On Thursday, Obama led a conference call with left-wing activists in which he repeatedly railed against his political opponents by using the old canard of rich Jews using their money to exert control.
Accusing critics of the deal of being "opposed to any deal with Iran"--i.e. of advocating war--Obama railed against "well-financed" lobbyists, as well as the "big check writers to political campaigns," and "billionaires who happily finance super-PACs." He complained about "$20 million" being spent on ads against the deal--a subtle reference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC--whose support he had repeatedly courted when running for office).
Some of Obama's references were thinly-veiled attacks on specific (Jewish) individuals--columnist Bill Kristol, for example, the Weekly Standard publisher and former New York Times resident conservative who served in the George H.W. Bush administration, and also helps run the Emergency Committee for Israel, which opposes the Iran deal; or billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who is a prodigious Republican benefactor, super PAC donor, and well-known hawk on Israel issues.
On the call, Obama twice accused his opponents of being the same people "responsible for us getting into the Iraq war." That sweeping, and largely false, characterization of the opponents of the Iran deal repeats the sensational accusations of The Israel Lobby, a widely discredited 2007 book that accused a group of pro-Israel, and largely Jewish, individuals and organizations of pushing the U.S. into war with Iraq, and seeking to drag America into a new war with Iran.
Obama's deliberate, and jarring, choice of words clearly worried even some sympathetic Jews.