But in an electoral climate dominated by the economy and other domestic issues, what, exactly is there to say about foreign policy? An excellent preview in the Financial Times predicted that Romney would hone in on one issue, “Obama’s Achilles heel when it comes to foreign policy”: Israel. And in his speech today, the two issues Romney brought up first were, duly, Iran and Israel.

We’ve already been through why in discussing Perry. Iran/Israel works best as an attack on President Obama for two reasons: first, it’s virtually the only specific foreign policy issue where he is even vulnerable; and, second, because Americans rightly identify with Israelis, Israel can be framed as an attack on Obama’s values rather than his foreign policy record. The top soundbite from Romney’s speech is: “I will not surrender America’s role in the world. This is very simple: If you do not want America to be the strongest nation on Earth, I am not your President. You have that President today.” That’s not an argument for a specific agenda; indeed, the speech was light on specific agendas, especially concerning the disastrous situation in Afghanistan-Pakistan. But it is an argument, implicitly, for a different kind of leadership. Which is why you’ll be reading about Israel on more than just this Website over the next 13 (yes, really 13 more) months.

Republican Rivals Frame World in Domestic Terms [FT]
Text of Mitt Romney’s Speech on Foreign Policy at the Citadel [WSJ Washington Wire]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue

Between S&P, Elena Kagan, and Michele Bachmann, “chutzpah” is now ranking higher on Google Trends than at any time since the great spike of 2007, caused by a perfect storm of a Bush aide calling out the Clintons over the Scooter Libby affair and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad requesting permission to visit ground zero. Indeed, if Google’s search insights are any indication, “chutzpah” consistently out-performs the “cojones” that are sometimes invoked in its place—and is a runaway winner in Washington. (The main exception was in August 2010, when Sarah Palin, yet another potential president, accused President Barack Obama of having a nether profile more suited to a Ken doll than to a leader, and cojones were “on everybody’s lips,” as CNN’s Jeanne Moos put it.) While more Americans are familiar with Spanish than with Yiddish—a simple Google search yields 12.5 million entries for “cojones,” a mere 2.7 million for “chutzpah”—and more people are thus likely to require an explanation or definition for a use of “chutzpah,” there is a simple reason why neither term should replace the other: Real chutzpah is not the same thing as cojones.

It takes only five letters and a few inches of human anatomy to get from balls to gall, but it’s a distance that makes all the difference in the world. A person might need balls to behave with chutzpah, but those metaphorical balls are only the springboard for the concrete act of chutzpah itself. Balls alone aren’t enough; real chutzpah needs balls, as they’d say in England, that also have some neck on them. None of the writers mentioned above is talking about simple testicular fortitude.

The root meaning of “chutzpah” is “to be insolent or impudent,” and “chutzpah” has come into Yiddish with the same meaning as it has in Hebrew: “impudence, insolence, nerve,” to quote Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary. There’s nothing good about chutzpah in Yiddish; it’s an unambiguously negative quality characterized by a disregard for manners, social conventions, and the feelings and opinions of others. The chutzpahnik’s self-regard and sense of entitlement are so total that he’s unable to see that other people are just as real as he is. (If he’s a she, the chutzpahnik is called a chutzpahnitseh.) Chutzpah comes to your house for dinner and takes a dump in your potted plant; if it goes to its best friend’s funeral and then propositions the bereaved spouse during the shiva, it’s only because there was no chance to do so at the graveside.

Chutzpah shows complete disdain for everyone else’s intelligence; it believes that other people have been put on earth only to do the chutzpahnik’s will and serve as his suckers; sovereign power without a crown, Rashi once called it. Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein were not the only writers to accuse Standard & Poor’s of chutzpah when it downgraded government debt, and I doubt that many readers were surprised when both of them cited what Klein, in his Washington Post blog on August 6, called “the old joke about chutzpah”: a young man murders his parents “and then pleads for leniency because he’s an orphan.” Krugman, in his New York Times column the next day promoted Klein’s joke to illustrative anecdote and said that “chutzpah” is “traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents,” and so on.

Krugman and Klein are falling back on Jewish tradition, a tradition reaching back through through punk, way beyond disco, all the way to 1968 and the first flowering of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, when Leo Rosten, long famous as the author of The Education of Hyman Kaplan, presented the same story in The Joys of Yiddish as “the classic definition of chutzpa [sic].” So far as I’m aware, Rosten was the first to link this story to the notion of chutzpah; rather than quote a classic definition, he quietly created one by adapting a little-known text to the needs of the moment. Neither Talmudic, midrashic, nor even vaguely rabbinic, Rosten’s source tells the story of a 14-year-old boy “who deliberately murdered his father and mother in cold blood with a meat-axe.” He’s found guilty by a jury, and the judge asks him if he has anything to say before sentencing. The boy replies, “Why no … I think I haven’t, though I hope yer Honor will show some consideration FOR THE FEELINGS OF A POOR ORPHAN” (the capital letters are Ward’s).

Rosten’s source is set in Arkansas, not Warsaw; Rosten calls it classic because he’s borrowed it from the work of Artemus Ward, whom Mark Twain called “America’s greatest humorist.” Ward died in 1867 and probably never heard the word “chutzpah” in his life. Rosten’s definition is classic, all right, classic American humor that he circumcised into a piece of traditional Jewish lore without mentioning Ward’s name even once. Chutzpah is as chutzpah does—it’s as American as apple pie or Spanish balls.

Rosten doesn’t quote Ward’s final sentence, in which “the perfect young wretch” is sentenced, presumably to death, but Ward had managed to catch the dismay that typifies the usual Yiddish reaction to instances of chutzpah. The common English-language use of the term to denote an admirable display of nerve, courage, or independence of spirit in the face of outmoded, inefficient, or unimaginative ways of doing things—chutzpah as cojones—isn’t shared with any Jewish languages. Although Rabbi Nachman tells us the Babylonian Talmud says “chutzpah pays, even against heaven,” he’s generally thought to be speaking ironically; he’s talking about Balaam, who manages to get God to grant him permission to go off with representatives of the Moabite king to curse the Israelites. When it comes time to do the cursing, though, God puts a blessing into Balaam’s mouth, and Balak, the king of Moab, refuses to fork over the fee Balaam had been promised—some pay-off.

When a classical Hebrew text uses “chutzpah” to mean “cojones”—courage, guts, gumption—it does so only ironically. A midrash about the binding of Isaac has Isaac tell Abraham to tie down his hands and feet because “the life-force is full of chutzpah,” not easily vanquished or discouraged; that is, the life force never says die until it’s already dead. According to the Jerusalem Talmud, “Rabbi Ze’era said, Come and see what chutzpah the land of Israel has, that it produces fruit”—in spite of all the devastation that it has undergone.

The irony at play in the Talmud reaches its fullest development in Yiddish. If someone were to say that Alexander the Great showed plenty of chutzpah when he cut through the Gordian knot instead of trying to untie it, that someone would be adopting the view of Alexander’s competitors and opponents; as far as Alexander and his supporters were concerned, Alexander did the smart thing. Likewise, if we say that Rosa Parks showed plenty of chutzpah when she refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery bus, we use the racist point of view to mock the racist idea that Parks had the unmitigated gall to behave as if—can you believe it?—she were white. English-speakers unaware of the irony underlying such uses of “chutzpah” in Yiddish or Yiddish-influenced English simply ascribed a new, highly positive meaning to the term.

It probably says something depressing about the state of public life today that the only such ironic, “positive” use of “chutzpah” that I’ve noticed in all the recent flurry is a piece on ESPN.com about Seattle Mariners’ right fielder, Ichiro Suzuki, whose chutzpah seems to lie in his insistence on acting like Ichiro, even in the face of a recent slump. I don’t know if Johnette Howard, the article’s author, speaks any Yiddish, but she certainly knows how to tweak a chutzpah.

Howard aside, this sudden upswing in the fortunes of classic chutzpah might well be a sign of good—possibly even rapturously good—things to come. On the last page of tractate Sotah we are told that “in the days immediately preceding the advent of the Messiah, chutzpah will increase.” I’m going to start looking for a frum guy’s face on every taco and Pop-Tart I eat.

Michael Wex’s most recent book, a novel, is The Frumkiss Family Business.

But how is Luxemburg relevant to Jewish history? And what, if anything, would she have to say to Sarah Palin and her Tea Party supporters? The critic and essayist Vivian Gornick joined Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz to discuss these questions in the first installment of Long Story Short, a new monthly podcast about the people, places, and ideas that have shaped Jewish life and history. Each installment will focus on a different subject—from the 17th-century false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi to the 20th century’s princes of punk, the Ramones—and will feature a wide array of thinkers, artists, historians, and intellectuals.

The conversations, leisurely and long, are recorded in Leibovitz’s living room over a bottle of wine and are designed as the antithesis to haste, hype, and the other vulgarities that plague our popular culture. The podcast owes a great debt to the BBC’s long-running show In Our Time, with which it shares the belief that ideas matter, and that rather than be marketed, condensed, tweaked, trivialized, or bowdlerized, they should be passionately discussed. [Running time: 42:27.]

Subscribe to Long Story Short.

A close look at these polls reveals how flawed they are, but pointing that out is unlikely to stop pundits from recycling the underlying narrative of an imminent Jewish realignment. It’s a story that won’t die, no matter how often it’s proven wrong. This latest iteration is part of a long history of nonsense, built on a constant, almost willful overestimation of the commonality of interest between American Jews and evangelical Christians. Both of these groups care a lot about Israel. Both see anti-Semitism as a profound evil and a worldwide threat. But American evangelicals and Jews have very different ideas about Israel’s future. Besides, lots of evidence suggests that when it comes to identity politics, American Jews are most concerned with the place of Jews in America. They don’t trust people who want to turn their country into a Christian nation, even if those people swear to protect the Jewish state.

The last time a Republican presidential candidate won a plurality of the Jewish vote was in 1920, when Warren Harding won a landslide victory over James Cox. Even then, Harding didn’t get a majority—38 percent of Jews supported Socialist Eugene Debs; 43 percent went for Harding. But in the election of 1980, Jewish support for the Democrats reached a contemporary nadir: According to the book Jews in American Politics, Jimmy Carter, an evangelical who who was widely seen as unfriendly to Israel, got only 45 percent of the Jewish vote. Reagan received 39, and John Anderson 15 percent.

Not surprisingly, many people saw this as the beginning of a long-term shift in Jewish voting patterns, one they expected to continue in 1984. In that re-election year, Mort Kondrake wrote in the New Republic that “Jews are pulling loose from their traditional Democratic moorings.” The Reagan Administration, he reported, was trying to convince the American Jewish community that Walter Mondale would be weak on Israel, caving in “to Jesse Jackson and confirmed Arabisants from the Carter State Department.” (At the time, Jackson’s derisive reference to New York as “Hymietown” was very much in the news.) For the first time in 60 years, wrote Kondrake, “it’s not clear which party will receive a majority of the Jewish vote.”

That November, despite one of the worst showings in modern presidential campaign history, Mondale carried 67 percent of the Jewish electorate. Reagan got less of the Jewish vote in 1984 than Nixon did in 1972, despite the latter’s long reputation for anti-Semitism.

What happened? An important part of the answer lay in the growing association between the Republican Party and Christian fundamentalism. Reagan’s empowerment of the religious right was a significant issue in 1984. Endorsing Mondale, the New York Times concluded: “Mr. Reagan’s opponent talks about church and state with a care that verges on eloquence. [T]hat, alone, would be reason on Tuesday to vote for Walter Mondale.” Concerns about religion in politics did not sway the electorate at large, but Jews took them seriously. As a Commentary article said, “It seems that Reagan’s increasingly vocal embrace of the New—specifically, the Christian—Right scared Jews more than anything said by either Jackson or [Louis] Farrakhan.” Indeed, exit polls showed that Jews had a significantly more unfavorable opinion of Jerry Falwell—a man who’d been awarded the Jabotinsky Prize by Menachem Begin—than of Jesse Jackson.

Fast forward to the first George W. Bush campaign. Once again, Republicans had a candidate whose fierce Zionism derived from his evangelical convictions. And once again, Republican strategists thought they had a shot with American Jews. “Two issues stand in the way of Republicans gaining a significant percentage of the Jewish vote: abortion and the ‘religious right,’ ” GOP pollster Frank Luntz said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum. “But here we have an answer. The magic word is ‘Israel.’ ” A Jewish Telegraphic Agency story asked, “Can George W. Bush Win the Jewish Vote?”

The answer, of course, was no—Al Gore won 79 percent of the Jewish electorate. Yet four years later, predictions of a Jewish swing to the right started up again. After all, Gore was a special case—he’d chosen a Jewish running mate. Besides, Sept. 11 had made the Middle East paramount in American politics. The Republican Jewish Coalition conducted a survey that, it said, showed a growing Jewish tilt to the GOP. “We are seeing a major shift in American political-party alliances,” the RJC’s Matt Brooks told the right-wing website WorldNetDaily. “We expect these realignment trends to continue.” There was no trend. Kerry won 76 percent of Jewish votes.

Nevertheless, in 2008, journalists and pundits once again speculated about a potential rightward lurch among Jews. After all, the Democratic candidate was named Barack Hussein Obama. He counted among his friends the Palestinian intellectual Rashid Khalidi. “Some Jews are incapable of deluding themselves that Obama would be the most resolute candidate in defending Israel,” the conservative Jennifer Rubin wrote in a Jerusalem Post piece titled “Why more Jews won’t be voting Democrat this year.” There were even Jews, she promised, with “a lifetime of Democratic voting” who would realize that “some things rank higher than even the top items on the liberal political agenda.” Perhaps there were, but not very many. Obama ended up getting 78 percent of the Jewish vote.

Now we’re once again hearing about a Jewish realignment. “Has Obama lost the support of some Jews—and their funding?” asked a Jerusalem Post story in June. Morris purported to show widespread Jewish disaffection with Obama, claiming that if the election were held today, the president would get just 56 percent of the Jewish vote. Then came the Secure America Now poll that seemed to show that only 43 percent of Jews planned to vote to re-elect Obama. Once again, the conservative media exulted.

