “Holocaust in slow motion” in black urban communities, has been mostly (and predictably) critical. [NY Jewish Week]

• “I’m going to Graceland”? Paul Simon to release an album of Christmas jingles. [Jewcy]

And now, an ostrich and a baby giraffe playing tag.

According to Efraim Zuroff, the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s “chief Nazi-hunter” (!!!), Rosenthal praised Lithuania during a visit to the capital city of Vilnius last week for having “taken very proactive steps in dealing with anti-Semitism.” However, she reportedly did not speak about rising neo-Nazism in the Baltic republic, nor the state’s all-but-official doctrine of viewing the two occupations of itself as morally equivalent while glossing over the experience of Lithuanian Jews.

“What better occasion than Rosenthal’s visit to Vilnius,” Zuroff asks,

to finally make clear that there should be no tolerance for false historical symmetries between Nazism and communism, and that the time had come for Vilnius to teach the truth and internalize its lessons.

Instead of donating funds to a government which is the chief culprit in a campaign of disinformation, the Americans should be demanding that pupils in Lithuanian schools finally be taught the whole truth about their history during World War II, as difficult and as painful as that may be.

No Tolerance for False History [JPost]
The Crime of Surviving [Tablet Magazine]

“The political situation inside Israel is stable,” declared Solow, who spoke comfortably in his pronounced Chicago accent for about 15 minutes, from scribbled notes. “There is a better relationship between Obama and Netanyahu—it’s improved from the early days of both the Obama and the Netanyahu Administrations. What we’re seeing is the benefit of the passage of time.” As for Biden, with whom he had met the week before in Washington, Solow added, “I’m not surprised his visit to Israel has been a positive one.”

By the time Solow got back to his office, on the 19th floor of a tower up the street from City Hall, his blue-jacketed BlackBerry was buzzing with news to the contrary, provoking a cluck of exasperation. The vice president had just released a harshly worded statement: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said. “The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”

“The screw-up,” as it came to be known—in polite company, at least—threatened to undo a year’s worth of political work by Solow to bring the Obama team closer to the Israelis. Biden was the highest-ranking of the American officials who have traveled to Jerusalem this year in hopes of jump-starting the peace process; the incident virtually guaranteed that Obama would not soon follow. In the short term, it gave the Administration—not to mention the Palestinians—grounds to argue that the Israelis were being either childish, or politically unreliable, or both, in advance of the newly agreed upon “proximity talks,” a modern variant of shuttle diplomacy.

It might have remained one in a series of passing diplomatic contretemps between the Americans and the Israelis—except that, on Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu to deliver a further 45-minute scolding. On Sunday, White House senior adviser David Axelrod went on ABC’s This Week and said he thought the announcement had been calculated to undermine progress toward peace talks. People who had lived through the 1991 fight with the elder President Bush over loan guarantees to Israel started making the analogy. Although both Obama and Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren have since deflected talk of a “crisis,” the situation was widely seen as the thorniest interaction between the two allies in decades.

It was, as it happens, just the kind of incident the Conference specializes in addressing. The organization was established in 1954, at the request of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, whose office had been inundated with calls from various Jewish groups purporting to speak in the best interests of the fledgling Israeli state. The idea was that the Conference would act as a forum where the consensus view of American Jewish groups on issues relating to Israel could be worked out internally and then presented to the Administration; over time, it also came to act as an extra-diplomatic conduit between the American and the Israeli governments. It presently represents the spectrum of the American Jewish establishment “from A to Z”—a pun insiders like to wheel out in which “A” is the left-leaning Americans for Peace Now and “Z” is the firmly right-wing Zionist Organization of America. But its alphabet doesn’t include the new progressive lobbying group J Street—which drew ire from some Conference members by rushing to side with the Administration in issuing a stern condemnation.

