But when South Park finishes its improbable run, future generations will view it as an incomparable document of its time. The show—arguably more sustained in both relevance and quality than its animated contemporaries The Simpsons and Family Guy—will endure because South Park manages the binary requisites for cultural longevity: it succeeds in explaining its era and, more importantly, the show has heart.

The tragedy of South Park is that it remains culturally defined by specific controversies. In a 2006 two-part episode, the writers attempted to feature animated images of the Islamic prophet Mohammed to protest censorship in the wake of the Danish cartoon scandal (Comedy Central blocked them out after receiving death threats). What was overshadowed by the episode’s controversial message were jokes the writers made about its rival Family Guy. As with many other episodes, the broader context remained unexamined and the show, which is consistently a thoughtful and equally-offending American conversation, was dismissed for its lowbrow flourishes.

With the Jews, it’s no different. While the show’s detractors see only anti-Semitism (or the myriad boundary lines of identity politics), many fail to even investigate the extremely blunt points the show attempts to make, which often stem from topical real life. Consider Kyle Broflovski, the major Jewish character, who was actually created in the image of the show’s co-creator Matt Stone.

In interviews, the Jewfro-ed Stone cites his experience growing up as the only Jewish kid in his predominantly Christian hometown of Conifer, Colorado. Accordingly, the character Kyle (whom Stone voices) is also Jewfro-ed and shares Stone’s birthday on the show. Kyle is outspoken, morally righteous, and often insecure about his place adrift in the Midwest. Fearing the worst about his brother Ike’s impending bris, Kyle helps him escape. When the school’s most unpopular kid is revealed to have no Facebook friends, Kyle befriends him, losing everything in the process.

In an episode early in the first season, South Park covers the War on Christmas controversy that dominated the news cycles in the late 1990s. For the sake of tolerance, citizens of the town attempt to wash out religion from the school’s Christmas pageant. Much of the episode is a treatise on the life of an American Jewish family in a place where Jews are scarce, especially for Kyle, a Jewish kid struck between belonging and not.

Kyle’s ridiculous song “A Lonely Jew on Christmas” is high on sentimentality and an insider brand of exlusion. When Kyle’s stereotypically Jewish mother Sheila (who in the episode becomes the target of a once-famous song about her particularly Jewish obstinacy; the Estonian version will blow your mind) argues that the emphasis on Christianity in the school play offends the Jewish community, a teacher replies by shouting back, “You are the Jewish community!” It’s hard to imagine that this line and its specific verisimilitude could work its way into an episode of the show without some authentic experience behind it.

But the approach to South Park’s Jewish themes comes most often through Kyle’s confrontations with his foil Eric Cartman, the show’s best known and most incendiary character. Consider this amazing collection of (just some) of Cartman’s anti-Semitic utterances throughout the series. In the course of this minute-plus clip, Cartman uses the word Jew as a noun, adjective, and verb. (A note for novices: The most pernicious of the utterances in this clip is during an episode in which Cartman pretends to have Tourette’s Syndrome so he can say whatever he wants and still seem noble.)

While this compilation would no doubt give Abe Foxman shortness of breath (the accompanying user comments enabled by this clip are also wildly problematic), these moments isolated from their context don’t show Kyle fighting back, a microcosm for the shortchange the show receives from worried parents and critics.

Then, of course, there is the episode when the town is about to be flooded and Cartman is willing to save Kyle’s life if Kyle hands over the bag of Jew gold that “all Jews carry around their necks.” Kyle tries to tell Cartman he’s insane, but Cartman persists. Kyle then produces a bag from around his neck and Cartman calls it out for being the decoy bag of Jew gold that every Jew carries. Rather than give him the real bag, Kyle throws into the maelstrom below. It’s funny. You have to see it.

Previously on Network Jews:

Ziva David, the ass-kicking Mossad agent on CBS’s naval drama NCIS

Rachel Berry, the overachieving Jewish superstar-in-training on Fox’s Glee

Maurice Levy, the shyster lawyer on David Simon’s HBO show, The Wire

Adam Chandler is a contributing editor at Tablet Magazine. He Tweets at @AllMyChandler.

