WASHINGTON -- Presidential historians and convention observers believe this year’s Democratic convention will be the first time that a rabbi gives an invocation before the presidential nominee’s acceptance speech since the advent of modern American political conventions nearly a century ago.

WASHINGTON -- At a ceremony Thursday remembering millions of Jews [allegedly] slaughtered in World War II, President Barack Obama reaffirmed the strong US bond with Israel and vowed to confront Holocaust deniers.

"There are those who insist the Holocaust never happened, who perpetrate every form of intolerance -- racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, sexism and more," Obama told a gathering in the Capitol Rotunda organized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

"We have an opportunity and an obligation to confront these scourges," Obama said.

[Thanks to DBS at The French Connection for this one]

CHICAGO -- An Israeli-born boutique owner known for putting together edgy outfits in unexpected ways is quietly dressing one of the most famous women in the world, first lady Michelle Obama.

One month into the Obama presidency, Jewish communal leaders seeking high-level access appear to have come crashing through an open door.

The Independent (UK)
January 20, 2009

As the new U.S. administration prepares to take office amid grave financial and international crises, it may seem counterintuitive to argue that the very unsettled nature of the international system generates a unique opportunity for creative diplomacy.

That opportunity involves a seeming contradiction. On one level, the financial collapse represents a major blow to the standing of the United States. While American political judgments have often proved controversial, the American prescription for a world financial order has generally been unchallenged. Now disillusionment with the United States' management of it is widespread.

Our greatest founding father and first president, George Washington, probably wouldn’t be ready to celebrate his birthday on Feb. 22 if he were alive today. Having led the 13 colonies to independence from the British Empire in 1783, following the course of a difficult eight-year struggle by those freedom-loving American colonists who followed him, Washington (who lived from 1732 to 1799) would most assuredly be appalled to see that the liberties achieved from the American Revolution are now being flagrantly defied by a number of figures who populate the upper ranks of the administration of Barack Obama.

Six former Rhodes Scholars (educated at Oxford University in Britain) and four others associated with the London School of Economics are serving in key posts in the Obama administration. That’s not good.

CAIRO -- With the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip now in its second week -- and as the Palestinian death toll approaches 600 -- U.S. president-elect Barack Obama has continued to remain silent. Obama's reticence, say Egyptian commentators, indicates that he will be no more even-handed on the issue of Palestine than preceding U.S. administrations.

"Obama's silence shows he is just as biased towards Israel as outgoing U.S. President George Bush," Ibrahim Mansour, political analyst and managing editor-in-chief of independent daily Al-Dustour told IPS. "Like Bush, Obama's only role in the region will be to implement Israeli directives."

CHICAGO -- On a recent Sunday afternoon at a historic Chicago synagogue, the sanctuary was packed but the mood was restrained: A longtime congregant had died, and about 300 people had turned out for his funeral service. But amid the solemnity, the occasional mourner discreetly pulled loved ones out to the synagogue’s front steps to snap cell phone pictures of a large brick house, mostly obscured by shrubs, across the street.

Such scenes have become commonplace in recent months at KAM-Isaiah Israel, a Reform congregation in the Hyde Park neighborhood. The dome of the historic Byzantine-style synagogue looms over the red-brick house where Barack Obama has lived for the past three years, and from which he made the short trip across the street to deliver an early political speech to a Jewish crowd.

Quite a few of Barack Obama's "friends from the past" have popped up recently. It's doubtful whether he even knows their names, but in the Chicago Jewish community many people really are long-time friends of the president-elect.

Some of the older people in the community say that they "raised him," while others half-jokingly call Obama "the first Jewish president."

With the 2008 presidential campaign at its end, pundits have begun to discuss in earnest what expected winner Barack Obama's administration might look like. An important piece of evidence is Obama's campaign team, which largely escaped the harsh scrutiny that his opponent's lobbyist-laden team received.

Because of Obama's relative inexperience on foreign policy, it is this part of his team that is getting much of the attention, and one adviser in particular -- Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's Mideast envoy whose record includes supporting the pro-Iraq War advocacy campaigns of the Project for the New American Century and serving as a consultant to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a bastion of Israel-centric policy thinking in Washington.

A day after his historic election to become the first black American president, Barack Obama stepped into the role of president-elect yesterday, inviting Rahm Emanuel to join his administration as White House chief of staff, Democratic officials said.

Emanuel, a former Bill Clinton adviser, is the son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.

While Barack Obama has struggled to capture the Jewish vote, it turns out that one of his wife’s cousins is the country’s most prominent black rabbi -- a fact that has gone largely unnoticed.

For decades, the U.S. has jealously guarded its role of sole arbiter of the Arab-Israeli dispute. In light of recent shows of support for Israel by U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, however, many Arabs fear that Zionist influence on the U.S. body politic -- across the political spectrum -- has made the notion of 'U.S. even-handedness' a contradiction in terms.