Both polls, though, were sketchy. The website of the American Association of Public Opinion Research offers a guide to deciding whether a poll can be trusted; one of the most important things to consider, it says, is whether a pollster discloses his or her methodology. Morris does not. Meanwhile, what we know of Secure America Now’s methodology reveals the poll to be, as Adam Serwer wrote in the Washington Post, “laughably bogus.” It began with a conservative sample—only 64 percent of its respondents voted for Obama in 2008—and then posed a series of questions designed to turn them against the president. “Considering what President Obama has proposed for Israel just over a year before his 2012 re-election campaign—a return to the 1967 borders, dividing Jerusalem, and allowing the right of return for Palestinian Arabs to Israel—how concerned would you be about President Obama’s policies towards Israel if he were re-elected and did not have to worry about another election?” asked one. Finally, it asked whether the respondent would “consider” voting for someone else. Forty-three percent pronounced themselves unwilling to even entertain the idea. From that, the pollsters concluded that Obama’s support had dwindled to just that number.

That fact is, many American Jews might consider voting for “someone else,” but only a fraction would consider voting for the type of person that the GOP is likely to nominate. American Jews have shown, again and again, that they care more about social justice and a defense of American pluralism than a zealous defense of Israeli maximalism. They might get anxious about liberal criticism of Israel, but this anxiety tends to pale beside their abhorrence of the Christian right.

There actually was a moment in the summer of 2008 when Obama’s Jewish support looked relatively weak. “We did polling in the summer of 2008,” says Ira Forman, the former CEO of the National Jewish Coalition. “Obama was getting anywhere from 59 to 61 percent of the Jewish vote and McCain was at about 30. According to Gallup the numbers started shifting in August and they really jumped in September and October.” There is a simple, two-word explanation for this: Sarah Palin.

Jewish aversion to Palin has been clear to observers across the political spectrum. Rubin, author of the Jerusalem Post piece predicting a Jewish defection from the Democrats, acknowledged it in a Commentary article titled “Why Jews Hate Palin.” The piece would have read as vaguely anti-Semitic if a gentile had written it—among other things, she suggested that Jewish women were turned off by Palin’s decision to give birth to a baby with Down Syndrome because they “couldn’t imagine making a similar choice.” But Rubin had a point when she wrote, “If one were to invent a political leader designed to drive liberal, largely secular, urban, highly educated Jews to distraction, one would be hard pressed to come up with a more effective figure than Palin.”

At least, she had a point at the time, because since then, just such a leader has emerged—Michele Bachmann. Bachmann is even more rooted in the evangelical right than Palin is. Indeed, while at Oral Roberts University, she was the research assistant on a book by John Eidsmoe titled Christianity and the Constitution, which argued that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy and that it should become one again. “The church and the state have separate spheres of authority, but both derive authority from God,” Eidsmoe wrote. “In that sense America, like [Old Testament] Israel, is a theocracy.”

Bachmann, like many evangelicals, believes in the scriptural imperative to restore the entire biblical land of Israel to Jewish control. She first went to Israel after high school, on a trip sponsored by the evangelical group Young Life, and she talks about Israel in the language of premillenial dispensationalism, the influential theology that holds that the second coming of Christ depends on the return of the Jews to their homeland. “If we reject Israel, then there is a curse that comes into play,” she told the Republican Jewish Coalition last year. “And my husband and I are both Christians, and we believe very strongly the verse from Genesis, we believe very strongly that nations also receive blessings as they bless Israel.”

This sort of thing has endeared her to some Jewish conservatives, but if history is any guide, it will not sway the community at large. (Her mispronunciation of “chutzpah” won’t help.) American Jews are savvy enough to realize that evangelical support for Israel does not necessarily imply concern with Jewish safety. After all, the dispensationalist scenario culminates in a third world war in the Middle East and the consignment of unconverted Jews to hell before the messiah returns. For those who truly see Israeli politics in terms of evangelical prophesy, an apocalyptic battle on Israeli soil is not something to be avoided at all costs. Instead, it’s the portal to paradise.

Yet this chiliastic theology is only a small part of the reason that Jews will likely remain wary of the Christian right. In the end, American Jews care most about America. They are unwilling to assume a role in their own country that’s in any way analogous to that of Arab citizens of Israel—a people with legal equality who are nonetheless excluded from their nation’s raison d’être. Jews know they can never be full citizens of a Christian nation.

And Republican politics have never been so fully Christianized. The Tea Party was initially mischaracterized as a libertarian movement, but it is deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism, and polls show that a majority of its members believe that the United States is a Christian nation. It’s no accident that, upon taking over statehouses nationwide, Republicans elected with Tea Party support enacted a record number of abortion restrictions—80 in the first six months of 2011, compared to 23 for all of 2010.

Of the serious Republican presidential candidates, the only one who is not entirely aligned with the Christian right is Mitt Romney. Indeed, his campaign has gone out of its way to point out how, as a fellow member of a religious minority, he understands Jewish concerns. Yet he is running for the nomination of a party dominated by religious literalists; the majority of Republicans, for example, don’t believe in evolution, and more than half of them believe that humans were created in their present form less than 10,000 years ago. In his desire to appeal to the GOP base, he has already forsworn his earlier pro-choice position and now opposes not just legal abortion but also stem-cell research. Should he win the nomination, he will almost certainly do what McCain did and choose a running mate meant to energize the Republican base. Some consultants are already speculating about a Romney-Bachmann ticket.

Whoever is ultimately the nominee, we can be sure that he or she will reiterate Romney’s accusation that Obama has “thrown Israel under a bus.” We can be sure that he or she will support the religious right’s agenda in domestic politics. And we can be relatively certain of what will matter most to Jewish voters.

CORRECTION, July 26: It was Adam Serwer, writing on Greg Sargent’s Washington Post blog, and not Sargent himself, who called the Secure America Now’s poll methodology “laughably bogus.” The error has been corrected.

Samin was once better known as Siah, a Brooklyn emcee who worked in a duo with another emcee who called himself Yeshua dapoED. Siah was a nice Jewish boy from Manhattan Beach; his Colombian partner Yeshua—whose real name is Ed Avellaneda—lived down the way in Brighton Beach. Along with producer Jon Adler, the two released the hip-hop album The Visualz on a boutique label run by underground impresario Bobbito García.

Like everybody else in New York, they rhymed about how great they were and how much other emcees sucked. Siah and Yeshua’s capacious, vaguely metaphysical lyrics, delivered over jazz samples cribbed in part from Samin’s father’s record collection, made them at once innovative, warm, and very “real”—the buzz-word on both sides of hip-hop’s indie-versus-major culture wars. A small masterpiece, the EP culminated in “A Day Like Any Other,” an 11-minute fantasy adventure that, over multiple beats and abrupt shifts in mood and tempos, sent Siah and Yeshua off on a mysterious quest to save hip-hop from the clutches of fake rappers. It sounds hokey or contrived, but “A Day Like Any Other” won you over with its exuberance and sense of wonderment.

Their timing couldn’t have been better: Mainstream hip-hop was beginning its long, self-destructive infatuation with ditzy pop hooks and luxury goods, and the Internet was allowing New York acts to gain national visibility. What had been a local scene oriented mainly around open mic nights and García’s weekly radio show with DJ Stretch Armstrong was now reaching a network of true believers who got their fix via streaming audio, mail-order websites, and trades of third- and fourth-generation dubs. Yet The Visualz marked the high point of Siah and Yeshua’s careers, as well as of Samin’s engagement with hip-hop.

Today, Samin is an academic doing field work in the Middle East who quite credibly composes music for small ensembles and solo piano, for example, the recent “Wedding Song For Rolla and Charles.” Sometimes, he will rap along with Big Daddy Kane or A Tribe Called Quest in the car, much to his wife’s amusement.

Listen to “Wedding Song For Rolla and Charles”:

***

Samin was born in 1976 to a Yemenite Jewish father and an Ashkenazi mother. He remembers getting props as an adult from Rahzel the Godfather of Noyze, an early beat-boxer—“white boy got skills!”—and yet he never thought of himself as facing the same obstacles, or providing the same sort of example, as older Jewish rappers like 3rd Bass or the Beastie Boys. In an interview last month, he brought up Passing, the work by the Harlem Renaissance novelist Nella Larsen, while turning her language on its head: “I have Yemenite looks, Yemenite features—I have always passed as a New York City non-Jewish, non-Caucasian, or at least can when I want to,” he said. “I like to say I could pass from Ecuador to Bangladesh, along that latitude line. It perhaps made it easier for me. I didn’t have to overcompensate.” Yet Samin had a strong Jewish foundation at home, attending Jewish schools and learning Hebrew at a young age. You can hear some of this in “Good Feelings,” a 1999 tune that was later featured on the JDub Records compilation Rooftop Roots. (JDub handles marketing and publicity for Tablet Magazine and its parent, Nextbook Inc.) With its Hebrew chorus and allusions to foreskins and shrouds, it’s a rapper’s assertion of self with unmistakable Jewish overtones.

Listen to “Good Feelings,” from Rooftop Roots:

Samin found hip-hop around the age of 9 on the college radio station in his childhood home of Syracuse, New York. Soon, like many kids of his generation, he was the proud owner of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell and the Beastie Boys’ License to Ill—the two prime crossover texts of mid-’80s rap. Samin dabbled in composition, writing a parody of the Chicago Bears’ “The Super Bowl Shuffle” for a fifth-grade election campaign. When his family relocated to Brooklyn in 1987, Samin continued his informal musical education, turning to video shows like WNYC-TV’s Video Music Box to see LL Cool J’s latest, listening to DJ Red Alert on the radio, and undergoing his father’s aggressive course of jazz appreciation.

In high school, he tried his hand at hip-hop. “There were a couple of kids in the school writing rhymes, and I was like, ‘I could do that,’ ” he said. He had been hanging out with DJ Wave, who had a studio at his house nearby. Samin recorded three verses, over Black Moon’s 1992 underground hit “Who Got Da Props” instrumental, and then brought the cassette to school the next day to play for some friends, whose response was encouraging enough for him to keep at it. They said that Samin had a good voice for rapping, which is no mean thing: The late Guru, of Gangstarr, once recorded an ode-to-self titled “Mostly the Voice.” Hip-hop helped Samin find his way socially. “I’m a little guy and I have a big mouth,” he said. “For better or worse, people will always know that I’m around.” He added, “I noticed early that my rhymes gave me respect among some of the people who might otherwise be hostile.”

During this first year of rhyming, Samin also discovered the Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito Show, which aired on Columbia University’s WKCR radio Thursday mornings from 1 to 5 a.m. The show was a necessary stop for artists on the rise—its archives include early appearances by Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, the Wu-Tang Clan, and pretty much any other New York hip-hop artist of note from a certain era. Bobbito García also hosted open mics at several downtown clubs, including the legendary Village Gate. Stretch and Bobbito were key in establishing the purist, noncommercial underground as an end in itself. For Samin, that scene was a revelation.

Samin started college at New York University, but after a year, decided to move back to his parents’ house because he didn’t like living in Manhattan. Around this time, he was introduced to Avellaneda through a mutual friend. They started writing together. His friend Jon Adler, who was working in a jingle house, came to him with the offer of collaboration and free studio time. In 1995, The Visualz was recorded, and Bobbito agreed to release it on his fledgling Fondle ’Em label in 1996.

The EP earned rave reviews, and soon the duo was getting offers to perform outside New York. As modest as their success was, Samin still wasn’t sure how to deal with it: “I loved the accolades, but I also really detested them,” he told me. “In this little universe that I was inhabiting, I was a notable character, and I didn’t really know how to process it properly.” Bobbito offered him a valuable piece of advice—“don’t sell yourself short”—but Samin thinks he “took that advice too literally.”

***

Here’s where the story starts to get weird. Because Siah and Yeshua were part of what the hip-hop group Company Flow had termed rap’s “independent as fuck” moment of defiance, it’s easy to view their very limited discography as an enigmatic blip. In fact, though, for Samin, it was the business side that held him back. Following what he thought was Bobbito’s advice, Samin decided, as he put it, that “it has to be all about the business, it’s gotta be about the money. Not in a cynical way, but I took this attitude like, ‘If you guys like it so much, you’re gonna have to pay for it.’ ” In time, the focus on business soured him on making the actual music. His recording career stalled; he put out one solo single for Fondle ’Em, graduated from NYU, and spent three months hiking in India.

Then, on a Friday afternoon in early 1999, he got the proverbial phone call that changed everything. And it did, just not in the way it was supposed to. On the other end was Geoff Wilkinson, the founder of the early-’90s jazz-rap group Us3, who said he was putting together a record for Sony and offered to fly Samin to London to work on it at his home studio, after which would come future recordings and a world tour. “The deal memo had many more thousands of dollars than I had ever seen in my life,” Samin remembers. “I got a lawyer and we negotiated it, and then a few days later, I just said, ‘You know what? I don’t want to do this.’ It would have been the culmination of doing things with other people for other people’s music. I also didn’t want to enter the world of professional music with the musical ability that I had acquired up to that point: It was so inadequate, so rudimentary, and I was afraid that I would be stuck dealing with the image side of the business.”

“The lawyer,” Samin added, “was like, ‘I think you’re stupid, but OK.’ I think Geoff Wilkinson was like, ‘You’re stupid, but good luck.’ ”

Continue reading: “Pyrite,” Francis Fukuyama, and lyrics for Palin. Or view as a single page.

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is out of the hospital. She was shot point-blank in the head five months ago. Wow. [JTA]

• Mentioned this earlier, but it seems that in an email Sarah Palin referred to a Jewish former Alaska state representative as “Bird-Nose.” You be the judge! [JTA]

• “A Jerusalem rabbinical court recently sentenced a wandering dog to death by stoning.” Reincarnation was involved. Holy hell. [Ynet/Failed Messiah]

• The Krakow Factory, of Schindler’s List fame, is now a contemporary art museum. But here’s the secret: The art doesn’t actually work! [ArtInfo]

• The perilous occupation otherwise known as translating James Joyce into Russian. [Arty Semite]

Listen to Joyce read from Finnegans Wake. And then you can come to Housing Works Bookstore and see Ulysses acted out before your very eyes.

