A new book documents American Jewish history in an unusual way ”” through vinyl album covers.

Authors Roger Bennett and Josh Kun wrote And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl, which details Jewish vinyl album covers they have collected over the years. Jewish, in these terms, includes everything from the prolific cantor Sol Zim to the Temptations’ Fiddler on the Roof medley.

The kindred spirits found each other in 2003 as they searched for their own Jewish identities and dug through stacks of albums. They pooled their collections ”” word got around ”” and soon their garages were overflowing with vinyl.

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The expression “as poor as a church mouse” is taking on fresh meaning, especially for mainline Protestant churches such as [the Rev. Michael] Gray’s, which have been grappling for decades with a drop in members and donations.

Autumn is the time of year when many churches are drawing up their budgets and asking for donation pledges for the coming year. This year, many church leaders say they are preparing for hard times.

For some churches on the edge, this could be a winter of final reckoning.

“We are all on survival mode,” said the Very Rev. Benjamin Shambaugh, dean of the Episcopal Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Portland.

Like many congregations with drafty pre-energy crisis buildings, St. Luke’s is feeling the squeeze that comes from heating its soaring interiors. Shambaugh expects St. Luke’s to have spent $40,000 on oil to heat its State Street building by the end of this year, a big chunk of the church’s $578,000 annual budget.

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SEVERSON: Unlike Sarah Palin, Lori is pro-choice and in favor of gun control. She’s very worried about the economy, but again, the threat of terrorism trumps all.

Ms. LOWENTHAL MARCUS: I know people who have lost their jobs. It’s terrifying.But the idea of an entire nation being wiped off the face of the earth — if we are not alive, doesn’t matter how much money we make or what kind of job we have.

SEVERSON: Not far from Lori’s house, David Broida, a writer who also runs a tennis center for kids, is a devoted Jew for Obama. He was there at the convention. Broida supports Obama for the same reason that Lori opposes him.

DAVID BROIDA: I am just as concerned about Israel, Israel’s security, but in my judgment Barack Obama is the better candidate on Israel for American voters.

SEVERSON: Why is that?

Mr. BROIDA: We’re interested in negotiations. Israel is in a very precarious position, with Iran being armed with nuclear weapons probably or going to be. So we need to be thinking in terms of diplomacy, and we need the best diplomatic team out there.

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It’s been a hell of a week for God and for Mammon. “The love of money is the root of all evil” Dr John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York reminded City bankers on Wednesday, adding, rather presciently as it turned out, “We have all worshipped it. No one is guiltless”.

Indeed, less than 24 hours after the Archbishops of Canterbury and York had ripped into global capitalism, decrying the greed of “City robbers,” it emerged that the investments controlled by the Church itself were involved in short selling ”“ because its stock was lent to enable short selling to happen and because it owned shares in Man Group, a large hedge fund manager. As a morality tale, it was almost worthy of Chaucer’s Pardoner. Radix Malorum est Cupiditas: the Root of all Evil is Money he preaches in The Canterbury Tales, making, in the process, a tidy profit.

Yet for all the justified charges of hypocrisy, this weeks’ battles between Church and City have, if little else, turned the spotlight on God and the question of what, if anything, the world’s main faiths, Islam, Judaism and Christianity have to say about finance, debt and spirituality.

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We have not always put children first in recent times. They have been the victims, in Britain, of the breakdown of marriage, the instability of families, changes in work practices, and the consumerisation of society. We still have a long way to go in making ours a child-friendly society. In February 2007 a Unicef survey of 21 industrialised nations found Britain’s children the unhappiest of all. Children are always vulnerable. They are dependent on others. They have no vote and all too little voice. There are many different interpretations of the famous passage in the Bible ”” we read it on the second day of the new year ”” about the binding of Isaac, but I read it as God’s command to Abraham, and through him to us: Do not sacrifice your children. Isaac lives. God countermands his earlier request. Ever afterward, throughout the Bible, child sacrifice is seen as the most heinous of all sins.

There are many ways in which children can become victims, but none is justified. All too often, nations are driven by a sense of the past: there are grievances to be redressed, honour to be recovered, past glory to be regained. Yet we would have a more peaceful and constructive world if we looked to the future, of which our children are the symbol and the beneficiaries.

