The guide, published by the Chicago-based JAC Education Foundation, lists the votes of all members of Congress “on issues of concern to the Jewish community,” including foreign aid to Israel, abortion rights, immigrant rights, welfare reform and school vouchers.
The JAC foundation, established last year by leaders of the pro-Israel and pro-choice political action committee, JAC PAC, says it has sent copies of the pamphlet to Reform and Conservative congregations nationwide and to groups such as Hadassah and the National Council of Jewish Women.
Jewish federations and community relations councils across the country have received copies.
But the guide might not get much play in the San Francisco Bay Area. Several Jewish community leaders said they haven’t seen it yet. If they do receive it, they don’t plan on handing it out.
“I would never distribute it to my congregants, not in a million years,” said Rabbi Alan Lew of Congregation Beth Sholom, San Francisco’s largest Conservative synagogue.
Though he occasionally speaks from the pulpit on political topics such as immigration or welfare reform, Lew said he always announces that he is expressing his personal views.
“The real issue is that you don’t want to exclude anybody,” he said. “You don’t want to have only a synagogue for Democrats or only a synagogue for liberals.”
Likewise, neither San Francisco’s Hadassah chapter nor the regional American Jewish Congress chapter plans to distribute such a guide.
“I think the thrust is a little biased,” said Martha Dale, a Hadassah member who is coordinating the group’s voter registration drive. “We would not take a side. We are strictly nonpartisan.”
But Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, interim regional director of the Reform movement’s Union of American Hebrew Congregations, said she doesn’t understand the controversy.
“It gives people some sense of how their representatives are representing them…It’s useful information.”
Rabbi Stephen Pearce of San Francisco’s Reform Congregation Emanu-El agreed.
“I think this would be a useful tool,” he said, adding that he would consider ordering copies of the guide and placing them on an information table in the synagogue. “We’re not asking them to vote one way or another.”
Less than six weeks from Election Day, the guide has become a political hot potato. Like the “1996 Get Out the Vote Program Plan and Action Manual” issued by a coalition of Jewish organizations, which voiced criticism of the religious right, the JAC guide has come under attack as a partisan document.
At issue is the line between political advocacy and political education. The Internal Revenue Service forbids tax-exempt nonprofit groups from engaging in partisan politics, but allows them to educate voters.
Legal experts disagree on whether the guide amounts to partisan endorsements.
Meanwhile, the National Jewish Coalition charges that the guide was “clearly designed to make Republicans look bad” by “highlighting liberal, not Jewish issues,” said Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish group’s executive director.
The JAC foundation is staunchly defending its efforts.
The guide is “not only a permissible activity, but a desirable activity,” said Linda Sher, president of the JAC Education Foundation.
“Our goal is to let people know how federal legislators voted on issues of concern to the Jewish community,” she said. “This is absolutely not a liberal Democratic document.”
Concern that Jewish groups could endanger their tax-exempt status by distributing the guide prompted the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council last week to convene a conference call between legal experts.
The guide does not rate or endorse candidates and does not identify which members of Congress are running for office this year. It does, however, list 11 Senate votes and 14 House votes of interest to Jews and reveals how members voted.
Most Bay Area members voted in favor of the 1997 Foreign Appropriations Bill, which passed this summer and included $3 billion in aid to Israel. Exceptions, according to the guide, included Reps. George Miller (D-Pleasant Hill), Richard Pombo (R-Stockton), Pete Stark (D-Hayward) and Tom Campbell (R-Campbell).
Much controversy surrounds JAC’s descriptions of the votes.
The guide describes one House vote on a spending bill for the District of Columbia as a bill that “proposes a voucher system which would violate the separation of church and state.”
A vote on the balanced-budget amendment is described as an attempt “to balance the federal budget largely through cuts in social programs that would hurt people served by Jewish and other social service agencies.”
Some Jewish groups are not opposed to school vouchers and others have expressed support for a balanced budget.
These descriptions “clearly imply who voted right and wrong,” said Marc Stern, co-director of the legal department of the American Jewish Congress. “That’s not education, it’s endorsement.”
The JAC foundation disagrees.
“This is not a guide to tell you how to vote. It’s to tell you how they voted,” Sher said. “Right and wrong is up to the interpretation of the person holding the guide.”
Most troubling for Stern is what he termed the “similarity” to the Christian Coalition’s guides, which have drawn sharp criticism from many Jewish groups concerned about the religious right’s political power.
“This will expose the Jewish community to the charge of hypocrisy,” said Stern, who said he would advise AJCongress chapters not to distribute the guide.
Responding to comparisons with Christian Coalition guides, Sher said, “We do not rate candidates in the guide and do not tell people how to vote.”
Unlike the JAC voter guide, the Christian Coalition guides include numerical ratings and frequently compare incumbents to challengers.
Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, argues in a memo to Reform congregations that the JAC foundation guide “is different both in degree and in kind from the political activity engaged in by the Christian Coalition.”
Whether the guide is similar to the Christian Coalition’s or not is unimportant to Brooks, who argues that the guide is dangerous because it “makes longstanding friends of ours look bad.”
For example, Brooks said that Florida Republican Sen. Connie Mack “is one of the strongest friends Israel has in the U.S. Senate. To say that he is wrong with the Jewish community 64 percent of the time is outrageous,” he said, citing his reading of the voter guide.
Such controversy seems not to have slowed the JAC foundation’s effort. Officials said they have already sent out about 50,000 guides, the majority of which were requested by synagogues.
As Election Day rapidly approaches, some Jewish groups are mobilizing to distribute the guide.
In a memo to all member congregations of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the umbrella body of Reform congregations, Saperstein wrote: “Voting records like the 1996 Jewish Community Voter Guide are extremely useful information sources. These…can provide invaluable information for you and your congregants.”
JAC foundation officials sought to downplay the controversy.
“We strongly urge any organization…to talk to its own legal counsel,” Sher said. “I guess it’s a compliment that people are reading them and taking sides. Maybe that’s healthy.”
At the same time, she cited concern over the “misinterpretation of the effort,” saying, “Perhaps the title `Voter Guide’ needs to be looked at.”