Josh Marshall points to coverage by The Politico of Howard Dean's comments addressing the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities:

In another statement likely to stir debate among the evangelical Christians his party is urgently trying to court, Dean also asserted “there are no bars to heaven for anybody,” according to the report by JTA, a 90-year-old non-profit organization which calls itself “the global news service of the Jewish people.”

While the comment section of The Politico's report on Dean's address contains admonitions of a presumption on the DNC Chair's part over who qualifies for entry within the pearly gates, Dean really adds nothing to, nor subtracts anything at all from, rabbinic orthodoxy.  Although Dean could have innoculated himself from impending GOP talking points now emanating from The Politico's peanut gallery by simply quoting from the Talmud saying, "the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come," what Dean has ably done is to call into question the absurd notion of those good ol' mythologically hyphenated "Judeo-Christian values."

It needs to be said.  There are Christian values and there are Jewish values, and to conflate these in our political rhetoric is a cynical exercise in manipulation -- whether the intent is to contrive a more welcoming environment within the GOP for the intake of tradtionally Democratic Jewish voters, or to implicate American Jews' sympathies toward Israel and Zionism with the support by the Evangelical right for ongoing Israeli occupation and Jewish settlement expansion in Palestinian territories.  It needs to be said that there are diverse sets and systems of ethics and values among the American people, and that such diversity reflects the integrity of the Enlightenment principles that the founders and framers have bravely established here.  It needs to be said that the United States of America is a peculiar treasure in a human civilization otherwise divied up among competing ethnic and religious national interests, and that what we have here is both unique and fragile.