The 52 members of the Conference—some of whom had been aggressively, though privately, telegraphing their displeasure to Jerusalem all week for failing to prevent the situation in the first place—quickly sprang into action, now firmly on the side of defending Israel from diplomatic overreaction by the Obama team. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee—which opens its annual conference this weekend, and whose incoming president, Lee Rosenberg, is a personal friend of Solow’s who was also deeply involved in the Obama campaign—issued a statement criticizing the Administration for airing the dispute in public and reminding the White House that Biden had, after all, just reaffirmed that there was “no space” between the two countries on security. The American Jewish Committee, which engages in foreign affairs around the world, noted acidly that “it is not beneficial to pummel Israel with language that has rarely been used in U.S. foreign policy.”

As the nominal head of American Jewry, Solow found himself in the position of being responsible, on behalf of his members, for figuring out how and when to openly criticize the decisions of a president he sincerely believes has the best interests of Israel, and of Jews, at heart—and the apparently calculated strategy of Administration members to whom he is personally very close. During the campaign, Solow went on tandem road-shows with Dennis Ross, the National Security Council adviser who handles Iran policy; he is also close to Daniel Shapiro, the NSC’s Middle East expert. George Mitchell, Obama’s special envoy for peace talks, helped recruit Solow last year from the Chicago law firm where he worked for 25 years into the international powerhouse DLA Piper, where Mitchell was chairman of the board before joining the Administration.

On Tuesday, after three days of almost constant internal negotiations over what to say, Solow released a statement on behalf of the conference encouraging everyone to, essentially, get over it: “The interests of all concerned would best be served by a prompt commencement of the proximity talks that had been previously agreed to by all parties, and all parties should act in a manner that does not undercut such talks.” But the statement also criticized the Palestinian Authority for exploiting the spat and called attention to the Administration’s silence on the Fatah leadership’s decision to go ahead with the dedication of a square near Ramallah to a woman who led a 1978 bus hijacking that resulted in the deaths of 37 Israelis and an American photographer—a carefully calibrated effort to hit a sweet-spot of consensus by pointing out the responsibilities of many parties. “He banked on the fact that he could square Jeremiah Wright and AIPAC,” quipped David Twersky, the former editor of the New Jersey Jewish News. “That’s the nature of the dilemma.”

***

At 55, Solow is a generation younger than most of the other organization presidents he represents as Conference chair—a position that throughout its history has sometimes, and not entirely facetiously, been referred to as “King of the Jews.” Most of Solow’s putative subjects, of course, have no idea who he is, or what the Conference does. Indeed, Solow freely admits that, despite his elevation in status, he remains “this Jew no one’s ever heard of from Chicago.”

But they should, since, in many ways, it is often he who speaks for the Jews of America—though it takes a specific form. Like his former comrades who are now in the Administration, Solow has a constituency to which he is accountable: his colleagues on the Conference, who as a whole tend to be more conservative on Israel than most of the 78 percent of American Jews who supported Obama. That group includes the group’s longtime executive vice chair, Malcolm Hoenlein, with whom Solow says he’s developed a good working relationship, despite his being less conservative than Hoenlein. “The fair question is whether we are an effective team working on behalf of the major American Jewish organizations that we represent. I like to think that we are,” Solow said. Hoenlein returned the compliment: “He’s great—very unique and very articulate,” Hoenlein said. “His whole heart and his neshama [soul] are there.” The Conference rarely, if ever, takes votes or even straw polls on contentious issues; to do so would be to illuminate the fissures everyone knows are there. But the Conference can’t always look the other way; it exists in part to delineate the fault lines when ruptures do take place.

Some of his predecessors have been powerhouses in their own right: Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire publisher of U.S. News & World Report who recently floated running for New York’s Senate seat as a Republican, held the post a decade ago, as did cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder. Solow is neither old enough to retire, nor rich enough to stop working, but he is ambitious and canny enough to admit that his connections with the incoming Administration gave him an edge when he was approached about the Conference position in late 2008, during the transition period after Obama’s election. “My capacity to lead was not based on my relationship with the Administration, though that relationship was no secret,” Solow said when we met in Washington late one evening earlier this month.

