Be Kind to Your Hoof-footed Friends: for a cow could be somebody's mother We Jews just love to beat ourselves up. We can't even get depressed without feeling guilty about it. This weekend is Tisha b'Av, the one time of year when Jews get to have a good old-fashioned bitching session. We weep and wail and curse at the miserable treatment of Jewish people throughout history: the destruction of both Temples, the expulsion from Spain, the Nazis.

Historians--at least, those historians who sport peyes and streimels and use the Chumash as a source text--say that all of these Jewish catastrophes happened on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. That's today, for those keeping track. The rub, though, is that Judaism is pretty clear on why these things happened: because Jews screwed up.

The first temple was destroyed because Jews worshipped idols, slept around, and killed people. The second temple was destroyed because Jews were feeling too much hate toward their neighbors. The Holocaust happened because...well, whatever we did wrong there, it must have been pretty bad. I guess it takes a Chief Rabbi of Israel to explain such a thing.

Pretty rough, this idea of Jewish karma. "Shit happens. But when it happens to you, you must have sinned."

So how might we avoid sin and the catastrophe it brings? Surely the wisdom of our "elders" can help us out here, right? Not necessarily. Jewish scripture is clear: God will punish us for repeating the sins of our elders.

Which brings me to the Agriprocessers scandal, in which the Orthodox Union certified a splendidly profitable but ethically abominable slaughterhouse run by Orthodox Jews.

Anyone who opposes the pointless torture of animals will agree that Orthodox Jews ought not use meat hooks to rip out the throat of cattle before leaving the animals to slowly bleed to death. Anyone who cares about this country's problem with illegal immigration will agree that Orthodox Jews ought not forge immigration documents in order to ruthlessly exploit undocumented Mexican workers, including children (one federal official called the mistreatment of workers at this Orthodox-certified facility "medieval.")

You don't have to be a Jew to recognize that the whole affair is a hillul hashem--a pitiful public disgrace in which Judaism and Jewish values are humiliated before all Americans, Jews and non-Jews alike. Orthodox Union President Stephen Savitsky might as well have purchased a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl, and broadcast himself shitting atop a copy of Pirkei Avot, the Talmud's foremost work of Jewish ethics.

For non-Orthodox Jews, the coincidence of this year's Tisha b'Av and the Agriprocessors scandal should serve as a wake-up call. Judaism tells us that a good, safe, and honorable future for the Jewish people is ours to make. To create that future, we must honor the principles of the Jewish tradition; in so doing, we must not defer to the false authority of those who claim to be our "elders," but whose behavior desecrates the same Jewish tradition they claim to uphold.

Let's start with this: After this year's Tisha b'Av, boycott kosher meat certified by the Orthodox Union. Just stop buying it altogether. Instead, buy the humane, eco-kosher meat recommended by the Shalom Center. It'll be better for you, and it may be better for the future of the Jewish people.

As Michelle Obama continues her "make-over" tour, jumping from an appearance on The View's coffee klatch to the cover of glossy Us Weekly (story title: "Why Barack Loves Her"), it's clear that we haven't really progressed much in the past two decades. Educated, outspoken, potential first-ladies frighten Americans today as much as they did when "scary feminist" Hillary Rodham Clinton first blazed the path from the corner office to the campaign trail.

Voters are suspicious of influential spouses—period (think Eleanor Roosevelt or Bill Clinton during the primaries). Still, every election is different and this one has the special spice of race. Though Barack Obama is the first black candidate on a major party ticket, he has one advantage that his wife does not—he's the bi-racial son of an African immigrant, while she is the daughter of African-American parents descended from slaves. And research demonstrates that white people tend to favor black immigrants over African Americans whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years.

Prominent researchers like Nancy Foner, George Fredrickson, and Mary Waters, who study the integration patterns of black immigrants, have observed that white people seem more at ease with black immigrants than they do with other African Americans. Their research notes that black immigrants are usually described as "more polite, less hostile, more solicitous, and easier to get along with." Some of this is likely due to real cultural or socioeconomic differences (for example, Africans who immigrate to the U.S. tend to be highly educated, on average). However, there's no getting around the fact that we live in a country with a profound history of racial turmoil and that prejudice against African Americans persists in contemporary society.

