Judaism

Wednesday

October 17, 2018

I feel for Elizabeth Warren. I pretended to be Jewish for a year

As a child, I was fond of a catchy little ditty called ‘I’m An Indian Too’ (‘A Sioux!’) Though she’s 10 years older than me, I wonder whether this ear-worm also stuck in the consciousness of the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, whose claim of Native American descent has recently been rubbished by both a DNA test which revealed her to be around 1/1024th of this persuasion (most of us are more unicorn than this, surely?) and the Cherokee Nation Secretary of State, Chuck Hoskin Jr, who accused Warren of ‘undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.

Friday

May 11, 2018

Matt McDonald

Ben Shapiro, the child prodigy gone right

Liberty University, Jerry Falwell’s Evangelical Christian finishing school, gathers three times a week for “convocation”, a worship service with guest speakers from all backgrounds. Attendance is mandatory, but students say the man delivering today’s sermon would have filled the 8,000-capacity venue regardless. Because today, the Ben Shapiro show has come to Liberty. A lot of people don’t like Shapiro. His critics on the right dislike him even more than his critics on the left - “the alt-right think I’m a cuck Jew,” he tells his podcast audience. A touch of jealousy there, perhaps – Shapiro may be a bit soft for many of his rivals on the internet. What really hurts, however, is that he’s a bigger deal than all of them now. And his fans worship him.