Solow is universally praised as a quick study and a talented leader; as a bankruptcy attorney, he is practiced at finding common ground among people who sometimes bitterly disagree. He says he didn’t angle for the Conference appointment; in fact, it was only a fluke that he was even eligible. In 2005, he made a play for the chair of board of Chicago’s Jewish federation, one of the largest and most Israel-focused in the country. He didn’t get the job, but at the same time he was offered the presidency of the JCC Association, a group that represents Jewish community centers around the country but that is not one of the powerhouse political organizations that typically supplies chairmen to the Conference. “If I’d gotten the Federation job, everything would have turned out differently,” Solow told me. “I couldn’t have worked for the Obama campaign”—it would have been considered too partisan—“and I wouldn’t have been eligible for the Conference. So, who knew, right?”

We were sitting in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental—a plush five-star hotel on the relatively out-of-the-way south side of the Mall that Solow began patronizing after paying Netanyahu a visit there in November, following the prime minister’s last terse summit with Obama at the White House. Solow, a meaty guy who wears angular gunmetal-rimmed glasses and keeps his graying curls brushed back, settled deep into a red-upholstered wing chair, wearing a pin-stripe suit with a French-cuffed shirt fastened with large silver links. He ordered a Coke and periodically leaned forward to stab at a tiny plate of olives with a knotted green bamboo toothpick as he talked over the din of a Chinese New Year celebration from the main bar area.

He was in the capital to attend a briefing with Biden in preparation for the upcoming trip to Israel, at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House. He was unsure about how long the vice president would spend with the group, which was to include representatives not just from the Conference but former Florida congressman Robert Wexler, heavyweight Democratic donors like entertainment mogul Haim Saban, and personal friends like Michael Adler, a former chair of the National Jewish Democratic Council. “They may want to test their message on us, because they know this trip will get heavy coverage,” Solow said. In his 15 months on the job, he said, he’s perfected his grueling travel routine: fly out from Chicago after work the night before, get up, stop into the DLA Piper office to get some work done, and then head to whatever meetings are scheduled in Washington, where he goes about once a month, or New York, where he visits every other week or so. “I get back home to Chicago before I’d usually go to bed, so it’s just like a long commute,” he said, laying it out like George Clooney in Up in the Air.

Solow is only the second chair from Chicago and one of only a handful not to come from New York, where most of the national Jewish organizations are headquartered. The other Chicagoan was Philip Klutznick, a developer who, as the president of B’nai B’rith, was the founding chairman of the Conference; his son, Jim Klutznick, said his father knew Truman from his days working for the Federal Housing Administration in Washington during the Depression and was also close to Abba Eban, the Israeli ambassador, who was deeply involved in bringing the group to life. As it happens, Solow grew up in Park Forest, a development in Chicago’s southern suburbs built by Klutznick. “I learned to play basketball on their driveway,” Solow told me. “They had a very large house with a very large driveway and a garage that was not attached, unlike most of the garages in the neighborhood, so you could go play basketball and no one would know.”

But Klutznick never enjoyed the close relationship with the president that Eddie Jacobson did. Jacobson was the Jewish businessman who, after befriending Truman in basic training at Fort Sill during World War I, later enjoyed open access to the Oval Office and helped convince Truman to welcome Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, to the White House and to recognize Israel in 1948. (Indeed, it may have been the absence of a Jacobson figure in the Eisenhower Administration that necessitated the founding of the Conference in the first place.)

