New York Magazine Calls Obama the First Jewish President

New York Magazine's cover story describing Barack Obama as "the first Jewish president" generated significant debate in the fall of 2011, illuminating tensions within American Jewish political identity and the gap between foreign policy substance and the perception of that substance among a community whose support both parties actively courts.

The argument, made by writer John Heilemann, rested primarily on policy: Obama's administration had by several measurable standards been more supportive of Israel's security than his critics claimed. Military cooperation, intelligence sharing, Iron Dome funding, and opposition to Iranian nuclear development were cited as evidence of a working relationship that well-publicized personal tensions between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had obscured.

Netanyahu and Obama had clashed repeatedly—over settlements, the parameters of a two-state solution, and Iran's nuclear program, where Netanyahu favored military action on a timeline Obama consistently declined to endorse. For American Jews who viewed Netanyahu's assessment as authoritative, this friction was disqualifying regardless of underlying policy continuity.

The cover story was also a response to persistent conservative narratives suggesting Obama was hostile to Israel or insufficiently committed to Jewish-American concerns—a characterization the magazine characterized as caricature unsupported by the policy record.

American Jewish political identity is itself complicated: diverse, internally contested, and not reducible to Israel policy alone. The Jewish community has consistently voted Democratic by large margins while holding a range of views on Israel that do not map cleanly onto partisan categories.

The controversy the cover generated reflected how charged the question of Israel had become as a lens through which American Jews evaluated presidential candidates—and how contested the terms of that evaluation remained.