July 25, 2008 | 8:35 pm

Rediscovering gangster Jewish roots

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I always thought my gangster roots were on the Italian side of my family. My sister often joked that some distant relative of ours was mobbed up. They weren’t, but considering all the Italians and Jews in my family that came through New York, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone along the way was a nogoodnik. Or a not-so-nogoodnik. Generations removed from Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, the image of Jewish gangsters is more cool than criminal.

Moment magazine devoted this month’s cover story to this topic.

“There were Jews who said, ‘We’re oppressed and we need some tough Jews,’” Jonathan Sarna, the eminent American Jewish historian, told the magazine. “People admired them for being ‘alrightniks,’ for ‘making it’ in America.”

Moment plays this as a new trend, but it’s not. Jews have been writing about their gangster past for more than 30 years, “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America,” “But He Was Good to His Mother ...” and “Tough Jews” among them. The best book on this topic, for the way it blended social history with familial stains, was Eric Konigsberg’s “Blood Relation,” which I blogged about in November. The book, by recounting the thug life of Eric’s great-uncle Kayo Konigsberg, shows that Murder Inc. and gangster Jews were always revered by their own. Here’s what U.S. Rep. Barney Frank said about growing up with the Kongisbergs:

“We loved the fact that he was one of us. I mean, here’s a guy who had—you know, he wasn’t just an accountant like Meyer Lansky. I remember teasing one of your father’s cousins about him. She’d get upset, but most of the Jewish kids I knew were sort of worshipful of Kayo.”

The Kosher Nostra, of course, is not a thing of the past.

July 25, 2008 | 7:18 pm

Keep sweating those evangelical votes, Obama

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Evangelical voice James Dobson

It appears ChristianityToday.com’s survey of evangelicals voters, which showed Barack Obama edging John McCain, was as inaccurate as it was unscientific, at least for Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The latest results from the Quinnipiac Poll found McCain the evangelical favorite by 62 points—78 percent to 16 percent—in Colorado; that’s James Dobson country.

But the poll also showed, as Spiritual Politics notes, that evangelical support for McCain, though still the favorite, was not as overwhelming in the upper Midwest: 60 percent to 27 percent in Michigan, 62 to 30 in Minnesota and 54 to 34 in Wisconsin. Those numbers, though still losers, could set off that “political earthquake” John Green at Pew warned us about.

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July 25, 2008 | 4:11 pm

Why Iran should leave Israel alone

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

From Spiritual Politics

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July 25, 2008 | 3:23 pm

Colson, gay marriage and ‘soft despotism’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

For those who can’t enough of the Christian victimization shtick, Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s chief counsel who found God in prison, says gay marriage (“marriage,” he calls it) is an act of “soft despotism.”

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July 25, 2008 | 2:27 pm

John Hagee’s holocaust

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Christians United for Israel held their annual conference this week—a story I willfully ignored—and it seems leader John Hagee, the megachurch pastor whose 15 minutes as a political powerplayer ended oh-so abruptly in May because of this sermon using theodicy to explain the Holocaust, made a very strange appeal to the memory of the 6 million Jews and millions of other “undesirables.”

The phrase “never again” is one Jews often say when referring to their commitment to prevent another attempt to destroy the Jewish people; some organizations, like Jewish World Watch, have incorporated this message into their mission to prevent genocide anywhere and against anyone. But some folks like to use this phrase for emphasizing a commitment to far more than preventing murder, such as the killing of Hagee’s political career.

At CUFI’s conference, Hagee’s address included this bit of self-pitying:

His routine litany of “Never agains” punctuating pledges to protect the Jews from terrorists, Iran and anti-Semites was rounded out with a new promise Tuesday night: “What will I say the next time I’m asked to endorse a presidential candidate? Never again.”

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July 25, 2008 | 2:05 pm

LA times in Zell Hell

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Spring Street now has a sign welcoming you to Zell Hell.

This banner appeared this morning on the parking structure for the Los Angeles Times, which has gotten thinner, sloppier, shallower and lighter—much lighter—on staff since Sam Zell took over last year. Problems have well outpaced those at the Daily News.

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July 24, 2008 | 9:35 pm

‘Why do people think Jews run Hollywood?’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

My colleague Danielle Berrin asked that question last week of Irv Weintraub, COO of the William Morris Agency. His response:

“I’m not sure I want to answer that question.”

