At the end of our visit, Sarah went to the guest book and wrote simple words that I will never forget: "Why didn't somebody do something?" That is all she wrote, but with those words, I knew that, in her own way, she "got it."

She sure did. "Why didn't somebody do something?" is all you need to know about the Holocaust — and also the historical roots of anti-Semitism, the nineteenth century nationalism that led to the unifications of Germany and Italy and persisted into various right wing clubs and societies, the rise of mass ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the widespread success of the Dolchstosslegende in Germany, the fear of revolutionary communism that disposed the remnants of Europe's anciens regimes to ally with right-wing populism, the Catholic Church's embrace of Franco and the western powers' fecklessness during the Spanish Civil War, the unpunished genocide of Armenians by Ottoman Turkey, and the overall sense of the impotence of democracy during the thirties — but except for all that, Sarah got it. But of course, Huckabee isn't just interested in teaching Israelis Holocaust history; he's also got an axe to grind. To wit, he finds deeply troubling "Senator Obama's desire to 'hold a summit in the Muslim world' and "to listen to the 'concerns' of these nations." And rightly so. The first step to negotiating any long-term middle-Eastern peace is a blanket refusal to negotiate with any middle-Eastern countries. Incidentally, Huckabee may be in better company than he knows. The folks at Commentary incisively noted Barack Obama's sinister commitment to an "even-handed approach" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sweet Odin's raven, the man has clearly not absorbed the lessons of Yad Vashem. As for the underlying question of why Huckabee would bother to write an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in the middle of a presidential campaign — my guess is he had some recollection of evangelicals' support for Israelis, but managed to get the order wrong.

The post Huckabee Slams Obama in Jerusalem Post appeared first on Jewcy.

By the way, the second McCain joke was unplanned, uncalled for and I actually feel bad about it. Seriously, I've lost sleep. Senator John McCain is an American hero and I am a sissy, spoiled bitch who deserves to get his ass kicked. Please, sir, punch me in the face — it would be an honor.

The post Marty Beckerman Talks Politics And Humor On MSNBC appeared first on Jewcy.

Best:

"Talking about a strong border is one thing. It's when you get into enforcing the law—which means deport—that you lose people's votes. Oddly enough, people resent the idea that you might throw their mother out of the country." —Grover Norquist in Rolling Stone

Worst:

"Republicans, to their shame, will trumpet McCain's experience over Obama's…" —Alec Baldwin in Huffington Post

(To their shame? Isn't that a legitimate talking point?)

The post The Best And Worst Opinions Of The Day appeared first on Jewcy.

"This was the worst movie I've ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a 'movie' and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. [The directors] do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization's decline…" —Josh Levin on Meet the Spartans

Worst:

"How about trying self-restraint? It’s free." —Michelle Malkin on college students who can't afford birth control

Related: Premature Education

The post The Best And Worst Opinions Of The Day appeared first on Jewcy.

"That the Times decided it was not going to show the cartoons-O.K., they're terrible-ass cartoons from a quality standpoint, but the idea that those thugs get offended and we just acquiesce, that was the most astonishing display of cowardice. And the killing of Theo van Gogh, the film director, by some jihadist in Amsterdam-all of a sudden the most liberal societies in the world were having intimidation murders happen. That's when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing-not the Iraq war but the larger struggle." … Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture…

Will Currin succeed in politicizing porn? Will his reaction-provoking paintings, such as "The Danes" and "Women of Franklin Street" inspire liberal societies to rise up against the forces of violent religiosity?

Maybe, but Currin fails to address an ominous paradox: He wants to spark resistance to censorship, but he's using a medium that has lost its ability to shock anyone. The pornography industry is suffering at the creatively destructive hands of the market. Sex has been sold, sold and sold. Consumers are past the point of saturation. The corporate extensions of the biz are in crisis due to Internet piracy and amateur video. High definition is "ruining" the "quality" of porn because every blemish becomes magnified, reducing those perfect bodies to flawed flesh with wrinkles and surgical scars.

Even the definition of pornography has been lost. The hyper-publicized paparazzi trophies of 2007 — crotch-shots of Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan — blurred the line between pornography and celebrity gossip-mongering. The label "pornographic" no longer elicits major outrage. The majority of our population would no longer hold book burnings to purify the world of sinful material. Instead pornography simply bores us.

