• So, reconciliation appears to be back on track, for now. [JPost]

• That great Times Magazine cover for the Gilad Shalit article? It required 60 hours of drawing. [NYT The 6th Floor]

• Henry Kissinger will not serve as secretary of State in a Herman Cain administration. Which, actually, might be the first good reason to vote for Cain. [Politico]

• Stuart the Turtle sees something he doesn’t like about Occupy Wall Street. [Forward]

• Nextbook Press deputy editor Wayne Hoffman returns to shul. [Huff Post]

Palestinian protesters attempted to take the bus into Jerusalem without permits, in a nod to the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.

• A onetime Jewish Obama donor who refuses to allow his name to be used “(let’s call him John)” tells a conservative blogger that he is abandoning the president and it’s not because of Israel. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Right Turn]

• Kinky Friedman backs Gov. Rick Perry. Clearly Obama needs to improve his standing with the Jewish community. [Ben Smith]

• Joe Klein questions Glenn Beck’s recent comments about the Jews. [Time Swampland]

• A Mexican-Jewish cookbook? Sign me up! [Book Bench]

• Mardy Fish isn’t Jewish. I weep. [Kaplan’s Korner]

Stay safe, everybody.

This week’s winner is “sk,” who wondered, apropos the arch-conservative historian David Barton’s involvement in Glenn Beck’s rally in Jerusalem, “I thought David Barton was a gym owner in Manhattan, not a historian.”

As columnist Michelle Goldberg explained, Barton is at the very least a pseudo-historian, one who uses dubious methods and interpretations to push an extreme, Christianist narrative of American history.

A different David Barton is, however, a gym owner in Manhattan (although his chain recently filed for bankruptcy).

For being on top of this distinction with a difference, “sk” gets a copy of Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body.

Glenn Beck Is Restoring Courage
Related: The Jewish Body [Nextbook Press]
History Lesson [Tablet Magazine]
The Man Who Made Working Out Cool [NYT]

One thing to note is that many who have traveled from the United States to attend are being funded by WallBuilders, the organization of “historian” David Barton, who, as columnist Michelle Goldberg documented, has a past littered with white-supremacist and anti-Semitic associations and whose work is dedicated to arguing that the United States was explicitly founded as an evangelical-Christian nation. Which doesn’t make Barton a particularly strange bedfellow for Beck. But for Israel, he certainly is. Isn’t he?

Live Blog: Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Courage” Rally in East Jerusalem [Haaretz]
Glenn Beck’s Israel Tour Raises Eyebrows [LAT]
Should Israel Welcome Glenn Beck’s Support? [Hudson Institute]
U.S. Jews Warn Israel Not to Get Too Cozy With Glenn Beck [Haaretz]
Major Funder for Glenn Beck’s Israel Rally Linked to Anti-Semitic Group [Lobelog]
Related: History Lesson [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Take a Trip to Israel With Glenn Beck
Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’

• Israel is blaming Popular Resistance Committees, a Gaza-based group with ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, for yesterday’s attacks. [The Envoy]

• In Iran, is Supreme Leader Khamanei gearing up to arrest his underling President Ahmadinejad? [Frontline]

• Despite prior statements that they would, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Eric Cantor will not attend Glenn Beck’s rally next week in Israel. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Former Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, won’t run for president, senator, or governor. [Ben Smith]

• Bar Refaeli has shot a new bikini catalogue. Yes, Virginia, there is a photo gallery. [Page Six]

• This Ed Koch robo-call in that Queens/Brooklyn race has to be read (and ideally heard) to be believed. [PolitickerNY]

• Half-black Jewish songsters unite: Drake is featured on a new Lenny Kravitz track. [The Fader]

• A Forward editorial notes all the “Rich Jews for Tax Hikes,” and rightfully schleps naches from them. [Forward]

• The woman in That Black-and-White Photo You’ve Seen in Italian Restaurants speaks out. But the photographer was Ruth Orkin, a Jew! [MSNBC]

• Hebrew U. is 57th. [Haaretz]

• Frequent Vox Tablet contributor Jon Kalish has a podcast on contemporary musicians covering old pioneer songs. [iTunes]

Contributing editor Mark Oppenheimer gets frequently insightful, frequently infuriating critic Lee Siegel exactly right: he’s an intellectual tummler. As opposed to a tumbler, born under punches (I’m so thin).

• Russia is semi-secretly working to restart nuclear talks with Iran. [AP/WP]

• Roughly one-fifth of the House of Representatives is visiting Israel during summer recess, especially notable given the poor relations between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT] Texas

• An advocacy group accused Israel of arresting an Al Jazeera journalist and holding him without charges. [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck, in Israel in advance of next week’s rally, called the #j14 protesters the “hard left” and repeatedly insisted referred to “Judea and Samaria.” [Ynet]

• Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, is sponsoring a bill to halt U.S. funding to three elite IDF units (including the famed Shayetet 13), which he says engage in human rights violations in the Palestinian territories. [Haaretz]

• President Abbas called for a meeting of the Arab League to address the Palestinian Authority’s emergency lack of funds. [JPost]

• Grand Ayatollah Khamanei appointed a mediator to help resolve all the disputes that have cropped up between himself and President Ahmadinejad. [AP/WP]

• Roger Cohen’s fairly standard column on suspected Oslo killer Anders Bering Breivik takes a big turn in the final paragraph that you’ll want to stick around for. [NYT]

• “Who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics?” Glenn Beck asked in reference to the young, innocent victims of Breivik’s massacre. “It sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler Youth.” Actually that thought only occurred to you. [Ynet]

• A group of former top Israeli military and diplomatic officials visited Washington, D.C., including the White House, pushing peace and insisting that the ’67 borders themselves are defensible. [Haaretz]

The news this month has shown, once again, how tricky it can be to tell Jews and Christians apart: a community of Majorcans, who have been Catholic for, oh, about 700 years, turned out to be Jewish according to ultra-Orthodox authorities, while Glenn Beck, addressing the Knesset in Israel, intoned the iconic words from the Book of Ruth that inspire and often figure in conversion ceremonies (“Your people is my people / Your God is my God”) but remains, nonetheless, steadfastly, creepily, vaguely Christian.

Complicating these matters further is the first book by Bible scholar Matthew Thiessen, titled Contesting Conversion: Genealogy, Circumcision, and Identity in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Oxford, July), which argues that “for many Jews in antiquity Jewishness was a matter of genealogy. Gentiles could not become Jews regardless of whether or not they underwent circumcision.” Even back then, no one agreed about what makes somebody Jewish.

***

Today, there’s general agreement at least that conversion to Judaism is possible, even if there’s still plenty of disagreement among authorities across the religious spectrum about what constitutes an acceptable conversion. Reconstructionist Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben and Jennifer S. Hanin don’t want anyone to let that get them down on their way to joining the tribe, so their cheery guidebook, Becoming Jewish: The Challenges, Rewards, and Paths to Conversion (Rowman & Littlefield, September) shepherds eager aspirants onward with sections like “Facing the Bet Din: Don’t Sweat It.” Most remarkably, this has got to be the only book ever co-written by an ordained rabbi published with a foreword by the incomparable Bob Saget.