YouCities from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

Surprisingly, however, Tobin defended Bachmann by favorably comparing her to Sarah Palin, in part because they share not only similar beliefs and appeals but the same gender. (I’m only comparing Palin and Bachmann on the basis of their sex because Tobin did—it’s his argument I’m parsing.) While the details of Bachmann’s life “can be woven together into a narrative that makes Bachmann look like a nutcase,” Tobin wrote, “the problem with such efforts is that unlike Palin, after more than a decade as a legislator, [Bachmann] can’t be dismissed as a political flash in the pan or an empty suit. … As even her foes in Congress and in Minnesota politics have conceded, she’s sharp as a tack and a formidable foe.” It’s a fair argument, if you acknowledge its core premises: That, unlike Bachmann, Palin can “be dismissed as a political flash in the pan or an empty suit;” that, unlike Bachmann, Palin isn’t “sharp as a tack;” that, unlike Bachmann, there is no problem with making Palin look like a “nutcase.”

Commentary‘s turnabout on Palin—it was only January of last year that it published nearly 4000 words chastising Jews for hating Palin—is notable. After all, although most Jews always hated Palin, a few Jews of the neoconservative persuasion were responsible for her improbable ascent. But now, even her staunchest supporter, Bill Kristol, says that she should neither run for nor be elected president, and in this latest post Tobin throws her under the bus. (And this was presumably before he knew she had referred to a Jewish former Alaska representative as “Bird-Nose.”) Bachmann is Palin 2.0, he says. Upgrade, and then throw 1.0 away.

But 1.0 was cool when it first came out, right? “Her authentic ‘hockey mom’ personality and tart criticisms of her opponent, as well as of the media and the Washington establishment,” Tobin wrote in September 2008, “enthralled not only the delegates but a great many of those television viewers.” He added, “While it is way too early for such a discussion, no one should be surprised if Palin vaults to the top of the ticket in four or eight years, leaving more seasoned male GOP bigshots in the dust.”

Any bets on who Palin 3.0 will be?

The Bachmann Backlash Begins [Contentions]
Michele Bachmann’s Unrivaled Extremism [Newsweek]
There’s Something About Sarah [The Jewish Press]
Related: Why Jews Hate Palin [Commentary]
The Insiders [The New Yorker]
Kristol: Palin Probably Won’t, Shouldn’t Be Nominee [Ben Smith]
Former Alaska Lawmaker Responds to ‘Bird-Nose’ Comment in Palin Emails [Capital J]
Earlier: Why We Hate Her

Gingrich gamely tried to project optimism. “I am running for president to lead a movement of Americans who will insist on changing Washington so we can renew America,” he announced from the podium. But he made no bones about the straits he is in, and he borrowed from William Faulkner’s Nobel speech to cast himself as a martyr.  “I will endure the challenges,” Gingrich said. “And with the help of every American who wants to change Washington, we will prevail.”

The dominant story line about Gingrich’s campaign implosion last week is that his aides had despaired of weaning him from the influence of his third wife, Callista, whom he chose to squire on a Greek cruise rather than going on hayrides through the cornfields of Iowa. But it is also clear that the mass defections were, as Politico put it, “all about the Benjamins”—or, more specifically, the lack thereof. Campaign finance records aren’t due to be released before July, but according to the Washington Post, the Gingrich campaign didn’t have the $25,000 it needed to enter the crucial Iowa straw poll in August, let alone another $30,000 to buy voter lists, while Gingrich was insistent on flying chartered planes for as much as $500,000 a pop. Gingrich had declined to set up a dedicated finance committee, the paper added, and he wasn’t used to fundraising under the rules passed since he left Congress more than a decade ago—and, in the meantime, he has grown accustomed to enjoying Adelson’s largesse.

In the absence of federal filings, it isn’t clear how much Adelson, who Forbes ranked in March as the fifth-richest man in America, has contributed to Gingrich’s campaign so far. But he has been the top donor to Gingrich’s political advocacy group, American Solutions Winning for the Future, giving more than $7 million, or about 13 percent of the $52 million the group has raised since its inception in 2007. Adelson has been sufficiently invested in promoting Gingrich, especially within the American Jewish community, that he took the time last month to call the editor of New York’s Jewish Week to complain about an article he found unfair.

Yet editorial decisions at local Jewish newspapers have far less chance of influencing the Gingrich candidacy than Adelson’s own fortunes—and, as it happens, Las Vegas Sands, the source of the casino mogul’s immense wealth, is currently under investigation by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The probe stems from bribery allegations lodged in a wrongful-termination lawsuit filed by the company’s former operations head in the Chinese enclave of Macau. Las Vegas Sands says it is cooperating, but since the disclosure, the company has lost more than $3.5 billion in value, or more than 11 percent, and last week Deutsche Bank booted the company off its list of short-term buy recommendations.

In other words, the largest single source of Gingrich’s backing is now, at least to some degree, both less flush than he used to be and newly at the mercy of the Obama Administration—a situation that can’t have improved the mood of Gingrich’s cash-strapped strategists as they wondered about where their next paychecks might be coming from. Last year, a person familiar with Adelson’s thinking told me that he wasn’t going to commit to new philanthropic expenditures until Sands stock hit a certain price, though it wasn’t clear just what that price was. At the time, Sands shares were hovering just below $30—a far cry from their 2007 highs of $140 but a vast improvement over their 2008 lows of less than $2—but it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that, if the market really starts to tank, Adelson might wind up sidelining himself politically, too.

As it turned out, Adelson was a no-show at the Beverly Hilton Sunday night. His wife, Miriam, told the audience that he was fighting a bad flu—“He is really suffering, leaking from every corner of the eyes, his nose. Not his ears!” But she conspicuously failed to give Gingrich a shout-out during her turn at the dais, where she accepted the evening’s Ronald Reagan Award for her husband. Earlier in the evening, when Gingrich emerged from a VIP reception to face a horde of television cameras swarming the pre-dinner cocktail bar, she went the other way, a blur of ice-blond hair and brilliant white pantsuit click-clicking through the hotel lobby. “Pay attention to the speech. It is so good. He is such a lover of Israel,” Miriam Adelson told me, in a brief interview near the front entrance. But what about his presidential ambitions? “Let’s not talk about politics,” she said, giving a Mona Lisa smile and shaking her head as she walked away.

It was a response far short of the full-throated, fighting endorsement Gingrich might reasonably have expected from the wife and proxy of his biggest fan—at an event almost expressly designed to facilitate matchmaking between the candidate and Adelson’s fellow Republican Jewish Coalition board members and activists. Gingrich, who characteristically chose to give a 40-minute-long lecture about the history of the Middle East conflict rather than a barnstorming campaign speech, was warmly received by the audience, which obligingly booed mentions of Obama’s name and cheered Gingrich’s repeated statements about not brooking any accommodation with Hamas. But that doesn’t do much to answer the question of who, especially among fiscally conscious Republican donors, would start giving money to Gingrich’s campaign now, in the absence of a credible campaign team. (The pollster Frank Luntz managed to punk Republican Jewish Coalition head Matt Brooks into tweeting, just before Gingrich took the stage Sunday, that he would be taking over the Gingrich command.)

Which raises, for the Republican Jewish Coalition, the uncomfortable possibility that, just as Gingrich’s dependence on Adelson may turn out to be his Achilles’ heel, the group’s willingness to follow Adelson’s lead in favoring Gingrich so early on may ultimately leave it without the influence it craves over a GOP presidential field that remains highly fluid—and whose leading members like Mitt Romney and even the famously pro-Israel maybe-candidate Sarah Palin were elsewhere, enjoying other audiences.

This week’s winner is Madeline McGuckin, who commented (on Facebook—yep, that counts too!), apropos Allison Hoffman’s profile of the man behind the group Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, “WTH? Jews for Palin? That’s like Felons For Judge.” (Bonus points for passing up the chance at even an abbreviated curse word.)

She gets a copy of Adam Kirsch’s biography of Benjamin Disraeli, who in the 19th century somehow made being an archconservative a Semitic matter, joining a club that didn’t want him as a member, refashioning it, and arguably becoming the true godfather of Jewish conservatives (even though he joined the Christians, another club that didn’t want him as a member and that continued to see him—as he saw himself—as a Jew).

Jew for Sarah [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

At the end of Palin’s speech, an Orthodox rabbi named Robert Shechter stood up to give a closing benediction on behalf of a year-old group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin, whose supporters had bought three tables at the 300-person dinner. Like Palin herself, the group piggybacked on Heroic Media’s event to stage its own Washington moment: a Shabbat retreat, or shabbaton, for Jewish supporters of Palin. Ten participants gathered at an Aish HaTorah center near the Marriott for a kosher dinner and lunch accompanied by freewheeling discussions about the Obama Administration moderated by the group’s founder, Benyamin Korn.

Korn—who is known to his oldest friends as “Buddy,” but sends his emails as “Bert,” short for Bertram, his English name—is a host on Philadelphia’s conservative WNTP talk radio station, an affiliate of the behemoth Christian broadcaster Salem Communications. At a Friday night service before the retreat, his rich baritone carried the uneven chorus of the regular Aish membership. Korn, who is 55, chanted from memory with his prayer book closed in his hands.

Korn appears to have few direct links to Palin herself—in public, he deferentially refers to the head of her political-action group, Michael Glassner, as “Mr. Glassner”—and he admits he has limited financial resources, though he says he has received support from Saul Fox, a Bay Area private-equity investor who donated last year to Tea Party candidates Sharron Angle and Tom Campbell. (Fox, en route to the Palin event from his California office, was not available for comment.) To the shabbaton participants, Korn insisted that he was not in the market for a job with Palin’s political-action group, or in a future Palin campaign. “I don’t need that tsuris,” he said. But over the past few months, Korn has become a go-to Palin soldier for cable news shows. Federal campaign records show he has never given money to Palin, but he runs a website devoted to aggregating news about her, which he says gets upwards of 10,000 hits a month, including a few dozen from Wasilla, Alaska. (“It could be Joe McGinniss,” Korn says self-deprecatingly, referring to the journalist who spent last summer living next door to the Palins while working on his book about them.)

But Korn has a long history of trying to add a Jewish voice to political movements that seemed closed to some Jews—starting with his work in the left-wing solidarity movements of the early 1980s, which frequently adopted anti-Zionist positions in sympathy with the Palestinian cause. Korn became more observant as he grew older, and in the Tea Party he sees a movement that speaks to the broader cultural concerns of a generation of newly conservative Jews who feel “mugged by reality,” following Irving Kristol’s famous formulation. “I started Jews for Sarah to create a link to a wider community,” he told his group and described his dream of building a network of Jews for Sarah chapters on the back of local Tea Party organizations around the country.

Unlike most conservative Zionist activists, Korn says he respects Jeremy Ben-Ami, the head of the dovish group J Street, with whom Korn worked in the mid-2000s during a stint as associate director of the nonprofit David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. (Ben-Ami is on the group’s board.) “These people, they want to fit Israel into a left-wing paradigm but they don’t want to fit their worldview into a Jewish paradigm,” Korn said. “I know it because I lived it.” In some ways, Korn is attempting to engineer the political mirror image of what Ben-Ami has spent the last two years building: a political home for a group of conservative Jews who feel that no one speaks for them.

***

“Buddy” is the son of Bertram Korn, the former rabbi of Philadelphia’s Keneseth Israel, one of the oldest and largest Reform congregations in the United States, and a well-known historian of Jews in the Civil War era. His mother, Rita, was an heir to the Pep Boys auto-repair fortune; her father, Emanuel Rosenfeld, was better-known as the chain’s mascot, Manny. As an undergraduate, Korn studied journalism at Temple University and began learning Mandarin in hopes of going to China after he graduated—a nod to his father, who served as the Navy’s only Jewish chaplain in North China during World War II. But visa restrictions were still in place five years after Nixon’s landmark 1972 trip, and as a devoted Maoist—“Oh, how I long to carry manure up the mountain, and all that,” as Korn now puts it—Korn decided to forgo either Taiwan or Hong Kong and followed his Indian girlfriend to New Delhi, where he enrolled in a master’s program at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “My dad had to defend me to the congregation, that I wasn’t losing my mind in an ashram,” Korn said, in one of several phone conversations.

He was still in Delhi in 1979, when his father, only 61, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Korn returned to Philadelphia and enrolled in a doctoral program at Temple. In his off hours, he volunteered with Central American solidarity movements, going on missions to Cuba and hosting radio shows featuring radical music from throughout Latin America.

At the same time, Korn says, he began feeling his way back toward Jewish observance. For a while, his leftism coexisted peacefully with his Judaism—he launched Jews Concerned for Central Americans during this time, he says—but then, in 1985, found himself disillusioned after Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega went to Moscow immediately after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives voted down President Reagan’s request for funding to the opposition Contras. “I said, ‘How can this man go to Moscow the day after we saved his neck in the U.S. Congress?’ ” Korn said. (It is a story he tells often, according to people who have known him for decades.) “So, I said, if he will betray his own people, I am finished with this, I am going to learn Hebrew and go to Israel.”

Within a few years, Korn had married an Israeli woman and fathered four children. (The pair eventually divorced; Korn, who describes himself as Modern Orthodox, has since remarried.) He established the Philadelphia chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, but he then became a journalist himself, first as editor of three Jewish papers in South Florida and then, in 1994, as executive editor of the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. Four years later, he left to join the conservative Zionist Organization of America. “I often wonder to myself if I had come of age now rather than when I did if I would have gone off the derech,” Korn said, using the Hebrew word for “path.” “The Reform movement has now embraced Zionism, but it was not like that in the 1980s.”

