Helen Freedman
Helen Freedman
If the opponents of Israel’s Gaza disengagement plan didn’t derail anything, the failure can’t be blamed on Helen Freedman. Freedman, the tireless executive director of Americans For a Safe Israel, was practically a one-woman opposition movement this past spring and summer. She organized rallies, wrote press releases, organized missions to Israel and the territories and showed up seemingly everywhere, clad in the settlers’ trademark orange. Her organization, which claims 5,000 members, wasn’t the biggest disengagement opponent, but Freedman presented the steadiest, most emotional response. And while her side didn’t win, the process arguably turned Freedman into a de facto leader of the emerging new bloc of religious Zionists who want to break with Israel out of disgust. This fall, after an anonymous rabbi penned a controversial manifesto for this new movement but refused to step forward, Freedman — who doubles as a high school English literature teacher and a scholar of Broadway theater — wrote an open letter lending her own name to the ideas.
Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi
No one worked harder to ensure that Israel won major political kudos after its disengagement from Gaza in August than Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi, president of The Israel Project. Mizrahi, 41, started her organization in 2001 with two other women in Washington, D.C., originally dedicating the outfit to small-scale Israel advocacy projects. At the time she ran her own Democratic political consulting firm, but the Israel Project quickly expanded into a full-time job, and it’s now a major source of polling on American opinion about Israel. Mizrahi has also used her consulting skills to organize advertising campaigns defending Israel against pro-Palestinian critics. She’s sometimes run up against detractors, including some Israeli diplomats who say Israel needs less emphasis on conflict and a greater spotlight on its human achievements. But Mizrahi’s basic formula has proved itself; it’s spawned a number of imitators, each claiming to have just the right approach. Mizrahi opened her own Jerusalem office this summer, in time to supply correspondents there with a steady diet of well-culled information on the Gaza drama.
Daniel Pipes
After years of vague talk about a “war against terrorism,” American officials have shifted rhetorical gears in the last few months, identifying America’s enemy more openly as Islamic fundamentalism. It’s a change that conservative Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, 56, has been urging since the first days after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Pipes, founder and president of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, has routinely been out front of Israeli and American policymakers. His dour views, delivered on his Web site and in columns in conservative publications, has sometimes gotten him tagged as an anti-Muslim bigot by liberal academics, Arab leaders and some Democratic lawmakers. This year, however, he seemed increasingly energetic in pressing the implied flip-side of his message — that moderate, non-fundamentalist Muslims are essential allies. His views got him into a war of words with conservative journalist Lawrence Auster, who called him “ecumenist” and “deluded” for believing in moderate Islam. When Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf addressed a Jewish audience in New York in September, drawing scorn from hawks who mistrusted his gesture, Pipes sprang to his defense, praising his “respectful, accurate and constructive comments about Jews.”
Arthur Waskow
Most major national Jewish organizations came out in support of the Iraq war three years ago, and have been keeping their heads down ever since. Their silence amplified the voice of veteran anti-war activist Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader of the Jewish Renewal movement and a long-time icon of the American left. A founder of the 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society, Waskow turned his activism toward the Jewish
community early on; in recent years he’s been running the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center, which preaches his unique mix of environmentalism, spirituality and economic rights. This past September, Waskow helped mobilize participants in the mass anti-war rally in Washington, D.C., but faced a dilemma when it was announced that part of the rally would be organized by the anti-Israel group International Answer. The 71-year-old Waskow responded by organizing a pro-peace Shabbat morning service at a downtown Washington synagogue during the Answer portion of the rally, then leading Jewish marchers toward the White House, where he was arrested. Last month, citing polling data which shows that most American Jews oppose the war, Waskow launched a new campaign, attempting to influence the Reform movement, America’s largest Jewish movement, to adopt an official position opposing the war.
POLITICS
Eric Cantor
After just five years on Capitol Hill, Eric Cantor is now the third-ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. Cantor, 42, the only Jewish Republican in the House, assumed most of the majority whip’s duties in a leadership shuffle triggered by the indictment of his close ally, Texas Republican Tom DeLay. With his promotion, the soft-spoken Virginian is an even more valuable electoral asset for a Republican Party wooing Jewish voters. An observant Jew long active in the Richmond community, Cantor parlayed his donor network to become a major fundraiser for GOP candidates nationwide this year. Of some $1 million that he raised through his Every Republican Is Crucial political action committee (ERICPAC), Cantor gave $280,000 to federal GOP candidates, far more than anyone else in the Republican leadership. After keeping a relatively low public profile in his first two years in the House leadership, Cantor this year was much more outspoken, often tapped by the White House and party leaders to lock horns with Democrats. In June, when Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean called the GOP “pretty much a white Christian party,” Cantor was the House Republican who demanded an apology for Dean’s “hateful and misguided statements.” A member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, Cantor frequently issues statements and pushes legislation aimed at boosting Israel and punishing its enemies.