If we put children first, we would, I believe, have a saner society and a less conflict-filled world. The rabbis said that the Universe only survives because of the innocent chatter of children.

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The third meeting of the Chief Rabbis of Israel and the Archbishop of Canterbury was held on 9th September 2008/9th Elul 5768, fulfilling the provisions of the Joint Declaration signed by them on 5th September 2006/12th Elul 5766.

The Most Revd Dr Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar and Chief Rabbi Yonah Metzger of Israel met in Lambeth Palace. The Chief Rabbis were supported by Mr Oded Wiener, Director General of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, whilst the Archbishop was supported by the Rt Revd Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher and Co-Chair of the Anglican Jewish Commission, and the Rt Revd Suheil Dawani, Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem.
“We feel keenly the absence of Rabbi David Rosen who was not able to be present because of a family bereavement and express our condolences and prayers for him, his wife and their family. We also wish to acknowledge, with gratitude, the work of Canon Guy Wilkinson who has supported our meetings and those of our Anglican Jewish Commission since their inception.

“We are encouraged by the further steps we have taken, under God, to build up the trust and mutual understanding that have characterised our encounter. We have heard from members of our Anglican Jewish Commission of the special relationship that has developed in their meetings and received with gratitude the report of their work on the holiness of person, place and time. The Commission’s meeting in Canterbury this year during the Lambeth Conference gave it a special character. We were delighted to hear of the warm appreciation shown by the bishops of the Anglican Communion and their spouses for the address on the theme of “Covenant” by Sir Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth ”“ an historic address as the first by a Chief Rabbi to the decennial Lambeth Conference.

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Rabbis and bishops joined in affirming their common beliefs regarding marriage in a joint statement titled “Created in the Divine Image.” The statement was signed by Rabbi Fabian Schonfeld of Young Israel Synagogue in Kew Gardens Hills, New York, and Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Centre, with other Catholic and Jewish leaders

The bishops and rabbis affirm “our shared commitment to the ordinance of God, the Almighty One, who created man and woman in the divine image so that they might share as male and female, as helpmates and equals, in the procreation of children and the building up of society.”

In June, California became the second U.S. state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriages. The governor of New York earlier this year instructed authorities in his state to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in states or countries where the unions are legal.

The Catholic-Jewish statement contests the claim that refusing to recognize same-sex unions as marriage is discrimination against homosexuals.

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One weekday morning in 1981, when he was new to Baltimore, Arnold Graf descended into the basement of the Enon Baptist Church. The steps took him into the midst of 60 skeptics. They were the black ministers whom Mr. Graf, a white Jew, was trying to persuade to join him in community organizing.

Even among a loquacious crowd of preachers, conversation stilled at Mr. Graf’s arrival. “I don’t know if we should be talking about this stuff with an outsider here,” one minister said, as Mr. Graf recently recalled the meeting.

Then the Rev. Vernon N. Dobson, one of Baltimore’s legendary civil rights leaders, replied. Alone among the dozens of ministers, he was already a member of Mr. Graf’s group, Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development. Alone among them, Mr. Dobson had already gotten to know Mr. Graf during the organizer’s brief months in the city.

“He’s with me,” Mr. Dobson said. “And who’s blacker than me here? The man is my brother.”

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While Barack Obama has struggled to capture the Jewish vote, it turns out that one of his wife’s cousins is the country’s most prominent black rabbi ”” a fact that has gone largely unnoticed.

Michelle Obama, wife of the Democratic presidential nominee, and Rabbi Capers Funnye, spiritual leader of a mostly black synagogue on Chicago’s South Side, are first cousins once removed. Funnye’s mother, Verdelle Robinson Funnye (born Verdelle Robinson) and Michelle Obama’s paternal grandfather, Frasier Robinson Jr., were brother and sister.

Funnye (pronounced fuh-NAY) is chief rabbi at the Beth Shalom B’nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation in southwest Chicago. He is well-known in Jewish circles for acting as a bridge between mainstream Jewry and the much smaller, and largely separate, world of black Jewish congregations, sometimes known as black Hebrews or Israelites. He has often urged the larger Jewish community to be more accepting of Jews who are not white.