At the retreat, Korn steered the conversation away from Israel toward an array of anti-Obama Tea Party staples: energy policy, health care, even Michelle Obama’s effort to reduce consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. He invited Tea Party activists Teri Adams and Adrienne Ross speak. Later, in a phone conversation, he repeated his frequent assertion that his admiration for Palin stems in part from what he sees as her ecumenical outlook, which he believes is demonstrated by the fact that her husband, Todd, is part Native American. “We want to break through some of the baseless charges made against her, separately and against the Tea Party movement, that they are racist, narrow, and bigoted, or that they come from some kind of cultural place that is hostile to Jews, blacks, and other minorities,” Korn told me.

Korn has been criticized, most recently in Salon, for being a party of one, engaged in a quixotic effort to try and lure his fellow Jews away from their well-established liberalism. But he is operating in a religious Jewish world that is more open to “values” conservatism than it once was—a universe apart from the secular Jewish world. “The earlier generation of secular Republican Jews were à la carte Republicans, making common cause with evangelical Christians on issues like foreign policy,” said Ami Eden, the editor of the JTA, who got his start working for Korn at the Exponent. “These Orthodox Jews are buying the whole conservative program, from health care on down—it’s a unified front against what they see as a secular-socialist worldview.”

And Korn isn’t shy about making use of his political journey. It’s just the kind of redemption narrative that characterizes successful conservative rhetoric today. He delighted in telling those gathered for dinner on Friday night, over brisket and chicken, that he was once a fan and follower of the late community organizer Saul Alinsky, a favorite punching-bag of the right-wing blogosphere. Mark Young, a physical-rehabilitation specialist from Baltimore, interjected, “You’ve done teshuva!” (Teshuva is Hebrew for repentance.) The group laughed. Korn gave a brief, sad smile and replied quietly, “I guess you could say that.” Then he picked up where he had left off.

Since then, as members of the Shayevich family have settled in different cities, they have also settled across the political spectrum. Bela’s grandparents, who spoke little English and remained dependent on Russian-language media, became Republicans. “They went the way that Russian radio wanted them to go, to the right, citing Israel,” says Bela. After Sept. 11, her father, Vadim, veered left, to the point of criticizing houseguests for wearing flag pins. “‘You used to hang a picture of Lenin there, why are you bringing your patriotic propaganda into my house?’” he asked one Polish immigrant. “The jingoism was for him too reminiscent of totalitarianism,” Bela says.

In becoming a liberal Democrat, Vadim Shayevich is in the minority of Russian-Jewish immigrants. Two waves of Russian-Jewish immigration have arrived in the United States fleeing totalitarianisms of sorts—one czarist, one communist. The first learned on the Lower East Side to mix its American patriotism with different flavors of liberalism and internationalism. The 1990s, Brighton Beach generation, not so much. Soviet Jews have generally embraced right-wing American and Israeli identities that would have left early 20th-century Lower East Siders cold. Phrased in the “Russian reversal” humor made famous by Odessa Jew Yakov Smirnoff, “In Russia, Jews loved the right-wing Republicans; in America, right-wing Republicans love Russian Jews!”

***

In July 1898, in the midst of America’s brief war with Spain, the Lithuanian-born Lower East Side writer and editor Abraham Cahan published his famous Atlantic Monthly essay “The Russian Jew in America,” which argued that Russian Jews were becoming patriotic Americans and deserved the trust and acceptance of their fellow citizens. For the first time in its history, the United States that summer was gripped by a modern, militaristic chauvinism. So strong was the red, white, and blue fervor for the crusade against Spain that it briefly occluded the nativist backlash that had been building against heavy immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The fever of ’98, fueled by the yellow press and marauding Patriotic societies, focused the national mind on “dastardly Dagoes,” as Spaniards were referred to, with a vengeance. Everyone else was, for the moment, off the hook.

Cahan, a refugee from the pogroms that followed the assassination of Alexander II, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He seized upon the war hysteria to advance the cause of his fellow Jews newly arrived from the Russian Empire—an emigration of 2 million destined to displace the Irish famine exodus as the largest in history. In 1898, Russian Jews needed all the help they could get. Gentiles and Americanized Jews alike had become increasingly vocal in decrying the Ostjuden as a threat to social cohesion (not to mention the social acceptance attained by earlier waves of Jews). The Yiddish-speaking refugees were, in the representative judgment of one Midwestern Jewish publication, “superstitious and uncouth Asiatics.” And so Cahan did what any smart ethnic advocate would do in wartime: He waved the flag ’til it hurt.

“The Jewish immigrants look upon the United States as their country, and now that it is engaged in war they do not shirk their duty,” wrote Cahan, who the previous year had founded the Jewish Daily Forward. “They have contributed three times their quota of volunteers to the army, and they had their representatives among the first martyrs of the campaign.”

To bolster his case for Russian Jews, Cahan pointed to voting patterns that showed the Lower East Side to be among the least corrupt ethnic wards in New York. This was true; it was also beside the point. By the late 1890s, socialism had replaced Tammany as the bogeyman haunting nativist dreams. Twenty years before the Bolshevik Revolution, Jews were closely associated in the American mind with radicalism and subversion—a race of Emma Goldmans. This fear would contribute to the U.S. government’s decision to tighten the immigration spigot during the 1920s.

Looking back, fears over Jewish radicalism were overblown. The “red Jews” of the Lower East Side never came close to fomenting revolution in America. Instead, they published some radical newspapers and elected a handful of socialist state assemblymen, plus a judge or two. Cahan’s plea for their patriotism today reads like the journalistic equivalent of a tenement museum, with many of the people he described learning a trade and becoming successful capitalists. Some of his grandchildren would even go on to lead a conservative counterrevolution against the legacy of the immigrant-hero FDR. Indeed, right-wing descendants of the first wave of Russian Jews are now scattered wide enough to supply Adam Sandler with an album’s worth of material without even mentioning Norman Podhoretz: Lillie Friedman raised Geraldo Rivera on her favorite Slavic dish/and don’t forget Sly Stallone’s mama, born Jacqueline Labofish.

But overall the legacy of the first wave of Russian Jewry tilts left. Most of their offspring became committed Democrats, with a dwindling overlap of gestural socialists. It would take a second wave of Russian Jews, arriving decades later and from the other side of the Russian Revolution, to bring a significant number of right-wing Jews to America.

The symbol of this second exodus is, of course, Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn neighborhood whose revival during the 1980s is credited to the tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian Jews who settled there and recreated Odessa on the Atlantic. Not that they were the first Jews to settle the neighborhoods. At the turn of the last century, as popular entertainments like Pawnee Bill’s Great Far East Show featured costumed Cossacks, Russian-speaking Jews from Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the Brownsville area of Brooklyn began settling along the newly developed Atlantic waterfront of Brooklyn, setting up left-leaning political groups and establishing a Yiddish theater in the old Brighton Beach Music Hall.

For reasons that may seem self-evident, the Jews who resettled Brighton Beach during the 1980s and ’90s viewed the world differently than their pinko predecessors from the Lower East Side. Unlike their forebears who fled the czarist barefoot brigades in the Pale of Settlement, that vast and vaguely boot-shaped swath of buffer ghetto that once separated Russia from Europe and ran from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, Soviet Jews did not see socialism in any of its variants as a liberation theology. The Moses of this second wave of Russian Jews was not Karl Marx but Ronald Reagan.

“Many Russian Jews came around the time of the Reagan Administration and compare his stand favorably to the pandering and weakness of the Carter Administration,” says Igor Branovan, president of the American Forum of Russian Jewry. “This created the stamp in the mind of the Russian immigrant that Republicans are stronger and more likely to stand up to tyranny than the Democrats.”

This gratitude for Reagan’s aggressive foreign policy tends to come with a domestic policy-preference flipside, in the form of revulsion at the perceived statism of the Democrats. “Because of the Soviet experience, Russian Jews are by nature skeptical of activist government,” says Branovan, who emigrated from Kaliningrad, Russia, in 1980. “We are drawn to the philosophy of rugged individualism espoused by the GOP.”

“When I was a kid coming up on Kings Highway”—the artery that slices through the heart of southern Brooklyn—“everybody was looking for opportunities,” says Dmitriy Salita, a professional boxer whose family moved from Odessa to Brooklyn in 1991. “Russian Jews are smart and hardworking and came here hungry to make something of themselves. I’d say less than 1 percent of Russian Jews think of themselves as liberals in terms of expecting [help from] the government.”

One percent is likely low, but Russian Jews vote Republican at the national level much more than other Jews. The most recent data, from the 2004 election, show that Russian Jews preferred Bush to Kerry by a margin of 3 to 1. Israel, national security, and the economy topped the list of concerns among Russian Jews, but there was also a cultural component to their preference; they were among the so-called Values Voters who voted Republican based on cultural wedge issues. A month before the election, 81 percent of Russian Jews supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages—nearly the inverse number of Jews nationally. They also expressed heavy opposition to affirmative action and showed less support for on-demand abortion, according to numbers compiled by the Research Institute for New Americans, which tracks the Russian-speaking community.

At the local level, it’s a more mixed picture, but even in municipal elections, Russian Jews will vote against the grain. “In New York, Russian Jews have consistently supported candidates known to be tough on crime and conservative on moral issues, notably New York’s Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” says Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis. “Whether their children will vote the same way remains to be seen.”

***

Theirs is no country-club Republicanism. Russian Jews in New York, the nation’s largest Russian-Jewish community, numbering 350,000, are largely under-employed; a majority earns less than $30,000. (These numbers do not reflect under-education. The average Russian Jewish immigrant has more higher education that his average American Jewish counterpart.)

Together with nostalgic Reaganism, Israel is a major factor cited in the development of Russian Jewish politics. The most recent study on the subject found that 89 percent of Russian Jews have close relatives or friends in Israel, more than twice the proportion of American-born Jews. “Within the Russian Jewish community, Israel is not an idea, it’s a reality,” says Branovan, of the American Forum of Russian Jewry. “When things occur in Israel, it impacts the Russian population in an immediate way. There’s a stronger connection.”

“Russians really have no sense of Jewish identity that can be built around anything besides the state of Israel,” says activist Rabbi Moish Soloway, of Brighton Beach. “A lot of the younger Russian folks especially are very hawkish, similar to the new generation of Israelis.”

“We could not be Jews in USSR, and so Russian Jews learned to express their love of Judaism through their relationship to Israel,” notes Salita, the boxer, an observant Jew active in a Lubavitcher youth program. “In Odessa, we’d listen to American radio just to get news about Israel. Whatever good happened in Israel, we rejoiced together. We all shared the dream of freedom but didn’t have it. We have an understanding of how important it is. To have a place on earth for the Jews is still something incredible to them.”

There is also the related issue of the profound cynicism and tough-mindedness born of living under a totalitarian regime. “Russian Jews understand that the dovish position on Israel is naïve, so they won’t support liberal candidates on this issue,” says Gennady Katsov, a journalist with Russian cable news channel RTN. “The Soviet experience teaches that you have to stay strong, choose non-conformism, and fight your enemies. It is more Malcolm X, less Martin Luther King.” Salita says Russian Jews “have been whipped on their backs and have a tougher mentality born from experience. They are tired of being bullied, being told what to do.”

Lurking behind these much-discussed reasons for Russian Jewish conservatism is the fact of deeply ingrained Russian xenophobia, which some say the nation’s Jews have internalized despite being an oppressed group themselves. This, say some, makes them more susceptible to the racial dog whistles employed by conservative politicians. Weeks before the 2008 election, Walter Ruby reported for the Jewish Week that he did not have to search Brighton Beach very hard before finding Russian-speaking Jews who subscribed to a Sarah Palin’s view of the United States; one real, one fake; one implicitly white, one not. “The president of such a great country ought to be a real American, by which I mean a white person,” one respondent told Ruby. Others expressed the fear that a Barack Obama victory would lead to “black triumphalism” and increased crime. When Rabbi Soloway appeared on local Russian-language Radio Davidzon to advocate for Obama, callers attacked him viciously.

“It’s gotten worse since the election,” says Soloway, a Democrat who emigrated from Leningrad in 1989 and today writes a column for the right-wing Russian-language paper Evreiskii Mir (Jewish World). “I am routinely called everything from ‘liberal scumbag’ to ‘fag lover.’ The style of many Russian Jews is old-school communist—my way or the highway. It’s like, ‘Why did you bother moving to the United States? You should have stayed in Russia.’ ”

Some say this is less true among the young. “Cities in the former USSR are not like NYC,” says Salita. “You don’t grow up around different kinds of people on the train and the bus, walking down the street. But the second generation of Russian Jews is like all American kids, absorbed into American society.”

Then there is the Russian respect for strongmen and the tough-guy image cultivated by the Republican Party. Russian Jews may unanimously loathe the Christian militarist Vladimir Putin, but they fell in love with his American analog, George W. Bush.

“Russians respect power,” says Gary Shteyngart, a novelist who emigrated to New York from Leningrad at age 7. “Many immigrants give lip service to democracy but in the end they want some patriarchal white guy to run things with a strong hand. Feelings of oppression that began within the anti-Semitic confines of the Soviet Union are turned from a defensive to an offensive stance under the false perception that the Democratic Party is indistinguishable from the Communist Party of the USSR.”

“There’s something in a lot of Russian-Jewish immigrant men that is opposed to the ideas of improvement and progress,” says Mark Krotov, a book editor whose family emigrated from Moscow to Atlanta in 1991. “The idea that it’s worth fighting for things—they think it’s feminine. They detest the Putin regime but bristle at the notion of opposition. It sometimes runs in tandem with an anti-intellectual streak, which is ironic when it’s found among intellectuals. There is this general disgust for weakness.”

This disgust took a noxious form during the controversy over a lower Manhattan Islamic center and mosque last summer, when young Russian Jewish immigrants made common cause with the quasi-fascist English Defence League in opposing the center, now called Park51. But do they really represent the future of Russian Jews in America? While there exists no hard data on the subject, it’s possible the future looks like 20-something Bela Shayevich, who started her assimilation in Chicago 20 years ago and now finds herself somewhere between nominally liberal and completely nonpolitical, just like most Americans her age. She does not consider her apathy a dereliction of civic duty but a psychological American luxury.

“The degree and the nature of my father’s and my grandparents’ convictions come out of trauma,” she says. “It makes me very sad to see how they compensate for having spent the majority of their lives in a terrible place.”

