In today’s Times, there was a profile of rightwing radio host Michael Savage that made something of his Jewishness. Turns out his real name is Weiner and he has a picture of his bar mitzvah in a glass case. “Tell that to my Muslim friends," he taunts. In yesterday’s Times, by contrast, there was a book review of a biography of Richard Perle that while delving into the lives of the neocons said nary a word about Jewishness.
Religion is everywhere in the discourse right now. Romney’s Mormonism, Huckabee’s evangelism. The media encourage us to discuss the importance of personal religious belief endlessly when it involves Christians.
Today I was listening to public radio in New York and host Brian Lehrer was interviewing Zev Chafets, the reporter for the Times Magazine who elicited the "Satan/Jesus" insult of Mormons by Huckabee. Lehrer took calls from various Christians about their beliefs, and Chafets held forth on the weakness of the evangelical Christian church in Connecticut and the likely controversy surrounding Barack Obama’s church in Chicago. At one point Lehrer said that many American Jews feel strongly about Israel, but they quickly moved away from that issue. There was no mention of Chafets’s Zionism; he once worked for Menachem Begin, pioneer of Israel’s settlements policy, and last year wrote a book celebrating the alliance of right wing Christians and Zionists in supporting Israel. On a later segment, when a reporter with an Indian name described the environmental hazards of Christmas trees, Lehrer said, "Now you’re a Hindu"–you didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas. She cheerfully answered.
Then tonight on Chris Matthews, Andrea Mitchell and Howard Fineman, who I believe are both Jewish, held forth on the significance of Huckabee’s Christmas ad. Mitchell seemed excited to point out that the music playing in the background of the ad is "Silent Night." Hold the presses!
I don’t mind interrogating public Christians about their beliefs. The imbalance is that Jews are rarely if ever interrogated about the role of their beliefs–even as The Israel Lobby has become a central issue in our subterranean politics. The reason Jews aren’t quizzed about this is, in fairness, because it’s a can of worms. Many of the reporters reporting on Christians are Jewish– four of them, in the two shows I heard today. That’s a position of incredible power. Talking about their own Jewishness would be squeamish-making and difficult and would expose the incredible numbers of Jews in the media (I know: a canard). So meanwhile the cultural/political significance of Jewish belief in our public life, on issues from stem-cell research to the occupations, goes unexamined.