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An Illinois man has petitioned the state supreme court to weigh in on a clause in his father’s will that disinherits grandchildren who marry non-Jewish spouses.

In a 2-1 decision, a state appeals court on June 30 upheld a lower court ruling that a provision in a will known as the “Jewish clause” was “unenforceable” and “contrary to state policies.”

“I believe (the case) does create a precedent for conditions attached to estate planning,” said Michael J. Durkin, attorney for Michael Feinberg, who wants the “Jewish clause” in his father Max Feinberg’s will held intact.

“It would be a reduction of a person’s right to dispose of his or her property as he sees fit, and an intervention by virtue of public policy by those rights.”

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Catholics at worship should neither sing nor pronounce the name of God as “Yahweh,” the Vatican has said, citing the authority of both Jewish and Christian practice.

The instruction came in a June 29 letter to Catholic bishops conferences around the world from the Vatican’s top liturgical body, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Sacraments, by an explicit “directive” of Pope Benedict XVI.

“In recent years the practice has crept in of pronouncing the God of Israel’s proper name,” the letter noted, referring to the four-consonant Hebrew “Tetragrammaton,” YHWH.

That name is commonly pronounced as “Yahweh,” though other versions include “Jaweh” and “Yehovah.” But such pronunciation violates long-standing Jewish tradition, the Vatican reminded bishops.

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Friends, I stand before you as a Jew, which means not just as an individual, but as a representative of my people. And as I prepared this lecture, within my soul were the tears of my ancestors. We may have forgotten this, but for a thousand years, between the First Crusade and the Holocaust, the word ‘Christian’ struck fear into Jewish hearts. Think only of the words the Jewish encounter with Christianity added to the vocabulary of human pain: blood libel, book burnings, disputations, forced conversions, inquisition, auto da fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom.

I could not stand here today in total openness, and not mention that book of Jewish tears.

And I have asked myself, what would our ancestors want of us today?

And the answer to that lies in the scene that brings the book of Genesis to a climax and a closure. You remember: after the death of Jacob, the brothers fear that Joseph will take revenge. After all, they had sold him into slavery in Egypt.

Instead, Joseph forgives — but he does more than forgive. Listen carefully to his words:

You intended to harm me,
but God intended it for good,
to do what is now being done,
to save many lives.

Joseph does more than forgive. He says, out of bad has come good. Because of what you did to me, I have been able to save many lives. Which lives? Not just those of his brothers, but the lives of the Egyptians, the lives of strangers. I have been able to feed the hungry. I have been able to honour the covenant of fate — and by honouring the covenant of fate between him and strangers, Joseph is able to mend the broken covenant of faith between him and his brothers.

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People often compare dating to interviewing for a job. In the Orthodox Jewish world, this notion is taken almost literally.

Upon returning from post-high-school studies in Israel, young Orthodox women (such as myself) meet with recruiters, commonly known as shadchanim (matchmakers). After determining whether the young woman wishes to marry a “learner” (a man studying full time in yeshiva), an “earner” (a professional) or a combination of the two, the shadchan collects the prospective bride’s “shidduch résumé,” detailing everything from education and career plans to dress size, height, parents’ occupations and synagogue memberships. The shadchan then approaches a suitable single man or, most likely, his parents — who add the woman to their son’s typically lengthy “list.”

Before agreeing to a noncommittal first date, the man’s parents begin a thorough background check that puts government security clearance to shame. Phoning references isn’t enough — of course they’ll say good things — so they cold-call other acquaintances of the potential bride, from camp counselors to college roommates. The questions they ask often border on the superficial: “Does she own a Netflix account?”; “Does she wear open-toed shoes?” (The correct response may vary depending on how Orthodox a woman the man is looking for.)

Just as the economy is headed to recession, the shidduch system is in crisis mode. Or so the rabbis moan, noting the surplus of women eager to marry and the corresponding shortfall in the quality and quantity of available Jewish men.

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“I have no future here to stay.”

Written in broken English but with perfect clarity, the message is a stark and plaintive assessment from one of the last Jews of Babylon.