I will. People “think Jews run Hollywood” because it gives folks like Bill Donahue a big bulls-eye for shotgunning blame for the degradation of moral values. “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular ... I like families.  I like children.  They like abortions,” is my favorite utterance from the Catholic League leader.

More cynically, those who consider their communities victims of Hollywood need villains. And Jews have always been an easy target. It doesn’t help that there are, in fact, a disproportionate number of Jews in positions of power in the entertainment industry; there also are a disproportionate number among the bottom feeders just scraping by.

Why?

Weintraub went on to say he was no historian but suggested that maybe—just maybe—Jews were drawn to the arts because of a penchant for creativity. I’d say a bit more emphatically that, Yes, Jews have a 3,000-year history of story telling, a skillset that comes in quite handy in Hollywood. The clearest example of this, obviously, is the Bible, followed, though not too closely, by “The Big Lebowski.”

Based on this tradition, and the fact that the movie business was originally an immigrant industry, it should be no surprise that there is a strong Jewish presence in Tinseltown. Here is how I explained this phenomenon last month in a sarcastically headlined post “Yes, Virginia, there is a Jewish media conspiracy.”

Today’s Hollywood Jews are familial and cultural heirs to the town their ancestors built. Neal Gabler recognized that with his definitive 1988 book “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.” This was not an anti-Semitic text, but a keenly observant cultural history. The big difference between Gabler’s book and, say, those of Kevin MacDonald, is that one offers telling portraits of a peculiar phenomenon while the other blames the protagonists for a conspiracy to corrupt American attitudes.

There is no Jewish plot to control our minds through entertaining, godless propaganda; there is an ancient affinity for telling stories. And, as I’ve mentioned before: If Jews really worked in media to get out a unified message at the expense of their gentile neighbors, they sure do a poor job.

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July 24, 2008 | 6:25 pm

Israel terrorizes Palestinians with super rats

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Israel’s stripper assassins must have been a treat compared to the Jewish state’s new weapon against Palestinians.

See the Jew is much more insidious in his choice of weapon. Palestinian militants and martyrs make Qassam rockets or strap bombs to their chests or hijack bulldozers. Jews poison the well and engineer supernatural rats with supernatural powers and a supernatural hatred for non-Jews.

A ridiculous claim, of course, but that didn’t prevent it from being reported last week by two Palestinian Authority papers, one directly controlled by Mahmoud Abbas’ office. From Palestinian Media Watch, via Yid with Lid.

According to the PA papers, the Israeli-Jerusalem rat is:
1. Immune to rat poison;
2. Aggressive and larger than usual;
3. Unafraid of cats and able to scare them away;
4. Highly fertile—female rat gives birth to 140 babies a year, four times the normal average;
5. Highly selective—Jewish residents of Jerusalem apparently are not affected by these rats.

Israel’s goal, the libelous PA articles accuse, is “to turn the residents’ life into a living hell, forcing them to leave.” Interestingly, the articles do not mention how the rats are trained to differentiate between Jewish and Arab residents of Jerusalem.

You can’t make this stuff up. At least, I couldn’t. Does anybody think this actually helps the peace process? Then again, political expediency has never been the forte of Arabs or Israelis.

The newspaper reports are after the jump:

Read more of this post

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July 24, 2008 | 3:59 pm

The communion controversy continues

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

PZ Myers

I told you Mark Shea wouldn’t have the last word. PZ Myers returns with “The Great Desecration,” a short history of how the transubstantiated body of Christ has been used to incite violence against Jews and other non-Catholics and how he thinks it applies to his call for the public defiling of a communion wafer:

Obviously, it’s not desecration they find disagreeable — it’s the idea that someone would offend their weird sectarian sensibilities. Here’s one from Jack Isaacks that fits the mold.

  Dear Professor Meyers,

  If you REALLY want to do a courageous, revolutionary act, defecate publicly on a copy of the Quran.

  Or do you have the cojones?

  Christians won’t attack you for desecrating a host, but will those wonderful cuddly peace-loving Muslims be as forbearing if you used their book for a toilet?

  Well, how brave are you?

