Trump's selection of Friedman shakes up Jewish political status quo

WASHINGTON — Nearly six years ago, when President Barack Obama was set to elevate one oorf his top emissaries to the Jewish community to the Israel ambassadorship, Dan Shapiro asked for — and got — the endorsement of one of Obama’s fiercest pro-Israel critics.

“Dan has always spoken to us, patiently and carefully explaining the administration’s position, and he does so with aplomb, with concern, and with intense appreciation of the other side’s position,” Morton Klein, Zionist Organization of America president, said at the time.

Don’t expect J Street, or the Reform movement — or, really, anyone on the liberal side — to extend that embrace to David Friedman, the bankruptcy lawyer who is one of President-elect Donald Trump’s top emissaries to the Jewish community and whom he nominated to be ambassador to Israel.

The nomination of Friedman has sent shock waves through a chunk of the organized Jewish community because of the signal it sends to the 71 percent of American Jews who voted for Hillary Clinton: One of marginalization, not of outreach. While Friedman’s nomination was hailed by a hawkish but influential minority as a sign that Israel will get the U.S. support it deserves, it possibly sidelines a pro-Israel mainstream that believes moderation best builds a pro-Israel consensus.

“We’re all trying to figure out how to navigate this administration,” said Jeremy Burton, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston. “But the notion that someone who would represent the United States would describe people as ‘not Jewish’ and ‘kapos,’ what does that say about respect for civil discourse and what does it say about temperament in a particularly volatile region?”

A range of liberal Jewish groups have already denounced Friedman, citing his online history thick with broadsides against liberals, many appearing on the pro-settlement Israeli news site, Israel National News, as well as his extensive fundraising for the settlement movement.

Jerrold Nadler, a left-wing Jewish congressman whose district includes many Jewish areas in Brooklyn and Manhattan, said Friedman’s “extreme views and use of such hateful language is an insult to the majority of American Jews.”

Hawkish Jewish groups have welcomed the appointment, most pronouncedly Klein’s ZOA. It said Friedman has “has the potential to be the greatest U.S. Ambassador to Israel ever.”

In an interview, Klein said he stood by his 2011 endorsement of Shapiro, who strove to reach out to right-wing Jews in the United States and hard-liners in Israel as a staffer on Obama’s National Security Council and then as ambassador.

“I said I found Shapiro to be a person of integrity,” Klein said. “That’s true of Dan and it’s true of David Friedman.”

Klein said he would not use “kapos” to describe J Street, which is highly critical of Israeli polices, but he understood how Friedman might have done so out of “anguish and misery.”

The Union for Reform Judaism stopped short of saying it would oppose Friedman, but expressed concerns about his statements and his rejection for the two-state solution.

Nathan Diament, Washington director of the Orthodox Union, said in reply to a JTA query that Friedman was representative of the minority of Jews (and a majority in his community) who voted for Trump.

“Trump’s selection of David Friedman to be his Administration’s ambassador to Israel is consistent with the policy view Trump expressed during the campaign and consistent with the view of most of those American Jews who actually voted for Trump for president,” he said.

Burton, whose Boston JCRC called on Friedman to apologize for his past remarks, said that it was key for Jews who object to Friedman not to be drawn into the polarizing invective that characterized Friedman’s writings in the past.

“We have to acknowledge that some members of our community are optimistic about the next administration,” he said. “We do ourselves a disservice collectively if we are in the black or white zone on everything.”