EW YORK - Whether or not Hillary Rodham Clinton screamed an anti-Semitic slur at a campaign aide 26 years ago, it tells much about New York politics that she has denied the claim with such uncommon heat and with the direct assistance of her husband, the president.
Several Jewish leaders said yesterday they doubt the allegation will have much impact on the first lady's Senate campaign, in part, they said, because she is in trouble with many Jewish voters already.
Of a half-dozen local rabbis and Jewish leaders interviewed yesterday, none thought reports of the alleged slur would change anybody's vote.
One prominent rabbi in Queens, who asked not to be identified, called the report ''absurd,'' and said, ''No one has called me in outrage about this.''
Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement yesterday: ''Mrs. Clinton's public record shows no evidence of anti-Semitism and we do not believe her to hold negative views about Jews.''
Still, a wariness of Mrs. Clinton lingers. As the Queens rabbi noted, ''Many people do not trust her. They really don't know what she thinks about Israel especially. Jews like to know these things. It helps them feel more secure.''
Mrs. Clinton's opponent in the Senate race, Representative Rick Lazio, sought to tap into this distrust yesterday. Calling the report ''a serious allegation,'' he said, ''I don't know who to believe. New Yorkers don't know who to believe. And therein lies a good deal of the problem.''
The flurry began late last week, when Internet columnist Matt Drudge quoted from a new book about the Clintons by Jerry Oppenheimer, a former National Enquirer reporter.
Oppenheimer says that in 1974, after Bill Clinton lost a race for Congress, Hillary, then his girlfriend, called campaign aide Paul Fray a ''[expletive] Jew bastard.'' Fray is not Jewish, though his paternal grandmother is.
New York's main tabloids, the Daily News and the Post, picked up the story Saturday and cited Fray, his wife, Mary Lee, and, the next day, another campaign worker, Neill McDonald, as confirming the story. TV newscasts soon followed.
Mrs. Clinton then took the unusual step of summoning reporters to her house in suburban Chappaqua to deny and denounce the story.
President Clinton rallied to her defense Sunday, and took time out from the Middle East summit in Camp David to make two phone calls to the Daily News - one to its publisher, Mortimer B. Zuckerman.
''I was there and [Hillary] never said it,'' the president was quoted as saying in yesterday's edition. ''In 29 years, my wife has never, ever uttered an ethnic or racial slur against anybody. ... She might have called him a bastard. ... But I've never heard her tell a joke with an ethnic connotation. ... It's not in her.''
As anyone in New York politics knows, if a story like this were proved true, or were widely believed to be true, the results could be devastating.
Just 12 percent of New York state's voters are Jewish - 600,000 out of 5 million in the 1998 Senate race - but they can be crucial in a close election, and Clinton-Lazio is as close as they come.
Three-quarters of Jews tend to vote Democratic, but the first lady is not doing nearly that well.
Recent polls, taken well before this flap, show Jews favoring her over Lazio, 54-34. This may seem a healthy margin, but the rule of thumb is that Democrats must attract at least two-thirds of the Jewish vote to win a statewide contest.
Republican Alphonse M. D'Amato won three Senate elections in part because he pulled away as much as 40 percent of the Jewish vote. In his last race, two years ago, he lost to Charles Schumer partly because he lured only 20 percent.
The first lady has long cut a controversial profile among Jews. Much of it dates to a comment early in her husband's presidency, advocating a Palestinian state.
Suspicions about her deepened last November, when on a trip to the Middle East, she sat nonchalantly at a forum while Suha Arafat, wife of PLO chairman Yasser Arafat, said Israelis have fired poison gas at Palestinian children. Then, while saying goodbye, the first lady gave Mrs. Arafat a kiss.
Mrs. Clinton waited 24 hours to denounce Arafat's remarks, saying that the simultaneous-translation she heard was milder than the official version she read later. (Reporters on the trip who listened to the same translation dispute this.)
''To the extent these stories may have an effect,'' one executive of a Jewish organization said yesterday, ''it will be within the context of the Arafat incident. But most of those who worry about the Arafat incident aren't going to vote for her anyway.''
