Dan and Sheila Segal exemplify the highest standards of service and commitment. Their influence on education, human rights and social justice has been felt through many parts of both our Jewish and broader communities.

Dan is Chairman of the Litigation Department at Hangley Aronchick Segal and Pudlin. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, he taught First Amendment and Constitutional Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Dan has served as President of the Juvenile Law Center, the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education and Akiba Hebrew Academy. He has also been Chair of the Philadelphia Soviet Jewry Council, Vice President of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia and President of the Board of Overseers of Hillel at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a member of the International Board of the New Israel Fund.

Sheila's first career was in the world of Jewish publishing. Besides serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Publication Society, she is the author of two books, "Joshua's Dream" and "Women of Valor: Stories of Great Jewish Women Who Helped Shape the Twentieth Century." In the 1990's, Sheila trained to be a professional chaplain. She has served at the Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life and its predecessor for the past twelve years, the last six years as Director of Chaplaincy Services. Sheila also serves as Vice President of the National Association of Jewish Chaplains and writes about spiritual aspects of aging.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER:

Peter Edelman is a lawyer, policy maker and law professor at Georgetown University. He is a national expert in the fields of poverty, welfare and juvenile justice. Professor Edelman was a Legislative Assistant to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and was Issues Director for Senator Edward Kennedy's Presidential campaign. During President Clinton's first term, Professor Edelman served as Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. He is also the Past President of the New Israel Fund, the leading organization committed to democratic change within the State of Israel.

CATEGORIES OF PARTICIPATION:

Benefactor and guest: $1,000

Patron and guest: $500

Sponsor: $180

Supporter: $90

Additional guests: $75 per person

QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW TO REGISTER?

Please call JSPAN at (215) 635-2554

Summum is a recently created religion. It sued Pleasant Grove City, Utah when the town refused its request to display a permanent monument in the town's Pioneer Park to the "Seven Aphorisms" on which the Summum faith is based. Since 1971, the park has included a massive Ten Commandments monument donated by the Fraternal Order of Eagles more than 35 years ago.

Although Summum lost in the federal district court, it prevailed before a three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit. Because the Circuit court had previously ruled in another case that a Ten Commandments monument was not religious speech, Summum brought its claim as a First Amendment, free speech challenge, claiming that the town had created a public forum for the display of monuments and that it could not discriminate against Summum's monument just because it disagreed with the content of its message. To avoid Summum's public forum claim, the town had to argue that the content of the speech on the Ten Commandments monument was no longer private speech, but that it had become government speech the very moment the government assumed control of it.

In the JSPAN brief to the court, we argued that no court should ever order government to display a religious monument without analyzing the case under the Establishment Clause, something that the lower courts had never done here. The importance of this issue was brought home less than three minutes into the argument from the first comment made by Chief Justice John Roberts to Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, a religious right organization that represented the town.

Chief Justice Roberts observed: "You're really just picking your poison. The more you say that the monument is 'government speech' to get out of the Free Speech Clause, the more you're walking into a trap under the Establishment Clause. What is the government doing supporting the Ten Commandments?"

At the end of the longest presidential election campaign in memory, JSPAN wants to evaluate the quality of the experience … were the right issues debated? Was the process effective at producing an informed electorate? Were you pleased with the very substantial time and attention given to our Jewish community?

We want to hear your views. Please take a few minutes to answer the questions below. They are intentionally open-ended to invite both your experiences and your reflections.

Or write us with the answers to the questions you want addressed.

1. What about the length of the process? Different candidates led the polls at different time in the two-year marathon. Was it too little … too much … just right?

2. Were the debates useful to you in making up your mind? Would you prefer more or less of these face-to-face encounters? Why?

3. What was most important in your choice of a candidate: The candidate’s specific position on one or two issues (which issues)? The overall philosophy expressed by the candidate? The candidate’s track record in government or elsewhere? The values expressed by the candidate? A sense of the candidate’s personality? The candidate’s handling of the debates? Other factors (name them)?

4. Did you read the ads addressed to the Jewish community in the Exponent? Elsewhere? Were you contacted by any of the campaigns with a message to Jews? Are these contacts effective or offensive?

5. The campaigns trotted out “surrogates” … friends, family and advisers who each assured us of their candidate’s virtues. Does that help you to decide?

6. Did you receive any contact from friends or family soliciting your vote for a candidate? Domestic or foreign? Tell us your experience. Did it influence you?

7. Should Election Day be a holiday (as it is in a number of other countries) in order to help more people to vote?

(Here is the link to the JSPAN post-election blog. You can add your name or submit your comments anonymously, of course.)

It is one week after election day as I write this, and the very term President (elect) Obama sounds like music to many of our ears. Someone once pointed out that almost none of the US presidents had names ending in a vowel - (Coolidge, McKinley and Kennedy are IT, if you count y as a vowel) - and they maintained that "ethnic" names are more likely to have vowel endings than those of WASPS. One way or another, Obama sounds wonderful.