Unless the mullahs of London and Amsterdam subscribe to the New Yorker or take a pilgrimage to the Gagosian Gallery, Currin's jabs at sexually repressed extremists might very well go unnoticed. (Will the same newspapers that were afraid to run the Mohammed cartoons decide to spotlight Currin's provocations?) Nevertheless, Currin's intermingling of Hustlerian voyeurism with "Mannerist compositions echoing Old Masters from Baldung to Parmigianino" makes his work striking. Even if no political mobilization arises, Currin's "elegy to liberal culture" is a solace for those who are disgusted with flaccid western complacency.

Related: Arabs Hot For Israeli Porn  

The post John Currin Fights Repressive Fundamentalism … By Painting Porn? appeared first on Jewcy.

"The biggest lesson was learning the nature of who Jesus was historically, not as God and being resurrected, but as the person he was and living as a Jew in a Jewish world."

Related: Why I Love the Bible

On the Book Irreligion Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times

"The volume gets off to a bracing start … by succinctly showing how Darwin’s theory of natural selection and free-market economics provide well-confirmed alternative explanations for the evolution of complex systems."

Related: Why Are Atheists So Angry?

On John McCain Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic

"The era of legal, authorized torture in America is coming to a close. … And it is more than fitting that a man who endured torture at the hands of America's enemies should now be picked to restore American honor after the disgrace of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld."

Related: National Review's Stupid Defense of Torture

On Edwards Ending His Run Christopher Beam in Slate

"Even when I agreed with the message, I bristled at the brazen insincerity —or appearance thereof—of the messenger."

Related: About That Genuine Quality, John Edwards

On Giuliani Ending His Run Michael Weiss in Pajamas Media

"What he had was 9/11, but his idol Churchill had World War II and that wasn’t enough either to win an election in 1945."

Related: Giuliani As Judge Doom

The post Jewcy Opinion Digest appeared first on Jewcy.

The post Daily Show Clip Of The Day appeared first on Jewcy.

"Nowhere is this division [between 'peasants' and royalty] more apparent than in who serves in our military and who does not."

Related: Join the Israeli Army or Lose the Right to Vote

On the State of the Union Fred Kaplan in Slate

"As with his previous State of the Union addresses, this was not seen as a time to face reality. … Maybe the president believes that saying something makes it close to true."

Related: Flip-Floppy on Genocide

On Endorsements Will Bunch in Attytood

"So let's make the boldest choice we can, in 2012 if it's too late for '08: To chuck endorsements altogether. … [L]et informed voters do their thing. Make up their own minds."

Related: Barack Obama for President

The post Jewcy Opinion Digest appeared first on Jewcy.

After writing a Boston Globe piece on latter-day apologists for Maoism, Oppenheimer compares the extremists' groupthink to Scientology.

Related: If Tom Cruise Were Jewish

On Ageism Sen. John Kerry in the National Journal

Sen. Barack Obama, often pegged as the "kiddie candidate," is older than Bill Clinton, JFK and Teddy Roosevelt were upon taking office, and older than Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. at the heights of their intellectual brilliance.

Related: Will the Election Hinge on Hairstyles?

On Secular vs. Secularist Judaism David Deutsch in the Forward

Today's young Jews embrace pop-culture-friendly "secular" Judaism, but have no use for the militantly anti-religious "secularist" Judaism of the twentieth century.

Related: How to Raise an Ideological Warrior

On Abortion Hadley Freeman in the Guardian

The female protagonists in blockbuster films such as Knocked Up and Juno never truly consider whether to terminate their pregnancies, unlike women in the real world who search their souls over this difficult decision.

Related: You Can Have An Abortion

On Drinking Sewage Eilene Zimmerman in Slate

We have the technology to purify our waste — and to save our planet, we must gulp it down. (There you have it, folks: environmentalism is shitty.)

Related: Environmentalists Are the New Communists

The post Jewcy Opinion Digest appeared first on Jewcy.

The Clintons will change focus from attacking Obama — clearly a losing strategy — to reminding voters of America's economic prosperity in the 1990s. But it might be too late. A Clinton campaign worker tells me: "Super Tuesday really is going to be a nightmare…"

A nightmare? Wasn't it a "fairy tale" a couple weeks ago?

The post Obama Crushes Hillary, Wins Kennedy Endorsement appeared first on Jewcy.