The "preference" for black immigrants over other African Americans is perhaps most pronounced on our nation's prestigious college campuses, where a controversial debate has erupted about the overrepresentation of black students from immigrant backgrounds (as opposed to those whose ancestors have been here for hundreds of years). In the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Education, researchers at Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania published findings from surveys given to 1,051 black freshmen at 28 selective colleges. They found that 27 percent of African-American students were first or second generation immigrants, which is more than double the national average for all blacks ages 18-19. The percentage of immigrants was even more pronounced at the four Ivy League schools included in this study (Princeton, Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania), where 41 percent of students were first or second generation immigrants. These numbers do not include international students who identify as black.

Why are black immigrants so overrepresented on selective campuses? While it's true that black immigrants are more likely to have higher grades and test scores (as I noted, their parents tend to be more educated), the authors of the study also conclude that admissions officers may be subconsciously selecting applicants with the "sociable qualities" that they more readily perceive in immigrants over other African-American students. We can't be certain of the degree to which this bias may play a role in college admissions decisions, but it's also hard to ignore previous research that demonstrates that white people find black immigrants more "likeable."

In researching my book, Fat Envelope Frenzy, I followed five different students navigating the selective college admissions process. One of the students was Ethiopian-American, grappling with the implications of his heritage on affirmative action policies. He often talked about how he couldn't relate to the other African-American students at his Memphis high school, but he also emphasized that he didn't think that race was such a big deal. "When was the last time someone was awarded a Nobel Prize because of their race?" he once asked me, rhetorically.

If only it were that simple. It would be nice if science was objective, but the ugly truth is that scientists have contributed to racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and every other possible prejudice throughout history. Sure, no one is given a Nobel Prize simply because they are white, black or brown. But that didn't stop James Watson, who won the Nobel for his work on DNA, from claiming that black people are "less intelligent" than white people just last year.

Though Barack Obama has suffered his fair share of background-based biased attacks (He's a Muslim! He hates Jews! He'll let Iran nuke Israel!), until the Jeremiah Wright hullabaloo, he was thought of as "not black" or "not black enough." Even with her two Ivy League degrees and Jackie O hair-do, there was never that kind of debate over Michelle's racial identity. The barely restrained racism directed at her in the press is practically old news, from the covert conspiracy theories of "respectable" writers like Christopher Hitchens—who basically blamed Michelle for the Wright controversy because she wrote her 1985 Princeton undergraduate thesis about "Princeton Educated Blacks and the Black Community"—to the total tackiness of Fox News referring to her as Barack's "baby mama."

With her South Side upbringing and dark complexion, Michelle is "black enough"—unlike her husband—and maybe that's part of the reason that she isn't as popular.

It was from an obsessive Darwin-defender that I learned of the Anti-Defamation League's attack on the theatrical documentary Expelled, for "misappropriat[ing] the Holocaust." This guy is constantly emailing me. He warned that the ADL had just "issued a terse press release today condemning the equation of ‘Darwinism' with Nazism in Expelled. How can you call yourself a religious Jew and still believe in such Fundamentalist Protestant Christian nonsense like Intelligent Design?"

I thanked my email correspondent for a good laugh. The idea that, having defended Expelled's thesis concerning Hitler's intellectual debt to Charles Darwin, I would now feel chastised and repentant because of a statement from the ADL, an organization for which I have not a feather's weight of respect! This was rich stuff.

Just to be clear, however: Expelled doesn't equate Darwinism and Hitler. That basic point was also missed by Professor Sahotra Sarkar, who published a confused attack piece on me here on Jewcy. Sarkar attributed to me the view, "If you believe in the theory of evolution, you are an anti-Semite" -- something that, obviously, I would have to be a fool to write or believe.

Dealing primarily with the academic suppression of Darwin-doubting scientists on campuses around the country, Expelled only spends about 10 minutes on the Hitler-Darwin connection. But it draws upon a solid, mainstream body of scholarship by the chief Hitler biographers and others.

Undeterred, the ADL wailed that "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness."

Much the same view has been propounded elsewhere. Once again here at Jewcy, Jay Michaelson seemed to argue that all science is by definition value-neutral: "Last I checked, Hitler also made use of automobiles. Indeed, he based a lot of ideas on militarism and machines; does that mean technology is morally wrong? Should you turn off your computer right now?"

No, Jay, there are obvious differences between Darwinian theory and auto and computer technology. Most important, the latter make no claims to answering ultimate questions, like how life originated, from which ethical corollaries are naturally drawn.

Auto and computer technology are also proved reliable every day by our experience. But no one has ever reported seeing a species originate in the manner described in Darwin's Origin of Species - not now, not in the fossil record, not ever.

More interesting than these observations is the hypocrisy of the ADL's outburst: "Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan."

