U.S. SENATE

Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.)*

Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.)**

Benjamin Cardin (D-Md.)

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

Al Franken (D-Minn.)

Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.)

Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.)

Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.)

Carl Levin (D-Mich.)

Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.)

Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.)**

Ron Wyden (D-Ore.)**

(Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who is projected to win his re-election bid, does not identify a religion, but notes that his mother is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.)

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.)

Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.)

Howard Berman (D-Calif.)

Eric Cantor (R-Va.)

David Cicilline (D-R.I.)*

Stephen Cohen (D-Tenn.)

Susan Davis (D-Calif.)

Ted Deutch (D-Fla.)

Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.)

Bob Filner (D-Calif.)

Barney Frank (D-Mass.)

Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.)

Jane Harman (D-Calif.)

Steve Israel (D-N.Y.)

Sander Levin (D-Mich.)

Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.)

Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.)

Jared Polis (D-Colo.)

Steve Rothman (D-N.J.)

Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.)

Allyson Schwartz (D-Pa.)

Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)

Brad Sherman (D-Calif.)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)

Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)

Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.)

John Yarmuth (D-Ky.)

* Elected to House or Senate for the first time in 2010 midterms

** Senators who were re-elected in 2010 midterms

The political career of Sen. russ Feingold, shown on the campaign trail for Barack Obama in Eau Claire, Wis., in August 2008, was marked by a fierce independence. (Phil Freedman)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — The speech that Russ Feingold gave to end his career in the U.S. Senate was much like his career itself: by turns crystal clear, obscure, ornery, defiant and gracious — and quoting a fellow Great Plains Jew to boot.

“But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free, I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me,” the three-term U.S. senator from Wisconsin said Nov. 2, quoting Bob Dylan while conceding to Republican Ron Johnson, a Tea Party-backed plastics billionaire who beat him by a 52-47 percent split at the polls.

Then, “It’s on to the next fight. It’s on to the next battle. It’s on to 2012!”

Feingold’s spokesmen later denied that the senator was hinting at a Democratic presidential bid exploration like the one he had pursued in 2006-07. What he did mean they wouldn’t say.

It was typical of the fiercely independent streak that put Feingold into office and may well have pushed him out.

Ira Forman, the former director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said Feingold’s refusal to accept outside campaign money may have helped elect him in the past but likely was his downfall in this election.

“He wouldn’t accept DSCC ads,” Forman said, referring to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, typical of the bodies that run negative ads against opponents. “He often ran against people who were the beneficiary of that kind of advertising. He hoped people would stand up for his integrity, as they had in the past.”

Forman’s voice was tinged with regret.

“He’s an independent voice, a loss to Democrats and the Jewish community,” he said of Feingold.

In fact, Feingold’s Jewish identity, while strong, rarely manifested itself in leadership roles on Israel, Holocaust commemoration or the other areas that many Jewish lawmakers have made their own.

That was an approach rooted in a childhood in Janesville, Wis., a Plains town near the Illinois border. Feingold, 57, has described his upbringing as blessedly free of anti-Semitism.

“I was honored because I was Jewish,” Feingold said, describing teachers and other grown-ups to Sanford Horwitt, who wrote a political biography, “Feingold: A New Democratic Party.” “It was an amazing way to be treated.”

In 2003, asked by the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle whether Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) stood a chance in his presidential bid, Feingold’s answer was why not?

“As a Jewish candidate from a state with a small Jewish population, I don’t feel I faced any issues as a Jew,” Feingold said. “In fact, it may sound naive, but I think some voters regarded my being Jewish as interesting. I’ve only had a good experience.”

The Feingold family was socially involved, erudite and reserved — characteristics that continue to define Russ Feingold. His staff is fiercely loyal to him, although he keeps them at a distance.

Feingold is discomfited by forthright fans. The Dylan song he chose to quote, “Mississippi,” speaks to the senator’s teasing intellect: It is not from Dylan’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, but from his 2001 album, “Love and Theft.”

Feingold’s lawyer father, Leon, was the first Jewish president of the local Rotary Club who mingled with farmer clients at 4-H events. (Leon’s father, Max, a refugee from Russia, established the family to the town and immigrated to Israel in 1950.)

Feingold has said that his Jewish legacy is manifest in his political career.

“I understood my religion as the pursuit of justice,” he told Horwitt.

That’s pretty much the extent of his public leadership on Jewish issues, although he routinely joins initiatives launched by other Jewish Congress members, recently expressing concerns to the Turkish government over its distancing from Israel and in 2008 joining a raft of Jewish senators pushing back against rumors that President Obama is a Muslim. He attends services on the High Holidays, and his sister, Dena, is a rabbi in Kenosha, south of Milwaukee.

Still, a national Jewish community that has a soft spot for independent liberals embraced Feingold. He drew Jewish support in his successful 1992 senatorial bid to oust the Republican incumbent, Bob Kasten, even though Kasten had a strong pro-Israel record.

“He is somebody who’s remarkably dedicated to civil liberties and to the Constitution, and has the courage of his convictions,” said Sammie Moshenberg, the Washington director of the National Council for Jewish Women. “He took a lot of gutsy stands,” she said, citing Feingold’s lone dissent in 2001 when the Senate approved the U.S. Patriot Act.

That vote drew derision at a time of heightened concerns over terrorism, but eventually made him a hero of the Democratic base. It is a legacy still in dispute: A televised encounter last week between two liberals, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell over whether Feingold should have tacked further right to get re-elected — O’Donnell’s position — has gone viral in the blogosphere.

Feingold was among a handful of lawmakers in the recent election who drew the endorsement of both J Street, the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” group, and donors associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Officials in both groups lamented his departure.

Feingold’s independence was his biggest draw. With. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), he crafted a law severely limiting corporate donations to campaigns. Unlike McCain, who won re-election last week, Feingold abided by the rules of his law even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it.

“This was a public servant who visibly, proudly and courageously stood on principle,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, who directs the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, which backs election reform. “His effort to make America’s election system more fair and transparent made major contributions to good government.”

