Perhaps the highlight of Keith Olbermann’s weeklong fifth anniversary celebration of his MSNBC show “Countdown” has been his back-and-forth with Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

Olbermann kicked off his big week on Monday by naming Rendell, a big-time Hillary booster, the day’s worst person in the world and suggesting that he might be an idiot. Rendell’s crime? Suggesting that Olberman’s favorite punching bag, Fox News, has been the most balanced of all the cable networks in covering the Democratic primary race.

Then the other day, Rendell shot back, asking one reporter if Olbermann “gets checks from the Obama campaign.”

Put aside the fact that Olbermann’s rant on Monday didn’t really speak to Rendell’s assertion that Clinton and Obama get balanced, if not fair, coverage on Fox. Olbermann might want to check in with NBC’s resident Yiddishist, Brian Williams, about the meaning of chutzpah.

Whether or not Fox (Olbermann prefers “Fixed”) News deserves the “most balanced” distinction, what’s indisputable is that Olbermann now presides over the most one-sided anti-Hillary show on all three major cable news networks. These days Olbermann arguably spends more time bashing Clinton than either President Bush or John McCain. And he basically never has a harsh word to say about Barack Obama.

The issue isn’t accuracy: Olbermann hits Clinton hard, but usually above the belt. The problem (if one chooses to see it that way) is that he only goes after one of the two Democratic front-runners. Again, to borrow the Fox paradigm, Olbermann is fair, but not balanced: When the Clinton campaign finds itself under fire, Olbermann sees it as his job to pour on the gasoline; when Obama is feeling the heat, Olbermann moves to put out the flames.

Looking past the hypocrisy issue, is there anything wrong – in the increasingly opinionated world of cable news — with the blatantly anti-Clinton tone of Olberman’s show?

To be honest, I never had much of a problem with his choosing-sides approach when the target was the president. After all, the media is supposed to be keeping watch on the White House, and with so many mainstream outlets falling down on the job, and conservative hosts playing apologist and cheerleader, Olbermann has played an important role.

But now it feels different. In the Obama-Clinton race, Olbermann isn’t checking power — he’s trying to swing the election. And, while liberal attacks on John McCain and conservative attacks on the two leading Dems certainly fall into the same category, playing favorites during the primary season is taking opinionated mainstream journalism to a new high/low. Now we’re not only going to have liberal and conservative shows/networks, we’re going to have them for individual candidates on each side of the aisle? Are there enough shows to go around?

All that said, the real issue isn’t Olbermann, but his role in MSNBC’s overall election coverage and the supporting cast of journalists from ostensibly unbiased media outlets that frequent his show. Olbermann isn’t just a guy with a show – he often plays co-host during debate and election night coverage. To be fair, he does a fairly decent job of toning it down and playing it less crooked in these settings. But, still, why is a blatantly anti-Clinton host sharing the point at a network that still claims to aspire to some standard of balance and objectivity?

Along similar lines, why are the Washington Post and Newsweek willing to pimp out their reporters to a show that is so one-sided? Sure, in print Dana Milbank and Howard Fineman might aspire to play it straight, but Olbermann’s consistently anti-Clinton line of questioning effectively turns them (and their publications) into pawns in his political crusade.

It’s been less than a year since Avraham Burg – former Knesset speaker, Jewish Agency chief, and scion of one of Israel’s most illustrious founding families – shocked his countrymen with some harsh appraisals of the Zionist enterprise (see an abridged English version of the Ha’aretz story that started the trouble here, and a more apologetic take on Burg in the Forward here). Israel’s leftist critics cheered — “Even impeccably credentialed Zionists cannot deny the truth of Israel’s evil!” — while Israelis either jeered or shook their heads in shocked confusion.

On Tuesday, Burg made his first stateside appearance since the controversy. The first thing to be said about the event is that it was long, nearly two hours long, run-down-the-batteries-on-my-MP3-recorder long. And people began drifting out well before it was over.

So nuanced and sophisticated are Burg’s critiques of the Jewish state that he cannot possibly express them in the pithy sound-bites we journalists crave. Instead, each question presented to him occasioned a background statement, a philosophical argument, a cheesy joke or two, and of course a story.

Since Burg won’t do it himself, here — briefly — are the salient points:

• Aliyah has effectively ended, thinking of Israel as a refuge for the Jewish oppressed is no longer meaningful, and Israeli society has therefore lost any sense of grand ideological purpose.
• Israel cannot find a new purpose because the quality of political intellectualizing is so low — a pathology Burg no doubt believes he stands in stark exception to — which is itself a consequence of Israel’s obsession with the Holocaust.
• The Holocaust has become a religion in Israel, traumatizing the society and making it fearful and untrusting. But fear not, for there is something more powerful than trauma — love. (For the record, I checked and that is not a lyric from a Barry Manilow song.)
• Israel should separate church and state, America-style, and move away from the Judaism of parochial concerns towards a universal, humanist Judaism. (Rabbi Sherwin Wine would have been most proud.)

If you still haven’t had enough, here’s some audio of the event.