***

There’s no question, by now, that scholars of rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity need to be reading and contemplating the same sources, as well as one another’s work. In Ann Astell and Sandor Goodheart’s edited collection Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution: Readings in Ancient Judaism and Christianity (Notre Dame, June), experts on the history of one or both of these religions—including such heavy hitters as Erich Gruen, Michael Fishbane, Robert Daly, and Bruce Chilton—riff on the theories about violence and imitation developed by the French Académicien and Stanford campus eminence René Girard. Meanwhile, Randi Rashkover, director of the Judaic Studies Program at George Mason University, brings Jewish-Christian comparativism into the high theory present: She contests recent arguments by academic superstars like Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek about Paul and the abolition of Jewish law in Freedom and Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (Fordham, September).

***

Likewise comparative, and more appetizing, is David Freidenreich’s Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (California, August), a study that explores the ways that the quotidian rituals of breaking bread have served as a means of identification and exclusion in the three monotheistic faiths. Everybody knows that kashrut functions socially—have you heard about the time Rabbi Akiva avoided a honey-pot trap because he smelled trayf on the breath of the ladies sent to seduce him?—but Friedenreich, an ordained Conservative rabbi and assistant professor at Colby College, offers extensive treatments of the aims and effects of Christian and Muslim laws about culinary consumption, too.

***

Freidenreich focuses on ancient and medieval religious authorities, but obviously food has continued to serve its function, shoring up religious identity and demarcating social boundaries, in modernity as well. Frederick Isaac’s  A Road of Our Own Choosing: A History of Reform Judaism in America (URJ, June) offers wider context for the Trefa Banquet of 1883, but there’s a reason that the serving of little neck clams and soft-shell crabs to the attendees of a rabbinic ordination ceremony in Cincinnati has become an iconic moment in the history of American Judaism. At the same time, the title of Yoel Finkelman’s new book, Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature, Artscroll, and the Construction of Ultra-Orthodox Identity (Academic Studies, August), reflects how resonant culinary metaphors can be; here it speaks to literary, rather than gustatory, practices. In the book, Finkelman, who teaches Torah at progressive Orthodox institutions in Israel including ATID and Midreshet Lindenbaum, follows Jeremy Stolow’s Orthodox by Design, in attending to Artscroll as exemplary of the way the ultra-Orthodox community draws on secular cultural models.

***

How post-Enlightenment Germans, both “Jewish-identified” and “ ‘Jew’-identifying” ones, have distinguished Jewish from non-Jewish bodies is the subject of Jay Geller’s The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of Modernity (Fordham, September). Geller is known for his supple and richly informed readings of Freud; here he addresses a host of other writers, from Rahel Levin Varnhagen to Arthur Dinter, analyzing the body as the site of Jewishness, as well as the appropriation of anti-Semitic tropes by Jews who were trying to figure out who they were. Don’t expect any of this scholarship to simplify matters when it comes to figuring out who’s Jewish and who’s not: That will inevitably remain a puzzle as long as there are any Jews to argue about it.

• Glenn Beck is moving his “Restoring Courage” rally next month in Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to an as-yet-determined location; having it at the Temple Mount is seen as making him an assassination target and also as gratuitously provocative and tasteless, although he only cited the former reason. [Huff Post]

• When an earthquake hit New Zealand earlier this year, it killed 181 people, three of them Israeli. One of them, according to a new report, was in Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Jeff Goldberg says Michele Bachmann loves Israel not wisely but too well. [Bloomberg Views]

• Michael Walzer visits Hebron. [Dissent]

• Jason Diamond apologizes for having inadvertently worked for the international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. [Jewcy]

Oh yes, there is a new Beastie Boys video. (And, oh yes, Spike Jonze directed it.)

• “Now is the time to deal with these issues,” said President Obama at a press conference today about the national debt. “If not now, when?” A Joseph Telushkin fan, this guy! [The Caucus]

• Did Glenn Beck, testifying before the Knesset, make chit-chat with a member of a State Department-ordained terrorist group? Looks that way. [+972]

• Nextbook Press author Jonathan D. Sarna uses the story of Manischewitz, now run by Sephardim, as a microcosm for the increasing diversity of the American Jewish community. [Forward]

• Rep. Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton adviser Huma Abedin retreated to Miami to celebrate their anniversary. And why not? [Page Six]

• Mila Kunis is beautiful, Jewish, talented, and also awesome: She is attending a Marine Corps. Ball in North Carolina with a Marine who asked her out from Afghanistan. [CBS News]

Sam Fuld will be doing color commentary on ESPN for tonight’s Home Run Derby. I’ll be watching. And the entire time, I’ll be thinking of this:

• That said, the P.A. also expressed willingness to enter talks even without a settlement freeze, a recognition of their weakened position. [AP/WP]

• The Hamas-Fatah honeymoon really does seem to be winding to a rapid close. [JPost]

• Secretary of State Clinton said the flotilla that plans to sail for Gaza soon is not “necessary or useful.” [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s son, 19, has posted fairly nasty things about Arabs and Muslims on his Facebook page. At least there were no crotch-shots! [AP/WP]

• Glenn Beck will visit Auschwitz and broadcast from nearby. This will end well. [TPM/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Ron Prosor, the new Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, urged America’s Jewish institutional community to band together against the Palestinian push for statehood in September. [Haaretz]

• “Joe Lieberman, first Jew on a presidential ticket, was embracing Beck, the leading purveyor of anti-Semitic memes in the mass media,” Dana Milbank notes of the Connecticut senator’s decision to attend this August’s rally in Jerusalem. [WP]

• A moving essay on the unique position of non-naturalized Palestinian residents of Jerusalem. [Michael J. Totten]

• Charlotte Bloomberg, mother of New York Mayor Michael, died at 102 (!). [NYT]

• The lost—not last, but close—Jews of … Libya! [AP/WP]

• Oh, also, they’re not going to kill that dog. [Life in Israel]

“A change was made uptown, and the Big Man joined the band.” R.I.P.

• In the morning, we thought that almost the entire GOP presidential field would be attending Glenn Beck’s rally in Jerusalem. Now, we know that almost none of them are. Don’t worry, though, Joe Lieberman probably is! [HuffPo]

• Of the Awl essay I linked to yesterday, Jeff Goldberg writes, convincingly, that the author “seems to have exchanged one simplistic narrative for another.” [Goldblog]

• Israel HaYom, Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli tabloid, now has an English-language version. [Israel HaYom]

• “Regional developments” including Palestinian reconciliation and the crisis next-door in Syria have prompted the Turkish group IHH, which led last year’s flotilla, to consider dropping out of this year’s. The flotilla itself is still scheduled for the end of this month. [JPost]

• Natalie had a baby. It’s a boy! [JTA]

A helpful, brief video biography of Washington. You may learn a few interesting facts about him.

• President Obama will be speaking this coming Sunday at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. [AP/WP]

• Skiing in summertime: In one of the largest such busts in the country’s history, two men were arrested in Israel with $60 million worth of cocaine. [AP/WP]

• In a nearly overwhelming confluence of Nextbook Press star power, tonight author Elie Wiesel will receive the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s first award, and author Deborah Lipstadt will speak. [WP]

• A new U.N. report on Iran’s nuclear program vindicates the Obama administration’s strategy of successfully pursuing multilateral sanctions, argues Matt Duss. [CAP]

• Tonight is Storahtelling’s B Mitzvah, celebrated at City Winery in Manhattan. Go give it a pocket watch! [Storahtelling]

Today in Jonathan Richman’s 60th (sixtieth!) birthday.

