Of all the arrant, preposterous, and ludicrous attacks yet launched on Sarah Palin, there is none more absurd than the notion that she should have stood up in a huff and stormed out of church in her hometown of Wasilla because her pastor had invited a Jews for Jesus nutcase to speak there. Jews for Jesus is an organization straight out of a low-comedy operetta about American religion, a street-level bunch of silly evangelists started by a boob named Moishe Rosen. Rosen  figured out he could talk naive Christians — eager to bring about the conversion of the Jews so as to hasten the endtimes prophesied in Revelations – out of their hard-earned cash by promising to lead his co-religionists to Christianity. His chosen method of doing so was to publish colorful pamphlets sprinkled with Yiddish phrases and have them handed out on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, where they were greeted with disbelief and guffaws.

Pity the poor folk of Wasilla, Alaska, if they fell for this tripe. The man who spoke there, David Brickner, can’t even lay proper claim to being a Jew who converted to a belief in Jesus, since he was never even a Jew in the first place. Jews for Jesus is far too fringe-y an organization to be the subject of any kind of serious demographic study, but given the refusal of the group itself to enumerate the number of conversions it has managed in the forty years of its existence, my guess is that almost everyone involved in Jews for Jesus was, like Brickner, never a Jew at all. Indeed, it was from listening to a Jew for Jesus that Palin’s pastor — a Christian — decided to spend his life in service to Christ.

The nightmarish history of forcible conversion has led Jews to an understandable discomfort with the notion that anybody would want to seek their conversion in the present day. That is one of the reasons Jews for Jesus is, as an organization, as offensive as it is comic — because it toys, for money, with the darkest moments in the millennia-long history of the relations between Jews and Christians. Nonetheless, the people in Sarah Palin’s church, including Sarah Palin herself, did nothing offensive to Jews by listening, though to be sure, they would more profitably have spent their time thumb-wrestling each other and trying to memorize the Cyrillic alphabet.

Evangelical Christians like the members of Sarah Palin’s church  love Jews so much they want to save us. I, for one, am not offended by their loving attention, though I really wish they wouldn’t waste their time on me.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 5:18 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.