There’s an absurd Internet debate going on among Jews seeking on the most ridiculous grounds to impugn Joe Lieberman’s Jewishness for standing athwart ObamaCare and yelling “Stop!” In the debate about health-care reform, they demand to know, why can’t he just talk and think in conformity with the ethnic stereotype that instructs Jews that we must be orthodox liberals on all points?
Maybe because Lieberman is truer to the Biblical meaning of a “Hebrew” than most other Jews are. The word Ivri derives from the Hebrew avar which means to cross over. Abraham, the first Hebrew, was so designated because he came from the other side of the Euphrates but also because he stood in opposition to the “enlightened” opinion of his day. To be a Hebrew means to stand up to what, given your social and economic status, everyone assumes you are supposed to think. It’s a title you earn, not merely by being “born Jewish,” and Lieberman, unlike his Jewish critics, has done that.
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