cleveland | Like a lot of the other prizes in this year's presidential landscape, Ohio's Jewish community should be Hillary Clinton country — where fierce pro-Israel sentiments are wedded to a tradition of advocacy for the domestic issues Clinton has championed.

But pushback from the cadre of young campaigners working for Barack Obama and an impassioned direct plea from the candidate himself appear to be having an impact in the community.

In off-the-record chats, some of Clinton's Jewish supporters in Ohio said that they are now questioning if she's viable as a candidate and are giving Obama a second look.

The degree to which the Obama campaign has made a prize of the 80,000-strong Jewish community in the Cleveland area was made clear Feb. 24 when the candidate met with the city's Jewish leaders in a private meeting and when his chief Jewish surrogate, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Fla.), took questions a few hours later from a crowd of 500 at a local synagogue.

Obama suggested to the leaders that a driving force in his Jewish campaign was fighting back against an Internet campaign depicting him as everything from a secret Muslim to being surrounded by advisers who are soft on Israel.

"I don't think that we are in an era anymore where you can just ignore these things and not dignify them," Obama told the 150 leaders at a suburban meeting hall.

"You know we saw what happened with the Swift boat situation back in 2004," he said, referring to distorted and false attacks on the military record of Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), then the Democratic presidential candidate. "And so what we've done is try to lift it up and actively debunk it and encourage stories about it."

Obama's campaigners in Ohio say there is more to the Jewish campaign than simply quashing innuendo before it becomes a threat. The big prize is a key primary state that once trended strongly for Clinton but recent polls show could be up for grabs in the March 4 vote.

Steve Dettelbach, a former prosecutor now in private practice in Cleveland who was friends with Obama at Harvard Law School, but is not formally associated with the campaign, says his efforts on behalf of the candidate are emblematic: The Obama campaign supplies him with material dismantling the Internet attacks; he passes it on to Jewish friends and ends up bringing some aboard.

"My predominant experience is that I go through the process of explaining it, and they become Obama supporters," he said, attributing the enthusiasm to Obama's "campaign of ideas," emulating the civil rights movement of yore.

"The soaring ideas are very important," said Dettelbach, 42. "The Jewish community looks back with nostalgia to the 1960s, civil rights, marching with Dr. [Martin Luther] King, solidification of support for Israel, and they see Obama bringing that energy back to government."

Wexler made the point in addressing the Anshei Chesed-Fairmount synagogue in suburban Cleveland, recalling that its late rabbi, Arthur Lelyveld, marched with King and suffered beatings for his civil rights activism.

"He was an extraordinary hero," Wexler said to murmurs of agreement before pivoting to Obama's campaign, describing the effects of an Obama presidency on Israel's and America's places in the world after years of what he said was a neglect of alliances by President Bush.

"When that new day of trans-Atlantic relations emerges, Israel too will be a great beneficiary," he said.

Obama's crew has had a harder time eroding black support for Clinton in the state's 11th District, where she has the support of the hugely popular Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a black Democrat who refers to Clinton in radio ads as "my girl."

The other substantial constituency in the 11th, which straddles downtown Cleveland and its eastern suburbs, is its Jewish community.

That's what Obama delegate Gayle Horwitz, 27, and her twentysomething colleagues decided to target.

"I looked at the demographics and the exit polls, and I saw that if we did outreach, we could pick up one or two delegates," said the Georgetown Law School graduate.

Horwitz said she asks Jewish friends to forward anti-Obama emails as soon as they receive them. She then immediately blasts all the recipients in the forward string with explanatory material.

Jewish Democrats say the rapid-response tactics are having an effect.

Rob Zimmerman, a lawyer and a Shaker Heights councilman, heads the local National Jewish Democratic Council chapter and is a senior official in the local party. Zimmerman, 41, had leaned toward Clinton, but is now reconsidering simply because of the intensity of Obama's Jewish campaign and what he said was the silence from the Clinton camp.

"I've been getting emails, phone calls three to four times a day from people who have connections" to the Obama campaign, Zimmerman said in his downtown Cleveland office overlooking Lake Erie. "On the flip side there's been next to no outreach from the Clinton campaign."

In a late move, after it was clear that Obama was making a big Jewish push in the state, the Clinton campaign put together an event Feb. 25 featuring a talk by one of the New York senator's supporters, former U.S. diplomat and Middle East negotiator Martin Indyk.

Like so many other challenges now facing the Clinton campaign, the failure to match the Obama camp's moves in Ohio is a case of anticipating that her campaign would be wrapped up by the Super Tuesday primaries Feb. 5.

"We didn't think Ohio was going to be a player," said Lana Moresky, one of Clinton's top fundraisers in the state. "People are now starting to focus."

Clinton's longer record of support for Israel, her tendency to hew to pro-Israel orthodoxies and her nuts-and-bolts emphasis on issues plaguing Ohio — job creation, health care and mortgage relief — made her a natural for the Jewish community.

Along with Tubbs Jones and Gov. Ted Strickland — both popular with Ohio Jews — she had the endorsement of the state's top Jewish official, Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher. The Jewish attorney general, Marc Dann, has not endorsed a candidate.