Thursday, December 21, 2006

The Chanukah Roundup

In honor of possibly the most blatant example of a holiday receiving a battle-field promotion, I give you a Jewish news roundup!

Joel Stein decries the "war on Chanukah", and announces that Jews are going to fight back:
Until Hanukkah gets its proper respect, we're pulling our singers from Christmas albums. No more Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow. You'll quickly find you don't have many entertainers of your own when you're at Banana Republic listening to that one Kristin Chenoweth album over and over.

You have deployed your most annoying Gentiles against us: John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly. So forget Al Franken. Once we find the alley that Pauly Shore is sleeping in, he'll be singing the dreidel song outside your house. We'll force storeowners to greet you with a "Happy Hanukkah" -- and not the secular version but the one with the "Ch" in front and all the accompanying spittle.

Alan Dershowitz comments on Jimmy Carter's aforementioned refusal to debate him (along with Carter's amazingly hypocritical whine that nobody will debate him).

The Mormons were going to baptize Simon Wiesenthal after his death. After his representatives said "thanks, but not thanks," they agreed to withhold it (via Bitch, Ph.D).

When a Jewish lesbian marries a Muslim girl with a Catholic mother, wild craziness ensues!

All the Conservative Teshuvot (those that passed and those that did not) are now available online. In particular, Rabbi Tucker's opinion is available here, and it is beautiful.

Did you know that Ulysses S. Grant wrote an order expelling all the Jews from his "military department" (an area that included Tennessee and parts of Mississippi and Kentucky)? UNC Law Professor Eric Muller wrote about the sad event, which occurred 144 years ago (amazingly, when Ed Cone first raised the issue, the first thing one of his commenters did was try and defend the action!). Here is a taste from Muller:
Thus, all Jews in the Department of the Tennessee had twenty-four hours to clear out or be arrested. Grant's order applied indiscriminately to all Jews -- men, women, and children; traders and nontraders; recent arrivals and established members of the community. On its face, it applied even to Jewish soldiers in the Union army. Such a military order would not be seen again until General [John] DeWitt evicted [Japanese Americans] from the west coast eighty years later.

Like the west coast Japanese-Americans, the Jews of the Tennessee complied with the military order. Twenty-five hundred Jews desperately began looking for scarce transport up the Mississippi river and out of the reach of Grant's order. Their departure was rushed and traumatic. One surviving account tells of "a baby almost left behind in the haste and confusion and tossed bodily into the boat" and of "two dying women permitted to remain behind in neighbors' care." Another account tells of a group of four Jews in Oxford, Mississippi, whose horse, buggy, and luggage were confiscated shortly before they were sent away by train under guard. When one of them asked the reason for their detention, he was told, "Because you are Jews, and are neither a benefit to the Union or Confederacy."

To his credit, President Lincoln rescinded the order virtually as soon as he heard it.

American Muslims join hands with the Holocaust Memorial, condemn Iran's "Holocaust Conference."

A fascinating look at some of the events of the Nuremberg Trial.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The source where I saw this indicated that Grant was using the venerable Shylock cliche of Jews as speculators. Buying Southerners' cotton kept the Confederacy afloat, so those who did it were regarded as nearly traitorous. At the same time, a large portion of Grant's own troops engaged in cotton selling; it being difficult to pick out the actual wrongdoers, Grant took the traditional scapegoating route of blaming it on the Jews.

And hey now, what's this about American Muslims' condemning Iran's revisionism? I mean, they're Muslims, don't they have to want all the unbelievers dead? Doesn't it say so in the Koran? I heard Daniel Pipes say so and he surely knows what Muslims really think!