by NJJN Staff

March 27, 2008

For supporters of Barack Obama in New Jersey’s Jewish community, his relationship with his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, did nothing to shake their faith in the Illinois senator’s fitness to be president.

“The pastor is an embarrassment but he doesn’t reflect Obama’s thinking,” said Judy May, who lives in Lebanon Borough in Hunterdon County. “Obama doesn’t confuse his politics and his religion. I do accept his explanation for the pastor. We should drop it. It is just not essential to who this man Obama is.”

And yet for those who are troubled that Obama remains a member of the church that Wright formerly headed, the senator’s March 18 remarks on their relationship did nothing to shake their conviction that the Obama candidacy is a red flag.

Obama “ought to have made a much stronger statement about his political intentions regarding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright,” said Rabbi Azriel Fellner of Livingston, the former religious leader at Temple Beth Shalom. He voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the NJ primary.

That Obama did not do enough to repudiate Wright “was a failure of nerve,” said Fellner, “and the failure of nerve may very well be because he is afraid of affecting his relationship with the black community.”

Obama’s March 18 speech on race was in large part a bid to quell growing unease, in the Jewish community and beyond, about his relationship with a black preacher known for his strident rhetoric on race.

In doing so, Obama called Wright’s views on America — including its relationship with Israel — fundamentally “distorted.”

For Jewish voters like May, the speech confirmed their view of Obama as a candidate who stands behind his blemish-free voting record on Israel.

“I have no concerns at all about Obama’s commitment to Israel or the Jewish people,” said May, a past president of the one-time Morris Sussex Jewish Federation, which later merged with what became United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ. “He sees that what the Jews did in Israel mirrored what he did in his own life about not being a victim.”

May is critical of Wright but considers the focus on the pastor and his long-time congregant a distraction in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“We have 4,000 dead Americans in Iraq,” she said. “The bottom is falling out of our economy. And we have people worrying about an old minister! Come on!”

Like Fellner, West Orange attorney Roger Jacobs feels Obama has scarcely allayed concerns about his history with Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

“The difficult part for me is if Obama was at the church for 20 years and was aware of this, he did nothing to dissociate himself from the message at any time during that time,” said Jacobs, who is active in Democratic politics. “I have questions about his judgment.”

As for Obama’s support of Israel and the Jewish community, Jacobs said his “concerns are that he has surrounded himself with advisors who are questionable on the subject of Israel’s security.”

Jacobs described himself as a “partisan Democrat.” His concerns about the presumptive Republic candidate, Sen. John McCain, Jacobs said, have to do with what would happen to the Supreme Court and the war in Iraq. “It would be unlikely at this point to see myself supporting him, but I do have significant reservations about Sen. Obama.”

‘Completely disingenuous’

Susan Knopf of Warren shares those reservations. A Clinton supporter, she also questioned Obama’s 20-year relationship with Wright.

“This is simply completely disingenuous,” she wrote in an e-mail to NJJN. “The minister’s polarizing sermons are his stock in trade and sold to the public. Trinity United Church of Christ is a 10,000-member mega-church. I think we all have a good idea why Mr. Obama belongs there. I would have had more respect for the man had he just said membership in this church is politically expedient. It makes his career in politics possible.”

She also took issue with the church’s mission statement, which describes its “non-negotiable commitment to Africa.”

“Could a Jew be elected who belonged to a congregation with a non-negotiable commitment to Israel?” Knopf asked. “Could a Catholic be elected with a non-negotiable commitment to the Vatican? Could we embrace a white candidate who belonged to a church that advocated white theology that claimed it only advocated white pride? What if the minister was given to occasional tirades claiming that blacks and Latinos were to blame for much of our problems?”

Still, some in the community praised Obama for opening a dialogue on race and said his relationship with his pastor needs to be understood in that context.

“I think there has been a bit of overreaction toward Pastor Wright,” said Eric Freedman, the president of Ahavas Sholom, Newark’s last functioning synagogue. “As the pastor of an urban black church, there are times when you are going to come off as somewhat militant in your discourse when something is taken out of context. I think [that] Obama looked it squarely in the eye without skittering around the issue speaks to his good judgment. He disconnected Wright from his crew.”

Freedman’s Conservative synagogue sits between African-American and Latino Pentecostal churches in downtown Newark. He said he and many others in his congregation support Obama.

“My sense of him is that he has good judgment. As a Democrat, I would hope that he has strong support for Israel,” he said.

Rabbi Douglas Sagal of Temple Emanu-El in Westfield said he used to live near Obama’s church in Chicago. Sagal described the South Side community as “very diverse, with a high tolerance of sometimes extreme political statements. Statements like those by Wright that have caused so much dismay in the wider public would be accepted as the norm there.”

Sagal believes Obama “should be judged by his record, not his church, and he has never shown himself to be either anti-Jewish or anti-Israel.

“I don’t believe for a moment that he is racist,” the rabbi added.

Sagal said his congregation remains widely divided in their opinions of Obama and his former minister.

“I think we reflect the general population,” he said.

Others accepted Obama’s statement that he couldn’t disown a man who “has been like family to me.”

“Within a community and a family, there are people we love who make us cringe,” said Rabbi Laurence Groffman of the Reform Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove. At the same time, Obama “was clearly trying to distance himself” from Wright, Groffman said.

As for other issues, “I think Obama would be supportive of Israel, and his record, as far as I can tell, has been pro-Israel,” added the rabbi.

Although Fellner said Obama did not go far enough in repudiating Wright or explaining their relationship, he admitted to mixed feelings about Obama’s speech.

“I thought it was powerful. It was articulate. It was intelligent,” Fellner said. “It was a rare political moment when a politician spoke to me as though I were an adult. I thought he was trying to deal with very real issues — not just white racism but also black racism.”

NJJN staff writers Elaine Durbach, Johanna Ginsberg, and Robert Wiener contributed to this article.

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