“Susan Rice has a blind spot: Genocide,” said the ad appearing in Saturday’s New York Times, touting a talk on Iran this week in Washington hosted by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the New Jersey-based author and pro-Israel advocate.

As soon as the Sabbath ended, Jewish groups rushed to condemn the ad. The American Jewish Committee called it “revolting,” the Anti-Defamation League called it “spurious and perverse”, the Jewish Federations of North America called it “outrageous” and Josh Block, the president of The Israel Project, said it was “entirely inappropriate.”

Marshall Wittmann, the spokesman for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which will host Rice on Monday at its annual conference, said, “Ad hominem attacks should have no place in our discourse.”

And now he’s a Republican congressional candidate who will soon reap the gains from a $500,000 Super PAC donation from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson. He tells me that lessons learned in a country that survived genocide work both “microcosmically” and “macrocosmically.”

“When you live for yourself,” he says, “I think your economy corrodes. When you live with a greater sense of purpose, I think you do really well. The United States when it had far higher defense expenditures, during the Cold War, had a far more robust economy for the most part. It stood for something. I think we need to regain that. That’s why I went to Rwanda.”

Adelson is also the publisher of Israel’s widest-read newspaper, the free Israel Hayom daily, which critics say takes a blatantly pro-Netanyahu line.

When it came to Israel, Adelson, a personal friend of the prime minister, and Stephens deviated slightly. While Adelson said Netanyahu “would not live without taking some kind of action under the threat of harm to the Jewish people or the State of Israel,” Stephens claimed he is “all hat and no cattle.”

Negotiators from Iran and six world powers, known as the P5+1, are due to meet in Geneva for a round of talks on November 7-8, the second round of talks in as many months.

A senior administration official at the White House cited criticism from a number of Jewish advocacy groups in reaction to the ad, saying it has been met with "revulsion."

"This ad is being widely met with the revulsion that it deserves. Frankly, the ad says more about those who supported it than it says about Susan Rice," the official told CNN.

The administration official declined to elaborate on those comments or to provide an on-the-record defense of Rice.

The Anti-Defamation League called the ad "perverse and incendiary."

"Has Boteach helped the pro-Israel community, which, presumably, was the object of the exercise? Absolutely not. To the contrary, he has made our collective task more difficult," the American Jewish Committee said.