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“The Catcher in the Rye” is a sympathetic portrait of a boy who refuses to be socialized which has become (among certain readers, anyway, for it is still occasionally banned in conservative school districts) a standard instrument of socialization. I was introduced to the book by my parents, people who, if they had ever imagined that I might, after finishing the thing, run away from school, smoke like a chimney, lie about my age in bars, solicit a prostitute, or use the word “goddam” in every third sentence, would (in the words of the story) have had about two hemorrhages apiece. Somehow, they knew this wouldn’t be the effect.

Menand adds:

Supposedly, kids respond to “The Catcher in the Rye” because they recognize themselves in the character of Holden Caulfield. Salinger is imagined to have given voice to what every adolescent, or, at least, every sensitive, intelligent, middle-class adolescent, thinks but is too inhibited to say, which is that success is a sham, and that successful people are mostly phonies. Reading Holden’s story is supposed to be the literary equivalent of looking in a mirror for the first time. This seems to underestimate the originality of the book. Fourteen-year-olds, even sensitive, intelligent, middle-class fourteen-year-olds, generally do not think that success is a sham, and if they sometimes feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it, it’s not because they think most other people are phonies. The whole emotional burden of adolescence is that you don’t know why you feel unhappy, or angry, or out of it. The appeal of “The Catcher in the Rye,” what makes it addictive, is that it provides you with a reason. It gives a content to chemistry.

Alright, are we good? Good. So let’s start with what is generally (?) known of J.D. Salinger: American writer, famous recluse, Holden Caulfield, Mark David Chapman/Lennon, and perhaps some stories about the Glass family. And to that, add this: J(erome) D(avid) Salinger, grandson of a rabbi, son of a *ham* and cheese importer/father and a mother who hid her true Irish-Scottish (read: not Jewish) roots until after his bar-mitzvah. Of course, it was not until the deluge of tributes today that some (most) of us may have first sifted through his biographical information with any topical urgency. Now that we have, can we just concede that there is enough material in that early biography for a lifetime’s worth of not only storytelling–Great American or other–but a level of torture that is so specifically Jewish that, if amplified, it might give the entire Bernard Malamud canon a run for its money? (This is, of course, not even a slight knock on Malamud.)   So why do we not place Salinger in the Malamud-Bellow-Roth-Mailer pantheon of 21st century Jewish American writers? Well, first of all, while we know about his roots, little is known about whether he identified as Jewish later much beyond his youth and, from the few interviews he gave in his long and winding life, not much has been parsed. We do know that later in his life he was partial to some eccentric ideologies. Some literary authorities suggest that because Salinger so deftly camouflaged the Jewish experience in his writing it became unrecognizable. Therefore we, tortured as we are, couldn’t really claim him. Janet Malcolm, in a typically blistering essay, adds it’s not that Salinger didn’t find the Jewish experience salient or pure (she admits we’ll never really know), but rather, that because those edges were blurred the alchemy of solitude in his stories were made more universal. Characters, beyond the obvious Caulfield, like Franny Glass exhibited symptoms of isolation and outsiderness that really feel particularly “Jewish” (gleamed from what is either known by us or found in the works of the aforementioned the Jewish greats). But they also feel human in a way washed of any explicit tribal suffering. This irked Jews like Maxwell Geismar whom Malcolm quotes: "The locale of the New York sections is obviously that of a comfortable middle-class urban Jewish society where, however, all the leading figures have become beautifully Anglicized. Holden and Phoebe Caulfield: what perfect American social register names which are presented to us in both a social and a psychological void!" To echo Malcolm, perhaps it resonated because it was a sting so bare and unadorned. As for the rest of Salinger’s bio, well, a glancing over of it smacks of what many (or at least I, perhaps foolishly) would consider a very American experience: he hated high school on the Upper West Side, flunked out, hated military school, wrote about that, hated college, popped in and out of places, wrote banal and formulaic stories, they were rejected, wrote more, was published, was drafted for World War II (spoke German well enough to interrogate POWs and deserters), wrote about his service ("For Esmé — With Love and Squalor" is one of his best and most haunting), landed on Utah Beach on D-Day, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had a breakdown, was one of the first to walk into a liberated camp, befriended Hemingway all the while, published more brilliant stories, slipped off the radar more, experimented with Eastern religions, Christian Science, Dianetics/other crackpot philosophies, wrote more stories, then wrote ones without stark endings that were circular and so brilliant that people called them too weird to be enjoyed, had affairs with younger women, married a few times and had a few children (one delegate from both his wives and children wrote damning books about him calling him abusive, brooding, drinker of his own urine), sold the movie rights to a story for money, was dismayed by the outcome of the movie, never sold film rights again, had more affairs with younger women while locked up in the New Hampshire hinterlands, kept fellow reclusive friends, stopped publishing stories in 1965, remarried, stopped interviewing in 1980, sat quietly on a growing cache of unpublished work for 45 years, died at 91. Perhaps this later Salinger biography (sparse in its convention, mythical in its hermeticism), the adult version of the one to which Menand so aptly links youth and Caulfield, is a reflection that says something about Jews in America. Something unspecific, something, like his work, inchoate and generally unsaid by the great Jewish American writers: we’ve arrived, our travails are universal, we don’t have to name our experiences so much. Or perhaps we do. I suppose once all of Salinger’s hidden treasures are pillaged and finally published, we can enjoy trying to claim him.

