Steve Rabinowitz
Steven M. Rabinowitz is a political image maker, media strategist, publicist, and event planner whose primary work is for Democratic and Jewish causes. He is frequently quoted in U.S., Israeli and Jewish news media, and has had opinion pieces appear in numerous outlets.
In 2004, the Jewish Forward named him among the 50 most influential Jews in America. Eleven years later, JTA called his firm “the lead public relations outfit handling Jewish communal accounts.”
A former Bill Clinton White House press aide, he founded Bluelight Strategies in late 2014 with longtime colleague and Capitol Hill veteran Aaron Keyak, as a successor to Rabinowitz Communications and Rabinowitz/Dorf Communications.
Rabinowitz is a veteran of the paid national staffs of nine U.S. presidential campaigns and of numerous other campaigns for almost every level of political office, from U.S. Senate to county sheriff.
At Bluelight, where he serves as president, Rabinowitz was a founder of Jews for Progress, a pro-Israel super PAC to boost support for 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton among Jews in swing states. In 2012, Rabinowitz was instrumental in creating The Hub, which worked to ensure the Jewish vote for President Barack Obama's reelection. And in 2020, he supported his colleague Aaron Keyak, who left their firm to work full-time for Joe Biden as his Jewish liaison on the presidential campaign and in the transition and since.
Biography
Steve Rabinowitz, the only child of the late Dorothy and Harold Rabinowitz, grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He attended Tucson High School and the University of Arizona. He and his wife, Laurie Moskowitz, Principal at Lore Strategies, the campaign advocacy, coalition building and partnerships consulting firm, and former senior director for U.S. campaigns at the ONE Campaign, live in Washington, D.C., with their two sons, Jake and Sammy.Political career
Rabinowitz was national youth coordinator for Democrat Mo Udall's presidential campaign. He subsequently worked on the paid national staffs of the presidential campaigns of Jerry Brown, John Anderson, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, Paul Simon, Michael Dukakis, Bob Kerrey, and Bill Clinton. He headed Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign press advance team, During that campaign cycle, he became widely known as "the rabbi," a play on his last name, hosting the Yom Kippur break fast at his rented home in Little Rock, Arkansas. Hillary Clinton credits Rabinowitz with coming up with the term Hillaryland.During the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign and working with his colleague Jeff Eller, Rabinowitz helped remake the classic political town hall meeting, routinely placing Clinton in the center of a "bowl" of seated voters, surrounded and tiered on at least three sides, while Eller worked with local television stations for live regional and even national broadcast, and Clinton left the stool in the center of the audience and engaged individual, unscripted questioners, regardless of where they sat or the camera angle it produced. The format has been repeated hundreds of times since, including by Pres. Biden and VP Kamala Harris.
In addition, Rabinowitz worked with Israeli venture capitalist and then-Member of Knesset Erel Margalit when the Israeli sought his party’s leadership. Rabinowitz also previously and widely reportedly advised the Israeli Labor Party there and several of its leaders on Western campaign techniques in the 1990’s.
The White House
In 1993, Rabinowitz was named Bill Clinton's White House director of media planning. He helped produce the peace treaty signings between Israel and the Palestinians on the White House South Lawn in September 1993, and between Israel and Jordan in the Arava in October 1994.He also produced an East Room presidential signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, witnessed by three of Clinton's predecessors – Presidents George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
Also in 1993, Rabinowitz organized and led the first White House Passover seder for 50 Clinton White House and Administration staff. The traditional event was held in the Indian Treaty Room and catered kosher.
The Hub
During Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, Rabinowitz helped create the Jewish Media Hub, a political nonprofit directed at boosting the incumbent president's standing among American Jews.In 2014, Rabinowitz, Aaron Keyak, Marc Stanley, and Fran Katz Watson launched Jewish Americans Ready for Hillary to support a 2016 presidential run for Hillary Clinton in the Jewish community.
In 2016, Rabinowitz helped kick off and run Jews for Progress, a political action committee created to defend Hillary Clinton and persuade Jewish voters in swing states to support her. Employing tactics much like those used in The Hub, the No Nukes for Iran Project, which Rabinowitz advised and that supported the Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran, and Jews for Progress both used video, print, online and social media advertising and phones to target Jewish voters and influentials. In the case of Jews for Progress, polling showed a subsequent increase in the Jewish vote for Clinton over that for Barack Obama four years earlier, as all other Democratic Party base groups' votes dropped. Rabinowitz also often volunteered alongside his former business partner Keyak, the Joe Biden Jewish liaison, where helpful, both on the 2020 general election campaign and in the subsequent presidential transition, to some extent.
Rabinowitz served on the paid national staffs of nine presidential campaigns, and was an informal adviser to the presidential campaigns of the Bill Clinton re-elect in 1996, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004, both Hillary Clinton campaigns, and both Barack Obama campaigns. He produced Al Gore's official announcement for president in his hometown of Carthage, Tennessee in 2000. Rabinowitz was a paid staffer for Jim Florio and Peter Shapiro, both for governor of New Jersey, Carolyn Warner for governor of Arizona, and Pat Leahy for re-election to the U.S. Senate from Vermont.
And in 1980 Rabinowitz ran for office himself– unsuccessfully – seeking the school board in the Catalina Foothills School District in northern Tucson.
Long the pro-bono communications director and a board member of the now defunct National Jewish Democratic Council, he, Keyak, Stanley, Katz Watson and former Congressman Ron Klein founded the Jewish Democratic Council of America, which he and Keyak ran for its first two years.