After reading Scott’s The Training of Barack and Glenn Greenwald’s The Torturing of Barack (which is one way of describing Obama’s interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg and Marty Peretz), I recalled the day in 2000 when I ran into my Lebanese neighbor. Johnny was very excited, giving me the high-five and putting his arm on my shoulder.

“Mabrook, my friend,” he said. For a second, I was fantasizing that Ed McMahon showed up at my door to award me with the $10,000,000 I had (already) won in the American Family Publishing sweepstakes. That wasn’t it. My Lebanese friend was congragulating me because, well, Al Gore selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate, and coming from a country where the political system, known as Confessionalism is basically a community-based power sharing mechanism, Johnny assumed that all the Jews in America were dancing in the streets, celebrating the political victory of “our man” (who couldn’t even deliver the Jewish vote in Florida to Gore).

It seems to me that there are many American politicians who like Johnny subscribe to this notion that most American-Jews vote based on their ethnic interests, with the issue of Israel on the top of their list. But as Greenwald points out in his piece, despite the fact that John McCain and his supporters among the so-called Christian Zionists sound sometimes more Catholic the Israeli Pope, the majority of American-Jews prefer Hussein Obama over the Republican candidate, by a margin of 61 to 32 percent (my guess is that the margin is even wider among young American-Jews). Like most Americans, the economy and the mess in Iraq — and not Israel — are on the top of their list.

Phillip Weiss does a great job in demolishing many of the myths about the relationship between American-Jews and Israel on his blog. I wish that some of the guys on Capitol Hill will start reading it.