Solow is also no Eddie Jacobson. He first heard of Obama in the early 1990s, when the future president took over the Law Review at Harvard Law School, Solow’s alma mater. “He was the first person of color to edit the Law Review, and that was a big story for everyone who went there,” Solow explained. “So, I knew when he moved back to Chicago.” But Solow’s wife, Andrea, was the first of the two to meet the Obama family. She worked in the admissions office of the University of Chicago Laboratory School, where Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s older brother, sent his children. By the time the Obamas turned up with Malia and Sasha, “they were really just Craig’s sister and brother-in-law, not the state senator,” Solow explained. (Andrea Solow declined to be interviewed for this article.)

As a young lawyer, Solow decided to get involved in Chicago’s Jewish affairs—in part, he said, to satisfy his wife, an ardent Zionist who had planned on making aliyah until she met him. “But I was always a joiner,” he admits. One of his earliest mentors, he said, was Lee Rosenberg’s father, Lester, a pillar of the city’s Federation community. Solow, who served on the Jewish Council on Youth Services and in the city’s JCC, eventually worked his way back into politics via the Government Affairs committee at Federation—but the real link was through his older son, David, a political junkie who interned, as a college student, for the first campaign of Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. In 2001, David Solow went to work for Lisa Madigan, the scion of a promient Illinois political family who was running for state attorney general; her seatmate in the Illinois state senate was Barack Obama. “My son came to me and said, ‘Dad, Barack Obama is thinking of running for the U.S. Senate, and I know he’s not registering in the polls, but you should go sit down with him,’ ” Solow recalled.

In early 2003, they met for an hourlong discussion about domestic and foreign policy, particularly about Israel, which was in the midst of the Second Intifada, or, as Solow refers to it, using the term popular in the Israeli press, the matzav, Hebrew for situation; Solow said he asked Obama to consider what it would be like to wonder whether his own girls would make it back home from school safely each day. “I said, ‘Parents in Israel don’t have that kind of luxury, and if this is what it takes to make parents in Israel feel safe, so be it,’ and he got that,” Solow recalled. Solow said he didn’t have a messianic moment with Obama, the way others describe meeting him and knowing he would one day be the nation’s first black president; he just liked the guy and thought he was serious about running a real campaign. “I’m a person who is center-left, and so was he,” Solow said. They were on opposite sides of the Iraq war—Solow supported the American invasion—but he liked the fact that Obama could sit and have a reasonable discussion. “I said, ‘You’ve thought this through, and that’s important,’ ” Solow explained. “ ‘I can support you, because of the fact that we could not see eye-to-eye on some things and still have a dialogue on other subjects.’ ”

During the campaigns, Solow began writing memos to Obama explaining why he felt so strongly about Israel and Zionism. “I believe that without a strong Israel, the Diaspora will fade away,” explained Solow, who grew up in a Reform household (“but a serious one,” he added). His father, he said, stopped at services on his way home from his Dodge dealership every Friday. As an adult, Solow joined a Conservative synagogue but is now a member of an independent, traditional-egalitarian synagogue in Highland Park called Aitz Hayim, which he joined in 2001 after meeting members through a Wexner Foundation heritage seminar—a program devoted to preparing participants for participation in public life. The synagogue, he said, offered the sense of joy and community he experienced in Israel but felt was too often missing in America.

It was through his work on Obama’s campaigns—first the 2005 Senate campaign and then the presidential run—that Solow first intersected with members of Chicago’s powerful Jewish Democratic circles, many of whom, like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, are not actively involved in the relatively insular politics of the city’s Jewish Federation. Penny Pritzker, who chaired Obama’s finance committee, recalled in an e-mail message that she first met Solow in 2006, at the beginning of the presidential campaign. “He attended every meeting and event,” Pritzker, who chairs TransUnion, the credit rating company, wrote.

