Abe gives the speech at this year’s Y.U. graduation… (more…)

TMZ

Reality television star/tattoo artist Kat Von D raised some eyebrows this past week, when news surfaced that the illustrated woman had sent her former Israeli-born employer, Ami James, an autographed photo some months ago bearing a swastika and the invective “burn in hell Jewbag.”

James’ tattoo parlor is the subject of The Learning Channel’s popular reality program Miami Ink. The show propelled the 26 year-old Von D (born Katherine Von Drachenberg) to stardom and landed her her own spin-off series, LA Ink.

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Just to recap: On Monday night, in a debate with Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza, Lou Dobbs accused the ADL of being an “absolute advocate group for open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens.” Then he took another shot:

Well, on Thursday night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann fired back, giving his daily “Worst Person in the World” award to Dobbs.

Southern Poverty Law Center

The Intelligence Report, the publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which covers all things racist all the time, has a fascinating article on Michigan State University’s Young Americans for Freedom club. According to the SPLC, it is the country’s only university sanctioned student group that is also listed as a hate group.

The MSU-YAF was reportedly simply a fairly right-wing conservative group, until MSU junior Kyle Bristow became its chairman in 2006.

Since then Bristow, according to the Intelligence Report, has pushed it over the racist edge.

In November 2006, the group held a “Straight Power” demonstration in Lansing to protest proposed local legislation to protect gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Protesters carried signs reading “End Faggotry” and “Go Back in the Closet,” according to the IR.

The group has also held such patriotic events as “Catch an illegal immigrant day” and a “Koran Desecration” competition.

Here’s the kicker: Bristow and other group members like to wear black cowboy hats, which means if you’re at MSU’s campus and looking for MSU’s Chabad rabbi, you might go terribly, terribly wrong.

In the midst of an on-air debate Monday night with Janet Murguia, an immigrants’ rights activist from the National Council of La Raza (which recently launched a campaign to combat hate speech against immigrants), CNN’s Lou Dobbs called the Anti-Defamation League “a joke” and an “absolute advocate group for open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens.”

The ADL, which was cited by Murguia as “an outstanding organization,” has previously chided Dobbs for “spread[ing] false propaganda about how immigrants are harming the United States.”

The ADL has yet to comment on Dobbs’ remarks.

Video here. Transcript here.

(Hat tip to Greg Siskind.)

‘Tis the season for the war against the war on Christmas, so we weren’t surprised to receive a press release from the Catholic League’s president, Bill Donohue, listing about a dozen examples of “multicultural monsters” censoring holiday displays. What did catch our eye, however, was this item on the list: “A Jewish public official in Wisconsin wants to rename the state Capitol Holiday Tree the Christmas Tree, but is being opposed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.”

The Catholic League was talking about Marlin Schneider, a state representative from Madison – the very same Marlin Schneider who went to bat for naval veterans demanding a congressional investigation into Israel’s attack on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 war.

Hmmm.

As it turns out, Schneider is not Jewish.

But he does like Jews, which is why he was so baffled by all of the hoopla over his efforts on the U.S.S. Liberty issue:

The Liberty veterans believed that the attack on their ship was deliberate and not friendly fire, and that it had been covered up by the United States Navy and the State Department for years because of fear of reprisals by influential people who would bring down any politician with the audacity even to ask questions about the attack. Some of the people who later talked to me both within and outside our own capitol warned me to beware of massive political contributions against me and even potential assassination. I laughed that off because I have never been anti-Israel and, in fact, the people who got me to run for office in the first place in 1970 were Jewish constituents whom I admired because in the 1950s they had taken on Sen. Joseph McCarthy right here in central Wisconsin. Moreover, one of my former assistants was the daughter of a rabbi incarcerated at Buchenwald who now works for a Jewish organization in New York City. I also thought that a lowly state legislator was too small a potato for anyone really to care much about.

It turns out that the Catholic League misread this story, which identifies Schneider’s pro-Christmas Tree spokesman, as a Jew:

“A rose is a rose is a rose,” said Schneider spokesman Michael Schoenfield in the article. “Whatever you call it, it is going to be a Christmas tree, so call it what it is.”

While opponents to the resolution said by using the word “Christmas,” it is offensive to non-Christians, Schoenfield said he disagrees.

“As a Jew, I have a problem calling it a holiday tree,” he said in the article. “It’s not my holiday.”

While we’re on the topic … Schneider from “One Day at a Time”:

Jew or not a Jew? I’d say no. But that was actor Pat Harrington Jr. sitting at Larry David’s seder table in Season 5, Episode 7 of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” (Thanks to my wife for that pickup.)

