WASHINGTON – The athletes, the astronauts, the alternative music, the black rabbi, the white dress uniforms, and, above all, the left-handed baseball immortal: Welcome to Barack Obama’s Jewish America.

The inaugural Jewish America Heritage Month celebration at the White House, held May 27, underscored the Obama administration’s determination not to be locked into Washington’s conventional notions of Jewish leadership.

News Analysis

President Obama did not exactly snub the usual suspects who have peopled similar events for decades. Lee Rosenberg, the president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Alan Solow, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, were on hand. Both also happen to have been major fund-raisers for Obama’s campaign, as were several others among the 250 or so in attendance.

Baseball legend Sandy Koufax attracted plenty of attention at the Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the White House, May 27. The Jewish Channel

But the image that the White House sought to convey was of a Jewish America not necessarily bound to the alphabet soup of the Jewish organizational world and of pro-Israelism. Instead, Obama presented an array of Jewish heroes and celebrities who pronouncedly defied Jewish stereotypes. In addition to the major givers, the entrepreneurs, and the communal leaders, guests included sports heroes such as Sandy Koufax, veterans, nonprofit innovators, journalists, actors, and organizers.

Obama referred also to “the countless names that we don’t know — the teachers, the small-business owners, the doctors and nurses, the people who seek only to live honestly and faithfully and to give their children more than they had.”

The reception was in the works for months, and planning predated the tensions between Israel and the United States precipitated in early March when Israel announced a major housing start in eastern Jerusalem during an official visit there by Vice President Joe Biden, who also was at the reception.

Still, the White House’s pro-Jewish and pro-Israel messages were timely — coming in the wake of a weeks-long “charm offensive” launched by the White House to help allay anxieties over the recent tensions with Jerusalem. And luckily for those seeking an unadulterated feel-good moment, the event took place days before the international furor over Israel’s raid on the flotilla headed toward Gaza.

The reception included a traditional reference to the “unbreakable” Israel-U.S. alliance dating back to within minutes of Israel’s establishment.

Jewish values, Obama said, “helped lead America to recognize and support Israel as a Jewish homeland and a beacon for democratic values — beginning mere minutes after its independence was declared. In fact, we have the original statement by President Harry Truman on display here today.”

Obama also made it clear, however, that he sees the alliance as part of America’s strategy of global outreach.

“My administration is renewing American leadership around the world — strengthening old alliances and forging new ones, defending universal values while ensuring that we uphold our values here at home,” he said. “In fact, it’s our common values that leads us to stand with allies and friends, including the State of Israel.”

Overall, the festivities amounted to a bald emotional appeal to Jewish soft spots: The National Archives ran a session on stereotype-defying Jews in the military during the Civil War. The Library of Congress celebrated Jewish comediennes.

Nowhere were the emotions more in evident — yet more controlled — than at the White House reception.

The Heritage Month was established after legislation passed in 2006 by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), then a freshman in Congress. In subsequent years, Jewish Democrats fumed that President George W. Bush did nothing more to mark the month than issue a proclamation.

After such griping, it raised eyebrows last year when Obama did not mark the month, so the May 27 reception was seen as inevitable. When Obama pronounced this the “first-ever” such reception, Wasserman Schultz leaned back in her chair and beamed at her congressional colleagues.

Rabbi Alyssa Stanton of Greenville, N.C., the first black female rabbi, read the poem by Emma Lazarus inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. When she smiled and raised her arm to pronounce, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free,” there was a gasp: A descendant of immigrants brought to America in chains was celebrating those who fled bondage and sought its freedom.

Regina Spektor, the “anti-folk” singer who performed on a grand piano, presented a similar contrast: An alternative music favorite of New York cosmopolitans who refuses to shake off her provincial roots as the little 9-year-old refusenik who came here in 1989 and who famously told New York magazine when her career was taking off: “The Jewish question — it still exists.”

