A close friend of my childhood, whom I now see about once a year, is a lawyer in Manhattan. My friend is a lifelong liberal Democrat, the sun of an ACLU chapter president. My friend is NO ANTI-SEMITE.
The last time I saw him we were talking over the war and I gingerly expressed my opinion that the perception among many Jews that Israeli interests were on the table was a important factor in building an adequate concensus at home to go after Saddam.
My friend -- to my considerable surprise -- said that he had recently been at a diner in NYC with a couple of hundred people who were connected to an Israeli business which my friend's firm represented. In other words, this was a Jewish dinner in New York.
My friend said that someone at the head table made a remark about the Iraq war (then still in its first year) and the entire room rose as one to give thunderous applause.
It is only an annecdote, but it was pursuasive to me.
This is not anecdotal. Reform Jews are by far the largest percent of Jews in the US.
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"This past November, a measure that questioned the Bush Administration’s handling of the war in Iraq came before the General Assembly of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ). Of the 2,000 delegates sitting in the ironically named George Bush Ballroom that day, only one, a rabbi from Georgia, rose to speak in opposition. A press release issued by the URJ stated that the resolution was passed “almost unanimously.”
Though easily passed on the historically liberal floor of the URJ General Assembly, the resolution sparked an uproarious debate within the larger Jewish community over the Iraq war, Jewish perceptions of that war, and the overall state of Jewish political opinion in America today.
The Reform Movement Takes a Stand
The URJ is a 1.5 million-member umbrella organization of North American Reform Jewish congregations. It has a long history of political action, and issued resolutions opposing the Vietnam War in 1965 and 1969 that are still cited as sources of pride by some members of the Reform movement.
On November 18th, six Reform congregations and the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism submitted their resolution on the Iraq war to the General Assembly of the Union for Reform Judaism at the Union’s Biennial Convention in Houston. The resolution called on the Bush administration to present a strategy for the extrication of American troops from Iraq, and to set goals for troop withdrawal beginning after the December 15th elections. It also exhorted Congress to closely monitor the war’s cost, and condemned the torture of detainees.
http://www.newvoices.org/cgi-bin/articlepage.cgi?id=529