Solow first traveled with Obama in Israel on a visit the then-senator made in January 2006, after a congressional trip to Iraq, but he really lights up talking about his time campaigning domestically, remembering every time the candidate cast his special light on him, whether at the Super Tuesday returns party or on Election Night. “We were in Grant Park, and there were these three tents, one for family, one for donors, and one for campaign staff,” recalled Solow, who stayed, at his son’s encouragement, until well after the victory speech was over. “Well, finally Obama comes back, and he’s dog tired, but there’s a rope line, and I’m a few people back, and I’m thinking, ‘He’s not going to see me.’ I’m five-nine, not the tallest guy. But I raised my hand”—Solow lifted his hands in a thumbs-up—“and he saw me, and shouted, ‘Hey, Alan, how am I doing tonight?’ I thought, ‘This is great—this is the president of the United States talking to me!’ ”

Solow has an enormous amount of respect for offices. When Obama finally got to the White House—where Solow has only visited him privately a handful of times, including before the president’s July meeting with Jewish community leaders—the effect was the same. “I’m sitting in the Oval Office, and there’s the picture Dolly Madison saved from the War of 1812, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe I’m talking to the president of the United States, but, well, there’s Reggie Love, and I can’t believe he’s the guy who says the president’s ready to see me,’ ” Solow recounted. The same is true when he speaks of Israeli officials; when he traveled to Israel during the Gaza war, shortly before assuming his role as Conference chair, he said he went back to his hotel room every night and sent his wife e-mails saying, “Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but we just went to the Defense Ministry and Ehud Barak gave us an hour, during a war!” “It’s just an out-of-body experience,” Solow said. “I’m thinking, how am I going to convey this to my wife and kids? Did this just happen to me?”

In Washington and in Jerusalem, Solow is widely seen as one of Obama’s confidantes. Jan Schakowsky, the Illinois congresswoman, described the relationship in glowing terms, telling me, “It’s not just a professional relationship, it’s a personal relationship”—though she acknowledged that Solow is not part of the tight group of friends who visit the Obamas on weekends. Solow, who is personally close with members of Obama’s inner circle, particularly Dennis Ross and Daniel Shapiro, is careful not to overplay his closeness to the president. “Obama has a wide circle of acquaintances, and not a wide circle of friends,” Solow said. “So, there’s the inner circle—the Nesbitts, the Whitakers, Valerie Jarrett—and then there’s the outer circle. How close is my relationship? When I wanted to speak to him during the campaign, I could. But I didn’t want to abuse it. I didn’t want to waste his time.”

Nonetheless, when he was approached about the Conference job in November 2008, the first thing Solow did was e-mail the president-elect. “I don’t have his e-mail now, but I had it then,” Solow noted. He had been encouraged by several people to apply for Administration posts but hadn’t been urged to hope for anything specific. The Conference post—which typically lasts for two consecutive one-year terms—was the perfect way to marry his political work with his Jewish involvement. Plus, he added, “I’m a competitive person, and it’s a little like the Academy Awards. You want to say it’s an honor just to be nominated, but you know, they ask you for a résumé and the supporting material, and by the time they interviewed me, I really wanted it.”

He wrote Obama that he was being considered for the job, which would require him to be a spokesman for the American Jewish community to the Administration—a reversal of his role in the campaign as a spokesman for candidate Obama to the Jewish electorate. “So, I said, ‘If you’re uncomfortable with that, I won’t take the job,’ ” Solow explained. “The Conference needs access to the White House, and I didn’t want the Conference to lose access because of a circumstance when I’d been critical of the White House, because they expected some kind of loyalty.” And, he added, the reverse was also true. “The other part of it is that I wanted the president, and the other members of the Administration, to understand that my loyalty would be to the Conference,” Solow said. “I didn’t want them to think they’d get a pass from the Conference.”

Ten days went by, and then Solow’s son David called to say he’d seen Obama at a thank-you event for campaign workers, and the president-elect had told him to relay a simple message to his father: Go for it. A week or two later, Obama himself called to give his blessing. “I’m sitting in my office, and my BlackBerry starts buzzing, and it took me a minute to realize it was a phone call and not e-mail, and I missed this call,” Solow said. “So, I had this voicemail—‘Hi, Alan! It’s Barack!’ And of course I played it for everyone in the office.”

