It's Passover, and Sarah Palin is
wearing her Star of David necklace again. So it's a good time to check in on a group that launched just over one year ago, Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin.
The outfit, which launched to a fair amount of attention in 2010,
describes itself as an "independent group of academic, religious and political leaders" devoted to promoting Palin. Its founder, a Philadelphia-based former newspaper editor named Binyamin Korn,
told me last April that he would be releasing a list of prominent supporters of "Jews for Palin" within a couple of weeks. But that never happened. In fact, there's no evidence the group is anything more than a website and public-relations vehicle consisting of one member -- Korn himself.
Korn has not responded to an email I sent a week ago asking about all this. And he did not immediately return a phone call today.
While Palin has been known to make
strange comments about Israel and polls very
poorly among the largely liberal American Jewish population, Korn saw a potential champion in Palin. When he launched the Jews for Palin group last year, he told me Palin was "mainstream, charismatic, and she seems to get under the president's skin effectively."
Besides Korn, the only other named member of Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin is the anti-Muslim blogger
Pamela Geller, who has
described herself as a proud member of the group's "National Advisory Board." One cached
page from the group's website states: "our national Advisory Board (in formation, tba) includes a distinguished scholar of Hindu-Buddhist-Jain, and Jewish, studies." The Hindu-Buddhist-Jain scholar in question is not named.
Meanwhile, the Jews for Palin website remains under construction.
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http://www.salon.com/news/politics/sarah_palin/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/04/20/jews_for_sarah_palin