WASHINGTON On Monday, Feb. 1, Iowans will gather to launch the 2016 presidential election with an arcane ritual the caucus.
In living rooms and meeting halls throughout the state, caucus-goers will group themselves into clusters according to which presidential candidate they favor.
By the end of the day, two real-life winners will emerge: not a leader in the polls, not a likely frontrunner, but the Democrat and Republican who will have secured Iowas delegation to the parties respective conventions in the summer.
Iowas delegates, which come as a bloc, account for just 1% or so of the national total. But their selections will be the first substantive results in what has been a raucous and unpredictable campaign, especially on the Republican side.
A week and a day later, voters in New Hampshire will cast ballots in a more straightforward process, and by the late hours of Feb. 9, the race will truly be on with the media in hot pursuit. At JTA, the question is what it has been for nearly a century: What does all this mean for the Jews?
In that spirit, heres a look at the leading candidates their Jewish friends, family, advisers and donors, their stances on Israel and their Jewish-related controversies.
REPUBLICANS
Donald Trump, 68, real estate magnate, reality TV star
Jewish cohorts
Trumps daughter, Ivanka, is married to Jared Kushner, the Jewish publisher of the New York Observer and, like her, the child of a real estate magnate. She underwent an Orthodox conversion before marrying, and the couple are raising their children Jewish.
Donald Trump, a billionaire with a natural gift for generating free publicity, has yet to tap major donors, but given his New York origins and his professional fields real estate and show business its not surprising that some of his closest associates are Jewish. One of his leading proxies in the media is Michael Cohen, the Trump Organizations Jewish executive vice president.
Israel
Trump, who as a negotiator made his name playing his cards close to the chest, declined last month to commit to recognizing all of Jerusalem as Israels capital, explaining that doing so could preempt any bid for Israeli-Palestinian peace. That earned him boos at the Republican Jewish Coalition presidential forum.
This month, he said he would move the US Embassy to Jerusalem. Like the other GOP candidates, he does not like the Iran deal, but he is one of several who has refused to say he would scrap it outright.
Controversy
Trumps Republic Jewish Coalition appearance made headlines less for his refusal to embrace right-wing pro-Israel doctrine than for his joshing with the audience about how skilled everyone in the room was at making money. He likes compliments, and has retweeted flattery, even when it seemingly comes from white supremacists. He also slipped an image of Nazi soldiers into a tweet, pulling the post down in response to protest and blaming a young intern.
Ted Cruz, 45, Texas senator
Jewish cohorts
Much has been written in recent days about the four billionaires funding Cruzs insurgent candidacy; none of them are Jewish. Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate and GOP kingmaker, says he and his wife have yet to settle on a candidate, and while Adelson favors Marco Rubio, Miriam Adelson favors Cruz.
Cruz has not shied from cultivating Jewish fundraisers. He made headlines last spring when, despite his strongly conservative bona fides, he met with two Jewish and omosexual hoteliers. The hoteliers pro-Israel interests is what led to the meeting.
Cruzs point man in the Jewish community is Nick Muzin, a rising young political player and an Orthodox Jew.
Israel
Cruz says he would scrap the Iran nuclear deal and move the embassy to Jerusalem as soon as he enters office. He says he also would invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to attend his first State of the Union address. Cruz has cultivated the pro-Israel right, appearing at Zionist Organization of American events and organizing an anti-Iran rally on Capitol Hill last summer.
Controversy
Cruz has taken to bashing neoconservatives, blaming them for overseas interventions including the Iraq War that he says have weakened America. He also has insistently disparaged New York values.
Some see his references to both groups neoconservatives and New Yorkers as coded attacks on the Jews. His supporters cry nonsense, saying his issue is with policy and values.
Marco Rubio, 44, Florida senator
Jewish cohorts
Norman Braman, a South Florida car retailer, has been Rubios principal backer since his days in the Florida Legislature and employs Rubios wife, Jeanette, at his familys charitable foundation.
Sheldon Adelson is said to favor Rubio, although he has yet to commit, and late last year, Rubio secured the backing of Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who is deeply involved in pro-Israel funding.
Those neocons Cruz is running away from? Rubio says bring em on and seeks their advice. He has consulted with prominent Jewish thinkers and Republican administration veterans Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan and Eric Edelman. He also has met with Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixons secretary of state.
Israel
Rubio says he would move the embassy to Jerusalem and scrap the Iran deal. His campaign website has an Israel page, and it faithfully reflects right-wing pro-Israel talking points.
Controversy
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the Jewish chair of the Democratic National Committee, slammed Rubio for attending a fundraiser at the home of Harlan Crow, who collects Nazi art. Rubio fired back with outrage of his own, and by most accounts came out on top in the exchange.
Jeb Bush, 62, former Florida governor
Jewish cohorts
More than any other candidate, Bush has garnered the support of the Jewish Republicans who backed his brother President George W. Bush. Among donors, these include Fred Zeidman, a Texas lawyer, and Mel Sembler, a Florida real estate magnate. Jeb Bushs advisers include some of the most senior Jewish veterans of the second Bush administration, including former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
Israel
Bush also has said he will move the embassy to Jerusalem, but like several candidates who strongly oppose the Iran nuclear deal, he says it would likely be too late to scrap it by the time the next president assumes office.