Cheryl Halpern
As the new chairwoman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, longtime Republican fundraiser Cheryl Halpern, 50, has her work cut out for her: She must heal some of the rifts created by her predecessor, who raised hackles by trying to impose his conservative views on the famously independent public broadcasting community, which critics say is overly liberal. But Halpern, known for a gentle strength, seems well suited for the task. The first and only woman to head the Republican Jewish Coalition, the New Jersey resident has raised millions for GOP causes, but has still managed to maintain friendships on both sides of the aisle. A pro-Israel activist, as well as an advocate of children’s television, she headed the United Nations Advisory Council of B’nai Brith International from 1998 to 2002 and personally funded a review of antisemitic material in Syrian schoolbooks. Appointed to broadcasting boards by President Clinton, she served on the Broadcasting Board of Governors overseeing Voice of America, Radio and TV Marti, RFE/RL, Worldnet, Radio Free Asia and Radio Free Iraq for the better part of 15 years. She’s also — FEMA take heed — an expert horsewoman.
Robin Kramer
As Jewish organizations begin to wrestle with the implications of America’s surging Latino population, they’re going to be turning increasingly to Robin Kramer, one of the most important bridges between the two ethnic communities. A veteran California political activist, she’s the chief of staff to the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa — even as she continues to serve as president of the famed Hollywood Temple Israel. Her new boss took office last May, becoming the first Latino mayor in more than a century in the nation’s second largest city, which is home to the nation’s largest Latino community and second-largest Jewish community. Villaraigosa’s tenure could be a bellwether for the future of Jewish politics as Latinos gain clout nationwide, and he seems alert to the implications. He chose Kramer, 52, to lead his transition team immediately after he was elected; among other duties, she’s been put in charge of relations with the city’s 520,000-person Jewish community. This is not Kramer’s first foray into politics; she was chief of staff for Republican Mayor Richard Riordan in the 1990s. Since then, she’s worked for a Jewish philanthropist and spent two years as a Wexner fellow, a part-time but intense program of study in Jewish texts and traditions. By returning to city hall with the left-leaning Villagairosa, Kramer shows herself capable of working across political and ethnic boundaries — a skill that will be increasingly valuable to the Jewish community.
Ken Mehlman
A former White House political director who now chairs the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman may not be the best-known face in the GOP pantheon. But with all the legal clouds still circling his mentor, presidential adviser Karl Rove, in the Valerie Wilson leak case, Mehlman, 38, may yet emerge as the GOP’s — and the country’s — most powerful political operative. He is likely to be called upon to guide the White House through the coming tumultuous days; some speculate he will be offered a post there. As President Bush’s 2004 campaign manager, the Baltimore-born Mehlman, son of veteran Jewish communal activists, set new records in both fundraising and organizing, fielding the best get-out-the-vote operation the nation has seen. He also reached out to Jewish voters with the argument that Bush had shown uncompromising concern for Israel’s security needs and a Reaganesque “moral clarity” in foreign affairs, raising Bush’s total among American Jews by six percentage points. Known for his computer-like mind and practical jokes, Mehlman has spent the time since the election promoting the GOP to minority constituencies, mainly African Americans, but also Russian Jews. Some see Mehlman as the best embodiment of the GOP’s legacy as “the Party of Lincoln.”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
Freshman congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, 39, a Democrat from south Florida, has rightly gained a reputation as a rising star of her party. Articulate, with a trademark halo of curly blond locks, Wasserman Schultz burst onto the national scene during the Terri Schiavo controversy last winter, emerging as one of the most forceful advocates for family privacy and against congressional meddling in that tragic Florida case. Wasserman Schultz was speaking for many Jews in her district and nationwide who saw congressional Republican moves in the case as an attempt to legislate the Christian right’s definition of when life begins and ends. Since then, the energetic good-government liberal, the first Jewish woman elected to Congress from Florida, has stayed visible by pounding the Bush administration over its response to Hurricane Katrina and its proposed privatization of Social Security. Selected by the House Democratic leadership to serve as a senior whip, Wasserman Schultz meets regularly with her caucus to plot issues and strategy. Her own legislative priorities include health care, banking and immigration issues. A mother of three, she represents one of the nation’s most heavily Jewish districts, stretching from Miami northward to Hollywood. She is unabashed about her own Jewish heritage, active in several Jewish organizations and strongly identified with Israeli security issues.
Charles Schumer
Brash Brooklynite Charles Schumer, New York’s senior senator, has carved out dual roles for himself on the national scene: As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, he’s in charge of taking back the Senate from the Republicans in 2006; and as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, his voice is the loudest in the Democrats’ fight to block conservative Supreme Court and other federal judicial picks in the “mold of Justices Thomas and Scalia.” The tall, balding Schumer, 55, has got the mouth — and the moxie — for both roles, jabbing with vigor at President Bush’s judicial nominees while raising money for Senate hopefuls like a house afire. In a change for the perennially outspent Dems, his senatorial committee has twice as much cash on hand as its GOP counterpart. A public school grad who went on to Harvard Law School, Schumer has held elective office since he was 23. He once shared a podium with a GOP colleague and told the Jewish audience: “I’m also from a conservative background, but in my part of Brooklyn, Conservative means something different.” A Middle East hawk and longtime foe of the Saudis, he also has agitated mightily to protect America’s ports from terrorism and to restore downtown Manhattan after the September 11 attacks. With his relentless drive and punishing work schedule, Schumer may climb even higher: Some speak of him as a future Supreme Court justice.
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