It was an independence borne of his upbringing and the turbulent 1960s in which he came of age. Feingold’s home, harmonious in its support of liberal causes until the ‘60s, was riven by a split between Feingold’s two father figures: His father supported the war in Vietnam, and his brother David, older by five years, opposed it.

Feingold emerged from the era determined to do what best hewed to his philosophical principles, and in the process he occasionally frustrated his party. In 1998 he famously was the only Democrat to vote to consider the U.S. House of Representatives’ impeachment of President Clinton — not because he believed Clinton was guilty, but because he believed in the constitutional process of impeachment.

Three years later he voted to confirm former Sen. John Ashcroft (R-Mo.) as attorney general, even though they were polar opposites on critical civil liberties questions. Feingold’s reason: his abiding belief that a president, in this case George W. Bush, had the right to pick his Cabinet. He later also supported Bush’s nominee for Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts.

His explanation of his Ashcroft vote in 2001, to skeptical Feingoldians at The Progressive, a liberal journal, presaged the vituperative climate that brought about his downfall.

“I believe we have to hold the line and not use ideology alone in making decisions about Cabinet appointments,” Feingold said. “I fear if we keep going, more and more areas of our government are going to fall into the Great Divide and be engulfed in a culture war.”

Providence Mayor David Cicilline, shown here welcoming the U.S. Army Band in July 2010, becomes the third openly gay Jewish member of the U.S. Congress with his Election Day victory. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Band)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — A historic Republican sweep of the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday has propelled Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip, to the verge of becoming the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker in U.S. political history.

“We are excited for Eric Cantor to become the next House Majority leader,” said Matt Brooks, director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “The highest ranking Jew to ever serve in the House!”

Cantor, however, remains the exception: The fortunes of Jewish politicians in the United States for decades have risen and fallen with the Democrats, and Tuesday night was no exception.

The Republican sweep, picking up at least 60 House seats — the greatest swing since 1948 — and sharply reducing the Democratic majority in the Senate, drove at least six Jewish lawmakers out of office, with one of them a congressman losing his bid for the Senate.

The night’s Jewish losers included Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), the Senate’s most dogged civil libertarian, beloved by liberals for his steadfast opposition to the Iraq War and expansions of government powers of interrogation in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Feingold, in his concession, quoted another Great Plains Jew, Bob Dylan, who contemplated in “Mississippi” a difficult life well spent: “But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free, I’ve got nothing but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me.” Feingold then punctuated the lyric with, “On to the next fight!” to cheers from his supporters.

All told, Jewish representation in Congress dropped from 44 to 39, with 27 Jews in the House and 12 in the Senate. One loss in the Senate was Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.), who had been defeated in the primaries. Additionally, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who by Wednesday morning appeared to be on the cusp of a narrow re-election victory, does not list a religion but notes that his mother is Jewish and a Holocaust survivor.

The defeat of five Jewish incumbents, however, just hints at what this election could mean for Jewish access in Washington.

Since a sweep by Democrats in 2006, lawmakers with strong ties to the Jewish community had chaired some of the most powerful committees in the House. Committee chairmen, by determining agendas, hold almost unchallengeable power to advance or kill legislation.

With Republicans having taken the house, those lawmakers, all Democrats, lose their chairmanships. They include Reps. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who heads the Banking Committee; Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Commerce and Energy committee; Howard Berman (D-Calif.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee; and Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the foreign operations subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee.

Furthermore, Jewish groups — most but not all of which are bound up with Washington’s liberal-Democratic establishment — will see several veteran lawmakers with whom they have built years-long relationships exiting Congress. The most pronounced example is Rep. John Spratt (D-S.C.), who chaired the Budget Committee, which works with the White House to set spending priorities. Spratt’s office had an open door for Jewish social service lobbyists.

The benefit of such access often is subtle but valuable. Berman, for example, was a loyal Democrat who kept Iran sanctions at bay for as long as the White House hoped to coax Tehran into dialogue. As soon as the White House gave the green light, however, Berman was ready with a far-reaching bill that targeted Iran’s energy and banking sectors, and that was shaped in part with counsel from the pro-Israel community.

Such access will hardly disappear in a GOP Congress. Berman is likely to be replaced by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who has cultivated close ties with the pro-Israel community and was a leader in advancing pro-Israel legislation when Republicans previously controlled the House. Jewish social service officials say Cantor has been a sympathetic ear on their issues. Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), the minority leader poised to become speaker, has deep ties with his state’s active Jewish community.

The certainty of such access, however, is less clear in a Congress shaped to a great degree by the Tea Party movement and its agenda of across-the-board budget cutting. Cantor already has said he intends to end earmarks, the discretionary funding derided as “pork” but favored by Jewish groups as a conduit for funding programs for the elderly.

Cantor and Boehner also have vowed to repeal the health care reform enacted this year.

“I believe that when we take majority in January, I hope that we’re able to put a repeal bill on the floor right away because that’s what the American people want,” Cantor told CBS News after the victory.

Republicans are not likely to overcome a presidential veto, but the threat is bound to make uneasy a Jewish social service establishment that sees in the legislation, however cumbersome, reforms critical to bringing down health care costs.

Cantor and Boehner are now set to ride a conservative tiger energized by the greatest midterm victory in decades, and spurred by leaders like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), who already on election night was urging the new lawmakers to challenge the Republican “establishment.”

“These Republicans know one thing,” DeMint told supporters at his victory party in Greenville, S.C. “If they don’t do what they say this time, not only are they out, but the Republican Party is dead, and it should be.”

In the face of such sentiment, it is unclear to what degree the GOP leadership will be willing to countenance Jewish organizational urgings to tread softly on budget matters.

A bright spot for the Jewish community was the election in Illinois of Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) to the open U.S. Senate seat. Kirk not only has been a leader on pro-Israel issues, he is an increasing rarity, and one beloved by Jewish donors who hanker for bipartisanship: a Republican moderate on social issues.

Pro-Israel officials already have fretted about Cantor’s proposal to pull Israel’s $3 billion in defense assistance from the foreign operations package. Such a separation, the officials fear, will make Israel vulnerable to charges of special treatment and could make the generous package a matter of debate. Rand Paul, a Tea Party Republican elected Kentucky’s senator, already has said he will seek cuts in defense spending.