Alexander Zaitchik, a writer living in Brooklyn, is the author of Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance.

• Hamas shellacked Israel Saturday with mortar rounds from Gaza, breaking the two-year ceasefire and prompting a response from Israeli tanks and helicopters. More at 10 am. [NYT]

• Israel claims it has custody of a Palestinian engineer who went missing in Ukraine in February. Mossad is suspected. [JPost]

• Syria continues to experience a strong taste of the popular upheavals that have seized most other Arab states. [AP/WP]

• Arab League head Amr Moussa, who also wants to be president of Egypt, objected to airstrikes on Libya one day after they began with Arab League backing. [AP/WP]

• Sarah Palin is wheels-down in the Holy Land. [Reuters/Haaretz]

Sarah Palin to Visit Israel, Meet Netanyahu, Danon [JPost]
Related: The GOP’s Israel Primary [Politico]

Edward Irving Koch was born in the Bronx and raised in Newark, New Jersey, as a Conservative Jew. He represented New York City in Congress from 1969 to 1977 and served as its mayor from 1978 to 1989. Now 86, he is a partner at the law firm Bryan Cave, where the windowsill of his office, overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral, is decorated with a silver-colored Hanukkiah and dozens of pictures of himself shaking hands with celebrities. Koch is vague about what he does there, beyond building buzz. He has never been married and has no children, and he neither confirms nor denies persistent rumors of homosexuality. “What do I care?” he told New York magazine 13 years ago. “I find it fascinating that people are interested in my sex life at age 73. It’s rather complimentary! But as I say in my book, my answer to questions on this subject is simply: Fuck off.”

When I asked Koch about the importance of Judaism in his life, he called out to his secretary. “Jody! Bring him the tombstone!” She handed me a copy of Koch’s pre-written epitaph: “He was fiercely proud of his Jewish faith. He fiercely defended the City of New York, and he fiercely loved the people of the City of New York.” The headstone also quotes Daniel Pearl’s last words—“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish”—and notes that these words were spoken “immediately before his beheading by an Islamic terrorist.” Koch believes in God but describes himself as secular.

You came into office in the wake of New York’s financial crisis of the 1970s.

I said, “Whatever it takes, no matter what bricks are thrown at me, I will do to bring New York back to its great past.” And that means sacrifice. You know you’re hurting people. But if you want to keep the city from going in bankruptcy, which would injure even more, there’s no other way out. Now, everybody understands it. Now, guys like [New Jersey governor] Chris Christie—they applaud him. He’s doing what I did. Jerry Brown in California—he’s doing what I did. When I did it, it was unique.

When I ran for a fourth term, I got 42 percent of the vote [in the Democratic primary], and David Dinkins won. What is interesting is that I’m Jewish, but my biggest supporters were Catholic. Italian and Irish Catholic. I generally, over the years, would get 81 percent of their vote. With Jews, I would get 73 percent. People say, “How is that possible? You’re a Jewish boy!” And the answer is that the liberal wing of the Jewish nation doesn’t find me liberal enough. Because I’m a liberal with sanity.

What are some specific issues on which you clash with liberal Jews?

Well, for example, the death penalty. I have supported the death penalty from the beginning of my professional life, when I ran for Congress. I believe it’s liberal, if you believe that protecting society is liberal.

Do you think you’ve moved to the right over the course of your career?

When I was in the Congress, I was opposed to the Vietnam War. I went to Canada and talked to American young men who had left the United States to avoid the draft. And I came back and proposed that American soldiers who resisted the draft, evaded it, be given amnesty; and in addition, American soldier deserters—this is in the middle of the Vietnam War—be given amnesty. People said, “Are you crazy?” President Carter, six months later, gave amnesty to draft resisters and deserters. So I believe, on social issues, I’m as left as you can get. On fiscal issues I’m moderate. I hope I’ve changed over the years, but I certainly don’t believe you could say I’ve moved from the left to the right.

Do you ever feel that American Jews are afraid to support Israel?

I know there was a dearth of support when Obama changed the policy of the United States towards Israel not very long ago. I’m very proud that I aroused the Jewish community and the Christian pro-Israel community and Obama changed his anti-Israel position, most illustrative of that being when he insulted Bibi Netanyahu. As you undoubtedly know, when George Bush ran for reelection—not election—when he was running against, what’s his name—John, Massachusetts …

Kerry.

Kerry, right. Kerry was not good on Israel, in my judgment. So I supported Bush. And I said at the time, publicly, “I don’t agree with him on a single domestic issue. But on the issue of fighting Islamic terrorism”—which, to me, is more important than any other issue, not just because of Israel; it is because Islamic terrorism is seeking to destroy Western civilization. I said, “The Democratic party doesn’t understand that.” The Republican party did. I was shocked when I saw a poll which said that of Democrats, 48 percent supported Israel. 48 percent! Republicans, 70 percent. So I stood up and supported Bush. I have no regrets.

So why didn’t you support John McCain in 2008?

Well, because I’m a Democrat, and I believed that Obama was as good as McCain.

And now you feel you were misled?

I don’t say misled. I misjudged.

Do you think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are good for the Jews?

No. They’re not good for America, which is more important. We are spilling American blood for nothing. We are having American treasure looted by Karzai in particular in Afghanistan. We should pull out today.

So how does that mesh with your take on Islamic terrorism?

I don’t believe that we should fight them the way they want us to fight them. I believe we should bomb them with drones. Afghanistan—it’s not a country.

So you’re supportive of the drone attacks in Pakistan?

Absolutely. Pakistan is not a friend anymore. These are not countries you can depend upon. We shouldn’t have people there, and we shouldn’t give them the billions that we’re giving. With respect to that area, India is our true ally, not Pakistan.

Do you have views on Israeli politics?

Sure I do. I believe in a two-state solution. I believe that Bibi Netanyahu should throw out Lieberman and all those arch right wingers and form a broad cabinet with the center, and that you can have an Arab capital in Jerusalem along with a Jewish capital in Jerusalem. You should have boroughs in the Arab area and the Jewish area where they elect their own local leadership. It’s doable!

Do you think New York Jews stand up for Israel?

I don’t think [they do] enough. I think young people no longer understand the meaning of the Holocaust. Young Jews don’t understand that when Hitler offered to let the Jews out of Germany, there was no nation that would take them—including the United States. And all you have to do is remember the U.S.S. St. Louis, which was turned away. So I think that somehow or other the Jewish community has to educate, and say, “We’re Americans. But we also are like any other people that love our ancestry and our traditions.” And in our case it’s even more important, because there’s never been an effort to exterminate a people, a whole people, as was the case with Hitler and the Jews. Jews who think they’re not included in that extermination effort, should it ever occur again, they’re dead wrong. And we know the nation of Israel will stand up to the best of its ability. It will use its armed forces to protect Jews, as it did at Entebbe.

How did Judaism influence your life growing up?

I’m a secular Jew. I believe in God, I believe in the hereafter, I believe in reward and punishment, and I expect to be rewarded. That’s a partial joke. But I identify as a Jew. And I think when I was mayor, I made that clear. As a result of just being up front about it, I think I was helpful in changing relations vis-a-vis the Jews and making them more positive. I hope so.

Was being Jewish a big part of your life?

No. I go to synagogue twice a year. Park East Synagogue. It’s Orthodox, but that’s only because I like Rabbi Schneier. It has nothing to do with me. I would consider myself a Conservative—the reason I say Conservative, not Reform, is that I am very unhappy to be in a synagogue without a yarmulke. I feel naked.

I wanted to be buried in Manhattan. Near a subway stop, to make it easy to get there. So I got the last burial plot at the Trinity Church up at 155th Street. My tombstone is up there, and it has the Shma Yisroel, in English and Hebrew, and it has the last words of Dan Pearl: “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I’m Jewish.” Now, they probably made him say that as they cut his throat on television. Doesn’t make any difference. I think that should become a prayer on Saturday.

There was a forum recently in New York magazine debating who was the best mayor in New York history.

Oh, I saw that. Those were liberal—the historians who were there were all very liberal. They don’t like me. On the other hand, there was just a book out by a liberal historian [Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City, by Jonathan Soffer]. He says, when he announced to his confreres, who are all liberal, “I’m going to do a book on Koch,” they said, “Go get him.” But in his book he says that I was better than LaGuardia. He said the problems that I confronted were greater than LaGuardia’s and my responses were better. That’s what he says; I’m not saying it. I don’t mind others saying it, but I’m not saying it.

What do you think makes LaGuardia so popular today?

’Cause he’s dead.

You recently defended Sarah Palin’s use of the term “blood libel.”

Fairness! Don’t you think we should have fairness? What they were trying to do, some of the talking heads, was to blame her for the shooting of the Congresswoman in Tucson. In fact, she sent me a response—Jody! I’d like to give him the Sarah Palin response, her comment to me.

Sarah Palin’s email:

Mr. Koch: I hate to bother you through a personal email account but I wanted to send a “thank you” for your encouraging words. Thank you, sincerely, for sticking your neck out in such a public manner. My family and I appreciate your boldness!

My best to you,
Sarah Palin

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Koch’s response:

Dear Governor:

Thank you for your e-mail. I was delighted to speak out because I believe you were being unfairly attacked by some who wish to politicize the tragedy in Arizona. I believe in spirited political debate, and so do you. Yes, we disagree on many public issues, and that debate is good for America. I wish you and your family the very best in your own pursuit of happiness. God bless America.

All the best.
Ed Koch

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in New York, Slate, the New York Times, and other publications.

• The Palestine Papers keep on giving: In 2009, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that President Obama lost “credibility … throughout the region,” adding, “people in the Middle East are not taking Barack Obama seriously. They feared Bush, despite everything.” [JPost]

• The Qatari emir told Sen. Kerry about a year ago that now is the time for the United States to engage Syria, and that Hamas will accept a deal along the 1967 borders, though won’t say so publicly. This one’s WikiLeaks. [WikiLeaks]

• Her intentions aside, Anthony Grafton condemns Sarah Palin’s invocation of the term “blood libel” for the damage it does to history and to the memories of countless Jews who suffered because of it. [TNR]

• A new entry in the “who sucked more, Hitler or Stalin?” debate from Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder. Turns out that Stalin was more motivated by ethnicity than was thought … but that Hitler really did kill significantly more innocents. [NYRB]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Nicholas Noe argues that U.S. policy toward Lebanon since the 2005 Cedar Revolution was a colossal failure, only helping Hezbollah, and that the one way to head off a really bad confrontation with Israel would be to push Israel to make peace with Syria. [NYT]

• Gal Beckerman remembers the late Samuel T. Cohen, the little-known inventor of the neutron bomb whose memoir was called F*** You: Mr. President. [Forward]

• David Nesenoff, the journalist who asked the question that prompted Helen Thomas’s infamous response, has been appointed editor and publisher of Long Island’s The Jewish Star. [The Jewish Star]

• Hélène Grimaud is a courageous, amazing, and beautiful French pianist. So naturally she has to be Jewish, right? Wikipedia, take it away: “She is descended from Sephardi Jews from Corsica on her mother’s side and from Berber Jews on her father’s side.” God, French Jews are great. [NYT]

• Weekend reading: Two articles by the late Daniel Bell. [Dissent]

• The legendary Eric Hobsbawn tackles the strange tale of the Jews of San Nicandro, ably handled in Tablet Magazine by books critic Adam Kirsch. [LRB]

• Futurist-novelist William Gibson finds Stuxnet’s roots in the world of digital vandalism. [NYT]

30 Rock makes a joke about Tablet Magazine’s official Canadian Football League head coach, the tastefully named Marc Trestman (h/t Kaplan’s Korner):

• A letter bomb scare—which turned out to be false—caused the evacuation today of a branch of an Israeli bank in midtown Manhattan. [JTA]

• A Joan Rivers joke about Sarah Palin cost Joan Rivers a booking on Fox News, says Joan Rivers. [Arts Beat]

• New Yorkers! Go, tonight, to see Nextbook Press author David Lehman and novelist Rick Moody discuss Bob Dylan at the 14th Street Y. [Nextbook Press]

• A hodgepodge of journalists and ex-officials, including Peter Beinart, Andrew Sullivan, and Chas Freeman, signed a letter calling on the United States to support the Palestinians’ U.N. draft resolution condemning settlements. [Ben Smith]

• This article about the neighborhood of Murray Hill and its inhabitants is the most Jewish article that doesn’t explicitly refer to Jews ever written. [NYT]

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict in pop, 3.5-minute form.

• Last night, Paul Giamatti won the Golden Globe for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy) for his role in super-Jewy Barney’s Version. [Hollywood Outbreak]

• The other daily magazine of Jewish life and culture profiles Reboot, the organization for Jews rediscovering their Jewishness. [NYT]

• On Sarah Palin’s missed opportunity. [Goldblog]

• This Israeli dance troupe made up of five Orthodox men is just waiting for The Full Monty treatment. [NYT]

• TheJMom.com is literally every Jewish boy’s worst nightmare. No but like literally. [Jewcy]

Real Jew Gwyneth Paltrow plays non-Jew Taylor Swift playing a bar mitzvah (on SNL).

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak bolted the Labor Party, taking a few ministers with him, to form his own, smaller, centrist party while staying in the governing coalition. [NYT]

• Sarah Palin stood by her remarks on the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords while regretting her use of the phrase “blood libel.” Just kidding! She said her critics were “using anything they could gather out of [the] statement,” like, for example, its invocation, however inadvertant, of a centuries-old justification of violence against Jews. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Then again, maybe, per Jean-Marie Le Pen’s theory, I’m just crying wolf. [JTA]

• The Palestinian leadership continues to insist it will present an anti-settlement draft resolution to the U.N. Security Council. [JPost]

• Giffords’s breathing tube was removed as she continues to make progress, albeit while still in critical condition. [JPost]

Two quick points. While, as some conservatives have rushed to point out, the phrase has been used in other contexts, it is asking a lot to believe that Palin—who we know has several prominent Jewish advisers—did not have someone tell her what “blood libel” actually means. The phrase “blood libel” in relation to some pundits’ accusation that right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Tucson shooting had been out there for two days by the time this video dropped—it appeared to debut in this Wall Street Journal column (which I linked to on Monday morning); she had ample time to learn all about it. Add to this her known penchant for grabbing headlines with a provocative soundbite, and you are looking at some extremely strong evidence that she knew exactly what she was doing.