Spektor had to breathe deep before starting. Prodded by a nod and a grin from Michelle Obama, she attacked her first song, “Us,” with lyrics suggestive of Jewish frustration at coping with how others define Jews: “They made a statue of us and put it on a mountaintop/ Now tourists come and stare at us, blow bubbles with their gum, take photograph, have fun.”

The military veterans were guided to their seats by service personnel in white dress uniforms. Among the athletes was Dara Torres, the five-time Olympic gold medalist swimmer whose son snapped a photo of her with Obama. (“Can you beat your mom yet?” Obama shouted at the strapping teenager, who murmured, “No.”)

Jewish astronauts were invited, a White House official said, but none could make it — although one, Garrett Reisman, carried Obama’s proclamation into space aboard the last mission of space shuttle Atlantis, which returned to Earth last week.

There were establishment journalists, like Roger Cohen and Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, but there was also Heeb publisher Josh Newman and Doug Bloomfield, an irreverent Democrat who for years has been excoriating conservatives in Jewish weeklies. There was Michael Adler, the Florida philanthropist and vice chairman of the board of trustees of the Jewish Federations of North America, but there also was Eli Winkelman, the college student who founded Challah for Hunger, which brings together students to bake challahs that are sold to raise funds for Darfur.

But the star of the afternoon was Koufax, the legendary Dodgers’ southpaw who made baseball history by pitching four no-hitters and Jewish history by bailing on a World Series game because it fell on Yom Kippur.

“We’ve got senators and representatives, we’ve got Supreme Court justices and successful entrepreneurs, rabbinical scholars, Olympic athletes — and Sandy Koufax,” Obama said. “Sandy and I actually have something in common — we are both lefties. He can’t pitch on Yom Kippur; I can’t pitch.”

JTA

WASHINGTON – Teenager Adam Nesenoff and his father, Rabbi David Nesenoff, are pretty far down the media food chain.

The son, an active member of the National Council for Synagogue Youth, the Orthodox Union’s affiliated youth group, runs his own newsy site, Shmoozepoint.com. Dad operates a website called RabbiLive.com and sometimes portrays the satirical character of Julio Ramirez, a Hispanic priest who teams with a rabbi to deliver “Holy Weather” reports.

So it was impressive enough that both managed to snag media credentials for the American Jewish Heritage Month celebration May 27 at the White House. But in the past week, the senior Nesenoff took things to another level, turning his few hours as a hobnobber into 15 minutes of fame as the YouTube journalist who brought down a media icon.

Helen Thomas, known for her rough questioning of presidents, resigned this week after being assailed for saying that Israeli Jews should “go home.” Michael Foley/Flickr

It was the rabbi, armed with a camera and accompanied by his son and his teenage friend, who went around asking notables if they had any “comments on Israel.”

As the world now knows, Helen Thomas sure did.

“Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” the doyenne of the Washington press corps said, and laughed. “Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land.”

Nesenoff asked where she thought they should go.

“Go home,” she responded.

Asked to elaborate, Thomas said, “Poland, Germany,” and after more prompting by the rabbi, added “and America, and everywhere else.”

The rabbi didn’t post the video until June 3, but it quickly gained national attention, unleashing a flurry of demands for Thomas’ marginalization, if not dismissal.

On Monday, Thomas, 89, heeded the calls and quit, according to her employer, the Hearst Corp. Thomas’ phone number was not answering.

The Nesenoff video went viral after being picked up by Yidwithlid, a popular site run by the conservative commentator Sammy Benoit, and then posted to the hyper-popular conservative video site Breitbart TV.

That’s when the complaints started: First out of the box was B’nai B’rith International, which issued a June 4 statement from its president, Dennis Glick, demanding that Thomas be fired.

A diverse slew of other Jewish organizations soon followed with their own condemnations. Officials of the two most recent administrations — Ari Fleischer of the Bush administration and Lanny Davis of the Clinton administration — also slammed Thomas and called for her to be sacked.

The first death knell for Thomas’ career, though, probably came when she found herself being criticized on liberal Websites such as Huffington Post and Talking Points Memo, which have long lauded her for asking discomfiting questions of presidents — particularly her encounters with George W. Bush during the Iraq War.