Yeah, right. Catholics won’t attack me, but Muslims will. Never mind that the Catholic League demands that I be fired, thousands of Catholics write to me demanding I be kicked out of the university immediately, and that they send me death threats, both the explicit kind and the vaguely menacing kind. Let’s not forget Webster Cook, who started this all by simply walking back to his seat with a cracker, and now faces censure and possible expulsion from his university. Oh, those Catholics sure are forbearing and tolerant.

I have nothing more to say about this. Let me know if you do.

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July 24, 2008 | 2:46 pm

Americans (allegedly) don’t do atheism

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

The Atheist Handbook's view

Polls consistently find that Americans harbor strong animosity toward atheists, and that Americans would be less likely to vote for an atheist than for a woman, African American, Latino, Catholic, Jew, Muslim or Mormon. (What these polls don’t state, but what I, as a God-fearing Christian, will say, is that the fear, loathing and general suspicion of the godless is not only unwarranted but ungodly.)

“This kind of thing tends to leave Britons either bewildered or terrified,” Nick Spencer wrote on his blog for the London Telegraph. “The US and the UK are two nations divided not so much by a common language as by a common religion. In the former, Christianity is officially absent but unofficially everywhere; in the latter it underpins the entire structure of state but usually dares not speak its name.”

That is an astute, and poetic, observation. Spencer goes on to detail just how intertwined Christianity is with the Amerrican presidency, using as his launching pad the new book by David Domke and Kevin Coe, “The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America.”

Spencer’s lamentations continue:

Domke and Coe’s analysis suggests that the current climate of theo-political rhetoric means would-be presidents do not, in fact, have that many “different ways” open before them now. It is simply inconceivable that Americans would elect a president who refused to genuflect energetically before the altar, any more than they would elect one who failed to do so before the idea of liberty.

But Domke and Coe also sense (as does the political activist Jim Wallis who was in UK last month) that the tide is turning. They put this down to a new evangelical conscience, which is noticing people trafficking, climate change, the AIDS pandemic, and other issues that had somehow slipped their minds before. And they see Rick Warren (see above) as a key mover in all this.

If that is so, those Britons who fear the mixing of God and Caesar might have reason to be a little less panic-stricken today than they were four years ago. And those who actually like to see God get down and dirty with Caesar, but have been depressed by the narrow and ugly way that has happened over recent years, have reason to be cautiously optimistic.

This perspective is essentially a mirror image of how religious American feel when they look at godless Europe. I looked closely at this issue of atheism and the future of religion in America two years ago in this story. Despite what Domke and Coe say about the tide turning, about religion leading the revolution, I find that Christian rhetoric is now more dangerously interwoven with politics than any time during the past eight years, or in American history.

The Bush campaigns of 2000 and, especially, 2004 showed just how powerful this pandering could be. Now everyone else is following the model.

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July 24, 2008 | 4:11 am

Tennis star in Playboy reveals Jesus fish tattoo

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A cropped version of Harkleroad's Playboy pose

Daniel Radosh, author of “Rapture Ready!”, has the skinny on tennis player Ashley Harkleroad, who made headlines recently, not for her play on the court but her agreement to pose for Playboy. She has, and Radosh spotted an odd inking in one of the photos.

It’s a tattoo of the Jesus fish, just above her waistline, and I sure hope this is a first for the magazine.

“In the word-things that accompany the pictures,” Radosh writes on his blog. “Ashley says she got the tat when she was younger, but stands by it. ‘I still believe in God, but God made female athletes beautiful and sexy, and I want to represent that.’”

Oh brother. And I thought putting the Ichthys on your bumper was bad because, as Ben Folds sharply sang, “See that a—hole with the peace sign on his license plate/ Giving me the finger and running me out of his lane.” God is definitely not happy.

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July 24, 2008 | 2:08 am

Obama visits Western Wall

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Obama at the wall (Photo: AFP)

It’s Thursday morning in Jerusalem. Do you know where your Democratic U.S. presidential candidate is?

As evidenced by the photo here, Barack Obama was at the Western Wall, paying the obligatory visit to the remnant of the Second Temple. No trip to Israel would be complete without a visit to the wall, and no trip to the wall would be complete without a quiet prayer being interrupted by the cacophony of some protester, this one shouting, “Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale! Obama, Jerusalem is not for sale!”

Seriously, he’s got to be wondering what it takes to catch a break. (Probably not this.)

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