It has yet to be seen how a GOP-led Congress will affect the peace process or efforts to get Iran to stand down from its suspected nuclear weapons program. Foreign policy traditionally has been the prerogative of the president, but Congress is able to play an obstructionist role by exacting tough oversight on foreign spending.

Cantor in a pre-election interview told JTA that $500 million in spending for the Palestinian Authority would be subject to new scrutiny, and could depend on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

In the House, four Jewish Democrats were defeated: Reps. Alan Grayson and Ron Klein of Florida, Steve Kagen of Wisconsin and John Adler of New Jersey. Grayson, who won in 2008 against an incumbent weakened by a strong primary challenge, represents a district that encompasses Orlando and leans Republican. Since his election he had emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of the Republicans, accusing the party of wanting the uninsured to die. Outside groups poured money into negative campaign ads taking aim at Grayson.

Klein, swept in with the Democratic majority in 2006, lost a swing seat to Allen West, an Iraq War veteran. Klein was a leader on pro-Israel issues, particularly related to Iran sanctions.

Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.) lost his bid to win his state’s open U.S. Senate seat; so did another Jewish Democrat, Ohio Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher.

Jews did pick up a few seats. Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general and a Democrat, won the Senate race to succeed retiring Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.). Democrat David Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., won the House race to succeed Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), who also is retiring. Cicilline brings to three the number of openly gay Jewish lawmakers on Capitol Hill, joining Frank and Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.).

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) appeared set to keep her Tucson area seat. Giffords, married to Mark Kelly, the first astronaut to join his twin, Scott, on a space station, beat back a challenge in part by distancing herself from Obama’s more liberal immigration policies.

Pro-Israel money helped incumbent friends of Israel pull off narrow victories. Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, rallied against tough challenges, and by Wednesday morning it appeared that Bennet and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) were on their way to winning as well. All four had been targeted  for assistance by pro-Israel fund-raisers.

So had Democrat Jack Conway, who faced Paul in Kentucky in a race so bitter that Paul refused to mention Conway in his victory speech. Paul, whose father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), is a noted isolationist, kept pro-Israel groups at arm’s length during his campaign.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), ousted by Tea Partier Joe Miller, appeared to be on her way to keeping her seat in a historic write-in campaign — one backed by NORPAC, one of the largest pro-Israel political action committees, in a last-minute fund-raising appeal.

J Street, the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” lobbying group, scored 0 for 3 in its Senate endorsements but appeared to do relatively well in its 58 House endorsements. The question is whether those successes will help push back a full-frontal campaign by groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition to depict J Street associations as poison at the polls.

J Street’s endorsee in the signature race for Pennsylvania’s open U.S. Senate seat, Democrat Joe Sestak, lost to Republican Pat Toomey — but by a razor-thin margin.

Jewish groups also are watching closely how this election will impact social issues. For example, the Reform movement, among other groups, supports a repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on gay members of the military. With conservatives in Iowa ousting three judges who ruled gay marriage constitutional in a rare recall election, such initiatives may be headed for deep freeze.

Jews won a number of statewide races: Steve Grossman, a former AIPAC president and Democratic Party chairman, and Josh Mandel, a Republican state legislator, Orthodox Jew and Iraq War veteran, won their races for Massachusetts and Ohio state treasurer, respectively. Also, Sam Olens, a Republican, was elected Georgia’s attorney general.

Members of the New Israel fund express their desires in two languages during Jon Stewarts Rally for Sanity in Washington, Oct. 30, 2010. NIF)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — When “Saturday Night Live” alum “Father Guido Sarducci,” delivering the benediction at Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, ran through a list of religions seeking the true faith, Judaism received the biggest applause.

That didn’t surprise Rivka Burstein-Stern.

“There were a lot of Jews there,” she said of Saturday’s rally. “But when it comes to rallies and social activism, you’re going to have a lot of Jews.”

Jewish participants — many from the Washington area, some from farther away — seemed to comprise a hefty proportion of the estimated crowd of 250,000 attending the event conceived by Stewart and fellow Comedy Central star Stephen Colbert, the faux conservative host.

At least three liberal Jewish organizations — J Street, the New Israel Fund and Jewish Funds for Justice — were represented on a sunny Saturday in a crowd that spilled over the National Mall. Jewish Funds for Justice used the occasion to launch its “Fear Not” campaign aimed at convincing voters to tune out political forces depicting President Obama and his allies as a threat to the nation.

All three groups chose to emphasize Stewart’s overarching message of keeping down the shouting and keeping up the listening. The NIF fielded posters saying, in Hebrew and English, “Sanity, Sanity, Thou Shalt Pursue,” a play on the justice commandment in Deuteronomy.

Naomi Paiss, the NIF spokeswoman who headed her group’s delegation, said many of the queries from attendees were from participants who recognized Hebrew.

“Some other people said, ‘What language is that?’ ” said Paiss. “Everyone we explained it to was very supportive. We thought the message of lowering the temperature and civil discourse and not demonizing the opposition was an appropriate message.”

Participants said the message was appropriate to a Jewish upbringing, although they recognized that Stewart (who is Jewish) and Colbert (reportedly a devout Catholic) sought an ecumenical appeal.

During the past three years, much attention has been focused on the fear in some Jewish circles that President Obama is hostile to Israel and bent on tilting U.S. policy toward the Muslim world. But the run-up to the Stewart-Colbert gathering and the increasing predictions of Tea Party-fueled Republican gains has shifted the spotlight onto what past polling suggests is the more common brand of Jewish anxiety — fear over the rise of a potent conservative political movement dedicated to rolling back nearly a century’s worth of liberal gains and willing to employ inflammatory rhetoric aimed at minority groups, including Muslims and illegal immigrants, not to mention Democratic lawmakers.

Jennifer Helburn, a Washington gardener, said she joined the rally partly as a statement for those she described as “refusing to be open to facts that contradict what they want to believe.”

“It’s very disturbing to me,” she said. “Especially for Jews, we’ve been targeted by groups who have determined they know who we are.”

Helburn cited the issue of the planned Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York.

“And here are Jews doing the same thing,” she said to a number of Jewish bloggers and groups that have targeted the center.