***

At the Mandarin, Solow stayed up until after 1 a.m. talking; he doesn’t sleep much, he said. The next morning, I got an e-mail from him at 6:45 elaborating on some of the points he’d made the night before. “So much for sleep!” he added. That afternoon, after stopping into his law office, he went over to the Eisenhower building, where Biden spent an hour listening to the 20 invitees present their top priorities for his trip.

Solow did not speak to Biden while the vice president was in Israel, or after he returned. In Chicago, before the “screw-up” had metastasized into a genuine incident, he told me he had not been in touch with either Ross or Shapiro; he acknowledged that he reaches out to them more than they reach out to him. He would not specify who in the Administration he’d spoken with in the days since but said he has not talked to either the president, who has publicly kept aloof from the diplomatic dust-up, or to George Mitchell, who on Tuesday decided to postpone his next trip to the Middle East. “Look, my impression, having known Barack Obama for a long time, is that is that he solicits opinions from a lot of people. He likes to hear ideas, and I think he’s pretty good at sorting them out,” Solow told me after that March 9 luncheon in his Chicago office, where he sat facing me in an armchair beneath a Leroy Neiman portrait of Lincoln. “And I personally don’t lose sleep over the fact that his Administration solicits opinion from lots of different sources, and I do not worry about whether the door is open to the Conference. I know that when I have something important to communicate on behalf of the Conference that I will be able to communicate it to the appropriate person and that it will be taken seriously. I have absolute 100 percent confidence in that.”

Behind his desk, Solow keeps a 6-inch-tall action figure of Obama standing next to a wooden tzedaka box. “An action figure we can believe in,” Solow explains, quoting the marketing line on the doll’s packaging. He says the current crisis has actually not been the most uncomfortable of his tenure. That distinction goes to his decision, in December, to publicly castigate Hannah Rosenthal, Obama’s special envoy on anti-Semitism and a personal friend of both Solow and his wife, who supported the Chicago Foundation for Women, the organization Rosenthal headed before joining the Administration. On a trip to Israel, Rosenthal—a former executive director of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, which is in the Conference—made comments to the Israeli press critical of Michael Oren for his own comments about J Street. “As an official of the United States government, it is inappropriate for the anti-Semitism envoy to be expressing her personal views on the positions Ambassador Oren has taken as well as on the subject of who needs to be heard from in the Jewish community,” Solow said in a statement.

In his Chicago office, Solow told me that these kinds of difficult moments came with the job. “I wasn’t going to shy away from it because she was my friend,” Solow said. “So, that gave me a little heartburn—that was unpleasant.” But, he argued, his criticism was motivated by a desire to help the Administration. “I did not think her taking a position on that issue was helpful to her being successful,” he said. “I thought it was bad for her, and for the Jewish community, and for the Administration.”

That was a case where Solow was clearly speaking on his own behalf, and the situation did not require, as the aftermath of the housing announcement did, navigating the tangle of egos and agendas required to reach consensus within the Conference. When I asked, Solow refused to articulate what he, personally, thinks of how both the American and the Israeli governments have handled themselves. “I won’t tell you,” he said on the phone from Chicago earlier this week, just after the Conference statement was released. “It’s not useful for me to be evaluative of the Administration because the result is either that I would get defensive or that it would influence the positions I take at the Conference,” he went on. “And either of those is not useful.” When it came to the president, Solow said, his primary value to the Conference was less as a go-between than as a translator. “The way that I hear the president is the product of my experience with him—I am more of a student of how this president communicates than lots of other people,” Solow said. “What you don’t want is to have an argument that’s driven by a misunderstanding.”

In other words, this King of the Jews is simply doing what he knows best: being a negotiator. “Look, I’m a lawyer,” he said. “My job in life is to represent the positions of people other than myself and to be as persuasive and effective as I can at doing that.”

