Jon Stewart: No Nachas Here

You cannot help but feel the sense of Jewish pride in this article from Arutz 7:

Jewish-American comedian Jon Stewart is the most influential man of 2010, far ahead of President Barack Obama, according to a survey conducted by the AskMen online magazine, which attracted roughly 500,000 people to vote in the poll.

What yiddishe nachas!!! He's number one, far ahead of the president!!! The article continues, telling us who Jon Stewart is and what he has done. I do not watch television and I have not seen him perform. Being curious, I googled the guy and I found out the following:

Although the topic doesn’t come up often, it’s also evident where Stewart stands on intermarriage. In 2000, he married Tracey McShane, a veterinary technician and a Catholic. Stewart, who does The New York Times crossword puzzle daily, popped the question with a puzzle of his own. The paper’s “Puzzle Master,” Will Shortz, found Stewart a puzzle creator for the occasion.

The Stewarts (they changed their names legally in 2001) live in a loft in lower Manhattan and have two children. Nathan Thomas Stewart, four, is named after his grandfather. Maggie Rose Stewart is two. As Stewart told Tony Blair on The Daily Show in a September 2008 interview, “My wife is Catholic. I’m Jewish. It’s very interesting; we’re raising the children to be sad.”

And then there is this:

Stewart is the assimilated Jew writ large, joking about raising his child to observe Christmas and Hanukkah before wryly noting that "Christmas blows the doors off Hanukkah." In his Jewish mode, Stewart resuscitates the kind of awkward, neurotic Jewish-themed humor associated with USY events and bar-mitzvah instructors. The Festival of Lights, Stewart observes, "celebrates the birth of our savior, Hanukkah Harry."

I know where Stewart is coming from. He is my contemporary. He also grew up in a part of suburban New Jersey where authentic Judaism was almost non-existent. What I do not understand is why Arutz 7 would bother reporting about such a guy.

This blog has absolutely no tolerance for intermarriage, as you can see from some previous posts. You can also see the comment (number 7) that I left on the Arutz 7 article.

The Arutz 7 article, which started bubbling over with Jewish pride, ends on a somewhat sour note:

He has been criticized by nationalist Jews for his coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, which tends to accept the leftist media narrative that blames Israel for failed negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

How come I'm not surprised?