Josh Pudnos, a graduate student in political management at George Washington University here, also cited the Islamic center controversy as a factor spurring him to apply for a ticket to sit up front.

“The Tea Party and the religious right really worry me,” said Pudnos, 22, referring to the conservative insurgent movement that seems likely to propel Republicans back to power in Congress. “Using extreme terms like calling the Manhattan mosque ‘terrorist,’ that’s a little extreme.”

A number of participants regretted that the rally wasn’t more political. Stewart, they said, could have hewed to an apolitical line and still rallied participants to vote.

“They focused on the media,” said Burstein-Stern, 26, who works at an educational nongovernmental organization. “But politicians are also a big part of the problem.”

Bess Dopkeen, a Pentagon analyst who hosted her brother and a friend for the rally, said the point was to gather with the like-minded.

“The overall fun was seeing all the great signs,” she said.

Dopkeen flooded Facebook friends with photos of her favorites, including “Ditch fear, choose puppies,” “God hates these signs,” and a man, dressed as Indiana Jones, bearing a placard that read “No one in American politics is a Nazi. Trust me, I know Nazis.”

The chaos — organizers expected 60,000 and got that fourfold — meant that the like-minded didn’t have the wherewithal to find each other.

The NIF’s Paiss echoed others interviewed when she reported that a friend who watched the event unfold from home, on C-Span, caught more of the rally than she did.

“I wish,” she said, “we could have caught the ‘Jump Rope with Muslims’ people.”

U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, shown speaking at the 2009 General assembly of the Jewish Federations of North American, is poised to shepherd the GOP to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Robert A. Cumins/ Jewish Federations of North America)

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Eric Cantor has spent a lifetime relishing wearing the other hat.

Among Jews, the Republican congressional whip from Richmond, Va., likes to play the genteel Southern conservative, the posture that won over his wife, a socially liberal banker from New York.

Among southerners, he’s the nice Jewish boy who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue and graduated from Columbia University, but who has an easy familiarity with NASCAR, country music and evangelical beliefs.

It’s an approach that has Cantor poised to become the highest-ranking Jewish member in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives. If the Republicans take the House, as the pundits and polls are predicting, he is expected to rise to the position of majority leader.

Maybe even House speaker, as the buzz goes, if the new wave of Republican lawmakers decide to dump Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), who some conservatives see as too close to lobbyists and establishment interests. Cantor, the only Jewish Republican lawmaker in the Congress, denies that talk.

At the same time that Cantor, 47, stands on the verge of what could be his greatest victory in his young career, he faces what also might be his greatest test: reconciling the liberal tendencies of the smaller, Jewish community in which he grew up with the sharp swing right in the larger, conservative community he has embraced.

He insists it’s not such a big deal.

“The American Jewish community is not unlike others in this country,” Cantor told JTA this week in a quick phone interview from the campaign trail, where he has been spending a frenetic summer and fall in hopes of  helping his party win as many as 90 seats from the Democrats. “Jews are frustrated at their own economic circumstance.”

Cantor said that American Jews have nothing to fear from the Tea Party, the disparate conservative insurgency that appears ready to propel the Republicans to victory.

“Tea Party individuals are focused on three things: One, limited, constitutional government; two, cutting spending, and three, a return to free markets,” he said. “Most Americans are about that, and the American Jewish community is like that.”

In the same interview, Cantor laid out a proposal on funding for Israel that could test exactly how “like that” is the American Jewish community — or at least its organizational leadership.

Cantor said he wanted to pull the $3 billion Israel receives in funding from the foreign operations budget so that GOP lawmakers — who in recent years have been voting in increasing numbers against the foreign funding bill — may vote their conscience: for Israel on one bill, against countries perceived as anti-American on another.

“Part of the dilemma is that Israel has been put in the overall foreign aid looping,” he said. “I’m hoping we can see some kind of separation in terms of tax dollars going to Israel.”

Other Republicans have suggested putting the Israel funding in the defense budget, noting that most of the money is for defense assistance.

Prior to that statement, a number of pro-Israel officials had told JTA on background that they feared exactly such an initiative. However, the expectation was that it would come from Tea Partiers and not the GOP leadership, whom the pro-Israel officials expected to be an ally in making the case for foreign funding in January when the new Congress is inaugurated.

Repeated attempts by JTA in the wake of Cantor’s comments to reach the same figures — among them, some of the most voluble pro-Israel advocates — went unanswered.

The silence itself was not unusual — no one in a non-partisan role wants to stand directly against an entire party a week before Election Day. But it signaled the chasm with Republicans that pro-Israel groups may be looking at come January.

Democrats and their allies were not so shy in reminding Cantor of the traditional pro-Israel argument for wrapping spending on Israel into the broader foreign aid budget.

Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), the chairwoman of the foreign operations subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, called Cantor’s proposal “outrageous.”

“Manipulating aid to Israel in this way would dangerously threaten continued bipartisan agreement on national security policy and programs other than direct assistance to Israel that aid in its security,” she said in a news release.

The funding, Lowey said, promotes diplomacy and alleviates the factors that create a fertile ground for terrorist recruiters.

“Because it is inextricably linked with broader U.S. national security goals, separating assistance for Israel in order to make it easier for Republican members to vote against the foreign aid bill would be counterproductive,” she said in her statement.

Cantor outlined a much different view: Israel was not like other nations, he said.

“Israel’s survival is directly connected to America’s survival,” he said. “Israel’s security is synonymous with our own.”

Bridging divides is not new to Cantor. His conservative posture on social issues — he is against gay marriage and abortion — place him on the opposite side of most Jewish voters. And Jewish advocates for the elderly strongly oppose several proposals in his new book, “Young Guns,” co-authored with two other youthful conservatives, Reps. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

The Republican trio calls for opening up Social Security and Medicare to private companies and raising the eligibility age for both plans. In addition, the book extols the GOP leadership’s voluntary freeze last March on earmarks, which Cantor wants to make permanent — and extend to Democrats, should the GOP win the House.

Jewish groups have relied on earmarks, the funds lawmakers set aside for their districts, to fund programs for the elderly.