“But why do they call it Jerusalem stone?”

“I want that.”

“I know the Wayfarers make it confusing, but, no, I am not related to the folk musician Bob Dylan.”

“Where’d Barton go? Where’d Barton go?? Oh, whew, there you are. Sorry, I couldn’t see you because of your camouflage yarmulke.”

“You’ll have to help me—does ‘Glenn’ have one or two ns?”

“Nothing like delicious, locally raised pork.”

Exclusive Photos: Glenn Beck in Israel [Glenn Beck]
Glenn Beck of Fox News to Meet With Netanyahu, Danon [JPost]
Related: History Lesson [Tablet Magazine]

• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

Leibovitz’s piece does not allege that Limbaugh (or Beck or Hannity) have used this service; in fact, it implies that the service is mainly used for gags on ostensibly less serious programming, and then situates this plastic notion of authenticity in the context of that week’s Torah parasha. Keith Olbermann’s new blog, which yesterday highlighted Leibovitz’s article, also does not allege that Limbaugh has used the service, although it does make the point that Premiere conspicuously failed to deny that actors have called in to more serious shows.

Actually, Limbaugh is similarly curious on the question of Premiere’s non-denial. But he also labels Tablet Magazine a “radical left-wing operation” (take that, Philip Weiss!). Plus, some actual radical right-wing operation accused Leibovitz of being paid by George Soros to attack Limbaugh. (I have checked with Leibovitz, who denied any Soros connection, but suggested the billionaire liberal activist get in touch if he wanted to say thank-you.) An abridged transcript of Limbaugh’s remarks, as well as full tape, follows—courtesy of Media Matters (which, go figure, is Soros-funded). Enjoy!

LIMBAUGH:

You can’t do it any more! One of the great comedic arts of radio—and this is 20 years ago now—was dealt a fatal blow when the FCC said you can’t put people on the air without their permission. … People still wanted to do the bits. That led to hiring actors to portray the dupes, the objects of the bit.

… Why didn’t these people at Premiere deny, why didn’t they specify for this is for their prank calls in their morning shows, or whenever it happens during the day? [Ed.: Good point, Rush!] But it is not for talk radio. I have never heard of this. One of the cardinal rules here, from the get-go: Nothing is staged on this program, ever.

… But I still can’t figure out why Premiere did not specify—they let it stand out there that this is all happening as part of their talk-radio division, which it’s not, at least not here, and I can’t believe that it’s happening anywhere else. [Good point again!]

This story originally appeared in something called the Tablet Magazine, which calls itself ‘a new read on Jewish life.’ [True!] And Tablet Magazine is a radical left-wing operation [Not really!], and from Tablet Magazine, here’s one of the excerpts:

Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers Magazine, the talk-radio world’s leading trade publication, said he knew nothing of this particular service but was not altogether surprised to hear that it was in place. There was, he said, a tradition of “creating fake phone calls for the sake of entertainment on some of the funny shows, shock jocks shows, the kind of shows you hear … ”

That’s exactly right, but not here! People doing pranks? I would consider it an insult.

Limbaugh Denies Paying Actors To Pose as Callers [Media Matters]
Radio Daze [Tablet Magazine]
Racketeer Rabbit Republicans [Fok News Channel]

Meanwhile, the New York Jewish Week at some point apparently took down a post about the affair by blogger Jonathan Mark that was headlined, “When Glenn Beck Compares Reform Judaism To Radical Islam, He’s Unfair To Islam.” The RSS summary of the post begins:

When Glenn Beck says that Reform Judaism is like radical Islam, insofar as both are more about politics than faith, he’s being unfair to radical Islam. Yes, both are deeply involved with politics and confuse their own politics with God’s. But radical Islamists seems [sic] to be much more serious about their religion. Reform rabbis often lead congregations whose overall culture is indifferent to Shabbat and kashrut, indifferent to daily prayer and intermarriage, and indifferent to religious literacy.

Then it cuts off and links to the post, which has clearly been removed. Um, did anyone by any chance make a copy? If you look at the Google search, you can tell that it was a looooong post, and I sure would like to see the rest of it. UPDATE: That didn’t take long.

Glenn Beck Apologizes for Reform Judaism Comments [Mediaite]
Earlier: Foxman on Beck: ‘Bigoted Ignorance’
The Things He Said Yesterday

Well, credit where it’s due, I stand corrected, etc. In a statement today, Foxman accused Beck of “bigoted ignorance” and said he should apologize to the Reform movement:

Glenn Beck’s comparison of Reform Judaism to radical Islam demonstrates his bigoted ignorance. Despite his feeble attempt to suggest that he was not equating Reform Judaism with Islamic extremist terrorism, the simple fact that he would mention them in the same breath is highly offensive and outrageous.

The truth is that every religious body has political points of view, whether one agrees with them or not. To compare Reform Judaism, which supports democratic institutions, to Islamic extremism, which supports anti-democratic movements and the repression of basic rights—including, for example, the denial of women’s rights—is beyond the pale.

Glenn Beck has no business discounting the faith of any people, and he should think twice before commenting on something he doesn’t know much about. He owes the Reform movement an apology.

Don’t think I can’t still quibble—Foxman appears, to me, to be more offended by the comparison to Islamism (which Beck himself limited in the course of his making it) than anything else. Still, the concise term “bigoted ignorance” actually manages to capture the quote nicely—the willed know-nothingness tinged with fear of Jews. All in all, a good day’s work for Foxman.

ADL: Glenn Beck’s Comments About Reform Judaism Demonstrate “Bigoted Ignorance” [ADL]
Related: ADL Stands By Glenn Beck in the End [Salon]
Earlier: The Things He Said Yesterday
Fire Abe Foxman?

Beck basically sounds ignorant: “Reformed rabbis are generally political in nature,” he says (it’s Reform, not reformed, but that’s more a symptom than an offense). “It’s almost like Islam, radicalized Islam in a way, to where it is just—radicalized Islam is less about religion than it is about politics. When you look at the Reform Judaism, it is more about politics.” Mark Pelavin, of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, clarified for me this morning that Beck’s attack yesterday on Reform Judaism has less to do with his beef with Judaism and more to do with his beef with certain faiths that see social justice as part of their movements: “We are outraged and yet not surprised,” Pelavin told me. “I think that his attack is of a piece with his attack on folks in the Christian community who have social justice as part of their ministries.” He added, “There are plenty of people who get into public policy work because of their faith. It’s their faith that compels them to take the positions they do. Beck fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between people’s faiths and their religious beliefs.”

Of course, there is still the part where he compared Reform Judaism to radical Islam. I’m sure Abe Foxman won’t be on the case in no time.

Earlier: Beck Compares Reform Judaism to Islamism
Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
Glenn Beck Goes There
Fire Abe Foxman?

