Part ii

Friday August 13, 1999

Hillary has Jews in her family, but will it affect her campaign?

MATTHEW DORF

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

WASHINGTON -- "OY VEY!" the New York Post blared across its front page in 3-inch letters last week.

"Hillary's ALMOST Jewish."

An accompanying column carried the headline, "The First Shiksa wants to be a yenta? Oy!"

New York's supercharged Senate campaign took a distinctly Jewish turn last week when the Forward, a weekly Jewish newspaper, reported that Clinton has some Jews on her family tree. Her step-grandfather was Jewish and her mother's half-sister converted.

The Forward called Clinton's grandmother, Della Rosenberg, "the feisty wife of a Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrant" and predicted that the revelation would boost her Senate chances.

But even if Clinton were Jewish, her background would not influence Jewish voters, according to pollsters, analysts and politicians.

"Ethnicity has very little to do with how Jews vote," said John Zogby, president of Zogby International, a New York-based polling firm that has conducted many surveys of Jewish voters.

"Basically those who really viscerally dislike Hillary will add another notch in the column and ask, 'What's she trying to do?'" Zogby said.

And those who support her will ignore the issue, he said.

To be sure, Clinton has made courting Jewish voters a central focus of her campaign. One out of every eight voters in New York is Jewish, making them a key constituency in her campaign.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch tried to put the revelation into perspective.

"I think it's much ado about nothing," he said Sunday on ABC's "This Week" news show.

"I'm a proud member of the Jewish faith, and it would be wonderful if Hillary were Jewish. But she's not," Koch said.

According to the Forward, Clinton's maternal grandmother, Della Murray, divorced her husband in 1927 and remarried Max Rosenberg in 1933. Together they had a daughter, Adeline.

Like many activists from both parties, Koch said it "means nothing" that Clinton has Jewish relatives.

"Jews don't vote, normally, on the basis of ethnicity," Koch said.

While the impact of the story is not fully known, pollsters are watching the Jewish vote carefully. Zogby predicts that the winner of the Jewish vote will win the election.

A compilation of Zogby polls over the last eight months released this week shows New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani leading Clinton, 43.9 percent to 41.8 percent, among Jewish voters.

The sample of 678 Jewish voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent, has 14.3 percent undecided. Among all voters, Giuliani leads Clinton by 46.9 to 41.7 percent, Zogby said.

"Hillary is not doing as well among Jewish voters as a Democrat normally would do," Zogby said.

At the same time, Giuliani does better among Jewish voters than a Republican normally would, he said.

In 1996, Republican Party leaders supported the Senate bid of Dick Zimmer, a New Jersey Republican, in part because he is Jewish. But when the votes were counted, his opponent, Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), received almost 80 percent of the Jewish vote, according to exit polls conducted by Zogby for the New Jersey Jewish News. New Jersey's other senator, Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat who is Jewish, received less Jewish support than Torricelli did in his last election, polls showed.

In other recent races, Rep. Jon Fox, a Jewish Republican from suburban Philadelphia, received an estimated 25 percent of the Jewish vote in his losing 1998 battle for re-election against Rep. Joe Hoeffel (D-Pa.). And in New York, some 70 percent of Jewish voters supported Giuliani in his race against Ruth Messinger, a Jewish Democrat.

"Because someone married someone Jewish three decades ago is not particularly relevant," said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He added that the revelation is simply "a humorous one-day anecdotal story."

Max Rosenberg

FORWARD : News

www.forward.com/BACK/1999/99.0 - [Cached]

Published on: 9/10/2000 Last Visited: 9/10/2000

Asked about Max Rosenberg, a spokesman for Mrs. Clinton's Senate exploratory committee, Howard Wolfson, said the first lady has very fond memories of him.

...

Enter Max Rosenberg. Born in 1901 in Russia, the son of Joseph and Mollie, by 1933 Max Rosenberg had made his way to Chicago, where he married Della Murray. A city court judge performed the ceremony, according to a copy of the marriage license. His mother, Mollie, was a member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Sisterhood of Agudas Achim North Shore congregation, according to a death notice published in The Chicago Tribune. Mollie was a subscriber to the Yiddish Forward, according to court records of her estate. (A Chicago attorney and genealogist, Charles Bernstein, assisted the Forward with the documentary research for this article.).

