The Policy Director

By Anonymous -
From The Forward, a progressive Jewish paper:
The new policy director of the presidential campaign of former Vermont governor Howard Dean spent a number of years toiling for Israeli and American Jewish philanthropies.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, a veteran of the Clinton administration's policy shop, worked in 2002 as the New York director of the New Israel Fund, which funds projects promoting peace, women's rights and social justice in the Jewish state. From 1997 to 1999 he lived in Israel and worked with Israeli not-for-profits and "a handful of minor politicians," providing them with strategies for reaching out for support and funds in the United States, he told the Forward in a telephone interview. Among the groups he helped were the Van Leer Institute, the Jerusalem Foundation, Peace Now and the Center for Educational Technology.

Ben-Ami, who grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side as the son of an Israeli, worked for Clinton from 1992 to 1997 on welfare reform, education, women's issues and AIDS policy. He bristled at the idea that Dean might be perceived as a more liberal politician than his former boss.

"I took a long time to research and get to know the field and felt there's only one candidate putting forth an alternative for the Democratic Party," Ben-Ami told the Forward. Noting that Dean is a fiscal conservative who "implemented welfare reform following the Clinton model," he said, "it's a big mistake...if people take a simplistic, left-right, single-word label and attach it to Howard Dean."

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