About 30 people turned out for a Wednesday evening showing in Manhattan. After being greeted by earnest volunteers in Zeitgeist T-shirts and given the chance to pick up pamphlets and newsletters about the Zeitgeist movement—or TZM, as its acolytes call it—they sat through a two-and-a-half-hour film, alternately frenetic and soporific, explaining the necessary and imminent collapse of economies based on money, the root of all the world’s sufferings. The film prophesied the emergence of a superior “resource-based economy,” in which decisions about the allocations of goods and services will be made by computers free from corrupting “opinions.” Robots will do most menial work, liberating people for more creative, humanistic pursuits, and technological innovation will ensure abundance for all. The movie ends with scenes of crowds worldwide surging into the streets and, realizing that money is but an enslaving illusion, dumping their cash in great piles in front of the now-impotent central banks. Amazingly, only one person walked out.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward is silly enough that at times I suspected it was all a put-on, a sly satire about new-age techno-utopianism instead of an example of it. But to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, the Zeitgeist movement is entirely serious. At times, it even seems like the world’s first Internet-based cult, with members who parrot the party line with cheerful, rote fidelity. In a phone conversation, Brenton Eccles, a former member from Melbourne, described how his involvement cut him off from reality. “It’s very, very, very isolating,” says Eccles, who was part of the communications team in the movement’s Australia branch. “You’re encouraged to kind of exit the real world. There’s kind of this us-and-them attitude.” A few days later, he sent me a document recanting most of his charges and claiming that his conflicts with the organization had in fact been his fault. This did not make it seem less cult-like.

There are lots of strange things about the Zeitgeist phenomenon, but strangest is how it got started. It’s a global organization devoted to a kind of sci-fi planetary communism, but it was sparked by a 2007 documentary steeped in far-right, isolationist, and covertly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The first Zeitgeist documentary borrowed from the work of Eustace Mullins, Lyndon LaRouche, and conspiracy-mad Austin radio host Alex Jones to rail against the cabal of international bankers that purportedly rules the world. It was this documentary that reportedly obsessed Jared L. Loughner, the disturbed young man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.

Since the shooting, conservatives have latched on to the Zeitgeist movement’s new-age side to argue that Loughner hailed from the left. Others, myself included, have pointed out that the original Zeitgeist film is full of fringe right-wing ideas that have migrated toward the mainstream via the Tea Party. Zeitgeist warns, for example, that the United States could soon be subsumed into a North American Union as a precursor to the establishment of totalitarian one-world government. Members of the Zeitgeist movement, not surprisingly, reject any connection between the shooting and their ideology, even as some of them welcome the new attention that it has brought their ideas. “It’s ultimately a positive thing,” says Keith Embler, the earnest aspiring actor who co-chairs the New York chapter. “It’s press. And”—with the third documentary just released—“the timing couldn’t be better.”

Meanwhile, the evolution of the movement itself remains obscure. How did a modern gloss on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion inspire a global organization of wide-eyed technophile environmentalists? What is the Zeitgeist movement?

***

The documentary that started it all began as an art project. “The original Zeitgeist was not a film, but a performance piece, which consisted of a vaudevillian style multi-media event using recorded music, live instruments and video,” the Zeitgeist website explains. The director, a young college dropout who goes by Peter Joseph, his first and middle names, says he “tossed” it up online, where it soon was getting hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions of views on Google Videos. It has since been removed from that site, but several people have posted it on YouTube, where various versions have received millions of views each, and on Vimeo, where it’s been seen almost 600,000 times in the last six months. DVDs of the first two documentaries are also for sale online.

“The work was never designed as a film or even a documentary in a traditional sense—it was designed as a creative, provoking, emotionally driven expression, full of artistic extremity and heavily stylized gestures,” the Zeitgeist website says. This might, however, be a bit of a post-facto rationalization, meant to distance Joseph from some of the reactionary ideas in his film. It certainly doesn’t explain how the piece made the transition from performance art to relatively coherent two-hour documentary.

The original Zeitgeist has a three-part structure, and if you just saw the first third, you might think it came from the left. It begins by arguing, using a characteristic mix of fact and invention, that Christianity is a colossal fraud, a set of myths appropriated from pagan sun cults for purposes of social control. Control is the film’s real theme: All our politics and our institutions, it suggests, derive from a conspiracy of international bankers who manipulate world events for their own profits. The second part argues that Sept. 11 was an inside job, engineered by these moneyed interests. Much of its footage was taken directly from documentaries created by the far-right radio host Alex Jones, whose work is devoted to exposing the global elite’s plan for totalitarian one-world domination.

From there, Zeitgeist launches into a pseudo-exposé of the international monetary system, a theme that runs through both its sequels. According to Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, a think tank that studies right-wing movements, much of it derives from two books: The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, a member of the John Birch Society, and Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins. Mullins hated Jews, but his references to Jews in the book are oblique. “It’s bait, written by one of the world’s most notorious anti-Semites to lead people into that analytical model,” says Berlet.

Zeitgeist works the same way. Though it says nothing about Jews, its analysis mirrors classic anti-Semitic canards. Immediately after footage of the twin towers falling, for example, the film features an excerpt from a speech that Charles Lindbergh gave to an America First group in 1941: “When hostilities commenced in Europe in 1939, it was realized that the American people had no intention of entering the war. But it was realized that this country could be enticed into the war, in very much the same way that it was enticed into the last one.” As his words play, headlines about Iraq float across the screen. “We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction,” he concluded. Lindbergh, of course, was talking about the Jews. Viewers attuned to anti-Semitic rhetoric would naturally conclude that Joseph was, too.

After Joseph put Zeitgeist online, it quickly became an Internet sensation. Clips appeared on the websites of Ron Paul supporters, white nationalists, and, before long, some Tea Party groups. Anarchists and anti-imperialists embraced it as well. Stories about it appeared in newspapers worldwide. Some were admiring: South Africa’s Cape Times compared it to An Inconvenient Truth. Even the debunkers testified to its reach. An article in the Irish Times described the “massive interest” the documentary had attracted before lamenting, “One really wishes Zeitgeist was a masterful pastiche of 21st-century paranoia, a hilarious mockumentary to rival Spinal Tap.”

As Zeitgeist’s audience grew, people started asking Joseph what they should do with his explosive information. He didn’t know what to tell them. He supported Ron Paul, but he believed the system to be too irredeemably corrupt for a political solution. That’s when he met Jacque Fresco, a radical futurist and would-be secular prophet who has been preparing for his moment in the limelight for more than five decades.

Born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Harlem in 1917, Fresco moved to Los Angeles after World War II. The journalist Lionel Rolfe, in his memoir of California bohemia, Fat Man on the Left: Four Decades in the Underground, wrote that in the early ’50s, “Fresco had a circle of disciples who considered him next only to Albert Einstein, although the friends and relatives of those disciples often thought Fresco was a fraud and a charlatan.”

Back then, Fresco, a self-educated industrial designer, had already developed his ideas about machines making traditional economics irrelevant. In the 1970s, he moved to a compound in Venus, Fla., where he and his partner, Roxanne Meadows, set about creating designs for the cities—and civilization—of the future. They call their work The Venus Project.

Joseph learned about the Venus Project when Fresco, having seen Zeitgeist, sent him one of his books. For Joseph, Fresco’s highly detailed vision of a world without money, a world where work itself is largely unnecessary and human ills like greed and crime are obsolete, was a revelation.

Soon, Joseph was devoting himself to spreading the word about Fresco and The Venus Project. His second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum, starts in much the same vein as the first, with an attack on the international financial system. But then it shifts to a worshipful examination of Fresco’s work, offering it as a solution to the ravages of the current system. Joseph’s latest film, Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, further elaborates Fresco’s irenic vision of a “resource-based economy,” one without poverty, inequality, or environmental strain.