Last Friday—not long before the start of Shabbat, when Conference business typically winds down—news broke of Clinton’s angry phone call with Netanyahu. Solow found himself under pressure from the more conservative members of the Conference to look for a consensus in favor of getting the Administration to lay off. According to people who were on this week’s calls, some members pushed hard for a statement that would not only chide the Obama Administration for blowing the diplomatic snub out of proportion, but for choosing to come down so hard on the Netanyahu government on the issue of where Jews could and could not build in Jerusalem.

Solow told me he walked into the job knowing there would be flashpoints of disagreement and hasn’t been surprised he can’t predict them. “Look, I just thought they would be inevitable, because there are always some,” he told me. “It’s been no great surprise to me because I didn’t have any set of expectations except that I just knew that there would be moments there would be different points of view.” What isn’t clear is what happens if the differences of opinion on how to respond to these little tremors continues or if the tremors become an earthquake.

“I think our statement has been received,” Solow said, with characteristic lawyerly caution this week. “Whether it’s accepted will only be told over time.”

• A small group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis declared lox to be unkosher due to a certain parasite that salmon can host. Most rabbis disagree, though, so stick that on your bagel and eat it. [Grub Street]

• Prominent Palestinian lawyer Elias Khoury was moved by his son’s murder by a Palestinian terrorist to pay for the translation of top Israeli writer Amos Oz into Arabic. [NYT]

• Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy and a one-time J Street board member, said that anti-Semitism’s foes need more non-Jews on their side. [JTA]

• Eight Republican senators expressed worry over appointing a U.S. ambassador to Syria for the first time in five years. [Laura Rozen]

• Los Angeles Laker star, skilled defender, and crazy person Ron Artest had the word “Defense” dyed into his (dyed-yellow) hair in several languages, including Hebrew. [Deadspin]

Below, the making of the haircut:

Today, the department did the same with Rosenthal. “Special Envoy Rosenthal has the complete support of the department,” it asserted. “As a matter of longstanding policy the United States has supported a peaceful solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end the U.S. government encourages broad dialogue among responsible partners for peace.” Looks like Uncle Sam is getting its wish.

State Department Backs Its Anti-Semitism Envoy [JTA]

Earlier: Administration Rebukes Its Anti-Semitism Envoy
U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Tablet Magazine reached Rosenthal earlier today at home in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is busy packing up her furniture for the move to Washington, D.C., later this week. She declined to comment on the furor her comments provoked, except to say that she believes the original Haaretz headline—which said she “blasted” Oren—exaggerated what she actually said, which was that she thought it “most unfortunate” that Oren apparently thinks J Street’s dovish policy positions could put the lives of Israeli Jews at risk.

“The interview focused on what is and what isn’t anti-Semitism,” Rosenthal said. “I don’t think a reporter asking me about J Street is out of bounds, and I don’t think my answer was out of bounds.”

American Envoy Sparks Furor with Criticism of Oren [Haaretz]
U.S. Official Slammed for Criticizing Ambassador Oren [JPost]

Earlier: U.S. Anti-Semitism Envoy Attacks Ambassador Oren

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Tablet Magazine’s Allison Hoffman interviewed Rosenthal upon her accession to her current position last month. She had this to say about J Street:

Criticizing a certain policy in Israel or a certain policy in the United States regarding Israel does not make someone an anti-Semite. … I think J Street needs to be at the table, and I think other organizations representing many strategies all need to be at the table, because the status quo in the Middle East is totally unacceptable.

U.S. Official Blasts Israel Envoy’s ‘Unfortunate’ J Street Remarks [Haaretz]

Related: The Anti-Anti-Semite [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: Israeli Ambassador Scolds and Praises J Street

Last year, Rosenthal—who sits on the advisory board of J Street, the left-leaning Israel lobby—published a controversial op-ed in New York’s Jewish Week, timed to coincide with Israel’s 60th anniversary, calling on progressives to make themselves heard on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “Perhaps out of fear, perhaps out of timidity, we have failed to stand up to those who favor military solutions to political problems or oppose peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts in the name of promoting Israel’s best interests.” The piece drew criticism from Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman, who responded with an open letter to Rosenthal disputing the claim that conservative voices dominate the Israel debate; this week, the right-leaning Brooklyn-based Jewish Press sharply criticized Rosenthal’s appointment in an editorial, while conservative blogs took it a step further, tarring Rosenthal as anti-Israel.