With shows like “In Treatment,” Israel is finally starting to carry its weight in the U.S.-Israel pop culture relationship. And how do we return the favor? Check out this piece of news from the Forward…

A consortium of Tel Aviv-based producers, talent agents and TV distribution specialists recently announced auditions for the first-ever Hebrew version of the play, which is based on the 2006 Disney Channel movie about teen love ignited during a session of karaoke. Despite its culturally specific setting — an American high school populated by such figures as a popular jock and a competitive drama club tyrant — “High School Musical” proved an international smash hit, viewed by young people in 100 countries and becoming one of the top-selling DVDs of all time. …

The musical will be adapted, appropriately, by someone whose last name means “song” — Smadar Shir, a children’s book author and journalist also responsible for a number of youth-oriented plays. Shir, who is the writer of two weekly columns in the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, has also translated into Hebrew versions of “Aladdin” and “The Little Mermaid,” and the stories of Mark Twain. She’ll have limited creative leeway in adapting her newest project, which, according to contractual agreements with Disney, must hew as closely as linguistically possible to the original.

The student paper at Youngstown State University reports on the record deal signed by 18-year-old Jewish freshman Jonathon Tepper:

Tepper, aka Throwback the Jewish King, has just signed a major record deal to New York’s top independent record label, Affluent Records, which has a few other artists such as Outlawz, Dead Prez and Hood Surgeon.

“It’s an all-star line up, and a perfect fit for me,” said Tepper.

As far as being from Youngstown, Throwback raps that people hate on the Yo’, but he’s proud of where he comes from. In his songs, he focuses on misconceptions of a city back on the rise. …

Tepper describes his rap style as unique. He enunciates his words and embraces stereotypes about Jewish people.

Click here to visit his My Space page and listen to a clip of his music.

No one can accuse the Boston Red Sox and Cleveland Indians of getting complacent after squaring off last fall for the American League pennant. This season both teams are stepping up their game — with kosher hot dogs.

The Boston Herald has the scoop on Fenway Park’s new kosher dog machine:

The home of the Fenway Frank, which claims to sell more hot dogs than any other ballpark in the country, is adding a new option for Jewish fans who adhere to strict kosher dietary laws. A new automated “Hot Nosh” vending machine, to be located in the big concourse under the bleachers, will cook and dispense all-beef, glatt kosher hot dogs in under a minute.

Fenway is the first customer of Wayne Feder’s Hot Nosh Boston LLC. The Brookline company is the New England franchisee of Kosher Vending Industries, a New York supplier of glatt kosher, hot food vending machines.

This season, the Cleveland Jewish News reports, the food folks at what used to be known as Jacobs Field had their act together for opening day:

It took nearly half of last year’s baseball season for rabbinically supervised, strictly kosher hot dogs to be served at Indians games.

This year, Jewish baseball fans can enjoy kosher franks starting with the Tribe’s very first game. …

Ghazi Faddoul, a Lebanese Christian who runs the kosher Subway restaurant at The Mandel Jewish Community Center of Cleveland, started the stand last June with help from Clevelanders Earl Lefkovitz and Tom Sudow. The two men also assisted in launching the stadium’s very first kosher stand in 1998.

Listen to an excerpt of the new piece of Jewish music that Sue Fishkoff reported on yesterday.

The Jewish Museum has a slideshow from the their “Off the Wall: Artists at Work,” a two-week slate of events featuring more than a dozen young artists of various sorts. Jennifer Bleyer did a profile for Nextbook about one of the participants, a Chabadnik-turned-fashion designer named Levi Okunov, who put on a runway show at the museum using scraps of parchment, the dried calfskin that mezuzahs, ketubahs and other holy texts are written on.

Click here to see JTA’s Daniel Sieradski video interview with Okunov.

Israeli visual artist Dov Abramson take a Kabbalistic look at Opening Day of the baseball season in his new work, “Field of Life” (click to enlarge):

The New York Times has a front-page story today on Hamas incitement against Israel and Jews:

In the Katib Wilayat mosque one recent Friday, the imam was discussing the wiliness of the Jew.

“Jews are a people who cannot be trusted,” Imam Yousif al-Zahar of Hamas told the faithful. “They have been traitors to all agreements — go back to history. Their fate is their vanishing. Look what they are doing to us.”

At Al Omari mosque, the imam cursed the Jews and the “Crusaders,” or Christians, and the Danes, for reprinting cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. He referred to Jews as “the brothers of apes and pigs,” while the Hamas television station, Al Aksa, praises suicide bombing and holy war until Palestine is free of Jewish control.

Its videos praise fighters and rocket-launching teams; its broadcasts insult the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, for talking to Israel and the United States; its children’s programs praise “martyrdom,” teach what it calls the perfidy of the Jews and the need to end Israeli occupation over Palestinian land, meaning any part of the state of Israel.

Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.

Plus this clip, from MEMRI, of a puppet show on Hamas television, in which an Arab child tells President Bush that the White House has been turned into a great mosque and then stabs the U.S. leader to death.