***

The Zeitgeist movement emerged in 2008, after the release of the second documentary, as chapters formed worldwide to figure out how to prepare for immanent economic collapse and technological salvation. Joseph never acknowledged his massive ideological shift from decrying a one-world system to embracing it—he just powered through the contradictions with an intense, weirdly mesmerizing self-confidence. He seems entirely sure of his movement’s capacity to fundamentally reshape human beings. In the first Zeitgeist newsletter, he explained to a letter-writer why there would be no gluttony in a resource-based economy. “[F]or a person to want ‘more’ than another is an unsustainable, conflict invoking value which serves only a selfish conditioning generated by the current cultural climate of ‘survival of the fittest’ via the Market System of Competition,” he wrote. “TZM seeks to remove this system, hence removing the distorted values that coincide and are hence imposed and reinforced.”

Lots of right-wing fans of the original documentary have since deserted Joseph, though not all—the Zeitgeist newsletter features an essay by a former Ron Paul activist who described trying to get his Tea Party group to embrace Fresco’s ideas. Meanwhile, new cadres of progressive seekers have joined, going to meetings and throwing themselves into the movement’s vibrant online community. At 96, the bearded, impish Fresco suddenly has a large global following—last year, he visited 18 countries on an international lecture tour.

Since 2009, the movement has celebrated Z-day in March, with chapters worldwide putting on events. The New York Times covered the inaugural Z-Day gathering in Manhattan, which attracted a sold-out crowd of around 900 to hear Joseph and Fresco speak. It was, wrote reporter Alan Feuer, “as if Karl Marx and Carl Sagan had hired John Lennon from his ‘Imagine’ days to do no less than redesign the underlying structures of planetary life.” This year’s Z-Day will take place on March 13, with a main event in London and local happenings worldwide.

Most members, particularly the new ones, are probably unaware of the Jew-baiting subtext of the documentary that launched their movement. Many were genuinely baffled in 2009 when a German social networking site, studiVZ, banned Zeitgeist groups because of their implicit anti-Semitism. Others seem a bit embarrassed by the first Zeitgeist; they’ll often say it’s “irrelevant”—one of TZM’s favorite epithets—because it came out before the movement got started. But no one is disavowing it, and so a growing global movement of tech-savvy idealists continues to promote a work of far-right paranoia.

“I’m willing to accept that the filmmaker is a person who has a great energy and tremendous ignorance who inadvertently replicated the Nazi view of money manipulation,” says Berlet. “In which case he needs to repudiate it.” That seems unlikely. In a video interview available online, Joseph rails against his critics, “the self-appointed guardians of the status quo.” The first Zeitgeist, he insists, “is based on pre-existing information. There isn’t one thing in that film that doesn’t come from a source.” True enough. The problem is what the sources are.

• The Israeli Air Force responded to the rockets of the past 24 hours with three strikes in Gaza. Injuries were reported. [LAT]

•On the way: A written U.S.-Israel freeze agreement. [Haaretz]

• A remarkable story, begging to be turned into a 12,000-word New Yorker feature: A 50-year-old Jewish real estate lawyer who is the son of a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls at the University of Chicago was convicted of impersonating a different Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, a professor at NYU. [City Room]

• There is a fascinating Israeli campaign to introduce anti-sex trafficking laws that criminalize the consumer. [Ms. Blog]

• A prominent New York lawyer wants a day off of a trial following the birth of his grandkid—but only if it’s a grandson and there is a bris. “Look, the Jewish religion is sexist. It just is. But I didn’t make the rules!” [WSJ Law Blog]

Jon Stewart and I have had our differences. But when he decides to actually take a position—as here, on Glenn Beck’s documentary about George Soros—he does himself proud, and is funny as hell.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has accepted an apology from Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News Channel, for his use of the expression “Nazi attitudes” in an interview to describe officials at National Public Radio.

In a letter to Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, Mr. Ailes wrote that he was sorry for using the term “Nazi” in an interview with The Daily Beast. “I was of course ad-libbing and should not have chosen that word,” he wrote, “but I was angry at the time because of NPR’s willingness to censor Juan Williams for not being liberal enough.”

(Actually, not to nit-pick, but Ailes did more than “use the expression ‘Nazi attitudes’”—he actually said of NPR, “They are, of course, Nazis.”)

My parents used to tell me that when you apologize but add a “but,” you are basically negating the apology. Oh well: “I welcome Roger Ailes’s apology, which is as sincere as it is heartfelt,” Foxman said. (As it happens, I too believe that Ailes’s apology was exactly as sincere as it was heartfelt.)

All this may turn out moot: The soon-to-be Republican House Majority is planning to defund NPR. Which means you should enjoy the awesome Twitter #NPRGoesNazi hashtag—Goerring Edition; Morning Becomes “Night”; This American Life, No Longer With The Jew Ira Glass—while you can.

Earlier: Fox News Head Called NPR ‘Nazis’

• Residents of Ghajar, the disputed town on the Israel-Lebanon border, want the IDF, which is set to vacate, to stay. [Haaretz]

• Breaking: Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America likes to second-guess the behavior of teenage Jewish boys during the Holocaust. [JustASC]

• An interesting quote from Hannah Rosenthal, the Obama administration’s anti-Semitism envoy, on the connection between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. [Goldblog]

• The fall-out from Wire creator David Simon’s speech at the General Assembly, in which he complained that Jewish institutions are not doing enough to halt the “Holocaust in slow motion” in black urban communities, has been mostly (and predictably) critical. [NY Jewish Week]

• “I’m going to Graceland”? Paul Simon to release an album of Christmas jingles. [Jewcy]

And now, an ostrich and a baby giraffe playing tag.

• Beck, meanwhile, attacked the Anti-Defamation League, inaccurately saying that its “Soros-started” “smear campaign” accused him of being an anti-Semite. Poor Abe can’t catch a break. [Media Matters]

• Will America’s delicate relations with Pakistan prevent a full investigation into the 2008 Mumbai bombing that targeted a Chabad house? [WP]

• The Israeli cabinet unanimously approved the aliya of nearly 8,000 Ethiopian Jews who had been living in dire conditions. [JPost]

• A woman who fights to end the ritual slaughter of chickens on Yom Kippur had her Brooklyn house vandalized with red paint. [Gothamist]

• San Francisco may vote on an initiative to ban circumcision. It is shocking to find that the activist behind the proposal is named Lloyd Schofield. [Jewcy]

SNL does Patti.

I’m willing to believe that Beck is too stupid to fully understand the accusations he has leveled at Soros. But there is a far more disturbing (and less examined) claim embedded in Beck’s film, which has much farther-reaching and damaging repercussions for Jews than the easily refutable international conspiracy mumbo-jumbo seconded by the intelligence ministry of Iran. It is Beck’s characterization of Soros, a Holocaust survivor, as a Nazi collaborator who actively aided in sending Jews to the death camps. As a 13-year-old.

Because that is what Soros was in March 1944, when the Germans invaded his native Budapest: Thirteen. A child marked for death by a superpower, young Soros, along with scores of other Jewish children, was instructed to deliver deportation notices to other Jews. As Soros himself has explained, in a narrative most people find moving, not damning: “I was told to go to the Jewish Council. And there I was given these small slips of paper … and this list of names. I took this piece of paper to my father. He instantly recognized it. … He said, ‘You deliver the slips of paper and tell the people that if they report they will be deported.’”