Still, Cantor is always a welcome presence at Jewish communal events, associates say.

“He always has gotten community support, even though the Jewish community is mostly Democratic,” said Jay Ipson, a retired auto parts dealer who has known Cantor since he was a boy.

Cantor, who has a reputation for tirelessness, makes himself available to the Richmond Jewish community when he is home, Ipson says — visiting its institutions and working on its behalf. Cantor’s intervention on the state level helped Ipson establish the city’s Holocaust museum, which opened in 2003.

Richard November, a former president of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond, said Cantor was typical of a younger generation of Southern Jews who refused to be circumspect about their Jewishness and would wear their identity with pride even as they ventured into the broader community.

November recalled tracking Cantor, who was the same age as his daughter, Debra, as he grew up.

“In my day — I graduated high school in 1956 — it was more isolated if you would, the Jewish kids stuck together,” he said. “During my daughters’ high school years, there was a greater acceptance of the Jewish students, the Jewish students were more aggressive in becoming involved in things that were not just Jewish.”

Cantor was well turned out early, he recalled.

“He always had a certain demeanor that most people don’t have at that age,” he said.

It helped win over his wife, Diana, six years his senior and a Goldman Sachs employee when he courted her while he was at Columbia.

“I said, ‘I thought you were Jewish?’ I’d never met someone who was Jewish and Republican,” she told The Washington Post in 2008.

In Washington, Cantor has made the Jewish community’s case to the Republican leadership, particularly as it applies to funding for safety net programs, said William Daroff, who heads the Jewish Federations of North America Washington office.

“He’s been helpful with legislative matters where there have been funding issues, issues around regulations, particularly with Jewish family service agencies,” Daroff said.

Some Jewish Democrats see Cantor as a friend and appreciate his outreach on Israel.

“We disagree on domestic issues, but when it comes to Israel there are no disagreements,” said Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). “His heart is in the right place when it comes to Israel.”

Cantor’s Jewish profile has, if anything, heightened as he ascended to the leadership. While his family remains Conservative, he now attends Orthodox services and, when his busy schedule allows, takes classes with a rabbi.

In “Young Guns,” his new book, he makes no bones about the Jewish values he brings to the GOP.

“I pray on Saturday with a Southern accent,” he said. His co-authors, Ryan and McCarthy, “go to church on Sunday and talk to God without dropping their g’s.”

That’s an outlook appreciated by a professional Jewish class that has been stymied at times in reaching out to Jewish lawmakers.

“The Jewish community has unfortunately had its fair share of members who shy away from their identity as they embrace public life and build their careers,” said Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who directs American Friends of Lubavitch. “Eric has done the exact opposite.”

Activist Ed Rosenthal, shown in an undated photo in a marijuana greenhouse, says "Jews have a special affinity to marijuana." (Photo courtesy of Ed Rosenthal)

OAKLAND, Calif. (JTA) — Ed Rosenthal has been working to legalize marijuana in California since he moved to the state in 1972.

Vindication may finally be at hand for the Bronx-born former yippie.

On Nov. 2, California voters will consider Proposition 19, a ballot initiative to legalize the cultivation and possession of small amounts of marijuana for recreational use, and empower local governments to regulate and tax its sale.

Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996, and is legal now in 13 other states and the District of Columbia. But if Prop 19 passes — recent polls show opposition and support running neck and neck — California will become the first state to legalize pot for general use.

Plenty of Jews are throwing their weight behind the initiative.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Rosenthal, 66, a a longtime marijuana activist and the author of books on everything from growing the herb to avoiding jail time.

Rosenthal, a  columnist for High Times magazine, is sitting in his office — a small, cluttered room in the Oakland home he shares with wife, Jane Klein. An ashtray on the desk is filled with roaches, and a lifetime achievement award for his drug policy reform work hangs on the back wall.

He makes no secret of his own marijuana use, saying that he smokes it, drinks it, eats it and puts drops of it under his tongue. Rosenthal no longer grows the stuff, however, acting now as a consultant, developer of a new herbicide and an organic pesticide, and executive director of Green Aid, a medical marijuana legal defense and education fund.

“Jews have a special affinity to marijuana,” he mused. “It’s an intellectual drug, not a drug that takes you outside your senses like alcohol or opiates. And a lot of marijuana research comes out of Israel.”

THC, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in cannabis, was first isolated in 1964 by Raphael Mechoulam, now a professor of medicinal chemistry at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. Other studies of the drug’s effect have been conducted at Israeli institutions.

“A lot of my parents’ friends in Boca Raton use it,” chimed in Klein,  an active member of Oakland’s Temple Sinai. “My aunt’s husband was diagnosed with liver cancer. I gave [pot] to her and said this isn’t just for him for after the chemo, it’s for you because you’re going through stress. She’s in her 80s, and it gave her back her appetite.”

Even if Prop 19 passes, Rosenthal points out, marijuana is still illegal under federal law, putting those who wish to grow, sell or possess it at risk of federal prosecution. That’s the case in states such as California where marijuana is legal for medical use.

In 2002, federal agents arrested Rosenthal in Oakland even though he had been deputized by the city government to grow marijuana for medical use. He was convicted the next year by a jury that was not told of his connection to the city — an omission that later caused many of the jurors to denounce their own verdicts. A sympathetic judge sentenced him to one day in prison, time served.

In February 2003, a group of supporters from Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos, a Silicon Valley Reform synagogue, handed out “Ed Rosenthal — Hero” buttons to delegates at the Reform movement’s West Coast regional biennial.

The campaign was organized by policy analyst Jane Marcus, who headed the congregation’s Medical Marijuana as Mitzvah project, itself launched to support medical marijuana on the grounds of Jewish values of social justice and compassion for the sick.

Jewish institutional support for legalizing marijuana has been spotty and limited to tentative support for its medicinal use.

In 1999, Women for Reform Judaism passed a resolution calling for greater research into its pain-relief properties, and urging the U.S. Congress to permit physicians to prescribe it for critically ill patients. A similar resolution was passed by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbinical association, in 2001.

