Poll: Jews back party more than Obama

The first thing you notice about David Kleid’s new electric sedan is the quiet.

Driving up the hills toward Jerusalem from his home in Ma’aleh Adumim, Kleid’s shiny blue Renault Fluence emits barely a whisper.

But the lack of noise is not what motivated the former Fair Lawn resident to lease the Fluence through Better Place, the U.S.-Israeli electric car company that aims to set up Israel as a replicable model for the rest of the world — if enough David Kleids are willing to give it a test drive.

Kleid, a physician in the pediatric intensive care unit at Hadassah University Medical Center-Ein Karem in Jerusalem, does not consider himself an “early adopter” type. The all-electric Renault appealed to him mainly for its ability to free him from the gas pump.

The Kotel, the western retaining wall of the Temple in Jerusalem, has symbolized the symbolic heart of the Jewish people for two thousand years. It has been a unifying vision, the magnet that drew the iron in each one of us.

When it was retaken by Israeli soldiers in June 1967, and Jews once again were able to draw near to it, it represented both victory and hope, although some people, here and in Israel, complained about the “bicycle racks” that separated men from women almost as soon as the area was cleared and the Western Wall was opened to the public. Still, the Wall was a symbol of Jewish unity and pride.

Attorney Julius Berman, embattled chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, struck back at his and the organization’s critics on Thursday in a lengthy memorandum to his board of directors. The Jewish Standard received a copy of Berman’s memo late Thursday. It is posted below the story.

In recent weeks, the Claims Conference has been under heavy fire for allegedly ignoring nearly a decade of warnings that the organization was being defrauded from within. During a 17-year span, employees and their outside collaborators managed to redirect $57 million to their own pockets. Berman’s memorandum does not ascribe motives to his critics, but the totality of the evidence he presents does suggest that self-promotion, rather than genuine concern, was at the heart of their criticism.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Rep. Anthony Weiner resigned and apologized in the wake of a scandal in which he lied about sexually explicit exchanges on social media outlets.

“I am here today to apologize for the personal mistakes I have made and the embarrassment that I have caused,” Weiner (D-N.Y.) said at a news conference Thursday at a home for the elderly in Brooklyn where in the past he has announced his intention to run for office.

WASHINGTON – From accolades like “compelling” to accusations like “Auschwitz borders” to radio silence, to label the Jewish response to President Obama’s speech on Middle East policy as diverse understates matters.

The very breadth of the Middle East policy speech — 5,600 words and covering the entire Middle East and decades of history — helps explain the wildly divergent responses from Jewish groups and opinion shapers, even among some who are otherwise often on the same page.

One could as easily pick out points for Israel — slamming the Palestinian Authority’s pact with Hamas as well as its bid for unilateral statehood — as one could the demerits — for many, the most explicit endorsement of the pre-1967 lines as the basis for future borders by any American president.

WASHINGTON – President Obama said the future state of Palestine should be based on the pre-1967 border with mutually agreed land swaps with Israel.

In his address Thursday afternoon on U.S. policy in the Middle East, Obama told an audience at the State Department that the borders of a “sovereign, nonmilitarized” Palestinian state “should be based on 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.”

Negotiations should focus first on territory and security, and then the difficult issues of the status of Jerusalem and what to do about the rights of Palestinian refugees can be broached, Obama said.