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The gesture was met with both reluctant acceptance by Jewish organizations needing to appear magnanimous (see: Foxman, Abraham) and consternation by various Jewish figures who still dislike Jimmy and/or saw the timing of Carter’s apology a little too closely linked to grandson Jason Carter’s run for the Georgia State Senate.

The ZOA falls into the latter camp, issuing their rejection some two-and-a-half weeks after the Carter apology was announced. The ZOA was firm in the assessment of Carter’s apology, deciding to actually reject it twice. In the second pronouncement, the ZOA references a characteristically harsh op-ed written by Carter in the Guardian literally hours before his apology to American Jews washed ashore in the New World. The ZOA statement called upon the ADL, NJDC, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center (named for a historic lover of apologies) to retract their ambivalent approvals of Carter’s apology some fifteen days after they were originally issued.

I’m sure I will eventually have to apologize for asking this, but…how does any of this political pussyfooting help the people actually suffering because of the obstinacy surrounding this conflict?

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My friends and I walked around the grounds, listening to the old soldiers exchange stories about the war, share memories of their proud homecomings, and give tributes for friends that hadn’t made it back with them. The experience was exceptionally humbling. On the drive back to campus, my friends and I overcame the quiet to confess our lament at having not engaged in some form of national service; the day had highlighted a naturally felt shortcoming in our “love for country” stock. We never spoke about it again. Veterans Day is one of those holidays that afford Americans a rare look inward, especially at the issue of national service. It is also a holiday that is entirely overlooked. Among the four of us in the car that day, I had done the closest thing to national service, albeit abroad. I had spent the previous year before college in Israel where I volunteered for four months in a small town with an emerging economy and took a semester of college classes. That year I experienced life in Israel, a country where most of the people my age were starting their compulsory national service. While service, for many of them, meant the military (the majority of which is non-combat service) or some volunteerism, I could not help but be struck by how enmeshed this rite of passage was in Israeli society. Eight years later, I cannot help but continue to be struck by how badly this commitment to country is needed in the United States today. The Twitter phenomenon has imbued an entire American generation with a self-obsession that rivals the most farcical apologues of classical mythology. More potent than statistics is the sentiment that so little was asked of my generation that the definition of service in America (as once famously prescribed) actually became shopping. Despite this, American volunteerism is currently at one of its highest levels in decades. But across the country, there are still at-risk students who need mentors and after school tutors, our swelling elderly population needs care, and our first responders need back up. The number of illiterate Americans is fast approaching the number of the uninsured. The obesity rate for children in this country has tripled since 1980. America is suffering from an energy crisis of another sort: a dearth of spirit. It’s time to ask for more of the next generation. In Israel, national service is compulsory after high school. Despite a growing percentage of Israeli teens that now shirk that duty, for decades, national service has been a standard part of the adolescent experience there. One upshot is that when Israelis go to college, they are generally two or three years older than American students. In exchange for service, the government pays for college, allowing Israeli students to approach their higher education without the looming specter of spectacular debt. What is certainly more important (and less quantifiable) is the effect that national service has on its participants. Those few years of service offer invaluable perspective for young Israelis leaving home. They witness firsthand the problems in their country. Many become invested in finding solutions. In my experience, if you ask an Israeli for an opinion about an issue in his or her country, you will likely be on the receiving end of a vigorous, well-informed, and impassioned response (often given in his or her second or third language). Or as one Israeli put it: “There is a real feeling here that you serve and therefore have a stake in what goes on.” It would not be an irrational leap of logic to assume that service has something to do with the fact that voter turnout in Israel (a non-compulsory exercise) is generally 15-20% percent higher than in the United States. The Israeli model is not perfect and certainly not perfect for us. But it is an idea that pays dividends in ways we desperately need. And while we continue to be a country that bristles at mandates, obligatory national service is an idea we should approach more thoughtfully, starting today, as we pay tribute to those who have served.