The community of Jews in Baghdad is now all but vanished in a land where their heritage recedes back to Abraham of Ur, to Jonah’s prophesying to Nineveh, and to Nebuchadnezzar’s sending Jews into exile here more than 2,500 years ago.

Just over half a century ago, Iraq’s Jews numbered more than 130,000. But now, in the city that was once the community’s heart, they cannot muster even a minyan, the 10 Jewish men required to perform some of the most important rituals of their faith. They are scared even to publicize their exact number, which was recently estimated at seven by the Jewish Agency for Israel, and at eight by one Christian cleric. That is not enough to read the Torah in public, if there were anywhere in public they would dare to read it, and too few to recite a proper Kaddish for the dead.

Read it all from the front page of this morning’s New York Times.

The main task of prophetic thinking,” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-72) wrote in his seminal book, “The Prophets,” “is to bring the world into divine focus.” For two hours at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage last week, Dartmouth Prof. Susannah Heschel (the rabbi’s daughter) and Princeton Prof. Cornel West used Rabbi Heschel’s words to discuss whether there is a “prophetic spirit” in modern America.

The answer, more than a century after the rabbi’s birth, was a resounding “yes.” But the question of how that spirit can manifest itself — and in whom — turned out to be more complex.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, born in Warsaw, was the descendant of two Hasidic rabbinic dynasties. He grew up in Poland and received his doctorate from the University of Berlin. His dissertation was later published as “The Prophets.” In 1940, he left Europe for the U.S., and in 1945 he became a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Heschel’s writings — studied extensively in Jewish and Christian communities alike — give great consideration to the relationship between man and God and the potential for individuals to imbue their own lives with a sense of sanctification and purpose. “We are called upon to be an image of God,” he said in an ABC interview in 1971. “You see, God is absent, invisible, and the task of a human being is to represent the divine, to be a reminder of the presence of God.”

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With the economy down and needs up for the homeless, the hungry and the elderly, donations to South Florida churches and other religious institutions are straining to keep up with soaring needs, leaders say.

At the Miami Archdiocese, collection-plate revenues are steady, but assessments that individual parishes pay are slow in coming or are down, and needs are up sharply, resulting in the layoff of 49 of the 182 staff members at its Pastoral Center on Biscayne Boulevard, said spokeswoman Mary Ross Agosta.

In a letter to parishioners, Archbishop John C. Favalora said: “Each year, a greater number of parishes and programs are seeking our financial help, and, therefore, we must prioritize. We can only work with what we have.”

South Florida’s Jewish, Methodist, Episcopal and other faithful face similar problems.

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Some years ago I read a book, written by an Israeli, about the relationships between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Holy Land. It contained a fascinating remark made by a nun, Sister Maria Teresa: “I watch the [Jewish] families who visit here on weekends; how the parents behave toward their children, speaking to them with patience and encouraging them to ask intelligent questions. It’s an example for the whole world. The strength of this people is the love of parents for their children.” I see a very similar devotion to children among the Sikhs I’ve been privileged to know.

Sister Maria’s remark touches on another feature of Judaism: the idea that Jewish parents must teach their children to ask questions. We do not believe that faith is blind or unquestioning. Nor do we believe that education is a process in which adults speak and children listen, adults command and children obey. That is the sign of an authoritarian culture, not a free society.

In the Hebrew Bible, people ask questions of God, and the greater the person, the deeper the question.

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Shortly before Toby Goldfisher Kaplowitz married two years ago, she went to a kallah teacher ”” a woman who prepares Orthodox Jewish brides to be intimate with their husbands.

The teacher spent most of her time going over how to observe the laws prohibiting physical contact between husband and wife during the woman’s menstrual period and for a week afterward. She described sex as “”˜so horrible, so painful, but said, ”˜I’ll give you some tips to deal with it,’ “ Ms. Goldfisher Kaplowitz recalled.

“I was really shocked,” she said. “I knew it was probably true for some women, but I didn’t want to be one of them.”

Today she teaches brides herself in Brookline, Mass., taking a very different approach.

Ms. Goldfisher Kaplowitz is part of a movement among more liberal Orthodox Jews toward open discussion of sexuality and sexual health.

