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Professor Robert A. Katz was quoted in the New York Times on October 14 regarding a web-based campaign pitch for Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama involving comedian Sarah Silverman called The Great Schlep. The organizers' intention is to exhort Jewish grandchildren to visit their grandparents in Florida in order to persuade them to vote for Obama, and therefore swing the crucial Florida vote in his favor. To date, only one hundred or so young Jews have answered the call. From the NYT “The Great Schlep isn’t really about changing Jewish votes,” said Robert A. Katz, 43, a law professor in Indianapolis and one of the roughly 20,000 people who have signed up as Great Schlep fans on Facebook. “Rather, it’s a humorous and self-deprecatory way for younger and more progressive Jews to signal to African-Americans that they’re ashamed of the outrageous rumors and slanders [about Obama] being circulated and swallowed in some Jewish circles.” Link to the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/us/politics/14schlep.html?ref=politics .

Katz has written a chapter exploring the American Jewish community’s relations with other groups and society in general. His chapter, “’PAGING DR. SHYLOCK...': Jewish Hospitals and the Prudent Re-investment of Jewish Philanthropy," will appear in Giving: For the Love of God (David Smith, ed., Indiana University Press, 2009). Katz argues that Jewish communities built non-sectarian hospitals in part to combat anti-Semitic stereotypes that Jews only took care of “their own.”