Maybe I will have to start watching again.
Way better than Colbert!
"Shande for the goyim"
By Darren Garnick
So when did Jon Stewart morph into Jackie Mason?
The celebrated anchor of "fake news" and the washed-up Catskills comedian are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but they share the same flawed approach to entertaining young Jewish audiences. Their strategy: Recycle material from the '60s and '70s and sprinkle in a few "oy veys" for dramatic effect.
Stewart, host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show," recently mocked the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and how it gets presidential hopefuls to kiss its collective tuchus. Interspersed in a monologue now widely circulating on the Internet, candidates Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain can be seen, in footage from AIPAC's recent national conference, bragging about how many times they have been to Israel and who has the most Jewish best friends.
The face of Clinton is melded into Golda Meir's, while McCain turns into 1967 war hero Moshe Dayan. Reflecting the alleged Jewish squeamishness about the possibility of voting for Obama, we see the Illinois senator turn first into Yasser Arafat and then into black-Muslim basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Stewart delivers his punchlines in the hokey accent of an Eastern European grandmother and rates candidates on his "Kosh-o-Meter," which includes cliched Yiddishkeit phrases such as "Could Be Worse!" and "My Son the Doctor!"
Based on the silence heard from The Daily Show's studio audience, it is clear that very few young voters - Jewish or not - recognize Dayan, Meir or perhaps even Abdul-Jabbar, who retired 19 years ago. Stewart wonders aloud if his routine might be better appreciated in Tel Aviv, but he'd be more likely to get laughs at a Florida nursing home.
Showing highlights from the AIPAC conference, the comedian anchor explains how the Democrats and Republicans can "win over these Elders of Zion."
McCain boasts that Jewish political posterboy Joe Lieberman escorted him on a recent trip to Jerusalem. ("When you go to Israel, you don't need to bring your own Jew," snorts Stewart. "There's a wide variety of Jews there.") And Obama waxes poetic about his old Jewish-American camp counselor who had spent time living in Israel.
Viewers are then told they will hear candidate critiques of Israeli foreign policy. "Oh, I forgot, you can't say anything remotely critical about Israel and still get elected president," Stewart says. "Which is funny, because you know where you can criticize Israel? - [in] Israel!"
Imagine if Pat Buchanan babbled on about the Jews controlling the agendas of presidential hopefuls. Or Mel Gibson. Or Louis Farrakhan. Or Jimmy Carter. How loudly would American Jews be screaming about these anti-Semitic spigots - and the need to shut them off?
Obama's spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, rose from obscurity to YouTube darling just by dissing the Jews, shouting "Goddamn America!" and sprinkling in a few 9-11 conspiracy theories for good measure.
Surprisingly, Stewart's upbeat rant barely makes a blip on YouTube. As of midweek, the video had just surpassed 13,000 views. In the YouTube universe, that is on a par with kitten and puppy videos.
But the cleverly titled "Indecision 5768" newscast has attracted more than 275,000 hits on the official Comedy Central Web site - and not all those viewers are interpreting the humor the way Stewart may have intended. Because the comedian is Jewish (birth name: Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz), his ridicule of the Jewish lobby inadvertently provides the ultimate testimonial for neo-Nazi bloggers. Quoting the research of "Israel Lobby" authors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer is boring. To really capture the attention of the kiddies, it's far more effective to have the former host of the Academy Awards say that Israel is America's puppet master.
The words are all there - minus the context. Only a regular viewer of Stewart's would assume he is using the term "Elders of Zion" ironically, not legitimizing the "Jews control the world" canard. After being cut and pasted on the Web, however, the skit might appear as if it were pulled from a czarist Russian comedy show.
Not surprisingly, then, the Daily Show's AIPAC bit has inspired plenty of pungent anti-Zionist sentiment in the blogosphere. Perhaps the most bizarre was one YouTube screed that accused Stewart of secretly playing "Good Cop/Bad Cop" with the Israelis: "Be careful of guys like Jon Stewart," it warned. "They pretend to be on your side when really they are just playing the fake opposition for the Jews. It's a tactic used throughout history by them. The truth is that if Jew Stewart was actually critical of Israel and they felt he was even the slightest threat, then he wouldn't be on TV on a Jew-controlled network."
Anti-Semitism aside, it's refreshing how Stewart has bluntly exposed the patronizing nature of ethnic politics. On top of doing arts & crafts with a Jewish camp counselor, Obama told The Atlantic magazine that his "intellectual formation" was jumpstarted by Jewish authors like Philip Roth and Leon Uris.
Coming up next: McCain reveals that he gets a warm fuzzy feeling at the supermarket freezer near the Lender's Bagels, later joining Lieberman for a photo-op with Hebrew National hotdogs.
AIPAC, of course, is strong enough to take any satirical beating served up by The Daily Show. But Jon Stewart fans might not survive his lame Catskills shtick. If he keeps that up, he might soon have trouble amusing a temple brotherhood breakfast."
