Sara Ehrman

Born on Staten Island, N.Y., and forged by the politics of the Labor Zionist Youth movement of the 1930s, Mrs. 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. In 1974, two years after Senator George S. McGovern’s failed bid to unseat President Richard M. Nixon, and after she had graduated from Yale Law School, Hillary Clinton lived in Mrs. Ehrman’s Washington home while she worked on the Senate Watergate Committee. That August, Mrs. Ehrman, who saw a bright future for her spirited, if sloppy, young tenant, offered to drive her to Fayetteville, Ark., to be with her boyfriend, Mr. Clinton. Mrs. Ehrman was born Sara Teitelbaum on April 24, 1919, the youngest child and only daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants who had fled persecution and whose communist sympathies would inspire their daughter’s left-leaning politics. Her mother, Mary, died when Sara was 8; an aunt in Manhattan with 10 children of her own took her in. Mrs. Ehrman first learned about the Labor Zionist movement in 1934, when she was 15, at a dance hosted by the Young Poale Zion Alliance, a Marxist-Zionist group. She then spent summers at the group’s Camp Kvutza in upstate New York. The friends she made there, including Jews of Palestinian descent, would serve as an influence years later in her fervent push for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. By high school, Mrs. Ehrman lived in Flushing, Queens, with her father, Maurice, and older brother William. She was conditionally admitted to Barnard College, but she 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 eventually settled in Hollin Hills, a progressive enclave outside Washington in Northern Virginia. They divorced in 1969. Mrs. Ehrman is survived by her two sons, Daniel and David. In 1992, Mrs. Ehrman moved to Little Rock, Ark., to lead Jewish outreach efforts for Mr. Clinton’s presidential campaign. On the morning of his inauguration, she attended church with the Clintons. During Mr. Clinton’s first term, Mrs. Ehrman, then the Democratic National Committee’s deputy political director, helped organize Mr. Clinton’s 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. She spent decades pushing for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving as a senior adviser to S. Daniel Abraham, the billionaire who helped found the Center for Middle East Peace, and working with Americans for Peace Now and J Street, two groups that favor such a solution.