For those of you who read through my entire Q & A with Abe Foxman, this will be hard to believe: There was actually some stuff that didn’t make it in. One line was his claim that James Traub and The New York Times Magazine had tried to undercut his credibility by comparing him to Al Sharpton.

“It’s tempting to compare Abe Foxman with Al Sharpton, another portly, bellicose, melodramatizing defender of ethnic ramparts,” Traub wrote in his profile of Foxman last January. “But you never feel that Foxman is admiring his own performance, as you do with Sharpton.”

The P.S./punch line to all of this? Foxman and Sharpton issued a joint statement last week “regarding the series of recent displays of nooses and swastikas in our community”:

The recent epidemic of nooses and swastikas appearing in various places in our communities are acts of hate and are intended to intimidate and instill fear. Such acts are despicable, and we call upon all people of good will – of all races, religions and ethnicities – to stand up and say such acts will not be tolerated.

Together we call for swift passage of proposed legislation to modify the existing New York state law which prohibits the depiction of a swastika on someone’s property, to similarly prohibit the public display of a noose with the intent to threaten or harrass. Nooses, like swastikas, are remnants from a tragic period of history, and the impact of their display still resonates deeply in our souls and in our communities. They cry to their intended targets, “You still do not belong!”

We must encourage an open and honest examination of the underlying hatred and potential for violence that these recent rash of incidents represent. They are attacks against not just a person or a group but against democracy and pluralism. We must use these incidents to educate people—especially our youth—about the consequences of racism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of bigotry and prejudice.

If the National Jewish Democratic Council is so steamed over Ann Coulter’s saying that Jews need to be perfected by embracing Christianity, then why has it released a cartoon mocking the religious views of GOP presidential hopeful and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee?

Yes, as the NJDC notes in its accompanying press release, back at a debate in May, Huckabee raised his hand when the candidates were asked if any of them did not believe in evolution.

So what?

Huckabee was asked a question and he answered. It’s not as if he said it in the context of advancing legislation that would ban the teaching of evolution or require the teaching of Creationism.

Is the mere belief in something other than evolution now grounds for disqualifying a person from the White House?

Even if you think the answer to that question should be yes, why is it kosher to mock the guy’s religious beliefs?

If all that weren’t enough, as it turns out, the NJDC is not only mocking his religious beliefs — it’s distorting them. On at least two occasions, Huckabee has clarified that by answering no to evolution, he was rejecting the idea of a Godless creation process (see two clips below). Is the Earth billions of years old? Are human beings descended from primates? Maybe, but then God was directing the process, he says. And, either way, he asked, what does that have to do with being president?

One can certainly quibble with a view of evolution that puts God in the driver’s seat, but then you’re quibbling with what I suspect is a mainstream view among Americans of various political and religious stripes.

Laura Kaufman, the voice of ‘Obama Girl,’ gets all Jewey in her takedown of Ann Coulter.

The public editor of The New York Times, Clark Hoyt, recently gave a real spanking to the Sunday magazine and Deborah Solomon over her approach to the weekly “Questions For” feature. Next time he has the magazine on the brain, maybe he could get to a question that’s been bugging me for months: Does the NYT Magazine have a Jewish problem?

I wouldn’t normally put it that way, but the first troublesome item to catch my attention was the January 14 profile by James Traub titled “Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem?”

Next was Ian Buruma’s February 4 “Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue.” And, finally, “Orthodox Paradox,” Noah Feldman’s much-discussed July 22 lament about being cut like a foreskin from his high school alumni newsletter on account of his marriage to a non-Jew.

All three articles contained a Jews-should-get-over-it-already bias: Traub’s piece was a critique of Abe Foxman’s crying “gevalt” over anti-Semitism, with the underlying message that the Jewish community in general needs to stop stifling debate on Israel. Buruma basically told American Jewish organizations to stop picking on Tariq Ramadan, a controversial Muslim scholar whose chance to teach at Notre Dame fell through because the State Department would not give him a visa. Feldman portrayed any effort by Orthodox institutions to uphold a communal taboo against intermarriage as a primitive obstacle to “reconciling the vastly disparate values of tradition and modernity.”

Of course, harping on bias in the NYT Magazine is like complaining about chocolate chips in a Toll House cookie. If you expect straight cookie, then stick to the newspaper — the magazine is a place for writers to open up, both in terms of space and voice.

Still, creative freedom doesn’t mean creative license. Each of these stories either danced up to or crossed the line on pertinent facts — in a way that served to bolster the writer’s agenda. In at least one case, the journalistic misdeed was serious enough for the public editor to urge one Jewish organization to write a letter to the editor — which the magazine then failed to print.
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