The backdrop of Max and Della Rosenberg's life puts some aspects of the first lady's relationship with Jews into a new light. Some of her oldest and closest friends and associates include Jewish women -- Sara Ehrman, Ann Lewis, Patty Kenner.

Hillary Clinton's Jewish Family Ties Unearthed

South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com

Jews back Clinton in super way

Staff and wire reports

March 27, 2008

TALLAHASSEE WASHINGTON

A disproportionate share of the Democratic super delegates — the people who may ultimately decide who gets the party's presidential campaign — are Jewish. And, a new survey shows, many are supporting Hillary Clinton.

More than 70 of the 800 super delegates are Jewish.
At this point, 36 have declared their support for Clinton. That includes U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, a national co-chairwoman of the Clinton campaign.
Another 12 are supporting Barack Obama. That includes U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Delray Beach, Florida co-chairman for Obama.
And 26 are undeclared.
Undeclared Jewish super delegates from South Florida are U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton; Broward Democratic Chairman Mitch Ceasar; and Diane Glasser of Tamarac, vice chairwoman of the state Democratic Party.
The information comes from a survey and analysis conducted by the Forward, the influential and well-known Jewish newspaper.
The Forward concluded that "Jewish insiders could play an outsized role in anointing a nominee" if the nomination ends up being determined by super delegates. — Anthony Man

Clinton-Madonna-Pellicano-Kabbalah: Africa Connection

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

By Roger Friedman

Fox News

A

Can you connect these dots? Madonna-Bill Clinton-Kabbalah-Anthony Pellicano and ... Africa?

Madonna’s disastrous public-relations effort in the small African country of Malawi only gets worse. I can tell you that she has started a new charitable foundation, Raising Malawi, to help orphans in that country, but that the whole thing is a front for the Kabbalah Centre in Hollywood.

To compound matters, Clinton's own foundation is right there on Madge's new Web site as her No. 1 supporter. The Clinton Foundation is the only one of Raising Malawi’s listed partners to have a usable link on the Web site. But the chief individual benefactress is the second wife of a Hollywood billionaire who hired jailed private detective Pellicano to spy on his first wife.

Don’t the people of Malawi have enough trouble?

The charity, Raising Malawi, is designed to spread the word of Philip Berg’s Kabbalah Centre, his own version of Kabbalah beliefs and mysticism, through Malawi’s orphaned children.

Indeed, the Web site for Raising Malawi, the new charity, tells the whole story. The entire organization is run by the Bergs as a kind of missionary program for Africa, with Madonna as the leading proselytizer.

Madonna is already suffering worldwide criticism this week for taking a child away from its father and “adopting” it against Malawi law. Some say she’s “bought” a 1-year-old boy named David, and Tuesday there was news that she whisked the child out of Malawi under the cloak of secrecy. There is fresh news Wednesday that now Madonna may even want a Malawian girl to add to her collection.

But now it seems that the charity she’s set up in Malawi is just the infamous Kabbalah Centre of Hollywood under a different name. The listed founders of Raising Malawi are Michael and Monica Berg. He is described as the son of Philip Berg, founder of the Kabbalah Centre.

“In addition to physical support,” his bio reads, “Michael is committed to providing psychosocial relief through the Spirituality for Kids curriculum.” The latter organization is essentially Kabbalah for children, a group that Madonna endorses. The proceeds from her children’s books went to that branch of Berg’s organization.

Raising Malawi is run entirely by Spirituality for Kids, or Kabbalah, according to the site. Other leaders including SK’s Director of Development Philippe van den Bossche, SK’s Director of Research and Global Training Dr. Heath Grant,and “philanthropist” Hedi Gores, wife of Beverly Hills “barely a billionaire” leveraged-buyout king Alec Gores, who runs Gores Technology Group. (continued)

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