Second, here, if ever, were a chance for the Anti-Defamation League to step up. It is still perceived as a nonpartisan, above-the-fray validator when it comes to adjudging questions of anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish rhetoric, and the like. Were the organization or its head, Abraham Foxman, to come forward and unequivocally condemn Palin’s invocation of the phrase, then real pushback could ensue (Rep. Eric Cantor, for example, is currently not commenting, but one can’t imagine that will be sustainable if the ADL speaks up). ADL: Your move.

UPDATE: Foxman’s statement after the jump, in which he says she should have chosen a different phrase.

It is unfortunate that the tragedy in Tucson continues to stimulate a political blame game. Rather than step back and reflect on the lessons to be learned from this tragedy, both parties have reverted to political partisanship and finger-pointing at a time when the American people are looking for leadership, not more vitriol. In response to this tragedy we need to rise above partisanship, incivility, heated rhetoric, and the business-as-usual approaches that are corroding our political system and tainting the atmosphere in Washington and across the country.

It was inappropriate at the outset to blame Sarah Palin and others for causing this tragedy or for being an accessory to murder. Palin has every right to defend herself against these kinds of attacks, and we agree with her that the best tradition in America is one of finding common ground despite our differences.

Still, we wish that Palin had not invoked the phrase “blood-libel” in reference to the actions of journalists and pundits in placing blame for the shooting in Tucson on others. While the term “blood-libel” has become part of the English parlance to refer to someone being falsely accused, we wish that Palin had used another phrase, instead of one so fraught with pain in Jewish history.

Sarah Palin Charges Critics With ‘Blood Libel’ [Politico]
Related: The Arizona Tragedy and the Politics of Blood Libel [WSJ]

• Former Secretary of State George Shultz asked President Obama to release Jonathan Pollard. [Ynet]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu insists sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program have so far been insufficient, and that more are required. [WSJ]

• The IDF bombed three Gaza targets, with no casualties. [Ynet]

• Munich is bidding on the 2018 Winter Olympics. The last Olympics it hosted—the summer games of ’72—were of course the site of the massacre of the Israeli team. [JTA]

• English Jewish book critic and essayist John Gross died at 75. [NYT]

• The Palins are going to Israel! No but it’s really happening. Likely this spring. [Page Six]

• American Jewish community leader Malcolm Hoenlein met with Syrian leadership in Damascus. Much more at 10. [Haaretz]

• Israel will likely nearly double its oil and gas taxes following its major off-shore energy finds. [WSJ]

• An Upper West Side synagogue received a bomb threat pledging New Year’s Eve devastation (so, phew). [JPost]

• The bombing of an Egyptian Coptic Church that killed 21 drew the Anti-Defamation League’s condemnation. [JPost]

• Get ready, Israel: Sarah Palin is visiting. [The Daily Beast]

• One of the women who has accused Julian Assange of a sex crime is reportedly now in the West Bank with a Christian outreach group. [HuffPo]

• Israeli MAD. Awesome. [The Magic Whistle]

• Whether or not Jews are greedy, Jewish law frowns upon greed, David E.Y. Sarna concludes. [NY Jewish Week]

• A short film on the making of the Beastie Boys’ iconic hit “Fight For Your Right” will debut in January at Sundance. [Jewcy]

Now that Hanukkah is over, we can get to the Christmas viral videos.

Late last month, the New York Times reported on this dissonance. Republican leadership as well as its influential neoconservative wing are, of course, staunch backers of Israel broadly and Netanyahu’s center-right policies specifically. The Tea Party, however, has an isolationist aura about it, and isolationism generally tends to correlate with less support for Israel. This is why there was such a panic when soon-to-be House Majority Leader Eric Cantor floated the notion of separating Israeli aid from other foreign aid: Even isolationism that explicitly makes an exception for Israel is considered dangerous by groups like AIPAC.

The Times reporters emphasize that the party leadership is still overwhelmingly pro-Israel. But Tablet Magazine contributor Barry Gewen has a new post pointing to very real fissures between the leadership and the Tea Party, and he seems much less sanguine that they will simply be papered over.

Gewen points to the two Pauls—father and son Ron and Rand, the former a longtime Texas congressman and cult GOP presidential candidate, the latter a newly elected senator from Kentucky and arguably the most prominent true Tea Partier—and various statements they have made about Israel and the Mideast. Ron Paul “has repeatedly condemned Israeli policies, often in the harshest terms,” Gewen reports. “One of his staffers declared that, ‘By far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government.’ Paul’s opponents inside and outside the Tea Party see undertones of anti-Semitism in his positions, or worse.”

Gewen’s point, and it seems to me persuasive, is that while the Tea Partiers’ main focus—if that isn’t a contradiction in terms—are domestic issues and general anger that has concentrated itself on the Obama Administration, they do have opinions on foreign policy and Israel, and they are not the same as the pro-Israel tilt of the GOP establishment, and when the issue is raised they will not be shy, and they will not be without influence.

The bellwether might be Sarah Palin. Up until now, she has, to paraphrase Gewen, out-Netanyahu’d Netanyahu, forcibly defending Israeli settlements (which is no surprise given that Bill Kristol was one of her earliest patrons and her chief foreign policy adviser is neoconservative Randy Scheunemann). Tea Partiers, according to Gewen, have not ignored this, or let her off the hook because she is the ultimate Mama Grizzly; rather, they have called her charming things like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” “simplistic,” and “a neocon Stepford wife.”

Here’s a prediction: Sometime in the next year, as GOP primary season begins, some issue—whether directly about Israel or touching on policies and values intimately related to American Israel policy—will come up and bring this oft-overlooked fissure to the fore. Where the GOP candidates—especially Palin, particularly if she runs—come down on it will be very telling.

GOP and Tea Party Are Mixed Blessing for Israel [NYT]
How the Tea Party Is Wrecking GOP Foreign Policy [Entanglements]
Earlier: Cantor’s ‘Foreign Aid’ Trial Balloon Is Popped

• The IDF uses Facebook to find draft dodgers. [Fast Company]

• Settlers. Love. Palin. [Ben Smith]

• The link between Prime Minister Netanyahu and George W. Bush is an author and political adviser named Ron Dermer. [Politico]

• The United States has reportedly put the freeze-extension deal in writing, as Netanyahu has demanded. [JTA]

• Three experts say America should publish a “declaration of principles” concerning the Mideast peace process. More getting things down on paper. [IHT]

Below: An Iranian weightlifter appears on a platform along with an Israeli weightlifter, while “Hatikvah” is played. For this (via Kaplan’s Korner), he has been banned from weightlifting for life.

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’

Bloomberg has been spending the midterm season traveling the country endorsing a bipartisan roster of smart, moderate, technocratic candidates (Republican Meg Whitman for California governor; Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) for re-election; independent former Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee for Rhode Island governor). Bloomberg probably won’t run unless he is truly viable, and he almost certainly won’t be truly viable unless, primarily, the economy continues to slip, further weakening Obama; and, secondarily, Sarah Palin emerges as the GOP front-runner.

Even if he runs, according to Heilemann, he is not likely to win, and in fact, particularly in the event of Palin’s nomination, he is most likely to hand the election, Ross Perot-like, to Obama. However:

By the accounts of strategists in both parties, Bloomberg—especially with the help of his billions—would stand a reasonable chance of carrying New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, and California. Combine that with a strong-enough showing in a few other places in the industrial Northeast to deny Obama those states, and with Palin holding the fire-engine-red states of the South, and the president might find himself short of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win.

(I can think of one demographic, unusually prevalent in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, and California, that might be unusually inclined to support Hizzoner.)

Assuming you still remember the basics from American Government 101, you know what would happen next: The election would be thrown to the House of Representatives—which, after November 2, is likely to be controlled by the Republicans. The result: Hello, President Palin!

My take, since you asked? The dramatic House of Representatives scenario is far-fetched: If Bloomberg ran and ended up a bigger Democratic than Republican vote-hogger, I still don’t see him winning any states other than, maybe, Jersey and Connecticut. However, the Republican would almost certainly win Florida, and quite possibly New York and California, giving him/her the requisite 270. In other words, it is time for Bloomberg, clear-eyed, to consider his legacy.

2012: How Sarah Barracuda Becomes President [NY Mag]
Earlier: Bloomberg for President?

Do we think this is going to work? For a start, DiverseTea—which I would assume is pomegranate-flavored—will have to work on the fact that Jews hate Sarah Palin. Right?

Tea Party Outreach Courts Jews [Politico]
Earlier: Why We Hate Her

Of course—perhaps because that side of the issue polls atrociously, both nationwide and even in New York City—it didn’t take 24 hours before the walk-back began: An Obama spokesperson said the president was merely passing judgment on religious freedom in the abstract, and then Obama himself added, “I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have.” Not sure if that is anything we can believe in. (Though a former Bush speechwriter finds plenty.)

Republicans, meanwhile, pounced, both responsibly (“This is not about freedom of religion,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, “but I do think it’s unwise to build a mosque at the site where 3,000 Americans lost their lives as the result of a terrorist attack”) and irresponsibly (ahem), even as some wonder how Obama’s predecessor—a Republican, but one who made great strides to show tolerance toward Islam—would have handled this.

Meanwhile, someone makes the right-wing case for respecting property rights. At the most, Obama probably pushed the conventional wisdom in that direction. But beyond the civil libertarian angle—the only angle, incidentally, that in my humble opinion falls within, say, the Anti-Defamation League’s purview—is it right that the center be built there? Both the left and the right have their answers.

Obama Backs Manhattan Mosque [Ben Smith]
Republicans Slam Obama Over Ground Zero Muslim Center Remarks [Haaretz]

The mosque became a statewide issue when New York gubernatorial candidates started talking about it, and then a national issue when the Tea Party (which opposes the mosque) caught on, and then an even bigger national issue when Sarah Palin made her famous Tweets against it and Newt Gingrich specified exactly where he would and would not be okay with a mosque being built in New York City (a city whose Jewish mayor, and borough whose Jewish president, both support the project).

By the way: The project is invariably described as a mosque, and while that’s not technically false, it is somewhat misleading. As planned, Cordoba House will be an “Islamic center” in much the same way that a Jewish Community Center is a “Jewish center”—in fact, Cordoba House is explicitly modeled after JCCs. “There will be a mosque component, which will be a separate not-for-profit component of the project,” backer Sharif El-Gamal told The Jerusalem Post. “It’s going to be a small component in a community center, just like the 92nd Street Y has a synagogue.”

Vote Boosts G. Zero Mosque [NY Post]
Earlier: Ground Zero for a Fight
Palin ‘Refudiates’ Cordoba House
Related: ‘This Is A Way for Me To Give Back’ [Forward]

זי איז שיין, זי איז קלוג, און אַ ביסעלע מעוברת. וואָס איז אַזוי שלעכט, פֿאָקס?

Transliteration: Zi iz sheyn, zi iz klug, un a bisele meuveres. Vos iz azoy shlekht, Fox?

Meaning: She is beautiful, she is smart, and she is a little pregnant. What’s the problem, Fox?

זיי טרינקען, רייכערן, ברענען זיך — אַ מלאכה! פֿאַר געלט באַקוּמט מען אַלץ אַָבער ניט קיין שכל.

Transliteration: Zey trinken, reykhern, brenen zikh–a melokhe! Far gelt bakumt men alts ober nit keyn seykhl.

Meaning: They drink, smoke, and tan–what a job! For money you get anything, except for brains.

קענט איר אויסזען ווי איך? ניין, זאָגט ער. קענט איר שמעקן ווי איך? יאָ, זאָגט ער. אָבער, מיר פֿרעגן אייַך: ווער וויל טאַקע שמעקן ווי אַלטע געווירצן?

Transliteration: Kent ir oyszen vi ikh? Neyn, zogt er. Kent ir shmekn vi ikh? Yo, zogt er. Ober, mir fregn aykh: ver vil take shmekn vi alte gevirtsn?

Meaning: Can you look like me? No. Can you smell like me? Yes. But we ask you: Who wants to smell like old spices?

סוף-כל-סוף, אַ פֿייַנע משפּחהלע! ליוואַי, געדענק אַז דייַן באַוווּסטע שוויגער האַלט אַ ביקס אין האַנט.

Transliteration: Sof-kol-sof, a fayne mishpokhele! Levi, gedenk az dayn bavuste shviger halt a biks in hant.

Meaning: Finally, a nice little family! Levi, remember your famous mother-in-law has a shotgun.

אין סכּנה… אָבער אַז מען לעבט דערלעבט מען! געטראָפֿן דעם שלאַנקן-פּיצעלע-לאָריס. קוּקט אויף זייַנע אויגן: ער וווּנדערט זיך מער אויף אוּנדז.

Transliteration: In sakone…ober az men lebt derlebt men! Getrofn dem shlankn-pitsele-loris. Kukt af zayne oygn: er vundert zikh mer oif undz.

Meaning: Endangered…but eventually one sees it all. We found the slender, little Loris. Look at his eyes: he’s more surprised than we are.

Lesson:

Two basic verbs that will come in handy when we learn past tense next week: to have האָבן and to be זייַן.