Rosenthal spoke to Tablet Magazine about her plans for her new job and about her critics.

Your predecessor, Gregg Rickman, was very involved in winning visas for Yemeni Jews and was also very critical of the United Nations for its approach to Israel. What are your top priorities?

I don’t know what the top agenda item is going to be, but when I look at newspapers and listen to people around the world who I know, I’m very troubled to see increases in anti-Semitic acts and attitudes in Europe. As the child of a Holocaust survivor, I thought Europe would be further along in the tolerance agenda than they are. I hate to hear about boycotts; I hate to hear about graves and cemeteries being defaced; I hate to hear about speeches tinged with stereotypes of Jews. These are things we thought would fade into distant memory.

So there will be a reactive part of my job, and a proactive part. The proactive part has me as an ambassador or an educator to various cultures on tolerance, on human rights, and on making sure that they recognize the importance of combating anti-Semitism on a human-rights agenda. There will also be a reactive piece of it, where we hear a speech being done by someone, or a cemetery being harmed, or even a public policy that may be introduced, where we will probably need to intervene to say, also in an educating way, that this is a fundamental human-rights issue. And I think the fact that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton have put this appointment high on their list in the field of human rights shows that there’s a strong feeling that the public at large needs to be educated that combating anti-Semitism is a fundamental human-rights issue.

Does responding to criticism of Israel fall into your portfolio?

I don’t know the answer. It’s a very fuzzy line. I can’t answer your question because I don’t know yet how that will shake out, but it will certainly be involved. Middle East realities and politics and challenges will be part of this job but I really don’t know how much.

There is no question in my mind that some of the attacks in the media and in the public against Israel come from a place of anti-Semitism. That is the unfortunate reality of some of the bad statements and hurtful ones. But not all of them are. Criticizing a certain policy in Israel or a certain policy in the United States regarding Israel does not make someone an anti-Semite. It makes them, perhaps, a thoughtful analyst of what’s going on, recognizing we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve been doing them.

What about critics who accuse you, like they accuse J Street, of being anti-Israel because of your position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or on America’s relationship with Israel?

My entire adulthood has seen the same thing over and over and over. I love Israel. I have lived in Israel. I go back and visit every chance I can. I consider it part of my heart. And because I love it so much, I want to see it safe and secure and free and democratic and living safely, where children don’t have to learn where every bomb shelter is. That’s my vision of what the future is, and if we keep the current policies and the current strategies that will not happen.

I don’t think questioning any policy, foreign or domestic, makes somebody an anti-Semite or an anti-anything. It makes them someone who wants a thoughtful discussion. I think J Street needs to be at the table, and I think other organizations representing many strategies all need to be at the table, because the status quo in the Middle East is totally unacceptable. And the people who are doing name-calling, and apparently taking me on—I have made a point of not reading them. My sister said I would need a bodyguard. I said it’s just the blogosphere.

And Abe Foxman?

I understand that Abe Foxman wrote a public letter to me. The problem is that he did not send it to me. I just heard about it. But I have worked with Abe in the past and I consider Abe a friend of mine and I would be shocked if he thinks this is a bad appointment. He and I will have differences and he and I will agree on things. He and I will agree that the world needs to have more good people to stand up and fight injustice. He may look to certain groups of people to find good people to stand up next to him, and I may look in a different group, or a broader group, but mostly we agree.

Rosenthal Is Anti-Semitism Envoy Choice, Announcement Imminent [JTA]