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MORE TROUBLE FOR ANN: We've

MORE TROUBLE FOR ANN: We've got our latest Easterbrook-like debate over whether something someone wrote is or isn't anti-Semitic- and this time the "someone" is none other than leggy conservative pundit Ann Coulter. In her latest column, in which she lambastes the entire Democratic presidential field for having the temerity both to have suffered deaths in the family and to have Jewish ancestors, Coultergeist fires off the following:

In addition to having a number of family deaths among them, the Democrats' other big idea -- too nuanced for a bumper sticker -- is that many of them have Jewish ancestry. There's Joe Lieberman: Always Jewish. Wesley Clark: Found Out His Father Was Jewish in College. John Kerry: Jewish Since He Began Presidential Fund-Raising. Howard Dean: Married to a Jew. Al Sharpton: Circumcised. Even Hillary Clinton claimed to have unearthed some evidence that she was a Jew -- along with the long lost evidence that she was a Yankees fan. And that, boys and girls, is how the Jews survived thousands of years of persecution: by being susceptible to pandering.

I'm not often in the habit of defending Ann Coulter, but in this case I'm willing to let her off on the anti-Semitism charge- her characteristically sarcastic point is that Jews aren't susceptible to pandering, but the candidates think they are, thus their sudden discoveries of Jewish relatives. Nevermind that the Jewish vote isn't nearly as important in presidential primary politics is it in New York (hence the Hillary relative); after all, how many Jews are there in New Hampshire and Iowa?
The quote, however, sounds anti-Semitic until you've read it a couple of times and that, coupled with the disclosure in David Brock's book that Ann said she quit her New York law firm years ago "to get away from all those Jews," sort of makes you wonder. Then again, the larger point of the column- and the rest of her work- is that Ann hates liberals, at roughly the level that the most vile anti-Semites hate Jews.
And my only other question- how does Ann know that Al Sharpton is uncircumcised?

Posted by Stephen Silver at November 28, 2003 07:49 PM