ON YOUNG BILL CLINTON

Advocate for Middle East peace and mentor to Hillary Clinton

Sara Ehrman, a feisty fixture in US liberal politics who advised President Bill Clinton on the Israeli-arab conflict but was best known as the woman who advised a young Hillary Rodham not to move to Arkansas to marry Clinton, died on Saturday in Washington from endocarditis. She was 98.

Born on Staten Island, New York, and forged by the politics of the Labour Zionist Youth movement of the 1930s, Ehrman became the outspoken doyenne of a generation of Democratic leaders who turned to her for expertise on the Jewish vote and the Middle East. She called herself “first a Jew, second a Democrat and above all a feminist” and was also a village elder dispensing tough love to young women trying to navigate their own careers in Washington. Her most notable protegee was Hillary Clinton. “There are people who come into your life at just the right moment,” Hillary Clinton said of Ehrman. “For me, Sara was one of those people. From the day our paths first crossed during the Mcgovern campaign in Texas, I knew I had found a mentor and a kindred spirit.”

In 1974, after she had graduated from Yale Law School, Clinton lived in Ehrman’s Washington home while she worked on the Senate Watergate Committee. That August, Ehrman, who saw a bright future for her spirited young tenant, offered to drive her to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to be with her boyfriend, Bill Clinton. For two days, and 1,193 miles, Ehrman tried to talk her out of it. “We’d drive along and I’d say, ‘Hillary, for God’s sake. He’ll just be a country lawyer down there.” In retrospect, Bill Clinton appreciated Ehrman’s protective urge. “She saw in Hillary a fellow trailblazer with an unlimited future,” he said. “So she had every reason to doubt that Hillary was wise in picking up and moving to Arkansas in 1974 to be with a young law professor making his first run – unsuccessfully – for Congress.”

“But,” Bill Clinton added, “she drove Hillary and all her belongings halfway across the country anyway, and we’ll be forever grateful she did.”

Ehrman was born Sara Teitelbaum on 24 April 1919, the youngest child and only daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution and whose communist sympathies would inspire their daughter’s leftleaning politics. Her mother, Mary, died when Sara was eight; an aunt in Manhattan with ten children of her own took her in.

Ehrman first learned about the Labour Zionist movement in 1934, when she was 15, at a dance hosted by the Young Poale Zion Alliance, a Marxistzionist group. She then spent summers at the group’s Camp Kvutza in upstate New York. The friends she made there, including Jews of Palestinian decent, would serve as an influence years later in her fervent push for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel.

By high school, Ehrman lived in Flushing, Queens, New York, with her father, Maurice, and older brother William. She was conditionally admitted to Barnard College, but failed high school chemistry and refused to retake the course at summer school.

She married Libert Ehrman in 1940, and after World War II, the couple settled in Hollin Hills, outside Washington in Northern Virginia. They divorced in 1969. Ehrman is survived by her two sons, Daniel and David.

Ehrman did not conform to the traditional role of midcentury housewife. She hated to cook but was eager for a career, so in the 1950s took a job as the manager of her sons’ school cafeteria. By 1965, withher sons almost grown, she got a job as a legislative assistant to Senator Joseph S Clark, and worked with him until he was defeated in 1968. The next year, she became a legislative assistant to Senator George Mcgovern and served as director of issues and research on his 1972 presidential campaign.

That role took Ehrman to South Texas, where she first met Bill Clinton, who was working as the Mcgovern campaign’s state director for Texas.in 1992 Ehrman moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, to lead Jewish outreach efforts for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. On the morning of his inauguration, she attended church with the Clintons. During his first term, Ehrman, then the Democratic National Committee’s deputy political director, helped organise his first trip to Israel and handled the arrangements for him to attend the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after the Israeli leader was assassinated in 1995.

Ehrman grew deeply disillusioned with AIPAC, the powerful pro-israel lobbying group she helped expand as political director in the early 1980s, and she was unflinching in her critique of American Jews who thought Israel could do no wrong. She spent decades pushing for a twostate solution to the Israelipalestinian conflict, serving as a senior adviser to S Daniel Abraham, the billionaire who helped found the Centre for Middle East Peace, and working with Americans for Peace Now and J Street, two groups that favour such a solution.

Ehrman’s advocacy took her on numerous trips to the Middle East, where she met dozens of heads of state, including Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader.

In 2009, the Clintons hosted a 90th birthday party for Ehrman in the grassy backyard of their Washington home.

In July 2016, Ehrman took a seat in the Clintons’ friendsand-family booth at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to watch her former tenant become the first woman to capture the Democratic nomination for president. Bill Clinton, standing to introduce Ehrman to the other guests, waved a long finger her way and said, “That woman told Hillary not to marry me.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“We’d drive along and I’d say, ‘Hillary, for God’s sake. He’ll just be a country lawyer down there’ ”