It's funny how when the subject of conversation is Darwinism, then Hitler needed no one particular inspiration. But when the conversation shifts from Darwinism to - oh, I don't know - Christianity? Ah, then suddenly the genealogy of Nazism becomes eminently traceable.

One of the ADL's main fundraising technique has long been to scare Jews by demonizing Christianity. The group accordingly isn't shy about tracing the genealogy of the Holocaust back to the New Testament. In an essay on the 40^th anniversary of Nostra Aetate, for example, Rabbi Gary Bretton-Granatoor, director of interfaith affairs wrote:

"The anti-Judaism that begins in the New Testament was transformed through the admixture of political, economic and sociological prejudice into the anti-Semitism of modernity. This reached its ugly and inhuman nadir during World War II with Hitler's Final Solution for the Jewish people."

Blaming the earliest Christian writings for setting off a chain of influences resulting in the Holocaust evokes little outrage in the liberal Jewish community. Visitors to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for instance, are greeted by a film, Anti-Semitism, purporting to uncover the "religious root of this phenomenon, the pervasive anti-Jewish teachings that evolved from overly literal readings and misreadings of New Testament texts."

Yet when Hitler successfully sold his ideology of hate to the German people in his bestselling tract Mein Kampf, he phrased his argument not in Christian terms but in biological, Darwinian ones.

Ignoring Hitler's evolutionary rhetoric, of course, some commentators brandish a famous quote from the same book -- "by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." They don't realize that Hitler was referring not to the God of the Bible but to Nature and her iron laws, as his preceding sentence clearly indicates.

In a curious irony, the modern paperback edition of Mein Kampf, available in any Barnes & Noble, includes an Introduction by - guess who? None other than the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman. Did he, I wonder, even read the book?

To be the first African-American president, Barack Obama needs to be seen as a uniter and not a divider on race. Much of the public excitement over Obama is rooted in the hope that a black president will propel the U.S. to a new era of racial harmony and color blindness. The controversy over Obama’s longtime pastor, Reverend Wright, has threatened to dampen that excitement, and therefore derail Obama's candidacy.

Yesterday, Obama sought to alleviate these concerns in his “race speech.” This may be his most important speech since his endorsement of John Kerry for president at the last Democratic national convention. And Obama delivered it with all his eloquence and grand vision. He expressed the need to focus on issues that indeed unite Americans of all races and socio-economic classes. Obama is correct that,

“We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies. We can do that. But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

Yes, this can happen, but it should be avoided. Obama is uniquely positioned to help us move past the “distractions,” to move past race as the divisive issue. And yet, as far as I can tell, he has no interest intention of making that happen if it requires anything more than pretty words.

Obama talked about those issues that affect all of us. He talked about the issues affecting the black community. He addressed anti-Zionism. But he avoided explication of those issues that affect only some others: whites. The fact is, Obama tolerated a man who is racist as his spiritual mentor. For a very long time. Until the public made him stop.

If this is causing him problems in the Democratic primary, how much more so will it be a problem in the general election if he is the Democratic candidate? He can’t merely explain himself by expatiating on the history of discontent and suffering that afflicted and still afflicts the American black community. That will simply not suffice. Not now. Obama tried to play one race card to knock out another race card, noting,

“I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Bullshit. We don’t choose our grandmother. But we do choose our spiritual leaders. Now Obama needs to offer something substantial. He needs to prove that his disagreement with his pastor is not mere sentiment and phrasing, but real policy differences. He needs to prove he truly wants to move America past its racial divisions.

To do that, Obama—at least once he has the Democratic nomination—needs to categorically reject racially based affirmative action programs. He needs to give that to whites if he is to defeat McCain. He needs to prove to whites that he feels for them not only as Americans, but also as white Americans. White Americans who are so overwhelmingly against affirmative action that the social left is resorting to devious machinations to knock referendums on the matter off state ballots rather than submit to the will of the voters . For good reason. Heck, even the famously liberal Jewish community swerves right on affirmative action.

Obama needs to be whites’ champion too—specifically against the discriminatory policies against them. Anything less will fail to dispel the shadow of racism and contempt cast onto his campaign by his pastor. Anything less will prove insufficient to win the trust of enough whites to win the presidency.

Obama and Wright: BFFs?The solutions offered by conservative commentators to Barack Obama’s existential crisis have been conspicuous in their shallowness. Unlike Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Victor Davis Hanson is no fake scholar; Hanson has intellectual heft. Yet he proposed that "all Obama would have to do is apologize, quit the church, and begin talking about the issues."

