Um, no, actually, he wasn’t.

My father is a pulpit rabbi. During his career, there are literally thousands of families who were inspired by my father to be better Jews and who consulted him for spiritual guidance, sought counseling from him during crises in their lives, and invited him to officiate at their circumcisions, baby namings, confirmations, bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals.

My father is not “close friends” with the vast majority of these people, just as Obama is not and has never been a “close friend” with the Rev. Wright. Wright was his clergyman, not his friend.

Obama threw Wright under the bus for personal ambition.

Actually, Obama stuck with Wright for far longer than was beneficial for his political career. If Obama’s was driven by “ambition” rather than by the integrity and strength of character which I and so many others see in him, then he would have cut Wright loose long before he did.

In reality, Obama didn’t throw Wright under the bus; Wright through Obama under the bus, and it was only after that happened that Obama disassociated himself from Wright.

In contrast, McCain has betrayed his principles to win the nomination for president, as anyone can see from looking at the many serious issues on which he flip-flopped in order to win (http://njdc.typepad.com/njdcs_blog/2008/07/senator-mccain.html). His silly, tired old “you can’t criticize me on anything because I was a POW in vietnam for five years” won’t help him evade this simple fact.

And, by the way, he was not tortured for five years.

Doni Remba has left Jews4Obama.com to run a new professional organization called KahalAmerica.com, which may develop boards with rabbis and the like.

J4O has returned to its netroots as a ragtag bunch of volunteers — liberal, conservative, orthodox, atheists, agnostics — without any authority (other than granted by ICANN:) doing the righteous work of trying to get Obama elected with substantial support by the US Jewish community which has been overrun with viral slander.

We have no board of directors, advisors, rabbis, Macher supporters, corporate tax status, locus of operations, deep pockets, to sue, libel, or even embarrass.

However, we are burning the shabbat candles at both ends until November, then will go home like good old-fashioned Jewish Utopian Anarchists!

We are inspired by Barack Obama and confident that he will be able to bring a new direction to efforts to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because he accepts neither the far-left axiom that Israel is responsible for the conflict and therefore responsible for resolving it, nor the far-right axiom that the Arabs and Palestinians have brought everything on themselves and we shouldn’t give them the time of day until they stop trying to kill us.

Expecting Israel to work toward peace at the expense of her own security is a non-starter. Expecting the Palestinians to work toward peace in the absence of humane treatment and good-faith negotiations from Israel is also a non-starter.

While it is wrong to “attack US supporters of the Israeli peace camp who refuse to couch every critique of Israeli policy with an equal and opposite denunciation of Palestinian sins,” it is right to dismiss those on the left who consistently critique Israeli policy without ever criticizing the Palestinians, just as it is right to dismiss those on the right who defend everything Israel does and dehumanize the Palestinians. The conflict will not be resolved by people on these two extremes, but ratther by people who know how to walk a more unifying path. We steadfastly believe that Barack Obama is such a unifier.

Obama is not going to give people on the far left everything they want, nor is he going to give the pepole on the far right everything they want. What he will do, instead, is look for and leverage common ground for the good of all, and we at Jews for Obama are proud to join him in that endeavor.

(I am one of the co-founders of the current incarnation of Jews for Obama.)