The outcome of the recent election, no doubt, pleased nearly all JSPAN members. Those of us who have dedicated so much of our time and energy to help create, if not a racially blind society, at least a near-sighted one, had to be especially thrilled.

On election day, my wife Barbara and I worked in Obama headquarters on Frankford Avenue in Philadelphia. It is not a section of the city I know very well, if at all. The demographics are of a largely Roman Catholic population, the skins are mostly white, the collars blue. The neighborhood men and women who came in and out of the office that day were named Joe, Patrick, Peter, Mary and Kate.

They were out on the streets going door to door asking neighbors to do something few had ever done before: vote for a black man. While it was true that these neighborhoods voted in higher numbers for Michael Nutter than they had for previous African American mayoral candidates, they probably had accommodated themselves to having a black mayor by now, but this was for the President of the United States, surely the most emblematic as well as powerful post in our nation.

“Living in Two Civilizations"
Celebrating Thanksgiving Jewishly:
A Thanksgiving Seder

By Rabbi Fredi Cooper, Director of NESS

At Your Own Thanksgiving Table:
Think of the Thanksgiving meal as similar to our own Pesah seder; it is a holiday that we celebrate at the table and can include some similar elements, such as blessings, maggid and birkat hamazon.

To access the testimonies, click here.

Akiva Eldar, diplomatic affairs analyst for the Israeli national daily Ha'aretz, suggests in the Haaretz.com issue on November 10 that the election last week proved that only a negligible number of Jews believe that territories are more important than peace.

Referring to his future administration's involvement in the peace process, Senator Obama has stated, "My goal is to make sure that we work, starting from the minute I'm sworn into office, to try to find some breakthroughs." In Akiva Eldar's estimation, Obama will find support for this goal from "most of Washington's power centers. .... The concept 'friend of Israel', which had become a synonym for supporters perpetuating the occupation, has begun to take on new meaning."

To read "Don't Be Afraid of the Jews", by Akiva Eldar, in its entirety. click here.

One of the Center's most successful programs is Walking the Walk, a service-learning project for high school students seeking interaction with peers from different religious traditions. This initiative provides teenagers with experiences, skills and resources which deepen their own identities and break through walls that distance and divide them from people of other religious, cultural and economic backgrounds.

On November 11, The New York Times published a special section, "Giving", which included an article devoted exclusively to the Interfaith Center and its Walking the Walk project. JSPAN congratulates the Center on this important national recognition and reproduces the article in this issue of our e-newsletter for all of our readers.

To read "Finding Similarities Among Differences", click here.

Q. From Israel’s standpoint, what are the most important steps President-elect Obama should now take?

A. He should meet with Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak, thereby signaling to Israelis, who pay attention to these things, what Israeli leaders he considers to be congenial and like-minded partners. If he meets with outgoing Israeli PM Ehud Olmert, he should caution him that his last-minute, lame-duck initiatives with Israel’s Arab neighbors should serve rather than hinder the long-term peace goals of those who will continue to lead after him.

Obama should be made aware that while his top Middle East priorities lie in Iran and Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, everything he does in those more distant places will affect Israel, too. Thus, figuratively speaking, on his way to Tehran he should stop off in Jerusalem to consult Israel about its security requirements. Before he moves to cut his losses in the Iraq fiasco, the incoming president should consider how an American withdrawal might further aggrandize Iranian influence there and calculate his steps accordingly, for the sake not only of Israel but of the moderate Sunni Arab mainstream as well.

Obama’s chances of substantively solving the Palestinian issue in the foreseeable future are highly problematic. He should be urged to pursue both a broad Israeli-Palestinian negotiating framework but also, and particularly, the current relatively promising track of American-guided security and economic confidence-building measures. Someone who is ready to talk to Iran should also begin to give some thought to ways to dialogue with Hamas, which will not disappear and is too important to ignore or ostracize for long.

Most important for the Israel-Arab sphere, Obama should engage Syria: it’s the lynchpin in any effort to turn the tide in the region against Iran and militant Islam.

Finally, a lot of good people in Washington will remind Obama that a strong Israel is his best ally. They should. It is.

ABOUT THE EXPO

The JRA Jewish Food & Community Expo is an unprecedented celebration of Jewish food, culture and community in the Philadelphia Tri-State Area.

The Expo will showcase the best of local, regional and international kosher fare and introduce culinary innovations in the kosher marketplace.

Please remember that JSPAN welcomes your donations to help us continue our important and effective work in Tikkun Olam. You may send gifts via PayPal on www.jspan.org. or to JSPAN, 1735 Market Street, Suite #A417, Philadelphia, PA 19103