In 2003, the Union for Reform Judaism passed a “resolution on the medicinal use of marijuana” urging federal legislation to permit the drug’s medicinal use under a physician’s supervision, and calling upon Reform congregations to advocate for such legalization at the local, state and federal levels. The Reform movement thus became the first religious body to call for such legalization, followed soon by the Presbyterians.

No other Jewish denomination has come out publicly for or against marijuana’s legalization. No Jewish institutions, including any Reform bodies, support Prop 19.

But individual Jews have been vocal in their support , including mega-philanthropist Edgar Bronfman, who penned an Oct. 20 editorial for the San Jose Mercury News urging its passage on the same grounds that Prohibition was repealed 77 years ago.

“Prohibitions of widely desired products or services don’t work,” he wrote, adding that taxing and regulating marijuana along the lines of alcohol will fund badly needed social services, free up the jails and court system, and bring rationality to an argument that is often anything but.

A state report values California’s marijuana crop at $14 billion annually.

Marcus, who is on the board of Women for Reform Judaism and a member of the URJ’s Commission on Social Action, last week sent a letter in support of Prop 19 to all the Reform congregations in the state.

Noting that she was “speaking as an individual,” she urged Jews to vote yes on Prop 19 in the name of social and racial justice (a preponderance of those arrested for drug use are non-white), compassion for the ill, social and financial stability (taking a multibillion-dollar crop out of the hands of drug cartels and taxing it for the country’s benefit), and general good sense.

“I keep going back to the issue of Jewish values,” Marcus told JTA. “The Just Say No generation didn’t allow us to be honest with our kids about the relative dangers of alcohol versus marijuana. Our country’s drug policy is wrong — addiction should be treated medically, as an illness.”

Ethan Nadelmann is executive director of the New York-based Drug Policy Alliance, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 that supports legalization and regulation of marijuana, among other drug policy reform issues. He was in California last week stumping at a San Francisco Reform synagogue on behalf of Prop 19, as well as taking part in a conference call with the leadership of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center.

“Is this good for the Jews?” he asked JTA, speaking rhetorically. “It’s good for individual values and social justice, so yes, it’s good for the Jews. The alternative — the war on drugs — is grounded in ignorance, fear, prejudice and profit, values one would like to believe are [anathema] to Jews.”

Jews have always been involved in social justice work, Nadelmann points out, and drug policy reform “is the cutting-edge social justice issue of the day.”

Even so, he adds, whereas Jews constituted the bulk of his staff and supporters a decade ago, more and more African Americans, Latinos and GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) activists now fill those ranks.

“To a certain extent, gays are the new Jews in drug policy reform,” Nadelmann said, noting that those who cut their political teeth in the AIDS battle are now turning to marijuana legalization as another issue affecting their community. “I’m struck by the number of GLBT activists involved in my organization and among my funders.”

Opponents of Prop 19, who include most key elected officials in the state, police associations and seated district attorneys, call it deeply flawed and chaotic. They say that because regulation and taxation is left to local governments, wildly different situations could exist city by city. Drug-free workplaces could no longer be enforced, the opponents say, and while lighting up behind the wheel would be forbidden, lack of enforcement mechanisms in the bill means that drivers who are already high could operate moving vehicles such as school buses or delivery trucks.

Prop 19 foes also fear that greater availability will lead to more users, leading to health problems and a greater number of regular users of the drug.

But even if the initiative does not pass, Nadelmann, Marcus and Rosenthal believe its political impact already has been felt.

“It’s changed the conversation,” said Marcus. “It’s not a question anymore of whether it will pass but when.”

What will Rosenthal do then? He looks up with a sly grin.

“Well, I moved here 38 years ago for Prop 19,” he said. “If it passes, my work here is done. I’ll probably go back to the Lower East Side. Or maybe Williamsburg.”

Activist Ed Rosenthal, shown in an undated photo in a marijuana greenhouse, says "Jews have a special affinity to marijuana." photo courtesy of Ed Rosenthal)

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is facing Tea-Party challenger Sharron Angle. (Brian Finifter)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Talk to veteran campaign watchers about this year’s congressional races, and within seconds they will tell you that they’ve never before seen elections quite like these.

“We’ve never seen a cycle where there’s been this many races this close to an election and you don’t know how it’s going to come out,” said Joy Malkus, the research director at the Chicago-based Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs, or JACPAC, a group that directs funding to candidates who are pro-Israel and moderate on social issues. “And I’ve been doing this since 1982.”

Ben Chouake, president of NORPAC, a New Jersey-based, pro-Israel political action committee, agreed.

“This one has taken twists and turns that surprise almost all of us that follow these events,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this in all the years I’ve been doing this — in my lifetime.”

Despite the unfamiliarity of the terrain, the rules of the Jewish fund-raising road remain the same: Stick with your friends and get to know unknowns as fast as possible.

In fact, the only change might be to append a “more-so”: There are many more friends at risk, and there are a lot more unknowns. An anti-incumbent surge already has had an impact in the primaries, ousting a clutch of incumbents in the Senate, where races generally are much more expensive than in the House of Representatives.

“The thing that has created the greatest demand for money in the pro-Israel world are all these open Senate seats,” said Lonny Kaplan, a veteran pro-Israel giver who is based in Philadelphia’s New Jersey suburbs and a past president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

A greater demand and, according to insiders, a surprisingly greater supply considering the economy’s narrow straits. Matt Brooks, who directs the Republican Jewish Coalition, said he has never seen money flowing like this in a non-presidential election year.

“This is the largest effort our leaders have made in a midterm — ever,” he said.

Here are some races to watch in this very watchable season:

Endangered incumbents: The triumvirate

A number of pro-Israel incumbents are at risk in the Senate. Some already have or are almost being written off, among them U.S. Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.), Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.).

Others at risk are rallying in the final weeks and have attracted a late burst of pro-Israel attention, including Sens. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.).

Reid, the majority leader, is facing a tough challenge from Sharron Angle, the Tea Party-backed Republican challenger. Reid is considered critical by the pro-Israel community because he has taken the lead in helping to shepherd through Iran sanctions legislation. He’s also seen as having advanced pro-Israel defenses, most recently in a letter with his Republican counterpart, Sen. Mitch McConnel (R-Ky.), pressing President Obama to designate the Turkish group behind the Gaza Strip aid flotilla as terrorist.

