Wolf, who died in 2008, is remembered by those who knew him as a modern day Jewish “heretic” whose radical dogma on Israel and the American Jewish community traveled from a small Chicago synagogue all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Barack Obama knew many Jews in Chicago, but they tended to be left-wing Jews and tended to be people later involved in [the liberal advocacy group] J Street,” explained Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University.
It is these liberal players who “bred in Obama a specific and subversive vision of American Jewish identity and of the Jewish state,” Peter Beinart notes in his forthcoming book, The Crisis of Zionism.
Wolf in particular is said to have played a principal role in fostering Obama’s belief that the Jewish state—and, by proxy, the American Jewish establishment—could be pressured into negotiations with intransigent Palestinian political leaders.
“Barack Obama really believed there was this kind of a silent majority in the Jewish community who supports those views because those were the views he heard—liberal, active, Reform Jews in Chicago,” added Sarna. “It was a shock to him when he found the majority of Jews are not that way.”
One of principal architects of this radical Jewish philosophy was Wolf, who came to prominence in the late 1950s when he was hired as the full-time rabbi of Congregation Solel in Highland Park, a wealthy, liberal enclave on Chicago’s North shore.
During his stint at the temple, Wolf honed his left-wing bona fides, playing host to, among others, the infamous Chicago Seven, who were charged with inciting a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
In 1972, Wolf moved to Yale University where he served as a Jewish chaplain and director of the campus’s Hillel Foundation.It was there that Sarna, then a student, first met Wolf.
“He enjoyed really being a little outrageous and riling people up,” said Sarna, who became close with Wolf. “At a certain point he accused me of being a heretic. … He was full of mishegas,” a Yiddish term for craziness.
“He was a colorful character and had no fear about taking controversial stances,” added Rabbi Jack Riemer, a Florida-based religious leader who influenced President Bill Clinton. “Some people really considered him a heretic and saw what he was doing as outside the pale.”
During the 1970s, Wolf established himself as one of the chief advocates of negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which, at the time, routinely orchestrated terrorist attacks against Israel.
“Arnold Wolf was one of the earliest Jewish public figures whose ‘love’ of Israel expressed itself in a relentless assault on the really existing Jewish state and a corresponding sympathy for its enemies,” explained neoconservative author and commentator Norman Podhoretz.
“What Obama learned from [Wolf] about Israel would have been entirely consistent with what he learned from the likes of [the Rev.] Jeremiah Wright and [Palestinian activist] Rashid Khalidi, whose hatred of the Jewish state differed from Wolf’s views only in being more naked,” Podhoretz said.
Obama initially became friendly with Wolf in the 1990s, when the rabbi served as the spiritual leader of KAM Isaiah Israel, a Chicago synagogue located across the street from the president’s former residence.
The future president was a regular guest at the synagogue and become close with a faction of Jews who shared Wolf’s views on Israel and the Middle East.
High level officials like Rahm Emanuel, then Obama’s chief of staff, told Jewish leaders that Obama had “screwed up the messaging” on Israel. The president’s Middle East point man, Dennis Ross, touted supposed “manifestations of the change” in how the administration would treat Israel.
“There’s widespread understanding, including in the administration, that the … approach of placing Israeli settlements as the central barrier to solving every issue in the Middle East was wrong,” noted the Jewish Democratic insider.The administration’s recalibration, however, was relatively short lived.
Obama again inflamed the Jewish community last May, when he demanded that Israel revert to its 1967 borders with mutual land swaps—a policy that experts say would imperil the Jewish state.
“He reignited the concerns of the Jewish community” with that speech, said the senior Jewish insider, who went on to note that the Jewish community has concerns about a potential second term.
“There are grave concerns that during his second term, when he no longer has to worry about mundane matters of electoral politics, that the real Barack Obama will come forward,” said the source. “Bibi Netanyahu better watch out.”Read the full story here.
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