I've been getting a lot of hits today for my post about whether Josh Bolten, Bush's chief of staff, is Jewish.
I'm guessing the sudden interest is related to the fact that Obama has now chosen Chicago thug Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. Rahm is Jewish, too, so you can stop your frantic googling right now.
But it turns out that for rabid Obama supporters on the left, being Jewish is NOT A GOOD THING AT ALL. As Omri Ceren explains at Mere Rhetoric (via Ace),
Pro-Carter shill MJ Rosenberg is asking the far left to eschew anti-Semitic attacks on Emanuel. Not because anti-Semitic attacks are wrong per se - what would the contemporary DNC ever do? More because Emanuel is apparently one of those "good Jews" that DKos cretins compare to "Likud German/Jew Fascists" like Joe Lieberman.
(More from Soccer Dad.) In my experience, a lot of liberal Jews think pretty much everyone to the right of them politically is either an anti-semite or a Jesus freak, which is probably about the same thing to them. To me, this is nuts. On the right, I've come across a small number of anti-semites, but I've been astounded at how many philo-semites there are, given that, politically speaking at least, the Jews are not terribly appealing to them.
In contrast, many Jews seem oblivious to the outright hostility toward Israel and, in many cases, hostility directly toward the Jews themselves that radiate from their allies on the left. So the way I see it is that if the Obama presidency, with Rahm as chief of staff, tests anything, it'll be the willingness of Jewish liberals to continue to turn a blind eye toward "progressive" anti-semitism.
And no, I'm not suggesting Obama himself is an anti-semite. But it would be nice if he told his anti-semitic supporters to put it where the sun don't shine.
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