With the Jersey Shore girls in mind:

I have clothes — איך האָב קליידער
You have cigarettes – דוּ האסָט פּאַפּיראָסן
She has jewelry – זי האָט צירוּנג
We dislike them – מיר האָבן זיי פֿייַנט
You love them – איר האָט זיי ליב
They have made fools of themselves – זיי האָבן זיך באַנאַרעשט

And the verb “to be”? As Mr. Old Spice may put it:

I am handsome – איך בין שיין
You are jealous – דוּ ביסט מיר מקנא
He is half-naked – ער איז האַלב-נאַקעט
We are taken – מיר זייַנען פֿאַרכאַפּט
You are not modest – איר זייַט ניט באַשיידן
They sell Old Spice and they’re happy – זיי פֿאַרקויפֿן אָלד ספּייַס אוּן זייַנען צוּפֿרידן

Want a bit of homework? Look for Yiddish words borrowed from Hebrew; they’re pronounced a bit differently, but you can easily find them…

Of course, the political media being the political media, the story has become Palin’s use of the, shall we say, neologism “refudiate”; her subsequent correction of her Tweet to “refute”; and then her defense of her own flexible use of the English language: “‘Refudiate,’ ‘misunderestimate,’ ‘wee-wee’d up,’” she Tweeted. “English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!” (Does that mean the Constitution is living as well?)

The real story here, though, is that prominent moderate New York Jewish politicians like Michael Bloomberg and Scott Stringer all have no problem with the Cordoba House, which, by the way, is actively modeled on Jewish Community Centers. Another reason, in other words, why Jews may hate her. Also her sublimely grandiose view of herself.

Palin Invents Word ‘Refudiate,’ Compares Herself to Shakespeare [WP]
Earlier: Ground Zero for a Fight
Why We Hate Her

• Respected Mossad chief Meir Dagan was reportedly denied a requested year-long extension of his tenure and will step down in three months. [Ynet]

• Hamas says U.S. officials have asked it not to tell people that they are meeting with the group. Which, Hamas adds, they may or may not be doing. Officially. Or unofficially. Or something. [Ynet]

• The Rabbinical Alliance of America warns that confirming Elena Kagan will “homosexualize” America. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Iran’s plans to send a flotilla to Gaza’s Mediterranean coast via the Caspian Sea were foiled by the revelation that the Caspian Sea is landlocked. [Heeb]

• The Macaroons, a JDub Records Act, will be performing tomorrow in lower Manhattan at Children’s Day. [Children’s Day]

Saw these guys last night. Seeing these guys again tonight. Last night, they played this:

• Potential GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been paying serious money to a Jerusalem-based consultant to help him beef up his pro-Israel bona fides. [Politico]

• A dispatch from the Gaza bodybuilding championship reports that many of the participants are former Fatah security guards who relish the opportunity to flout Hamas’s strict modesty rules by taking off their shirts and showing off their bulk. No pictures, (un?)fortunately. [AP/Haaretz]

• Sandra Bullock apparently gave her adopted child a bris (that is, the child was not merely circumcised; there was ritual and everything). This is ironic because (apparently again) her husband who cheated on her likes Nazis. Or something. [JTA]

• This is how Albert Einstein apparently got women to sleep with him. His method involved physics, of a sort. [Negev Rock City]

• Save the date! On Tuesday, May 18, our office-mate Jewcy is hosting the inaugural Yiderati reading series at New York City’s Strand bookstore. It will feature, among others, Tablet Magazine contributing editor Rachel Shukert. [Jewcy]

Instead of our usual Sundown video, here is your caricature of the day, from this Forward article on Jews who support Sarah Palin:

Korn himself has an unusual background. Up until the mid-1980s, he was a self-proclaimed “left-wing organizer” who taught pan-African studies, was a Central America solidarity activist and worked at a jazz radio station in Philadelphia with Mumia Abu-Jamal. He even voted for Jimmy Carter in 1980. He then had a radical transformation, switched to Orthodox from Reform Judaism and became a strident pro-Israel activist, an opponent of, as he put it, the “series of concessions that are called the peace process.” Eventually Korn, now 54, even headed the Zionist Organization of America.

Doesn’t sound that “unusual” to us!

• Such pressure has led Binyamin Korn, a former executive director of the Zionist Organization of America, to form a group called Jewish Americans for Sarah Palin; Korn calls the former Alaska governor “the most articulate person in the public arena today in opposition to the Obama administration’s shift in policies against Israel.” [NY Sun]

• A potentially crucial Pan-Mediterranean strategy for water preservation was foiled by an argument between the Arab League and Israel over the use of the term “occupied territories.” [JPost]

• Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian gunman at the Gaza border. [Ynet]

• The South African Jewish Board of Deputies denounced the pressure from local groups that led judge Richard Goldstone to decide not to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah in Johannesburg next month, saying it “deeply regrets that a religious milestone has been politicized.” [JTA]

• The most prominent elected U.S. official to criticize the Obama administration was Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia). He is the House Minority Whip, a GOP rising star, and the son of an Israeli. [JPost]

• In private, many pro-Israel Jewish politicians have expressed sympathy with Obama and frustration with Israel; at the same time, many have been reluctant to espouse these views all that publicly. [Laura Rozen]

• AIPAC asked its supporters to spread the word that the Obama administration went too far in its criticism of “our partner Israel.” The group’s annual conference begins Sunday in Washington, D.C. [Ben Smith]

• Sarah Palin, who has studied this issue long and hard from her perch on the Council of Foreign Relations, called for a “reset” of U.S.-Israel relations. [Ben Smith]

• The Democratic Party’s official Israeli branch has forcefully criticized Netanyahu and used the opportunity to try to register more Democratic U.S. voters living there. [JPost]

• Reps. Christopher Carney (D-Pennsylvania) and Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) sent a joint letter to Obama arguing he should back off. [Ben Smith]

• Part of the reason more Congressional Democrats have not been behind the administration is they feel it has done a poor job bringing them in on these decisions; many specifically would like a phone call from envoy George Mitchell. [Laura Rozen]

• Rep. Howard Berman (California) and Sen. Ben Cardin (Maryland)—two hawkish Jewish Democrats—stood by Obama and chastised Israel. [Ben Smith]

• Last, but maybe not least, J Street collected over 18,000 signatures on a White House-bound petition, “demonstrating,” the group said, “that large numbers of pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans agree with the Vice President when he says, ‘Sometimes only a friend can deliver the hardest truth,’ and urging the administration to turn this crisis into an opportunity for progress on two states.” [Haaretz]

(By the way, in case you can’t tell, you should really be reading Ben Smith’s and Laura Rozen’s Politico blogs if you want to keep up with this story.)

• Okay, one more thing: Jeffrey Goldberg reports that what Obama is trying to do is further crack Netanyahu’s already fragile (and right-wing) coalition, ideally in order to pave the way for a more moderate Tzipi Livni government. [Jeffrey Goldberg]

• Fine, one more: Sarah Palin accused the Obama administration of “missing the boat” (folksy!) on Israel and called for a hit of the “reset button.” [Ben Smith]

• The Simon Wiesenthal Center is still planning to build that controversial Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance. [AP/Haaretz]

• A long and fantastic profile of conservative Web journalist Andrew Breitbart notes that he was raised Jewish (though not very religiously) and contains this line of his: “You’ve gone to Hebrew school, you’ve gone to Auschwitz, you go, Never again, Never again. Then you go to Tulane and you go, Maybe never again. … Don’t include that.” [Slate]

• The Jews That Do Contest invites Jews who do … pretty much anything to submit video of themselves doing so. [Leadel]
Below: a Jew does something

This is bad news for Jewish Republicans. The Tea Party movement hearkens back to the old anti-immigration movement, to the Ku Klux Klan, to the George Wallace movement in the 1960s. Lurking behind all of these was the idea of 100 percent “pure” Americanism—and of taking America back from the “outsiders.”

The Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman told Besser, “It’s not a danger at the moment, but it bears watching.”

Well, those watching last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference will have noticed, as Besser did, that the potential presidential candidate favored by attendees in a straw poll was … Texas Rep. Ron Paul (Mitt Romney won second; Sarah Palin came in a distant third).

Forget the cultural cues that infamously makes Jews “hate” Palin. Paul opposes sanctions on Iran and aid to Israel, and has compared Gaza to a “concentration camp.”

“Yes I know,” Besser concludes,

the tea party movement is a big, churning and somewhat diverse collection of people, including some conservatives who think Israel is cool.

But as almost all the political scientists I talked to said, the insurgent movement also includes elements that are likely to scare the heck out of Jewish voters.

At least regarding his extreme-isolationist foreign policy views, Paul is probably not exactly whom Besser was talking about. He represents a totally different type of knot.

Ron Paul, Tea Parties, and the GOP’s Jewish Problem [JW Political Insider]

Tea Party Revolution Could Undermine Jewish Republican Outreach [Jewish Week]

Earlier: Why We Hate Her

If you’re looking to dress up as Lieberman or Obama—or Palin—or anyone—you could always attend Hamanbashin, JDub Records’s Purim party (co-sponsored by Tablet Magazine), which takes place this Saturday in New York’s Lower East Side. Bonus points to whoever does the best job depicting the assassinated Hamas guy.

Purim Politics Unmasked: Lieberman Leads Costume Poll [Arutz Sheva]

Earlier: Hamanbashin!

Or, more accurately, the writing on the hand: addressing the Tea Party movement’s national conference, Sarah Palin—paragon of stately elegance, former vice-presidential candidate, present television commentator, future unknown—jotted down the key points of her speech on her palm. The media, of course, reveled in Palin’s faux pas, but somewhere amidst the swirling scorn, the actual message was lost.

Here is what the Deer Hunter from Wasilla had on her mind: moving from thumb to pinkie, Palin had scribbled “energy,” “tax,” and “lift American spirits.” Of the three items, it was, naturally, the second that most delighted Palin’s listeners. The Tea Party, after all, takes its name from a famed tax revolt, and the movement draws much of its energy from its members’ deep-seated dismay with the federal government’s power to levy taxes.

Where does Palin stand on the issue? Like most of her political stances, her opinions on this subject are a collage of inconsistencies, misrepresentations, and lies. She claimed, for example, that Ronald Reagan ended the recession in the 1980s by cutting taxes (a dubious claim at best, and one that ignores the small matter of her idol having raised the national debt an incredible $2 trillion in eight years), or that undoing Bush’s tax cuts would hit working class families (in fact, only families making $83,000 and more would be affected). But like everything else with Palin, it’s not so much what she says as how she says it.

In her book, Going Rogue, there are several references to taxation, none more telling than the one in which Palin introduces her readers to that other uneducated, inexperienced darling of rabid Republicans.

“Our campaign,” Palin writes, “quickly realized that Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber by trade, typified the everyday American laborer who had worked hard to make his own way, was trying to improve his economic lot, and ought not to be punished by oppressive tax policies. Joe the Plumber reminded me personally of those Country Kitchen guys I’d sat with on Friday mornings in Wasilla when I was mayor. I liked him.”

If Palin’s putative presidential bid is successful, we can only assume that her policies would be designed to please Joe the Plumber and his fellow travelers in the Tea Party movement. Anyone wondering what such policies might yield need only look at California, where a successful 1978 taxpayers’ revolt known as Proposition 13 effectively curtailed the state government’s ability to govern the state. This, as Kurt Andersen writes in an insightful article in this week’s New York magazine, makes California “a big canary in this mine. Too much democracy and too little elite wisdom has crippled the state.”

The people who cheer on Palin, of course, are unlikely to heed such warnings when they appear in the media organs of the liberal, northeastern snobs. Perhaps, however, they might listen to the Bible.

If they took a few minutes to read this week’s haftorah, the Tea Partiers might find some jarring stuff. It’s all about taxation. The Temple, we’re told, had fallen into disrepair during the regime of an evil, incompetent, and power-hungry queen. The new administration, ashamed of the neglect gnawing at the nation’s most sacred place, announces plans to renovate, but the priests have become too corrupt: they’d rather filibuster the king than get down to fixing what’s broken. The work is then entrusted to the workmen themselves, who approach it with honesty and diligence and joy.

All that, of course, is in the very distant past. Had the same workers been around today, we can imagine, they would most likely denounce King Jehoash as a socialist and rush off to appear on Glenn Beck’s show.

If we truly want to lift American spirits, then, we need to reread II Kings, chapters 12 and 13, and remind ourselves that it’s not about taxation or representation but about responsibility, the kind of strong personal commitment that drives people not to for-profit festivals of malice and merchandise but to work for the common good.

The righteous men living in the time of Jehoash understood that restoring the Temple was a sacred task that addressed the spiritual and communal wellbeing of the entire nation. Likewise, the righteous men and women living in the time of Palin understand that affordable healthcare, social security, and similar programs designed to safeguard our health, our welfare, and our dignity are sacred tasks as well. If history is any measure, those who strive to repair the situation will triumph over those who listen instead to the din of demagogues. If they don’t, we would at least be able to say that we’ve seen the writing on the hand.

No doubt you’ve seen this black magic practiced before, and most likely, you’ve found it odious. But if you’ve never stopped to ponder the mechanics of this feeble act of conjuring, here’s a primer into the working of lazy journalistic minds: begin by taking a contemporary subject that’s popular and preferably controversial; find a historical subject that’s obscure; bend the rules of logic and decency until you can force both into the same intellectual framework.

You might, for example, claim an invisible affinity between the Na’vi, the heroes of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, and the followers of the French socialist Comte de Saint-Simon, or you might argue passionately that Snooki, the diminutive diva of MTV’s reality show Jersey Shore, is nothing but a modern-day reincarnation of the late Qing Dynasty’s Empress Dowager Cixi. In either case, a few well-placed historical facts may be selected to obscure other, equally pertinent and utterly contradictory historical facts and thus to endow you, the writer, with the everlasting halo of incomparable intelligence.

To demonstrate just how despicable I find this practice, allow me to repeat it: as I sat down to read this week’s haftorah, I opened the Book of Judges and was shocked to read about Sarah Palin.

In the book, her name was Deborah, and she was not the onetime, short-term governor of Alaska and current Fox News bloviator but rather a warrior and a judge. Still, there was little doubt: Sarah/Deborah spent most of her time speaking, simplistically, about God, about War, about people she hated and who were in no way like her and who would do well to just disappear.

It seemed a little strange, of course, that the book, describing events that took place circa 1280 BCE, during the reign of King Seti I, would so uncanninly capture the mindset of Queen Sarah, born 1964. But there was no mistaking it. The woman sitting under her tree between Ramah and Beth-el and the woman sitting on private jets between Wasilla and Washington were one and the same. Reading about Deborah, I could almost hear her claiming that she could see Canaan from her house.