How about admitting himself to rehab, or, even better, expiating on Oprah? (I read on the Los Angeles Times’ blog that Oprah, wise woman that she is, had long ago quit Trinity United Church of Christ for reasons that evaded Obama, her protégé.)

No, I give Obama credit. His reaction to the nation-wide reaction to Rev. Wright’s fulminating—everywhere on full display—was anything but shallow. It was, however, profoundly disturbing.

Obama began his “More Perfect Union” oration with perfunctory praise for the American founding, before moving on to the issue that looms largest for him and for Rev. Wright: the sin of slavery.

Accused of decontextualizing the message uttered by Obama’s mentor, rightist critics of the Rev. Wright have been subjected to a coruscating critique—Wright’s vile, vociferous, overwhelming hatred of whites did not, apparently, reflect the man’s mission.

I hereby accuse the man who may become president of reducing the greatest revolution in history—politically and philosophically—to the eternal Mark of Cain all whites must seemingly bear: slavery.

Obama situated his own mission firmly on the civil war and civil rights continuum—in this respect, he would be continuing “the long march of those who came before us.” This is not the universal philosophical route carved by the American Founders, the followers of the Lockean tradition of natural rights. Obama may be more gentrified than the vulgar Rev. Wright. However, by harking back to slavery, he has expressed the very particularism that is so disturbing about his mentor’s mindset.

Crime-related fears: A line no one should cross? Leveled at innocent white Americans, race is like stigmata. Lest modern-day whites fail to welt up and bleed at the mention of slavery, Obama, like other custodians of consensus in our culture, hammered home that he is “married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters.” White Americans who’ve come out in droves for Obama deserve better.

So does Obama’s (white) grandma. He tells us he loves her with all his rather intense being. But he considers that she too is marred by racism for “once confessing her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”

It is a fear rooted in fact, but Obama conflates it with racism. FBI and Justice surveys repeatedly show that, as Patrick J. Buchanan has written, “violent interracial assault, rape and murder [are] to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.”

It is, moreover, not racist to consider aggregate group characteristics—provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches—in how one invests precious scarce resources, to wit, one’s life and property. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decision in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities.

Obama’s grandmother was no different. Had she failed to treat individual blacks on their merit, he’d be justified in labeling her a racist. More material, if Obama brands his own grandmother a racist for failing to suppress a visceral reaction borne of the reality of crime, one hates to think of how he’d view ordinary Americans who “transgress” in this manner.

In Obama’s America, you had better button up about the “color of crime.”

Cool hunter: Ferraro In this context, Obama’s indirect swipe at Geraldine Ferraro rates a mention. The former vice presidential candidate suggested that the Senator would not be where he is if he were white. Indulgently, Obama has taken this to mean that Ferraro implied his “candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action.” Wrong. Ferraro was pointing to the coolness of being black in America and the considerable leverage that identity affords those who cultivate it. What better proof of that than Obama’s cult like following? Obama’s “More Perfect Union” address perfectly demonstrates that he has embraced this politicized racial identity, because to do so is smart; because in America, black is beautiful.

Obama continued in this fashion to expound on the defining issue that distorts his perspective as it does Rev. Wright’s: the alleged “racial injustice in this country.” “[S]o many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today,” he intoned, “can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

My family tree was truncated by an event far more fatal than was slavery: the Holocaust. I do not carry this legacy with me. I blame only those who planned and executed the Final Solution, mostly long dead. Members of my family have never ascribed their misfortunes and misdeeds to that contemporary calamity. They’ve owned their failings. Ditto most Jews I know.

Speaking of whom, Obama further minimized Wright’s wickedness by postulating that many of us “have heard remarks from [our] pastors, priests, or rabbis with which [we] strongly disagreed.” I have never attended a synagogue in which the rabbi boiled with racial bile as does Rev. Wright. In fact, my favorite rabbi, my father, Rabbi Ben Isaacson, was an anti-apartheid activist.

Obama did concede that “the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial.” But since he stopped there, allowing only that some of Wright’s vitriol was “wrong, distorted and divisive,” let me dilate on what’s missing from Obama’s formulation: what Americans need to take away from Rev. Wright’s words is not this or the other political message. Some of the pastor’s statements have a core of truth; others are purely phantasmagoric. Wright’s words are not isolated expressions; they constitute a worldview, a belief system—a rank racist belief system.

Americans need to ponder this: How and why did Obama become spiritually enmeshed with an impious pastor who adheres to such a philosophy? Obama’s Speech From Slavery explains it all.