If Reid goes, and if the Senate changes hands, its pro-Israel cast is not likely to change: McConnell is also solidly pro-Israel, and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), perhaps the chamber’s most stalwart Israel defender (and a Jew from Brooklyn), likely would replace Reid.

Yet pro-Israel insiders say it remains a priority to keep in place a party leader who has been a proven champion of Israel.

“I’ve worked very hard for Harry Reid’s campaign, and the pro-Israel community has been very very supportive of him,” Kaplan said. “It’s a very tough race. From my perspective we have a very friendly incumbent — it’s not hard to pick a side there.”

Boxer, a Jewish candidate who is facing former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, is likewise considered important because of the recent trend among liberal Democrats to question Israeli policies.

“She’s very liberal but also a leader,” said a donor who is close to top Democrats and did not want to be further identified. “She puts her name on pro-Israel legislation.”

Getting to know you: the Tea Partiers

Reid’s race is also considered critical also because he is facing Angle, who like most of the candidates backed by the Tea Party movement is friendly to Israel but also seeks budget cuts across the board. That makes her anathema to groups like JACPAC that are concerned about social services.

The Tea Party also makes some pro-Israel conservatives nervous because some in the movement want to slash foreign funding, although they have promised to work out a way to maintain funding for Israel. Some say that reveals a misunderstanding of the holistic nature of foreign aid: If aid is cut across the board, it signals an isolationism that can only harm Israel in the long run even if it benefits from short-term exceptions.

“The pro-Israel community has the challenge of keeping up foreign aid overall” if Tea Party candidates score major successes, said an insider associated with AIPAC.

That effort to keep up foreign aid already is under way, and pro-Israel insiders report warm conversations with Angle in addition to Mike Lee, the Republican candidate in Utah whose Tea Party insurgency unseated longtime incumbent GOP Sen. Bob Bennett, and Ken Buck, who is challenging Colorado’s Bennet.

Other Tea Party candidates have kept their distance from the pro-Israel community. They include Senate hopefuls Joe Miller, a Republican who is leading in Alaska, and Rand Paul in Kentucky.

Paul’s association with his father, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), whose isolationist polices have resulted in one of the worst pro-Israel records in the House, as well as the younger Paul’s reluctance to parry outside of his inner circle, have conferred upon his opponent, Democrat Jack Conway, the rare status of favored pro-Israel candidate in an open race. The pro-Israel donor community as a rule attempts to split the difference in such races, not wishing to alienate either side.

“Conway has great position papers on all of our issues — Israel, [reproductive] choice and separation of church and state,” JACPAC’s Malkus said. “Rand Paul is not good on any of our issues.”

Unlikely challenges to incumbents — and unlikely incumbent

House Democrats facing challenging races across the country fall into two categories: Those who just months ago were seen as sure bets, and those who beat the odds to win in 2006 and 2008, when Democrats scored victories over a weakened Republican Party. In 2008, those underdog Democrats were buoyed by voters enthusiastic about presidential candidate Barack Obama.

A typical candidate who used to be seen as safe but now is in jeopardy is Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.), who defeated his current opponent, Republican Allen West, by 10 points in 2008. Klein has strongly supported Israel in a heavily Jewish district that includes patches of Broward and Palm Beach counties.

West, however, has posed a formidable challenge this time, in part by linking Klein to a president perceived as less friendly to Israel than his predecessors, and in part because of anxieties among retirees over reports that Obama’s health care reform will suck funds from to Medicare, the government-funded insurance plan for retirees. An African-American Iraq war veteran, West also has an Achilles’ heel: Most recently he was associated with a biker gang that does not admit Jews or blacks as members.

Another Florida Jewish congressman is typical of the other column. In 2008, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), facing an incumbent weakened by a strong primary challenge, swept in a district that encompasses Orlando and leans Republican.

Grayson, one of the most outspoken critics nationwide of the Republicans, is now in trouble, with outside Republican-affiliated groups pouring money into negative campaign ads. He has offset the blitz by raising four times as much as his Republican opponent, Daniel Webster, in individual donations, stemming from the joy his politically incorrect broadsides bring the Democratic base.

Grayson has accused Republicans of wanting the uninsured to die. Nonpartisan campaign watchers criticized Grayson recently for a TV ad that edited remarks to make Webster appear as if he were endorsing New Testament commands that wives should submit to their husbands. In fact, Webster was advising Christian fathers that they should ignore the commandments in question.

Which pro-Israel are you?

Two major campaigns have split the pro-Israel community: Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) vs. Alex Giannoulias for the open U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, and Rep. Joe Sestak (D-Pa.) vs. Pat Toomey for the open Senate seat in Pennsylvania.

JACPAC is backing Sestak because of the organization’s twin missions of supporting Israel and moderate social policies. Toomey, Malkus notes, voted against foreign aid more often than not when he was a congressman in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

On the other hand, Sestak has been targeted by right-wing groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel for his associations with the left-wing pro-Israel lobby J Street.

By and large, however, J Street associations have not figured large in the campaign, said Kaplan, who is backing the Democratic incumbent Rush Holt in New Jersey.

JACPAC is staying out of the Kirk-Giannoulias race because of Kirk’s leadership role on pro-Israel issues in the House and his record as a Republican moderate. NORPAC’s Choauake referred to Kirk’s seminal role in shaping the enhanced Iran sanctions legislation that passed over the summer.

“He’s brilliant and hard working; he’s a mover and a shaker, “ he said of Kirk. “He can get stuff done — he knows how to strategize to get to the finish line.”

Races to watch? Try people to watch

Pro-Israel and Jewish money sometimes goes to candidates not because they need it, but because the community sees a future with the person in question.

That’s the case with Kelly Ayotte, a Republican leading in the open race for New Hampshire’s U.S. Senate seat, and Chris Coons, a Democrat in the same position in Delaware.

Ayotte “is someone who’s going to get into the Senate and do well,” Chouake said. “She’s been supported by Democratic and Republican governors as attorney general, which means she must be highly respected. She’s going to be a prime candidate for executive branch if they’re looking for a young Republican woman.”

