In his effort to win a greater share of the Jewish vote, Barack Obama has now launched a blog in Hebrew. Based on the first two posts, he’s clearly not putting too much time into it just yet: One is a letter from his Middle East advisor Eric Lynn; the other is a speech he gave in March 2007 on Middle East policy. But we should not underestimate the cleverness of this move.

One of the least understood aspects of Israel-Diaspora relations is the high-bandwidth sharing of information and opinions between liberal American Jews and the left-leaning Israeli media elite. This is clearly a two-way street: American Jewish opinion tends to follow whatever the mainstream media in Israel has to say about Israeli politics, while the Israeli media tend to parrot American Jewish thinking about the United States. Thus you often find Israeli pundits opposing the war in Iraq (despite the fact that the elimination of Saddam Hussein was one of the greatest strategic windfalls in Israel’s history), or criticizing Christian Zionists (usually without having ever met any of them).

Barack Obama understands that Hillary is crushing him in Israeli polls, and that this reverberates back into the American Jewish debate over who is better for Israel. It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that this alone will tip the scales on the American Jewish vote. But as part of a broader strategy, it makes more sense than one might think.