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A picture taken of the Iranian leader during elections held in March of 2008 features an image of Ahmadinejad’s identity card bearing his former last name, Sabourjian, a common Jewish name in Iran. The name derives from "weaver of the Sabour," the Persian name for a tallit. The Daily Telegraph reports that Ahmadinejad’s identity papers indicate that his family changed its name and converted to Islam after he was born.

I have to admit, this is kind of exciting news. What may turn out to be more exciting is how the information is handled. Will this confirm what Abe Foxman has said all along? Perhaps even non-Jews who speak out against Israel are retroactive self-hating Jews? If Christianity and Islam were birthed of Jewish tradition, is any anti-Israel sentiment somehow a manifestation of a dormant Jewish inclination toward the hatred of Jews? Will Norman Podhoretz take the opportunity to connect Ahmadinejad’s constantly sniping of Israel’s right to exist to the liberal movement?

More importantly, what are the psychological implications of this revelation for Jews? Does this make Ahmadinejad a sadder or more sympathetic figure? Do we have to claim him? Is it our duty as Jews to do? Discuss. 

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But then, the Jewish winds of manipulation wound their shifty clouted ways. In the final round, two countries changed votes in support of Ms. Bokova, who won by a tally of 31-27. Much to the relief of the UNESCO executive board, the Egyptian ambassador approached Ms.Bokova following the vote, hugged her, and then said "We are all in this together." Hosny, however, was not so sure about that. "It was clear by the end of the competition that there was a conspiracy against me," Hosny said upon his arrival back in Egypt. "There are a group of the world’s Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position." During the campaign, Hosny’s candidacy had been tarnished by a statement he made in the Egyptian Parliament in which he promised to burn any Israeli book found in the landmark Alexandria library as well as charges of censorship and anti-Semitism throughout his tenure as culture minister. Also, according to the Arabic language site Elaph.com, Hosny may or may not have boasted about aiding hijackers in their escape after they took an Italian cruise ship hostage in 1985, shot a wheelchair-bound Jewish American tourist, and threw him into the sea. So whither now Farouk Hosny? Now that the dust has settled on the divisive vote, Hosny has proven that the misgivings regarding his candidacy were warranted. Without trying to completely single out one group, it’s a little bit like the protests of the Muhammed cartoon. Masses were irate, in part, because the cartoon suggested that Islam preached violence and protestors manifested their anger at the characterization by burning things down and threatening to kill the author of the cartoon. I kinda feel sorry for Hosny. And not in a Yom Kippur kind of way. I know his irrational anger. Every time that I strike out with a non-Jewish girl, I know it’s because she’s anti-Semitic. We all have these tendencies. Maybe the UNESCO mission to build peace in the minds of men would work best if its director was honestly afflicted with a precondition of paranoia toward a particular culture. He’d be a poster child for the world’s continued grappling with multiculturalism. There would be no lip service. If nothing else, it would certainly suit the U.N. aptly.

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