Barack Obama: The first Jewish president? Chicago Jewish circle nurtured him all the way to the top

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Barack Obama: The first Jewish president? Chicago Jewish circle nurtured him all the way to the top

November 9th, 2015

Awake Goy

“I use a Yiddish expression, yiddishe neshuma, to describe him,” explains Mikva. “It means a Jewish soul. It’s an expression my mother used. It means a sensitive, sympathetic personality, someone who understands where you are coming from.”

Obama, of course, is a Christian. And his middle name is Hussein. In the presidential election, he won 78 percent of the Jewish vote and about 70 percent of the Arab-American vote, according to unofficial exit polling. Obama collected 52.8 percent of the overall vote.

Putting aside which of the three great Abrahamic religions can lay claim to Obama’s soul, it is clear that his political career, from its South Side inception to the audacious run for the White House, was nurtured and enabled by a close-knit network of Chicago Jews.

Mikva and his friend Newton Minow, the former Federal Communications Commission chairman and Kennedy-era New Frontiersman, were there at the beginning. Minow first heard about Obama in 1988 from his daughter Martha, a professor at Harvard, where Obama was studying law. Minow, senior counsel at Sidley Austin, offered him an internship and later a permanent job at the white-shoe firm, but Obama declined, saying he was planning to go into politics.

When Obama graduated, Mikva, then a U.S. appeals court judge in Washington, tried to lure him with a prestigious clerkship, but Obama turned him down too. That, according to Mikva, took some chutzpah.

Both Mikva and Minow say they sensed back then that Obama was something special. They made a point of staying in touch.

Obama’s circle of Jewish patrons and advisers widened further in 1992 when he became involved in a voter registration drive that brought him into contact with Bettylu Saltzman, a liberal activist (and daughter of the late Philip Klutznick, a former commerce secretary and shopping mall developer). Saltzman says she knew from the moment she met Obama that he would someday be president. She introduced him to David Axelrod, who saw something similar.

Axelrod designed the strategy in which Obama first won the backing of white liberals and then reached out to blacks. Jews made up a significant number of the first constituency.

“As Jews got to know him, they recognized a kindred spirit, not someone who came down from Mars,” Mikva said.

Rabbi Arnold Wolf, of KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue across the street from Obama’s Chicago home, was another early backer. Like Mikva, he sees what he called Obama’s “Jewish side.”

“Obama is from nowhere and everywhere — just like the Jews. He’s black, he’s white, he’s American, he’s Asian, he’s African — and so are we,” Wolf said.

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