Anti-Semitic Auto-complete?

By Symi Rom-Rymer Journalist Stéphane Foucart posed an interesting question in a recent article in the French daily paper, Le Monde: what can Google tell us about our prejudices?  Intrigued by an earlier piece in Télérama, a weekly French magazine, that pointed out that the word ‘Jew’ often appeared in the Google search drop-down menu when someone typed in the name of almost any French top media executive or public leader, Foucart undertook his own unscientific study; producing the same outcome. Based on this experiment, he took the results as a sign that the canard that Jews run the media or exert undue influence on French politics still hold sway among the general population. He furthermore argues that this is uniquely a French problem since the word ‘Jew’ did not  come up in the American or Spanish...

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Obama's Jewish CIA Director: Anthony Lake?

The New York Times claims Lake can have the job if he wants it. While it's not clear that he does, he's certainly in the running for something important. After all, Bill Clinton's former National Security Advisor backed Obama from the start, as Robert Greenberger explains in his profile of the recent convert to Judaism in Moment's May/June issue. "Unlike other veterans of Bill Clinton's Administration—such as Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke (Lake's equally ambitious rival in the foreign service class of 1962 who is considered to be a frontrunner for Secretary of State in a Hillary Clinton administration and is also Jewish), Lake chose not to support Hillary Clinton. "Instead, he threw his weight behind Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, to whom he is now senior foreign policy advisor. Lake was one of the first...

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This Week's Links

Sir Paul McCartney is soooo the man. He's bringing "a message of peace" to Israel. This is definitely not kosher: Charedi men were caught sneaking to computer labs late at night and looking at porn. Getting tired of Ahmadinejad talk yet? Too bad. Lots of people are irate at his planned appearance at an interfaith dinner tonight. His Royal Highness Prince Charles has a thing for Judaism, apparently. "The peculiar character traits I have noticed displayed by Jews over the years are the comic equivalent of gold dust." Comedian Mark Maier on Jews and comedy. Either Bill Clinton is procrastinating, or he really cares about the high holidays. He won't start campaigning for Obama until they're over. —Benjamin Schuman-Stoler

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Web Op-Ed: I Used to be a Democrat by David Epstein

By David Epstein My trajectory from Democrat to Republican had a few curves of my own making. First, I volunteered to work for George McGovern as the 1972 campaign's Ohio general counsel. I stood behind George McGovern, a brave World War II pilot and mushy foreign policy thinker, simply because he was the lesser evil alongside Richard Nixon. In 1976, I voted for Jimmy Carter. As President, Carter said we had made bad decisions based on "an inordinate fear of communism." I traveled in the Soviet Union and its satellites and spoke with the victims of the totalitarian states; my observation was that an inordinate fear of communism is totally warranted. Later, Carter had a rude awakening when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, saying, "My opinion of the Russians has changed more drastically in the last week...

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