Jews Want Health Care But Not Housing (and other tidbits from the DJA)

Saturday's WaPo has a great article on the campaign to develop a domestic Jewish agenda for 2008 jspot.org has been running in partnership with more than 20 friends and allies (including Jewcy.com). It does a good job spotting something new going in with this particular effort:

But some longtime Jewish advocates and historians say the campaign is as much about a new generation of activists trying to gain influence and inject their style of social justice work as it is about anything else. The new crop of groups is trying to spread influence through cultural efforts, such as JDub Records and the Jewschool blog, as well as through such traditional grass-roots groups as Jews United for Justice, which focuses on issues such as housing and labor in the D.C. area.

“It's true that established groups haven't spoken with one voice on domestic issues, but they have advocated for those things," said Pamela S. Nadell, professor of history and director of Jewish studies at American University. "What's happening is these new groups — which are very exciting — are trying to band together to exercise larger political clout."

I join Professor Nadell in her excitement over the possibilities revealed by this collaboration. There are dozens of independent organizations and blogs that share an upstart mentality, if not necessarily the same specific policy agendas. As I mention at the bottom, this campaign is part of our effort at jspot.org to develop a Jewish netroots.

WaPo also notes that