You betcha, Sarah Palin hits a nerve among Jewish women
By Marissa Brostoff, The Forward
Last update - 02:49 04/11/2008 When Clare Kinberg, editor of a feminist Jewish magazine, set up her booth at an Ann Arbor Jewish community event, she didn't expect to attract a parade of women eager to vent their rage against Sarah Palin. But woman after woman - perhaps noticing Kinberg's Barack Obama pin - approached her to tell stories of how John McCain's vice-presidential pick had galvanized them into becoming active in the Obama campaign. "She really brought out some ire, fear, something personal," said Kinberg, who edits the magazine Bridges. "It was almost a visceral reaction that she represented something anathema against Jewish values, something very deep in their identity." On a political level, it's no surprise that liberal Jewish women don't like Palin - they are liberals, after all, and Palin is an avowed and unabashed conservative, in a heated presidential race. But the Alaska governor also seems to strike a raw nerve on a symbolic level for many Jewish women, drawing far more indignation than a male candidate with similar views, almost as if she offends their sense of who they are.
"It was the place in their identity where they are Jewish women," Kinberg said of the angry voters who dropped by her booth. "People didn't bring up specific things about reproductive rights or abortion or separation of church and state, but it was all of those things wrapped up together."
Palin's attempts to woo both women voters and Jewish voters have made many members of both those groups resent what they see as unwanted advances. Despite being a woman running for vice-president immediately after Hillary Rodham Clinton's defeat in the presidential primaries, Palin has met with disapproval ratings from 45 percent of women (compared with 35 percent of men), according to a Time magazine poll conducted in early October.
And, despite having cast herself as a take-no-prisoners advocate for Israel, Palin has garnered an approval rating of only 37 percent of the Jewish electorate, according to an American Jewish Committee poll done in September. "In the same way I resent her coopting a feminist message in order to achieve a retrograde goal, I resent her pandering to the insecurities of American Jews," said Ayelet Waldman, a writer in Berkeley, California who has been volunteering full-time with the Obama campaign.
For some, the antipathy toward Palin is located even more closely at the intersection of feminism and Jewish identity. "She's the anti-wonk, the anti-intellectual, someone who doesn't want to brook differences of opinion," said Susan Weidman Schneider, the editor of Lilith, another Jewish feminist journal. "She is certainly not someone with whom I or other Jewish women I know would identify. There's a real sense of alienation." For Schneider, Palin represents the opposite of what Hillary Clinton meant to many women during the presidential primaries. Schneider told the Forward several months ago that she believed Jewish women identified with Clinton to the point of almost reading the senator as Jewish herself, "the same way that some people imagined Bill Clinton, during his time in office, to be the first black president." Even the negative stereotypes that stuck to Hillary Clinton - that she was emasculating or shrill - have also been used to tar Jewish women, while Palin has tapped into an entirely different set of signifiers.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1033950.html
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