“Sexuality needed addressing,” said Jennie Rosenfeld, director of Tzelem, a project housed at the Center for the Jewish Future, at Yeshiva University, that focuses on the topic. “Having grown up in the Orthodox community, it was too often a subject not spoken about, especially by people of authority, like teachers and rabbis, people who should be addressing it.”

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The back story of how a Torah got from the fetid barracks of Auschwitz to the ark of the Central Synagogue at Lexington Avenue and 55th Street is one the pastor of the Lutheran church down the street sums up as simply “miraculous.”

It is the story of a sexton in the synagogue in the Polish city of Oswiecim who buried most of the sacred scroll before the Germans stormed in and later renamed the city Auschwitz. It is the story of Jewish prisoners who sneaked the rest of it ”” four carefully chosen panels ”” into the concentration camp.

It is the story of a Polish Catholic priest to whom they entrusted the four panels before their deaths. It is the story of a Maryland rabbi who went looking for it with a metal detector. And it is the story of how a hunch by the rabbi’s 13-year-old son helped lead him to it.

This Torah, more than most, “is such an extraordinary symbol of rebirth,” said Peter J. Rubinstein, the rabbi of Central Synagogue. “As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust, this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

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Uganda has a small but thriving Jewish community. A reporter joined them for Passover last year.

Listen to it all and note carefully the reason for the leader’s conversion from Anglicanism to Judaism.

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Listen to it all from one of my favorite voices on the English religious scene.

The moment the war ended, I believed ”” we all did ”” that anyone who survived death must bear witness. Some of us even believed that they survived in order to become witnesses. But then I knew deep down that it would be impossible to communicate the entire story. Nobody can. I personally decided to wait, to see during 10 years if I would be capable to find the proper words, the proper pace, the proper melody or maybe even the proper silence to describe the ineffable.

For in my tradition, as a Jew, I believe that whatever we receive we must share. When we endure an experience, the experience cannot stay with me alone. It must be opened, it must become an offering, it must be deepened and given and shared. And of course I am afraid that memories suppressed could come back with a fury, which is dangerous to all human beings, not only to those who directly were participants but to people everywhere, to the world, for everyone. So, therefore, those memories that are discarded, shamed, somehow they may come back in different ways ”” disguised, perhaps seeking another outlet.

Granted, our task is to inform. But information must be transformed into knowledge, knowledge into sensitivity and sensitivity into commitment.

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The real question, which has echoed time and again through the corridors of history, is whether we can find ways of living together, despite the fact that we can’t find ways of believing or worshipping together.

That is what the Bible teaches in its very first chapter, when it says that we are all, every one of us, in the image of God. Our love of God must lead us to a love of humanity.

I find it extraordinary that in an age in which globalization is forcing us together, all too often, across the globe, faith is driving us apart. We should be fighting environmental destruction, political oppression, poverty and disease, not fighting one another, least of all in the name of God whose image we all bear.

That is why I believe the time has now come, even in Britain, to bring a message of religious tolerance into the public square. For if the voice of reconciliation does not speak, the voices of extremism will.

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THE World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) has reaffirmed its long-held belief that offering friendship and love to Jewish people is not enough: they must also be converted to Christianity. In a statement issued last week, the Alliance defended specialist ministries that were aimed specifically at the conversion of Jewish people.

The statement, signed by US and UK theologians, ministers, evangelists, and writers, said that the most loving and scriptural expression of friendship towards the Jewish people was “forthrightly to share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ. . .

“We believe that it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, he cannot be the Saviour of the World,” says the statement. Among the 45 signatories are Dr Lon Allison, Billy Graham Center; Chuck Colson, Prison Fellowship; the Rt Revd David Evans, former Bishop of Peru; Mark Greene, London Institute of Contemporary Christianity; Dr R. T. Kendall, an evangelist; the Revd Hugh Palmer, All Souls’, Langham Place; and Gordon Showell-Rogers, European Evangelical Alliance.

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Seventy-five years ago, Nazi police chief Heinrich Himmler announced the opening of the first concentration camp for political prisoners, ushering in one of the most tragic chapters in modern history.

Dachau, located about 10 miles northwest of Munich, opened in March 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In the beginning, prisoners were mostly opponents of the Nazi government, including Communists, trade unionists and Social Democrats.