Need proof? Here goes. Below are two quotes. Try to tell Sarah and Deborah apart.

“Why do you sit between the borders, to hear the bleatings of the flocks?” chided one of the two women, disparaging those of her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “At the divisions of Reuben, [there are] great searchings of heart. Gilead abides beyond the Jordan; and Dan, why does he gather into the ships? Asher dwelt at the shore of the seas, and by his breaches he abides.”

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C.,” chided the other woman, disparaging her fellow countrymen who did not support her zeal for war. “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

Which is which? Impossible to tell.

There is no need, of course, to carry this exercise any further. Mainly because it is not, alas, an exercise at all. While the historical comparison between the politician and the prophetess is a bit flimsy, the ideological underpinning, sadly, is not.

Lodged between Joshua—heir to Moses, practical fellow, conqueror of the land—and Samuel—holy man, anointer of kings—the judges represent, to modern, progressive eyes, a particularly dark period in Jewish history. Devoid, for the most part, of any concrete interest in governance or strong commitment to leadership, these swordsmen (and one woman) are blinding beacons of totality. For the glory of God and the love of the people, they will slay their enemies by the thousands, martyr themselves like Samson, or slaughter their daughters like the hapless Jephthah. With shedding blood their sole responsibility, they go about their business merrily, righteous and fierce and unquestioning.

Even in this flock of fanatics, however, none, perhaps, is more monolithic than Deborah. When we are first acquainted with the judge, she is concerned not with justice but with vengeance, summoning Barak, a local strongman, to her side and ordering him into war. Such, she claims plainly, is God’s will.

The battle, hallelujah, goes according to plan, but Deborah is just getting started. Elated, she breaks out in a thankful song, a stunning concoction of ecstasy and venom.

“Praise! Praise! Deborah,” goes one of its more feverish lines. “Praise! Praise!”

The rest isn’t much better. After disparaging those tribes that opposed the war, Deborah blesses Yael, the daughter of the Kenite king Heber. Approached by the defeated Canaanite general Sisera—bruised and bloody after losing to Barak and his men—Yael takes the weary soldier into her tent, feeds him warm milk, waits for him to fall asleep, and then takes one of her tent’s pegs and lodges it forcefully in Sisera’s temple, killing him instantly. For this act of treachery and murder, Deborah tells us, Yael should be blessed “above women in the tent.” Women, that is, like Sisera’s mother: not content merely with describing the general’s murder in gruesome detail, Deborah goes on to gloat with a ghoulish bit about the slain soldier’s mother, waiting in vain at the window for her son to return home from the battlefield. There’s no mercy here, no compassion, no justice. The haftorah’s end is stark. Deborah’s exhortation leaves little room for the imagination: “So may perish all Your enemies, O Lord.”

In case any reader becomes enamored with such murderous Manichaeism, the Book of Judges makes sure to conclude on a sour note: all war and no pray make Israel bad boys, and the nation is soon swayed by idol worshipping, punished for its sins, and is not redeemed until Samuel, the man of God, takes its helm.

This is one historical lesson we’d be well-rewarded to take to heart. From Deborah to Sarah, each generation is bound to have its own charismatic figure that speaks in tongues and blesses the ammunition and prefers the thundering marches of certainty to the subtle fugues of doubt. Before we follow these feverish few and go rogue, however, let us remember this: we’ve read this story before, and it never ends well.

• No Evidence That Jews, in Particular, Hate Palin
• Conflates Jews and Liberals
• Recycles Every Anti-Semitic Jewish Stereotype Known to Man

If anyone notices anything detailing why the haters are wrong and Rubin is right, do please leave it in the comments.

The Three Biggest Problems With ‘Why Jews Hate Palin’ [TheAtlanticWire]

Related: Why Jews Hate Palin [Commentary]

Earlier: Why We Hate Her

Jews, who have excelled at intellectual pursuits, understandably are swayed by the notion that the presidency is a knowledge-based position requiring a background in the examination of detailed data and sophisticated analysis. … Palin’s intellectual unfitness in the eyes of Jews was exaggerated during the course of the campaign as they, like other Americans, received an incomplete image of her abilities and talents.

(Of course, an image may be incomplete but not inaccurate. Just saying.)

Responding to Rubin, David Frum has a different idea:

More than any politician in memory, Palin seems to divide her fellow-Americans into first class and second class citizens, real Americans and not-so-real Americans. To do her justice, she has never said anything to suggest that Jews as Jews fall into the second, less-real, class. But Jews do tend to have an intuition that when this sort of line-drawing is done, we are likely to find ourselves on the wrong side.

Then again, perhaps, as Frum puts it in  a throwaway line, Jewish attitudes toward Palin are “another manifestation of the old rule about Jews being like other people, only more so.” In 2008, 53 percent of voters went for Barack Obama; 78 percent of Jewish voters did so. It should be similarly unsurprising that most Jews disapprove of Palin—and disapprove of her like Ahab disapproved of the whale.

Why Jews Hate Palin [Commentary]
Do Jews Hate Palin? [FrumForum]

their focus on settlements could also be seen as a calculated political move to distinguish themselves from the Republican pack. With virtually the entire Congress—Democrats and Republicans—reliably lining up to support Israel on the easy stuff, you can’t make your mark unless you take on the hard stuff and go further than anyone else.

Palin and Huckabee may also genuinely believe that a settlement freeze is as dangerous as they say. Still, it’s worth distinguishing the robustness of their opposition from that of other potential Republican candidates, who, says Neusner, “have found a way to take issue with the Obama administration’s stance on settlements without climbing out on the limb that Huckabee and Palin have.” For example, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the minority whip, has simply called the whole settlement issue a “distraction” from the more important matter of Iran’s nuclear program. Cantor probably does not need to make quite the same effort to distinguish himself on Middle East concerns, particularly among voters who share his Jewish faith.

Why Palin and Huckabee Dig Settlements [Forward]

So is the location—the Russia House in downtown Washington, D.C.—a joke, too? Is the party even happening? “We booked Russia House, and then realized there was so much we could do with that,” Spitalnick said. The party, in other words, is a go. Join J Street, friends of J Street, and Michael Goldfarb (maybe) in two Tuesdays for free booze. great times, and good conversation. We’ll even hazard the guess that the topic of Israel might come up.

J Street Chanukah Happy Hour at Russia House [Facebook]

Previously: The Pulse-Taker

When I read her reply, I thought that it was wonderful. In the two generations in which I’ve been covering the Middle East debate, it was one of the few times a public figure gave in response to a question about the settlements an answer that I would call ideal. It seemed to me courageous, in that Palin was going against not only the administration but many in her own party and the gods of political correctness. There was no shilly-shallying about the Oslo process and the Quartet and the United Nations. Palin didn’t seem particularly worried one way or another about how she might be perceived. She is just on Israel’s side.

But it turns out that one of the shrewdest reporters on the Middle East beat, Jeffrey Goldberg, finds the governor’s language alarming. He put up a post on his Atlantic blog under the headline, “With Friends Like Sarah Palin…”—a phrase that one expects to be finished with the question, “…who needs enemies?” Goldberg wants to know who, exactly, she reckons is going to be flocking to Israel and whether her view grows from her analysis of Jewish demography. Or whether she anticipates a sudden upsurge in Zionist sentiment among American Jews, who are, he points out, the only sizable Jewish community outside Israel.

“Or,” Goldberg asks, “is this an indication that Palin buys into creepy End Times thinking, in which the ingathering of the Jews, and their mass death, presage the return of Christ?”

That is a vision in which Christians are to be gathered up in something called the Rapture. Goldberg was so determined to get to the bottom of the question that he called the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center at Liberty University, Thomas Rice, who heads what Goldberg calls “one of the pre-eminent evangelical institutions in this country arguing for the literal Bible prophecy.” Goldberg asked him whether he thought Palin’s statement on Jewish settlements was informed by the belief about a Jewish ingathering to Israel in advance of Armageddon.

Rice, Goldberg reports, said that he’d heard the governor “has been part of an apparently unique movement” whose pastor “believed based on some personal revelation he claims to have gotten from God” that during the Tribulation “the Jews would move to Alaska.” But Rice also expressed his “understanding” that Palin actually holds what he called “fairly typical Protestant Zionist beliefs, and one of those beliefs is the regathering of the Jews in Israel.” He suggested that Palin “may just have a general geopolitical belief that the world is going to be increasingly anti-Semitic.”

I’ve been reading Goldberg long enough to have developed an abiding regard for his reportorial instincts. It turns out that he’s not the only writer worrying about Palin and the Rapture. Frank Rich echoed Goldberg’s worries over the weekend. And last year Alexander Cockburn’s Counterpunch, which specializes in attacking Israel from the left, ran its own warning about the possibility that Palin believes in the Rapture. Its writer, Raymond J. Lawrence, expressed the fear that a “believer in the Rapture with his or her fingers on the nuclear trigger might even be tempted”—apparently in the hope of advancing the Second Coming—“to bring on the Rapture.”

Lawrence reckoned that while Americans were prepared to accept reassurances from John Kennedy that he wouldn’t be taking orders from Rome, it’s not so easy to get around what he sees as the danger of a president who believes in the Rapture. “The problem is both more simple and more worrisome. The public must presume that Palin believes in the Rapture, since it is one of the central doctrines of her church. Furthermore, the American people should assume that Palin’s personal religious beliefs will have consequences in her decision-making as a President.”

Continues Lawrence: “The press and much of the public seem reluctant to engage Palin on her religious views, considering them to be a personal matter. In certain respects that is admirable restraint. We do not want candidates for office grilled on their private religious views as long as those views do not impinge upon the public welfare…. However, a belief in the Rapture as an historic event toward which history is rapidly moving, is a belief with potentially catastrophic political implications. Do the American people want a believer in such a fantasy to hold in her hands the nuclear power to destroy civilization?”

In other words, what Lawrence has done is set up, even while suggesting he is loath to do so, a classic religious test.

Now I don’t believe for a moment that it is distaste for the Rapture that animates Counterpunch; rather, it’s distaste for Israel and the prospect that Jews might settle in Judea and Samaria. That Palin is prepared to leave to the judgment of Israel and its democratic government is what seems to animate the Counterpunch camp. The thing to remember is that if we start allowing religious tests in politics, such tests will eventually be used, as they so often have, against the Jews.

Goldberg’s blog post sent me to the bookstore, and I spent the weekend reading Going Rogue. It turns out to be a marvelous memoir by a very smart, high-spirited woman, who is handling the messiness of family life and the challenges of a public life in a way that is inspiring millions. She may not be a veteran of, say, the anti-communist battles of the free-trade union movement that made Ronald Reagan a sage on the biggest issue of his time, Soviet communism. But she has the kind of clarity of commitment on key themes that he had and the same kind of wholesome optimism—and she’s still young. I couldn’t find anything in the book that made me worry about the fact that even on the difficult issues she supports Israel.

Anti-Defamation League chief Abraham Foxman didn’t appreciate that, and he last night he told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Eric Fingerhut that Ben-Ami’s statement was “the height of chutzpah.” See, Palin’s statements might have been a “simplistic effort to be supportive of the Israeli government” but they were “clear and well-intentioned,” and, anyway, “all politics is pandering.” As for Ben-Ami, Foxman accused him of “attacking a celebrity for supporting Israel, but not in the way they want her to support Israel.” This morning, Ben-Ami responded with a long, sharply worded letter accusing Foxman of being “willing to go along with the defamation of a world-renowned (and Zionist) jurist”—Richard Goldstone—“who has asked tough questions about the Gaza War,” and also of trying to hijack the designation of “pro-Israel.” “You of course have every right to disagree with us. It’s a free country,” Ben-Ami wrote. “But you have no right to decide who is and who is not pro-Israel based on whether they agree with your views.” We’ll let you know if Foxman responds.

Foxman Blasts J Street on Palin, Questions Its ‘Pro-Israel’ Slogan [JTA]
Ben-Ami Responds to Foxman [JTA]

Last week, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michelle Bachmann attacked Ezekiel Emanuel in a floor speech, citing a New YorkPost columnist’s interpretation of his writings about rationalizing the distribution of health care to argue that under the Democrats’ healthcare plan, elderly or disabled patients like her senile father-in-law would be stiffed medical care. On Friday, Sarah Palin—making the most of her unemployment—posted an item on Facebook inflating Bachmann’s critique into an attack on Emanuel’s “Orwellian thinking” and accusing Obama of planning to convene “death panels” of bureaucrats who will decide, essentially, who shall live and who shall die. It’s not really clear how far the Nazi trope will go—Mengele references are already circulating in the outer reaches of the Free Republican universe, after surfacing, perhaps predictably, on the blog of perennial presidential candidate (and anti-Semitic crank) Lyndon LaRouche—but if Zeke is anything like his brothers, it’s not likely to keep him up at night. After all, even actual torture doesn’t scare him: “I’ve had various episodes where people have not liked what I said and tried to put the thumb screws to me to shut me up,” he told The New York Times last spring.

Sarah Palin: Statement on the Current Health Care Debate [Facebook]
Previously: Limbaugh Sees Swastikas Everywhere

Truth be told, we’re puzzled. Sure, Palin and Prejean were beauty queens, as was Esther, but beyond that, the parallels start to break down. Let’s start with politics. In the presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket was against dialogue with autocratic regimes. Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t just in favor of engagement with a Persian despot—she married one! And while Palin and Prejean are proud of their outsiderness, convinced they’re being persecuted by elites, Esther was the product of a prominent political family. Her uncle Mordechai was a royal adviser—an inside-the-Beltway figure if there ever was one, the Rahm Emanuel of his day. And talk about family values! Esther’s Persia was about as louche a place as they come. When the whole megillah starts, the king, entertaining some friends, summons Esther’s predecessor, Vashti, to come join the party wearing the royal crown—the crown and nothing else, commentators say.

And so maybe the Christian conservatives should cut it out with the Esther comparisons and leave the name to a worthier heiress, someone who embodies the queen’s spirit in all its worldliness and complexity.

Palin Joins Miss California in the Queen Esther Pageant [USA Today]