After his father made the agonizing decision to split up his family in the hopes of a better chance of its partial survival, Soros was given forged documents and sent to live in hiding with a Hungarian official charged with confiscating property from the country homes of deported Jews. This man occasionally brought the young Soros along, rather than leave him alone in a war-torn city that the retreated Germans were beginning to blow up. This official, who confiscated Jewish property yet also, at incredible personal risk, saved the life of a Jewish boy, is a human contradiction that Beck’s idiot Manicheanism is ill-equipped to handle.

The experience of the Holocaust was death. Jews that lived lived at someone else’s fatal expense. You had a hiding place because someone else didn’t. You received an extra potato because someone else starved. Such was the unique cruelty of the Shoah. But Beck’s condemnation of a barely teenage boy’s route to survival (whatever you think of the grown man’s politics) amounts to an indictment of every Jew who managed to survive. So Glenn Beck is judging every Jewish child who hid with a Polish family and was taught to spout anti-Semitic canards; every Jewish man that mistakenly thought working as a Sonderkommando might buy him his life; every Jewish mother that smothered her screaming infant so that the other six people hiding under the floorboards might not be discovered. He is echoing the most pernicious claims of the more genteel Holocaust deniers that the Shoah was the outcome of some internecine conflict between two evenly matched peoples with similarly legitimate grievances.

I don’t know Glenn Beck’s life. I may have read Mein Kampf three times, but I haven’t yet been able to make myself crack open The Christmas Sweater. Maybe he’s had a hard time; he certainly seems to feel more sorry for himself than any Holocaust survivor I’ve ever known. But if his public displays of hysteria regarding Nazis and who is or isn’t one are anything to go by, it seems like, to Glenn Beck, the most legitimate victim of the Holocaust is Glenn Beck.

Earlier: Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
In Beck Documentary, Soros Is ‘Puppet Master’

Is Randy Scheunemann—a top foreign policy adviser to Sarah Palin whose firm also has Soros’ Open Society Institute as a client—a hypocrite? How about all the Jewish contributors to Fox News? The problem is that there is no Archimedean point from which an otherwise neutral observer could stand and declare, “Glenn Beck is being anti-Semitic”; there has been no universally trusted validator who can be cited to someone who denies this. So, while a part of me wants to call up Bill Kristol, and Eric Cantor, and every other prominent Jewish person of the right, and ask them where they stand, I know they will simply say, “Beck wasn’t being anti-Semitic,” and that I will have no rebuttal beyond my own opinions. I have no one to cite as definitive “proof” that Glenn Beck was being anti-Semitic. I cannot put them on the spot, because I have no spot to put them on. (I did request a comment from News Corp. yesterday regarding Simon Greer’s charge that Beck had engaged in “Holocaust revisionism.” I haven’t heard back.*)

The person that I can cite should be Abraham Foxman. The man has run the Anti-Defamation League for nearly a quarter of a century; he is as connected as they come; and on top of that, he is himself a Holocaust survivor. But the most he would say when I reached him yesterday was that certain comments of Beck’s concerning the Holocaust were “horrific” and betrayed a total lack of understanding of the Shoah. What about Beck’s use of tried-and-true anti-Semitic tropes to conjure an evil billionaire Jewish financier working in the shadows to take over the world? “People involved in global finance have been called all kinds of things,” Foxman told me. “I don’t think that’s anti-Semitism.” He reneged even further today to Salon’s Justin Elliott: “I also believe that there are certain things he doesn’t understand, which have led him to make insensitive remarks,” was the strongest statement Foxman could muster. This is not surprising: It was not a month ago that Foxman’s organization honored Rupert Murdoch, Beck’s boss, with its International Leadership Award.

Elliott correctly identifies the problem: the “tension between the ADL’s dual identities as a civil rights organization and a pro-Israel advocacy organization.” Still, imagine a scenario wherein, yesterday, Foxman had said, “I am against George Soros’ opposition to Israel’s government, and I recognize that Glenn Beck has been a friend to Israel. But Beck completely crossed the line, and made statements about Soros that can only be construed as anti-Semitic. He should apologize.” If Foxman does that, I then get to call Kristol, and Cantor, and whoever else, and I do get to put them on the spot, because Foxman is that spot: Do you disagree with Abe Foxman on the anti-Semitism of Glenn Beck?

There are pro-Israel organizations aplenty. The ADL needs to decide if its mission is still “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all,” as it pledged in 1913. If it does, then it needs to actually, you know, do it. If it doesn’t, then the American Jewish community needs to find someone else.

* A bizarre attribute of the debate is that even those who have called the anti-Semite an anti-Semite have focused on the Holocaust remarks, when—it seems to me, at least—the lowest-hanging fruit, by far, is Beck’s eager citation of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad—who famously said, “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong”—as an authority on Soros’ perfidy. Ironically, the Jewish community’s famed emphasis on the Holocaust as the sine qua non of anti-Semitism has actually undermined its ability to deal with anti-Semitism that is not directly related to the Holocaust.

ADL Stands By Glenn Beck in the End [Salon]
Top Palin Aide Is on Soros’s Payroll [Salon]
Earlier: Foxman Calls Beck’s Comments ‘Horrific’
Beck Accused of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
In Beck Documentary, Soros is ‘Puppet Master’

• Hezbollah pledged not to permit members to be arrested over the U.N. tribunal investigating Rafik Hariri’s assassination. [NYT]

• The Army of Islam group is seeking to kidnap Israelis in the Sinai Peninsula. [Arutz Sheva]

• The Times picks up the Glenn Beck story, demonstrating perhaps the power Abraham Foxman has to make an issue bigger. [NYT]

• The European Union proposed December 5 for the first meeting over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in more than a year. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Great, moving, sad piece about boxing promoter Bob Arum and his son, who recently died while hiking in the Northwest. Also describes Muhammad Ali coming for Shabbat dinner. [NYT]

I reached Foxman this morning by phone. “I think one can disagree with George Soros, one can like him or dislike him, one can be opposed to him,” he told me. “But to judge him on his role during the Holocaust is not only offensive, but horrific, over-the-top, and out-of-line. Not even Holocaust survivors have the audacity to judge other Jews during the Holocaust. For a political commentator and entertainer to go as far as to say, quote, Here’s a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the camps, is so over-the-top, so inexcusable.”

Drawing on personal experience, Foxman added, “I believe George Soros when he says there is nothing to apologize for. When I was six, I spat on Jews, because I was taught to spit on Jews. You want to go back to history, the Pope was in Hitler Youth.”

He continued: “The other thing I find unacceptable is it’s chutzpah for him to set standards for what makes a good Jew. We don’t set standards for what makes a good Christian or a good Mormon. It’s arrogant.”

As for Beck’s other charges against Soros, Foxman expressed less concern. “People involved in global finance have been called all kinds of things,” he said. “I don’t think that’s anti-Semitism.”

Earlier: Beck Accues of ‘Holocaust Revisionism’
In Beck Documentary, Soros Is ‘Puppet Master’

However, yesterday, on his radio show and then his second Soros segment, Beck must have tripped some wires, because prominent folks have come forth with condemnations, and I’d bet more are on the way. On radio, Beck reportedly accused Soros (a Holocaust survivor) of “helping send the Jews to the death camps,” prompting Simon Greer, of Jewish Funds for Justice (who has butted heads with Beck before), to accuse him of “Holocaust revisionism.”

