Just Folks

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, friend of -- and award faker for -- Jack Abramoff:

Lapin and his family relocated to Washington State in 1991, where he hosts a nationally syndicated weekly radio show.... Michael Medved also moved to Washington State around the same time as Lapin and hosts his own syndicated talk radio show based out of the same AM station in Seattle. Both Medved and Lapin promote conservative political principles, inter-mixed with traditional religious observance. Lapin was one of the Jewish voices in support of Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ, and was a strong supporter of Terri Schiavo's parents efforts to keep their daughter alive. He has declared that the Anti-Defamation League and its allies were "dangerous organizations, organizations that are driving a wedge between American Jews and Christians." ... Lapin believes the United States of America is the most Jewish-friendly state in history and that it is better for Jews to promote shared Judeo-Christian values with the majority. Lapin also rejects the idea that the Jewish left (which can be secular or even anti-religious) represents Judaism.

Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, from Philip Roth's, The Plot Against America:

Bengelsdorf did not immediate respond but instead created a portentous interval in which quietly to insert his rejoinder: "I was at the White House talking to the president just yesterday morning...I was congratulating him...on the significant inroad he had made into allaying the Jewish suspiciousness that dated back to his trips to Germany in the late thirties, when he was secretly taking the measure of the German air force for the U.S. government. I informed him that any number of my own congregants who had voted for Roosevelt were now his strong supporters, grateful that he had established our neutrality and spared our country the agonies of yet another great war. I told him that Just Folks and programs like it were beginning to convince the Jews of America that he is anything but their enemy. Admittedly, before his becoming president he at times made public statements grounded in anti-Semitic cliches. But he spoke from ignorance then, and admits as much today. I am pleased to tell you that it took no more than two or three sessions alone with the president to get him to relinquish his misconceptions and to appreciate the manifold nature of Jewish life in America. This is not an evil man, not in any way. This is a man of enormous native intelligence and great probity who is rightly celebrated for his personal courage and who wants now to enlist my aid to help him raze those barriers of ignorance that continue to spearate Christian from Jew and Jew from Christian.

Shared Judeo-Christian values, indeed.