[cross-posted from Street Prophets]
Americans, so it seems, are hot to find out if Ben Bernanke, the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is Jewish. Is he? Should we care? Should we care more, perhaps, that so many people seem to care?
According to Deb Frisch at South(west)paw, the search string "Ben Shalom Bernanke Jewish" is bringing loads of traffic to her site. And how did I stumble upon this odd new trend? I...uh (gulp)...googled Bernanke to see if he was Jewish (doh!).
According to Frisch:
I added a Sitemeter link to this site a few weeks ago and it is fascinatingly distracting to see who all visits my blog and how they arrived here. Today, many people are showing up as a result of googling "Ben Shalom Bernanke Jewish." This string leads to the July, 2005 archives of South(west)paw.
Unfortunately, "Jewish" and "Bernanke" appear in separate July posts. I do not know if he is Jewish. Wikipedia says he is. But Bernanke is evasive: "When I was a boy in South Carolina, my parents always advised me never to discuss religion or politics in public, those being subjects on which everyone has a strong opinion but on which no one can ever be proved wrong."
What's more interesting to me than the question of whether Bernanke is Jewish is the question of why so many people want to know. Are the "bernanke jew" googlers people who are sympathetic to creepy white supremacist sites that think there's a Jewish conspiracy to control the Fed? Probably not, but it's still strange (and a little scary)
(quoted from South(west)paw)
So, I was part of a trend, it seems, of people wondering if the President had replaced one Bar Mitzvah as head of the Fed Reserve with another.
But I really am curious! And not in a creepy way. So curious, in fact, that I tracked down this list of Jewish last names from the Jewish Genealogy project, which is something of a master list of names from Jewish Galicia. Let's see...Berlinski, Berls, Berman--Bernanke!
The JewishGen page has a link next to Bernanke that takes us to an online "Memory Book" written by people who grew up in the town of Przemsyl, Poland, including a list of all the local Jewish family names.
My conclusion: he's Jewish. But should we care? Should we care that so many people cared to google him to find out? Did more people google Bernanke to see if he was Jewish than checked the Dow Jones index to see if it went up (it didn't)?
I really wonder who was more interested: America's Jews or America's militias? Or was it even Americans? Are Europeans interested in this?
Now that I think about it...I wonder if Osama Bin Laden googled Bernanke to see if he is Jewish? Nah. Bin Laden probably has someone do his googling for him.