After putting his Great Schlep video on the Internet, former Walnut Creek resident Ari Wallach hoped it would spread fast. He just didn’t expect it to go “hyperspeed viral.”
That’s how Wallach described the impact of “The Great Schlep” and its now-famous clip of comedian Sarah Silverman urging young Jews to visit their grandparents in Florida and persuade them to vote for Barack Obama.
Before the four-minute video premiered on Sept. 23, Great Schlep co-founder Wallach hoped to get about 100,000 online views and maybe 5,000 “shleppers.” He said by phone this week from New York that the clip has been viewed 7 million times and more than 23,000 people have signed up on the Great Schlep Facebook page.
“We knew it had to be something that accelerated quickly through the Jewish Web-o-sphere,” said Wallach, who also co-founded JewsVote.org and its parent organization, the Jewish Council for Education and Research. “The No. 1 way to persuade people is face to face, ideally with someone they know and love. The logic wasn’t too difficult to put together. We just wanted to give people the tools to engage in the conversation.”
There are no hard numbers to measure how many people have yet shlepped to Florida or whether they changed Bubbe and Zayde’s minds about the election. But Wallach, 33, cited a huge spike in his Web site’s traffic right after Rosh Hashanah and the Yom Kippur break-fast as evidence families are at least talking about it.
As some polls showed the Democratic candidate lagging in Jewish support compared to previous presidential elections, a concern emerged among some Obama supporters that older Jewish voters, clustered in critical swing states and besieged by advertising stoking concerns about Obama’s position on Jewish issues, could tip the balance to McCain.
Might these concerns be overblown? A recent survey by the American Jewish Committee found Obama’s support was actually greater among older Jews than younger ones, but it’s a finding some observers question.
In Florida, many grandparents of “shleppers” said they were leaning toward the Democratic candidate even before their grandchildren paid them an unexpected — if highly appreciated — visit.
“Elders are getting a bad rap with the assumption that they are going to allow racism to cloud their judgment about what really is the best choice for our country and our interest in being advocates for Israel and the Jewish people,” said Rabbi Dayle Friedman, who directs a center for Jewish aging at the Reconstruc-tionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia and is a vice chair of Rabbis for Obama. “My experience with elders is that they are far more open-minded than people give them credit for.”
Several surveys of American Jews have shown Obama polling at around 60 percent, about 10 points below where John Kerry was at a similar point in the presidential race four years ago. Wallach said he hopes his efforts will improve on those numbers.
Wallach grew up attending Congregation B’nai Shalom in Walnut Creek and Camp Swig after his family moved to the Bay Area from Mexico. His late father was a Holocaust survivor, his mother originally from the East Bay.
After graduating from U.C. Berkeley, Wallach moved to New York to work in public policy and progressive politics. He said the Great Schlep is “a confluence of everything I’ve done.”
Wallach started the Great Schlep to aid the Obama campaign, but he said the project has taken on extra dimensions, especially in terms of intergenerational dialogue.
“I get e-mails from people saying ‘thank you for reconnecting me with my grandkids,'” he noted. “If the Great Schlep gets Obama in the White House, then I’d be thrilled, but a close second is that latter component.”
JTA contributed to this report.