JTA: Hillary Leads in Jewish Fundraising

Clinton leads in race for Jewish donors

Among Jewish Democrats, however, it’s no race, insiders in the fund-raising community say: While U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has generated considerable excitement, the years Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) has spent focusing on Israel and other issues of concern to the nation’s largest Jewish community puts her firmly in front.
“It’s experience,” said Lonnie Kaplan, a major pro-Israel fund-raiser. “It’s clear to me that she’s the best candidate the Democrats have. On domestic issues they’re all the same, but on foreign policy she has such experience and knowledge and the willingness to act.”
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Yet it is Clinton’s determined cultivation of the Jewish community that pushes her ahead, and not just because she represents the nation’s largest Jewish community in New York.
Clinton has spent her six years in the U.S. Senate reaching out to Jewish groups on nearly every domestic and foreign issue that the community embraces. She was a leader in getting homeland security funds to Jewish institutions and has taken the lead in demanding changes in Palestinian textbooks that would reflect the reality of Israel’s existence.

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