But by 1938, there were around 10,000 Jewish prisoners at Dachau. The camp would eventually hold as many as 188,000 prisoners, and the Nazis used Dachau as a model and training center for its other concentration camps.

Hard to do so, but important that you listen to it all from NPR.

A Palestinian terrorist opened fire at a central Jerusalem yeshiva late Thursday night, killing eight students and wounding 11 others, police and rescue officials said.

The 8:45 p.m. shooting at Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in the Kiryat Moshe neighborhood broke a two-year lull in terror in the capital and sent students scurrying for cover from a hail of gunfire – a reported 500-600 bullets – that lasted for several minutes.

“There were horrendous screams of ‘Help us! Help us!'” recounted Avrahami Sheinberger of the ZAKA emergency rescue service, one of the first to respond to the scene. “There were bodies strewn all over the floor, at the entrance to the yeshiva, in various rooms and in the library.”

Makes the heart sick–read it all.

One day last fall, a young Israeli woman named Sharon went with her fiancé to the Tel Aviv Rabbinate to register to marry. They are not religious, but there is no civil marriage in Israel. The rabbinate, a government bureaucracy, has a monopoly on tying the knot between Jews. The last thing Sharon expected to be told that morning was that she would have to prove ”” before a rabbinic court, no less ”” that she was Jewish. It made as much sense as someone doubting she was Sharon, telling her that the name written in her blue government-issue ID card was irrelevant, asking her to prove that she was she.

Sharon is a small woman in her late 30s with shoulder-length brown hair. For privacy’s sake, she prefers to be identified by only her first name. She grew up on a kibbutz when kids were still raised in communal children’s houses. She has two brothers who served in Israeli combat units. She loved the green and quiet of the kibbutz but was bored, and after her own military service she moved to the big city, which is the standard kibbutz story. Now she is a Tel Aviv professional with a master’s degree, a job with a major H.M.O. and a partner ”” when this story starts, a fiancé ”” who is “in computers.”

This stereotypical biography did not help her any more at the rabbinate than the line on her birth certificate listing her nationality as Jewish. Proving you are Jewish to Israel’s state rabbinate can be difficult, it turns out, especially if you came to Israel from the United States ”” or, as in Sharon’s case, if your mother did.

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The odd thing is that dignity seems to go hand in hand with humility. Only when people discovered that they were not gods were they able to reach their full stature as human beings. Finding God, humanity found itself. Losing God, it is at risk of losing itself. For the biblical view of the human person – free, responsible, lonely yet capable of redeeming his or her loneliness through the moralisation of love – is what gave Western humanism its singular glory. For once, the human person confronted God in a realm of freedom and was lifted to the heights.

When human beings lose faith in God they lose faith in human beings. They abandon their moral qualms about abortion. Some, like the biologist Francis Crick, have no problem with infanticide. They favour voluntary euthanasia, death on demand. They give their support to eugenics and “designer children”. For what, after all, are we but a random concatenation of genes, a handful of dust?

Faith does not disagree; “From the dust you came and to the dust you will return.” It merely adds one detail. There is within us the breath of God. We have immortal longings. Lose this and we will lose all else. We will have knowledge without wisdom, technology without reticence, choice without conscience, power without restraint.

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As he battles for the Democratic nomination, Senator Barack Obama is trying to strengthen his support among Jewish voters and in doing so, is navigating one of the more treacherous paths of Democratic politics.

The challenge of meeting the concerns of the Jewish electorate, a cornerstone of the Democratic base, was evident Tuesday when Mr. Obama was asked at the Democratic debate in Cleveland about Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has endorsed him.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Farrakhan an anti-Semite and denounced his support, but was pressed to go further by his rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, an experienced hand at Democratic politics who herself has been on the defensive with Jewish voters after an encounter in 2000 with Suha Arafat, the wife of the Palestinian leader.

Mr. Obama has also faced criticism over remarks he made about the suffering of Palestinians ”” remarks he says were incorrectly reported ”” and about who is advising him on foreign affairs. And he has had to beat back false tales, spread in viral e-mail messages, that he is a Muslim who attended a madrassa in Indonesia as a boy and was sworn into office on the Koran. In fact, he is a Christian who was sworn in on a Bible.

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