Then, on Fox News, Beck quoted former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad—who famously said, “The Jews rule the world by proxy. They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong”—as an authority on Soros’s perfidy; he also quoted someone else saying that Soros “sucks the blood from people,” perhaps the most hardy anti-Semitic trope (the German word is Blutsauger, and it was a favorite of Viennese mayor Karl Lueger, Hitler’s idol).

“It takes a cold, cold heart,” Beck also said of Soros, “to have full knowledge that what you are doing, to make a buck, is literally destroying the lives of people.”

“Glenn Beck’s use of the Holocaust to discredit George Soros is beyond repugnant,” said Interfaith Alliance President Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy in a statement I was emailed.

Said Greer,

No one who truly understands “the sensitivity and sacred nature” of the Holocaust [as Beck had said he did in the course of his prior conflict with Greer] would deliberately and grotesquely mischaracterize the experience of a 13 year old Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary whose father hid him with a non-Jewish family to keep him alive. Many other Jews survived the attempted extermination of the Jewish people by changing their identities and hiding with Righteous Gentiles.

With today’s falsehoods, Beck has engaged in a form of Holocaust revisionism.

Here is a clip, courtesy Media Matters, from last night’s show:

Related: Glenn Beck’s Anti-Semitic Attacks [The Daily Beast]
Earlier: In Beck Documentary, Soros Is ‘Puppet Master’
Did Beck Regret ‘Death Camps’ Comment?

I told you that there was a structure being put into place in our country, and it was designed to bring about the fundamental transformation that has been promised. Through the course of the journey of this discovery, amazingly, all paths, time after time, really led to one man: George Soros. One guy. There’s a crisis collapsing our economy—George Soros. When the progressives, the administration, look for a savior to step in and save the day—George Soros. He makes predictions, and his loyal followers make sure they come true. He’s pulled no punches about the endgame: It’s one world government, the end of America’s status as the prevailing world power. But why? Well, if you want to understand the why there, you have to ask questions, and there’s a few things you need to know about George Soros. … Eighty years ago, George Soros was born. Little did the world know then economies would collapse, currencies would become worthless, elections would be stolen, regimes would fall. And one billionaire would find himself coincidentally at the center of it all. [My bold.]

That is my transcription of a clip (below) that Media Matters has posted (I neglected to DVR the progam, as Beck himself advises I do at the outset; I haven’t made the same mistake today). Elsewhere, Beck, who in the past has essentially said that the Jews killed Jesus, says, with his trademark more-sorrow-than-anger stare of faux-anguish, “His mother was a strong anti-Semite—his words, not mine”; reports that Soros said he felt no guilt at having to aid in the confiscation of his fellow Hungarian Jews’ land before World War II; and he describes Soros’ ultimate goal as “one global society, one global gatekeeper.” He describes Soros’ alma mater, the London School of Economics, as “Fabian Socialist” (which may help explain the behavior of fellow-alum Mick Jagger).

Bizarrely, Beck cites the support Soros’ Open Society Institute gave to various revolutions in Uzbekistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere (good revolutions!), and casts them in a negative light: “So what is his target now? Us. America.” Beck floats the notion that Soros is planning a coup.

Beck notes that Soros was born George Schwartz to Orthodox Jews in Hungary, but is now an atheist; he casts Soros, now, as a self-hating Jew who does not support Israel.

Beck acknowledges that the charge of anti-Semitism has been levied at him for this lewd “Puppet Master” spectacle. His reponse: “I’m probably more of a supporter of Israel and the Jews than George Soros is.” Of course, according to Beck, that is not saying much.

Is Beck an anti-Semite? My understanding, as only an occasional Beck viewer, is that most of this stuff is just par for the course. Still, to adopt the man’s over-the-top rhetorical techniques for a moment, allow me to ask again: Is Beck an anti-Semite? I just reported. You decide.

Beck: The Puppet Master [Fox News]
Soros Exposed: Research on the Progressive Puppet Master [GlennBeck.com]
Earlier: Glenn Beck Goes There

“David is, I think, the most important man in America right now,” Beck said in July, introducing one of Barton’s many appearances on his show. In addition to being a frequent TV guest of Beck’s, Barton is also one of three professors at Beck’s online school, Beck University. He was a member of the expert panel that created Texas’ controversial new history standards, which played down Thomas Jefferson and played up John Calvin. In September, he spoke at a rally for Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, where he was billed as a “constitutional scholar.” Later this month, he and Newt Gingrich will headline a meeting for Nevada pastors at a Las Vegas resort, meant to mobilize them ahead of the upcoming elections.

“Barton’s role in the Tea Party movement is much like it’s been in the Republican Party for the last decade,” says Dan Quinn, communications director of the Texas Freedom Network, a civil liberties group that has watched Barton for years. “He is acting as an intellectual resource for them. He gives them the words in their increasingly extremist vocabulary. On the right he has become this great icon of American historical scholarship, when he’s anything but.”

In fact, Barton doesn’t have any historical training all. His sole academic degree is a bachelor’s in religious education from Oral Roberts University—though given the right’s rampant populism, his fans are unlikely to care about his lack of credentials. Barton’s past association with white supremacists and Holocaust deniers might be more damaging, if anyone paid attention. Still, he’s gotten much more sophisticated about race over the last two decades. These days, he’s more likely to be hurling accusations of racism than fending them off.

Barton built his career by arguing, via a selective reading of documents from the Founding Fathers, that the Constitution is rooted in biblical values and that the founders never intended to separate church and state. He claims, falsely, that 52 of the 55 founding fathers were “orthodox, evangelical Christians,” and that they always intended for Christianity to shape American government. Public secularism, in his view, constitutes an unconstitutional tyranny that is systematically robbing the country of its religious heritage.

This is in many ways an old story. People who write about the religious right—myself included—have often marveled at the intricacy and resilience of the movement’s carefully wrought alternative history. The Anti-Defamation League was criticizing Barton as far back as 1994, writing in one report: “This ostensible scholarship functions in fact as an assault on scholarship: in the manner of other recent phony revisionisms, the history it supports is little more than a compendium of anecdotes divorced from their original context, linked harum-scarum and laced with factual errors and distorted innuendo.”

Yet Barton just keeps getting more powerful and more mainstream. His public career began in the late 1980s when, he has written, God ordered him to the library to investigate the ostensible correlation between the end of state-mandated school prayer and declines in SAT scores. “I didn’t know why,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1988 America: To Pray Or Not To Pray?, “but I somehow knew that these two pieces of information would be very important.”

The next year he published The Myth of Separation, a farrago of quotes torn from context and outright misinformation. It claimed, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson described the wall of separation between church and state as “one directional,” keeping the state out of the church while maintaining “Christian principles in government.” It also falsely attributed a quote to James Madison, that the government’s future was “staked upon the Ten Commandments.” He later issued an extended correction for these and other mistakes, though that hasn’t stopped them from being repeated endlessly online.

Barton found an eager audience for his Christian nationalist history on the right-wing fringe. In 1991, as the ADL has reported, he spoke at a summer gathering of Scriptures for America, a group founded by Pete Peters, a pastor in the Christian Identity movement. Christian Identity holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true children of Israel, while Jews are the Satanic offspring of Eve’s liaison with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Black people, according to Christian Identity theology, are a separate species of “mud people.” Other speakers at the meeting were Holocaust denier Malcolm Ross and white supremacist Richard Kelly Hoskins. Barton was advertised as “a new and special speaker” who would ask, “Was it the plan of our forefathers that America be the melting pot home of various religions and philosophies?” (One can assume that the answer was no.) On November 24 of that year, Barton spoke at another Christianity Identity gathering, this one in Oregon. According to the ADL, his self-published books were advertised in “The Watchman,” a Christian Identity publication.