Controversy
Bush raised conservative pro-Israel hackles when he named his fathers secretary of state, James Baker, as an adviser. Baker has clashed with Israel and the Jewish community.
It did not help when within a month of his naming, Baker addressed J Street, and extolled the virtues of pressuring Israel.
Bush has said that while he values Bakers deep reservoirs of experience overall, the George H. W. Bush presidency is considered a foreign policy success story he does not look to him for Israel advice.
Ben Carson, 64, retired neurosurgeon and best-selling author
Jewish cohorts
Among his foreign policy advisers is George Birnbaum, who served as chief of staff for Netanyahu during his first term, from 1996 to 1999, and has been a partner to Arthur Finkelstein, the GOP public relations guru and political wizard who also has advised Netanyahu.
In speaking of anyone advising Carson, especially on foreign policy, there is an enormous caveat: He does not like taking advice, and some of his advisers have, on the record, called him out on it extraordinary, if not unprecedented, during a presidential campaign.
Israel
Carson has said he will abandon the Iran deal and has accused the Obama administration of abandoning Israel. But in real time, he seems less than familiar with the country and the challenges it faces.
At the Republican Jewish Coalition forum, he famously mangled the pronunciation of Hamas, making it sound like hummus. More substantively, the speech he delivered awkwardly, from notes appeared to suggest that if only Fatah and Hamas learned to get along, peace would be achievable.
Controversy
Carson earned rebukes from much of the Jewish establishment last year when he suggested that gun control was in part responsible for the Holocaust.
DEMOCRATS
Bernie Sanders, 74, Vermont senator
Jewish cohorts
Sanders is Jewish and spent time on a kibbutz with his first (Jewish) wife, although which kibbutz, no one has been able to determine yet, despite arduous efforts by Jewish journalists. Not long after his Israel sojourn, he moved to Vermont, where he would become best friends with two Jewish guys philosopher Richard Sugarman and Huck Gutman, a professor of literature at the University of Vermont with a fondness for Yehuda Amichai.
Israel
Since his days as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, Sanders has been unstinting both in his criticism of Israels policies toward the Palestinians and his support of Israels right to exist and defend itself. He backed the Iran nuclear deal.
Controversy
Sanders older brother, Larry, based in Oxford, England, last year tweeted yes to whether he supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel and favors dismantling Israels weapons of mass destruction. Bernie Sanders campaign wont comment, but, brothers, right?
Hillary Rodham Clinton, former secretary of state, former senator from New York, former first lady
Jewish cohorts
Like Trump, Clinton has a Jewish son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, an investment banker whose mother, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, then a Democratic congresswoman from Pennsylvania, provided the critical vote in 1993 that passed President Bill Clintons first budget.
In Clintons world, with its layers of loyalties, this is as tight as it gets. Bill and Hillary Clinton were accruing Jewish fans even before they moved to Arkansas as a couple. Bill Clinton had a Jewish fan base as the states governor and attracted Jewish supporters when he ran for president in 1992, many who remain loyal to Hillary Clinton.
She also has cornered the partys Jewish fundraisers, and her rival for Jewish loyalty in 2008, Barack Obama, has given his blessing to his Jewish supporters to back Clinton this election.
Her most prominent backer may be Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment magnate.
One of her closest and most loyal advisers is Martin Indyk, whom she met during her husbands presidential campaign when Indyk headed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank he had spun off from AIPAC.
Indyk, a veteran of the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts of both the Clinton and Obama administrations, is now vice president at the Brookings Institution.
Israel
Clinton has ties with Israel dating back to her days as first lady of Arkansas, when she adopted an Israeli early education program for the state. Since quitting as Obamas first secretary of state, she has broadly embraced his quest for Israeli-Palestinian peace as well as his Iran policy indeed, she now credits herself as one of the architects of both policies but she has also emphasized subtle differences.
Clinton has suggested she was not comfortable with making settlements a key point of contention between the Obama and Netanyahu governments, and she says she would closely monitor Irans compliance with the nuclear deal.
Controversy
Paul Fray, who managed her husbands failed 1974 congressional race, says she called him a [expletive] Jew bastard on election night.
Clinton was the first official in her husbands government to speak openly about the prospect of a Palestinian state.
As first lady, Clinton embraced Suha Arafat, the wife of the late PLO leader Yasir Arafat, after Suha Arafat delivered a speech accusing Israel of poisoning children. Clinton, who was listening to a simultaneous translation, claims she missed that passage.
When last year her private emails were dumped as part of an investigation into her privacy practices while she was secretary of state, it was revealed that one of her Jewish advisers, Sidney Blumenthal, to whom she remains fiercely loyal, kept sending her anti-Israel screeds by his son, Max. Clinton occasionally complimented Maxs writing to Sidney. There is no evidence she took any of his sons advice.