Certainly not either by inheritance or conversion or moral stance. Yet Sarah Palin seems to imagine that she's Jewish -- in a peculiar, one-dimensional way. It's not always easy to guess at what's going on in that soup of a brain, but is it possible to determine what Sarah means when she claims to be a victim of a "blood libel?"
The actual targets of the "blood libel," it is no secret, are not overpaid Foxy commentators but ordinary Jews who, according to pious medieval preachers, Henry Ford, Nazi propagandists, and contemporary Syrian statesmen, make it a practice to drain innocent babes of their blood, which they then bake into matzos.
Here are the exact words in which Sarah invokes this hideous accusation: "journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn.” It's a confusing sentence, hard to explicate. Can we be confident that Sarah is learned enough to know that "blood libel" is a phrase with a long and agonizing history? Are the "hatred and violence," which she claims are visited upon her, designed to recall the pogroms (and worse) that have been precipitated by the "blood libel"? If her sentence is to be taken seriously, Sarah believes that she is the victim of an attack analogous to the worst kind of anti-Semitic ravings. Just as Jews are accused of killing Christian children, so has Sarah herself been unjustly accused of killing Representative Gabrielle Giffords. In her scenario, in her analogy, she herself, Sarah Palin, is the Jew.
In her daily deeds, Sarah Palin does not seem to understand or embrace aspects of Jewish tradition such as compassion, the centrality of community, a deep reverence for education and learning, fierce and informed intellectuality, and robust philanthropy. Pure and simple, she sees herself as a victim -- a condition or state of mind, which, in my opinion, is not only incorrect but dangerous to the polity and to her own self-regard.
In short, she's scammed herself.
If I was her, I think I would refudiate this.
Posted by: LLL | January 20, 2011 at 03:18 PM