Check out this audio dispatch from Ben Harris, who is one of two JTA reporters at this week’s biennial convention of the Union for Reform Judaism. It’s a politically active, extremely liberal crowd of several thousand Jews — and, not surprisingly they’re buzzing in the hallways about the elections and cheering in the auditoriums about the need to stop any more conservative judges from getting on to the Supreme Court.

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‘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.)

Check out this account of Huckabee’s campaign stop back in October at the house of Jason Bedrick, the first Orthodox Jew to be elected to the New Hampshire State House:

In response to a question about the Middle East from Rabbi Moshe Bleich of the Wellesley-Weston Chabad Center, Gov. Huckabee expressed frustration with Israeli politicians who wanted to give away the Golan Heights and firmly opposed dividing Jerusalem.

When asked about a Palestinian state, Gov. Huckabee stated that he supports creating a Palestinian state, but believes that it should be formed outside of Israel. He named Egypt and Saudi Arabia as possible alternatives, noting that the Arabs have far more land than the Israelis and that it would only be fair for other Arab nations to give the Palestinians land for a state, rather than carving it out of the tiny Israeli state.

Tomorrow the American Jewish Committee will be releasing its annual survey of American Jewish opinion. There’s plenty of interesting stuff in it, especially about the presidential race…

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Here’s the reworked “column” version of my blog post on right-wingers who slam Condi but can’t bring themselves to say a negative word about Bush.

Well, here’s a great example: Aaron Klein, author of “Schmoozing With Terrorists,” writes about U.S. aid in the territories being used to attack Israelis, and blames it all on Rice — as if she doesn’t work for the president.

We know that Christopher Hitchens doesn’t like God or Mother Teresa. So I guess it should come as no surprise that he’s down on Chanukah, too:

The Hasmonean regime that resulted from the Maccabean revolt soon became exorbitantly corrupt, vicious, and divided, and encouraged the Roman annexation of Judea. Had it not been for this no-less imperial event, we would never have had to hear of Jesus of Nazareth or his sect—which was a plagiarism from fundamentalist Judaism—and the Jewish people would never have been accused of being deicidal “Christ killers.” Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism’s bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either. Every Jew who honors the Hanukkah holiday because it gives his child an excuse to mingle the dreidel with the Christmas tree and the sleigh (neither of these absurd symbols having the least thing to do with Palestine two millenniums past) is celebrating the making of a series of rods for his own back. And this is not just a disaster for the Jews. When the fanatics of Palestine won that victory, and when Judaism repudiated Athens for Jerusalem, the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.

From his own spot in the world, all of that makes perfect sense. But Hitchens could use a primer when it comes to the miracle of the oil. Here’s what he has to say:

And, of course and as ever, one stands aghast at the pathetic scale of the supposed ‘miracle.’ As a consequence of the successful Maccabean revolt against Hellenism, so it is said, a puddle of olive oil that should have lasted only for one day managed to burn for eight days. Wow! Certain proof, not just of an Almighty, but of an Almighty with a special fondness for fundamentalists. Epicurus and Democritus had brilliantly discovered that the world was made up of atoms, but who cares about a mere fact like that when there is miraculous oil to be goggled at by credulous peasants?

By emphasizing the miracle of the oil, the rabbis in the Talmud were essentially attempting to write the Hasmonean rulers that Hitchens so detests out of the story. Yes, the rabbis’ narrative is still an anti-Greek one, but even from Hitchens’ perspective, this shift in emphasis should be seen as progress.

Will the defeat of President Hugo Chavez’s broad-ranging constitutional referendum at the polls Sunday stem the tide of Venezuelan Jews leaving the country? JTA’s Larry Luxner speaks from Caracas with JTA Associate Editor Uriel Heilman about the mood among Venezuela’s Jews following the unexpected defeat of Chavez’s referendum.

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Biblical verses most likely to be recited by Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction II (Hat tip: Jewschool)…

Even if one disagrees with today’s editorial in The New York Sun raising questions about the Annapolis conference, the neoconservative newspaper deserves credit on at least one point: It avoids the intellectually dishonest argument advanced by many pro-Bush pundits that Condoleezza Rice, and not the president, is the proper address for criticism of the current U.S. diplomatic push (in fact, the piece doesn’t even mention the secretary of state).

Compare that, for example, to Bret Stephens or Frank Gaffney, who manage to vilify Rice without ever acknowledging that the buck stops with her boss.

Sure Rice is driving the current policy, but Bush knowingly handed her the keys to the car. If Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times is to be believed, Bush is well aware of Rice’s increasing anti-Cheney tendencies — the president has even joked about them:

More often in those years, Ms. Rice used her relationship with Mr. Bush to try to gain control over the national security process as well as two powerful men who drove much of the agenda in the first term, Vice President Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary….

In recent months, Ms. Rice has gone so often to Mr. Bush to push him on diplomacy with Iran and North Korea that he has started to needle her that she expects him to talk to people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the radical Islamist who is president of Iran, or Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader whom Mr. Bush has said he loathes.

“You want me to sit down with Ahmadinejad?” a White House official recalled that Mr. Bush had archly asked Ms. Rice. “Kim Jong-il? Is he next?” The White House official said that Mr. Bush had also taken to calling Ms. Rice “Madame Rice,” as in “Madame Rice, you’re not coming in to tell me that we ought to change our position?”

Bush’s willingness to follow Rice’s advice is no accident. The president is said to reward loyalty and value a sense of intimacy when it comes to advisers — and, on both counts, Rice reportedly fits the bill as much as anyone.

Of course, the same also is true of Bush’s approach to the world — he reportedly tends to personalize foreign policy. Is it so hard to believe that a president who looked into Putin’s soul and saw only happy colors, would decide that Mahmoud Abbas — as opposed to Yasser Arafat — was a man he could trust? Is it so hard to believe that a president who bet his entire presidency on building a stable democracy in Iraq, would decide that it’s within the power of the United States to play midwife to a democratic Palestinian state?

Now throw in the fact that Abbas’ reformist prime minister, Salam Fayyad, is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin — he and Bush were once reportedly seen exchanging the Longhorns’ famous index-finger-and-pinkie salute — and it’s quite easy to imagine that Rice and her boss are on the same page when it comes to the overall goal of pushing for a two-state solution by the end of 2008.

Russia’s Dec. 2 parliamentary elections are shaping up to be the least significant for the country’s Jews in the post-Soviet era. With Vladimir Putin steering the country toward authoritarianism, why does nobody seem to care? JTA Moscow correspondent Matt Siegel talks to JTA Associate Editor Uriel Heilman.

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