Joe Klein, the Time magazine scribe who has been a tough critic of Israel’s Netanyahu government, called her views “odious” and said she should no longer have the privilege, accorded by the White House Correspondents Association, of a front row center seat.

Thomas’ apology, posted June 4, preceded most of the broadsides against her.

“I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians,” she said in the apology. “They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Critics, including the Anti-Defamation League, said it did not go far enough.

By Monday, such requests appeared moot: After a series of blows, it was clear her career was finished.

On Sunday, Thomas was dropped by her speaking agent, Nine Speakers. The following day, the Washington Post reported that Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md. — a Washington suburb with a substantial Jewish population — was withdrawing its invitation to Thomas to be commencement speaker.

The final blow was a one-two: The White House Correspondents Association met to consider her front-row center perch. And White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called the remarks “offensive and reprehensible.”

The die was cast: Midday Monday, Hearst announced her retirement.

“Helen Thomas announced Monday that she is retiring, effective immediately,” said a statement issued Monday by the corporation. “Her decision came after her controversial comments about Israel and the Palestinians were captured on videotape and widely disseminated on the Internet.”

It was a rapid fall for a woman who had become a liberal icon.

Thomas was a perennial, admired for becoming, during the Kennedy administration, one of the first women to cover the White House beat. She was granted the first question at news conferences, and finished each conference with a “Thank you Mr. President.” She earned the ultimate Washington status symbol: cameos in movies about politics.

Thomas, for decades a consummate insider who had watched her beloved UPI diminish into irrelevance, embraced her new status as an irascible outsider. In 2006 she published the book “Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How It Has Failed the Public.”

Her posture as maverick was something of a feint: Washington has long nurtured an establishment journalist culture that cozies up to power, and Thomas since the 1960s was one of its denizens, hobnobbing with the Kennedys, the Johnsons, and their confidants.

Thomas, the child of Lebanese immigrants, was known to be a fierce critic of Israel and what she saw as the unwillingness of successive U.S. administrations to speak out against Jerusalem’s supposed misdeeds.

Her most recent encounter with Gibbs, after Israel’s raid on a Turkish-flagged aid ship, came after her remarks to Nesenoff but before he revealed them to the world.

She called Israel’s raid a “deliberate massacre” and said the White House’s expression of “regret” was “pitiful.”

Dan Mariaschin, the director of B’nai B’rith, said Thomas’ comments should have come as no surprise.

“There’s a Yiddish expression, ‘What’s on your lung is on your tongue,’” he said. “She has a long record of being purposefully hypercritical of Israel.”

Mariaschin acknowledged that the timing was against her. B’nai B’rith would have called for her dismissal even without the opprobrium visited on Israel after the flotilla raid, but it didn’t help, he said.

“The timing was such that, coming as it did right after the flotilla issue, I think perhaps it brought her comments into even starker focus,” he said.

Nesenoff, of Stony Brook, N.Y., said he had accompanied his son and his friend to share the joyful experience of the White House’s Jewish celebration.

Adam Nesenoff, 17, who in addition to running his own Website is his father’s Webmaster, had applied for a media credential after hearing that the event would have a youthful emphasis. The elder Nesenoff asked the White House if he could join his son, explaining that otherwise he would be stuck outside the whole day waiting to drive him home.

They wandered the grounds near the White House press room before the event. Rabbi Nesenoff said he pointed out Thomas to the teens because she was a press icon. He was vaguely aware she had views critical of Israel, but did not think she would be so outrageous.

“People can have their opinions, but this was ‘Get out of the whole land, cleanse the whole land of Jews,’” he said. “We’re there in our Shabbos best, we had driven down — we were taken back. If it was a skinhead in a parking lot — but here’s this sweet little old lady on the White House grounds. We were hurt.”

Nesenoff said he still hopes for a more expansive apology from Thomas.

“She has to do a little ‘tikkun olam,’” the rabbi said. “I hope to God she lives a very long time; she has business yet.”

JTA