The same is true of Coons, until now a little-known county executive, said the pro-Israel insider close to Democrats.

“He’s very much up on the issues, very foreign policy attuned,” the insider said. “He  pronounced [Iranian President] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad correctly.”

Reach out to the outreachers

Asked why he was backing Ayotte in the New Hampshire Senate race instead of Rep. Paul Hodes (D-N.H.), a Jewish congressman with a solid-pro-Israel voting record, NORPAC’S Chouake’s answer was simple: “She called me. He didn’t.”

Jan Schakowsky

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Joel Pollak has traveled from liberal to conservative in his young lifetime, and now he hopes to take Chicago’s storied Lakefront with him.

The Harvard Law School graduate, 32, is running a quixotic campaign against U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has held the seat since 1999, winning 75 percent majorities in elections along the way.

Pollak’s emphasis has been the economy, but Schakowsky’s close ties to President Obama has made Israel an issue in this heavily Jewish district.

Making it more interesting: Pollak  and Schakowsky are Jewish. He’s Orthodox, she’s not. He has the support of Alan Dershowitz, she is backed by J Street and the Chicago-based pro-Israel, pro-abortion rights political action committee known as JACPAC.

It’s a potent mix and potential proxy fight, reflecting at least on paper several Jewish demographic trends — most notably the increasing willingness of Orthodox Jews and some pro-Israel Democrats to line up behind GOP candidates.

Pollak has been quick to question Schakowsky’s bona fides on Israel.

“She plays a very cheap game of ethnic politics when it comes to Israel, but doesn’t understand the issues and the dangers,” Pollak said. “She’ll show up at the events and sign the letters when she’s pressured to do so.”

Schakowsky has said that her pro-Israel record is 100 percent, and pro-Israel insiders — including at JACPAC, the Joint Action Committee for Public Affairs — agree that she has been reliable on the issues that concern the community, particularly Iran.

She chided Pollak for making it a campaign issue.

“The strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship has been from the first minute the bipartisan support, and for a candidate to make it into a campaign issue without any warrant to do so is not helpful for Israel,” the veteran congresswoman said.

Pollak has picked at two areas where he thinks Schakowsky is vulnerable: She has accepted the endorsement of the upstart lobby J Street; and Helen Thomas headlined a Schakowsky fundraiser just weeks before the longtime journalist’s career imploded after she said Israeli Jews should “go home” to Poland, Germany and the United States.

Schakowsky distanced herself after the Thomas incident, saying that the journalist’s views on Israel did not come up during the “power lunch.” In a statement, Schakowsky said it was time for Thomas to retire.

“I think it is fitting that she has resigned her position as a columnist for Hearst over her inappropriate and highly offensive remarks,” the statement said. “It is a sad ending to Thomas’ pioneering career — one that has been uplifting for women in journalism — but it is clear that there is no room for such deplorable bias, nor should there be.”

It was the Thomas luncheon and the J Street endorsement that drew Dershowitz into the race — to endorse a Republican against a Democrat for the first time in his life. (He has endorsed Republicans in primaries against other GOP candidates.)

The Harvard law professor  said J Street’s “enthusiastic” support for Schakowsky made him nervous. The outspoken advocate for Israel has clashed with J Street in the past, saying it should promote its dovish policies within existing pro-Israel structures rather than making such disagreements public.

Much more of a consideration for Dershowitz, however, was Pollak’s status as a former student and assistant.

Dershowitz said Pollak helped him research his responses to Israel critiques by former President Jimmy Carter and Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.

Dershowitz headlined a sold-out lunch for Pollak that packed a room with more than 200 people and brought in $30,000 for the candidate.

On the same day, J Street ran an online fundraiser asking followers if they were “itching to send Dershowitz a message.” The campaign raised $35,000 for Schakowsky.

Schakowsky acknowledged that her relationship with J Street and her closeness to President Obama — she was one of the first lawmakers to endorse him — created opportunities for Pollak in a Jewish community that has been made nervous by disagreements between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“I am a supporter of the president. That doesn’t mean on every aspect or everything he does I might not have a nuanced difference,” she said, specifying Israel as an example.

Schakowsky said that at a recent closed meeting between Obama and Jewish members of Congress, she and others raised “all the kinds of things we hear in the community.”

One issue, she said, was the public nature of the tensions with Israel over settlement building.

Schakowsky also noted Obama’s recent statements of support for Israel and his success in shepherding new Iran sanctions through the United Nations.

The questioning of her bond to Israel “pains me,” Schakowsky said. “It’s even more directly like family for people to question my lifelong allegiance to Israel.”

Pollak earned a brief flash of fame a year ago when he confronted another Jewish Democrat — U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), the chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee.

Pollak said it irked him that Frank, addressing Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, blamed only conservatives for the mortgage crisis.

“It happened under your watch,” Pollak said.

Pollak and Frank sparred for five minutes over whether Pollak had “accused” Frank of something and who had which facts right. The video got Pollak a post-battle appearance on the Fox News Channel. Pollak said he had once been a left-wing Democrat, but what he described as the tendency on the left to squeeze out dissent pushed him rightward.

Pollak now opposes what he describes as big government spending, and he has been endorsed by the conservative Tea Party movement.

“I share its emphasis on controlling government spending and restraining executive power,” he said.

Pollak says that’s the issue that could get him elected in November, and noted that the district in recent years has pushed west, where more conservative voters live, among them an enclave of Orthodox Jews.

“There is a backlash there, even in Lakefront areas,” the kipah-wearing candidate said, adding that the Chicago metropolitan area has lost 250,000 jobs in recent years.

Jewish political insiders say that, if anything, Schakowsky is least vulnerable in this area — although anything could happen in a “Tea Party” year.

The incumbent is a formidable beat politician; she helped direct money to open a new commuter rail station in suburban Skokie.

“We’re running a strong campaign throughout the district,” Schakowsky said. “I’m home every weekend meeting with constituents and going to their meetings.”

She would not dismiss Pollak.

“I take every challenge seriously,” she said. “Joel is running an energetic campaign.”