Soon, though, Barton’s star started rising on the mainstream right, and he denounced Christian Identity, claiming that he hadn’t known he was addressing racist groups when he appeared at the movement’s meetings. That sounds implausible—it’s hard to imagine how one might speak at two white supremacist summits in five months by accident. Still, the association didn’t seem to hurt him. By the middle of the 1990s, every major religious right organization marketed Barton’s self-published books. In 1994, Newt Gingrich, then the House minority whip, praised Barton’s “wonderful” and “most useful” work, and, in 1997, Barton was elected vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. The Bush campaign hired him to do clergy outreach in 2004.

In recent years, Barton has pioneered a new kind of historical revisionism, one that absolves conservative Republicans of any complicity in American racism, which he lays entirely at the feet of Democrats. He points out, correctly, that before 1964, many of the country’s most virulently racist politicians were Democrats. He neglects to mention that they fled to the GOP en masse after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Indeed, in one astonishing document, he attributes Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democrats to his “dramatic change of heart on civil rights issues,” as if the former Dixiecrat had turned Republican out of outrage at segregation. In an equally audacious reinterpretation of history, he paints the founding era as a golden age of racial comity, denying that racism was ever an essential part of America’s DNA.

Such rhetorical maneuvers have been particularly useful to Beck, obsessed as he is with secret histories and a prelapsarian version of the American past. Over the summer, Beck hosted a series of shows he called “Founders’ Fridays,” revisionist forays into American history guided by Barton. Under the guise of teaching black history, Founders’ Fridays argued against the idea that black people had been oppressed by the Revolutionary generation. On July 5, for example, Barton presented a newspaper from the late 18th century that featured the obituary of a black man who had fought in the Revolution. The obituaries, Barton pointed out, were “not broken out black and white. … It’s telling you who’s died, didn’t matter whether were you black or white or anything, you’re a citizen.”

Denying the racial sins of the Founding Fathers makes it easier to deify them—and, in turn, to promote faith in America’s Christian destiny. “In learning about the founders and seeing the heroes that were involved, it only strengthens my view that this was a divine document, the Declaration of Independence,” said Beck at the end of one show. “For the most part, these guys were amazing. And they struggled in their time to do the right thing. You say that they’re not Christians. They were Christians. And they fought for people who weren’t. The same thing with [saying] they were all white. Well, they fought for people who weren’t.”

Barton has given American history an immaculate conception, one that turns slaveholders into civil-rights heroes. He’s helped recreate a myth of a golden age of unimpeachable American righteousness. “[T]he national motto is e pluribus unum, out of many we became one,” said Barton during one of his appearances on Beck. “And we have tried for 20 years to make it e unum pluribus, out of one we’re going to be all these groups.” In some ways Barton hasn’t changed much at all. He’s still making the case against diversity, and coating it in divinity.

Michelle Goldberg is the author of Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World.

Lapin, who has notoriously been tied to Jack Abramoff, echoed the larger themes of the night: “When you sever a flower from its roots, it dies,” he reportedly told the crowd. “I think what is happening in America is we’re being severed from our Biblical roots.” According to one of the event’s hosts, he urged the crowd to “study the Bible, make more money and say extra prayers for America.”

Of course, it was Shabbat, and so a microphone was a no-no. The audience, however, could apparently hear him fine, and even greeted him with a “Shabbat Shalom.”

The rally, Lapin told Tablet Magazine yesterday, demonstrated that “America is a country that is rooted in Christianity, and that this is one of the factors that have made America one of the most tranquil and prosperous homes that Jews have enjoyed for 2000 years.” He added, “I think of the Bible Belt as Judaism’s safety belt.”

At Lincoln Memorial, a Call for Religious Rebirth [NYT]
Glenn Beck Goes Messianic at America’s Divine Destiny Event Before 2500 Screaming Fans [Alternet]
Glenn Beck’s ‘Divine Destiny’ Event Focuses on Faith [Daily Caller]

According to Greer, though, so did Fox News executives, including CEO Roger Ailes. They met with Greer, agreed that Beck had crossed a line (specifically regarding the Nazi/death camps remarks), and pledged to confront him; a few days later, Greer apparently received a hand-written note from the host.

However, faced with this account, Fox acknowledged a meeting took place but denied that Ailes agreed that Beck had behaved inappropriately. “We absolutely stood behind Glenn Beck 1000%,” the spokesperson said. Aw, just when we were ready to praise you guys!

Beck’s Holocaust Comments Prompt Fox News Meeting [The Upshot]
Fox News SVP Disagrees With Account of Beck Meeting We absolutely stood behind Glenn Beck 1000% [TV Newser]
Earlier: Glenn Beck Says Jew Follows Nazi Logic
Glenn Beck Goes There

But, guys, if you thought that was bad … well, here was Beck last week (and sorry I missed it then):

Jesus conquered death. He wasn’t victimized. He chose to give his life. … If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would’ve come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did.

I’ll keep my checkbook handy, just in case.

Glenn Beck: Jews Killed Jesus [HuffPo]
Jewish Group Runs Ad Criticizing Glenn Beck [JTA]
Earlier: Glenn Beck Says Jew Follows Nazi Logic

(Specifically, according to Beck, Greer’s philosophy of prioritizing the common good “leads to death camps. A Jew, of all people, should know that. This is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany.”)

Point Two: Everyone is a Nazi to Glen Beck, says Lewis Black.

Who’s right? We report, you decide.

Beck Attacks Jewish Funds for Justice’s Simon Greer; Says Putting “The Common Good” First “Leads to Death Camps” [Media Matters]

And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t. Christmas is a Christian holiday—if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.

The Baltimore Sun got some angry letters about this, and understandably so. Hating on Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is, in a way, the same thing as the American Family Association’s boycott of the Gap for its “failure” to use the word Christmas in ads: both actions reject a dilution of Christmas by outsiders, just in slightly different ways. It certainly does not accord with the generous holiday spirit. And anyway: “Dreck?” Really? Who’s co-opting whom?

Nonbelievers, Please Leave Christmas Alone [Baltimore Sun]

Rage Grows in America [ADL.org]

Luckily, National Jewish Democratic Council spokesman Aaron Keyak spent some time considering Beck’s proposal in his Huffington Post column, and offers three possibilities: that Beck was trying to co-opt the Jews, that Beck was trying to co-opt all of Yom Kippur, or, more plausibly, that Beck just didn’t really notice. “Maybe Beck will be surprised when his Jewish staff doesn’t show up on Monday,” Keyak wrote. “I bet he will be surprised when they take the Fast and Prayer Day for the Republic that seriously.”

But here’s a question Keyak didn’t consider: when Beck invoked “the founders,” was he talking about George Washington and his friends or Abraham and his sons? Because as far as we know, George Washington and Ben Franklin were neither Jews nor given to observing Yom Kippur, and, you know, there wasn’t any Republic to fast for way back 5770 years ago. Mysteries upon mysteries! Anyway, we’ll keep you posted on how the fast parties shape up.

Glenn Beck: The Grinch Who Stole Yom Kippur [HuffPost]