Daniel Lubetzky

By AMY CHOZICK

Sara Ehrman, a fixture in liberal politics who advised President Bill Clinton on the Israeli-Arab conflict but was best known as the woman who advised a young Hillary Rodham not to move to Arkansas to marry Mr. Clinton, died Saturday in Washington. She was 98.

A family friend, Jodi Enda, said the cause was endocarditis.

Born on Staten Island, 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.

She described herself as “first a Jew, second a Democrat and above all a feminist” who, like a village elder, dispensed tough love to young women trying to navigate their own careers in Washington. Hillary Clinton was her most notable protégée.

“There are people who come into your life at just the right moment,” Mrs. Clinton said in an email. “For me, Sara was one of those people. From the day our paths first crossed during the McGovern campaign in Texas, I knew I had found a mentor and a kindred spirit.”

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, Mrs. 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.

For two days, and 1,193 miles, Mrs. Ehrman tried to talk her out of it. “We’d drive along and I’d say, ‘Hillary, for God’s sake,’” Mrs. Ehrman told The New York Times last year. “He’ll just be a country lawyer down there.”

In retrospect, Mr. Clinton appreciated Mrs. Ehrman’s protective urge. “She saw in Hillary a fellow trailblazer with an unlimited future,” he said in an email. “So she had every reason to doubt that Hillary was wise in picking up and moving to Arkansas in 1974 to be with a young law professor making his first run — unsuccessfully — for Congress.”

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.

For two days, and 1,193 miles, Mrs. Ehrman tried to talk her out of it. “We’d drive along and I’d say, ‘Hillary, for God’s sake,’” Mrs. Ehrman told The New York Times last year. “He’ll just be a country lawyer down there.”

In retrospect, Mr. Clinton appreciated Mrs. Ehrman’s protective urge. “She saw in Hillary a fellow trailblazer with an unlimited future,” he said in an email. “So she had every reason to doubt that Hillary was wise in picking up and moving to Arkansas in 1974 to be with a young law professor making his first run — unsuccessfully — for Congress.”

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.

That role took Mrs. Ehrman to South Texas, where she first met Mr. Clinton, who was the McGovern campaign’s state director for Texas.

For Mrs. Clinton, the 1974 road trip was a poetic crossroads in her career, and it indelibly linked her life with Mrs. Ehrman’s. “We talked the entire way, stopping for souvenirs and pecan pie,” Mrs. Clinton recalled in her email. “The trip solidified a friendship that would enrich my life for decades to come.”

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 in 1993, 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 was right there trying to figure out who to come on the plane — who was really important and who wanted to be important and who would you pay a price if you didn’t include?” recalled Maria Echaveste, a former White House deputy chief of staff to Mr. Clinton. She shared a room in Little Rock with Mrs. Ehrman when they both worked on Mr. Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

Mrs. Ehrman was a sisterly presence in the East Wing, and well after the Clintons left the White House, the denizens of what came to be called Hillaryland visited her sunny apartment in the Kalorama section of Washington, which became something of a salon for like-minded women.

“People on Hillary’s staff in the White House became very close to her and very fond of her,” said Lissa Muscatine, a longtime friend of Mrs. Clinton’s and a speechwriter for her.

For all her maternal warmth, Mrs. Ehrman was famously strong-willed, and her politics fell to the left of the Clintons’. “She was this person who’d been around and would speak truth to power,” Ms. Muscatine said. “She’d offer advice on the Middle East and beat them up if she thought they were doing something wrong.”

Mrs. Ehrman grew deeply disillusioned with Aipac, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group that she had helped expand as political director in the early 1980s, and she was unflinching in her critique of American Jews who thought Israel could do no wrong.

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.

Mrs. Ehrman’s advocacy took her on numerous trips to the Middle East, where her moxie was on full display in meetings with dozens of heads of state, including multiple sessions with Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader. In 2011, at 92, Mrs. Ehrman met in the West Bank with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority at the time.

In July 2016, Mrs. Ehrman took a seat in the Clintons’ friends-and-family booth at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to watch her former tenant become the first woman to capture the Democratic nomination for president.

Mr. Clinton, standing to introduce Mrs. Ehrman to the other guests, waved a long finger her way and said, “That woman told Hillary not to marry me.”