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October 11, 2008
Yom Kippur Smear
When Yom Kippur was over I opened up my email and found a Huffington Post article by self-proclaimed “cultural Jew,” Jesse Kornbluth sent by a non-Jewish friend. It was in the form of a public letter addressed to Senator Lieberman’s Rabbis, Rabbi Daniel Cohen of Congregation Agudath Sholom in Stamford, Connecticut and Rabbi Barry Freundal of Kesher Israel Congregation in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC.
Why is Kornbluth doing this? Here’s his bizarre ‘ultimate chutzpah’ pitch:
Sen. Lieberman is, if you will John McCain’s rabbi. So, I thought I would write to you and ask you, as Sen. Lieberman’s rabbis, to talk to Sen. Lieberman about the hatred that the McCain-Palin campaign is encouraging – and the special understanding that we Jews have of how that hatred plays out. Your voices do matter. If Joe Lieberman is the devout Jew he professes to be, you two are the most influential voices he can hear. He’d never listen to me. But to you- how can he turn away?
Congregation Agudath Sholom is Senator Lieberman’s ancestral family synagogue in Stamford, Connecticut. I had the privilege of meeting Rabbi Cohen in late 2006, after my stint in Senator Lieberman’s successful Independent campaign. Read about that experience here. At the time, I had organized a series of lectures in the Nutmeg state for veteran Likud politician, Dr. Uzi Landau, one of the ‘incorruptibles’ among political figures in Israel. Rabbi Cohen impressed me as spiritual leader of this orthodox congregation who had views that resonated with my own vis a vis his famous congregant and support for a change in Israel’s government. Rabbi Cohen, I believe wouldn’t give Mr. Kornbluth the courtesy of a public reply let alone confront the Senator or his wife Hadassah, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, during a Jewish Holy Day. A Holy Day in which fasting is coupled with a public confessional ritual and calls for charity, kindness, and justice.
Kornbluth, a former New Yorker writer has effectively delivered a thinly disguised smear against Senator McCain by insinuating that Senator Lieberman was engaging in support of hate against the ‘other’ meaning Democratic presidential Candidate Barack Hussein Obama. All because of some remark about ‘off with his head’, an alleged possible reference to the democratic candidate by a face in the crowd at a campaign stop caught by the press. Kornbluth does something worse in my view. He conflates this comment to Kristallnacht- the Nazi pogrom against German Jews in which 39 died, hundreds of synagogues were torched, Jewish households rampaged and more than 25,000 Jewish males were sent to concentration camps-some never to return.
Kornbluth goes on in his inevitable hyperbolic trajectory to connect the dots between Kristallnacht and alleged hate speech directed at Obama. He notes:
Jews, above all others, should fear this kind of hate speech. It may start with the demonization of one black man. Then it will go on to greedy Wall Streeters and “Jewish Bankers” (Lehman and Goldman Sachs, perchance) and a “liberal media” owned and controlled by Jews.
So what we have here is the specious thesis that criticizing Obama leads to ‘blood libel’ against the octopus of the international Jewish conspiracy in the Czarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ironically, the Protocols were used by Herr Hitler and his Nazi thugs, who perpetrated the Kristallnacht pogrom. A virulent anti-Semitic forgery that figured prominently in an Egyptian TV series in 2002 played to millions of Arab Muslim in the Middle East as evening entertainment during Ramadan.
Kornbluth tops this off with his absurd request to Rabbis Cohen and Fruendel:
I know I am asking a hard thing of you – to confront Joe Lieberman and ask him to talk to John McCain, and if McCain won’t stop this madness, to call upon Sen. Lieberman to condemn his friend.
This is ultimate chutzpah - to inveigh yourself to the Senator’s spiritual leaders to condemn his long time friend for what (?) the excesses of a face in the crowd. It is a thinly disguised attempt to suggest that criticizing Senator Obama is anti-Semitic. This would include his dalliance with the notorious former anti-Semitic preacher at his former place of worship, Trinity United Church of Christ, Pastor Jeremiah Wright and ‘adviser’, the Rev. James Meeks of the Salem Baptist Church in Chicago.
Unfortunately, we have grown used to the excesses of critics like Kornbluth espousing the specious line that any criticism of Obama is playing the ‘race card.’ Kornbluth, who eschewed engaging in the fasting and solemn rituals of Yom Kippur observed by Senator Lieberman and many American Jews, instead besmirches his Jewish heritage by permitting this extremist screed to be published on this Holy Day known in Hebrew as Yom Ha Din-‘the day of judgment’. By doing so he has been measured and found wanting. He has engaged in a Yom Kippur smear.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jerry Gordon is also a contributing editor at New English Review.
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