Salkin does it again

Jeffrey Salkin just can't seem to help himself. Everyone and anything he likes even a little bit he magically converts to Judaism. His latest installment of delusional wishful projection is "Thanksgiving is a Jewish Holiday." The premise, like previous Salkin "conversions", is incredibly flimsy. According to the tippler of Martini Judaism:
"Franklin wanted the Great Seal of the United States to feature a scene of Moses standing at the shores of the Red Sea, and the waters preparing to devour Pharaoh and his armies."
An immediate red flag is that he offers no citation what so ever. Having a background in history I am aware of a wide range of arguments our founding fathers had but never came across this one. I assume he either made this one up or got it from an equally credulous fool. Even if the story had merit it still doesn't make the idea "Jewish." All his arguments stem from this type of nonsense. He conflates specific Jewish rites and rituals with a variety of rather universal concepts. He also never seems to note that there is plenty of reason to believe that a wide variety of the stories and pracices of early Judaism were borrowed from the religions that preceded it or were contemporaneous to it. Is Salkin really really Assyro-Babylonian, Egyptian, Zoroastrian, Scythian....?

Basically, by Salkin's very feeble standards everything is _______ (fill in your favored bias). You can make any claim you want about anything since the only real measure is your own preferences and ability to shovel bullshit. 

Is Jeffrey Salkin Mormon?

It may seem an idiotic question if you are familiar with Jeffrey Salkin's blog Martini Judaism. After all, Judaism is right in the title. However, if you use the same logic of a few of the posts he's put out  over the past week or so it makes sense. It seems that any individual he happens to like the work of can be proclaimed Jewish. His short piece "Woody Allen, Jewish despite himself" at least has some superficial merit. Woody was raised in a Jewish family. He himself is actually an atheist. He is not a practicing Jew and can only be called a Jew in a flimsy cultural sense of the term. His more recent piece, "Was Sinatra Jewish?", is just nonsensical crap. Sinatra never had even a vague affiliation with Jews beyond those that anyone else with friends or acquaintances who happened to be Jewish would have.

In both instances Salkin does a lot of cherry-picking to force the careers of these two men into a mold of his own warped logic's devising. It's as sad as it is pathetic. With both pieces he could have used a few of the vague associations to discuss and examine the whole idea of Jewish identity. There's always been a bit of debate over whether Jewishness is a matter of faith, ethnicity, culture, or a mixture. Just as there have always been questions about to what extent the previous question matters. It is a very interesting topic well worth thinking about. It's too bad Salkin's writing more closely resembles that asinine Mormon practice of "baptizing" individuals as Mormon after they are dead whether they expressed any interest in Mormon faith while alive. It's stupid, dishonest, arrogant, and disrespectful.