Jeffrey Goldberg is trying to come up with a list of the top-50 philo-Semites. There's something uncomplimentary about the term; it suggests, as Goldberg writes, "anti-Semites who like Jews." In other words, Christian Zionists such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, who love Jews so much that they want us all to leave America, go "back" to Israel, and be smote by Jesus. But there's another class of philo-Semite, a group who actually do seem inspired by Jewish teachings and culture. Goldberg counts Barack Obama as a philo-Semite, and I'd agree. In a 2004 interview with Chicago Sun-Times religion writer Cathleen Falsani, Obama said, "[I]ntellectually I've drawn as much from Judaism as any other faith." Other people I'd add to the list? Princeton professor Cornel West, who's involved with the American Jewish peacenik movement Tikkun, and Newark mayor Cory Booker, who, as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, became president of the Jewish L'Chaim Society. The group's founder, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, has called Booker “the most effective non-Jewish exponent of Judaism in the entire world.” Of course, it's no coincidence that all three of these individuals are African American. I'd also count Christopher Hitchens as a philo-Semite. At the age of 38, Hitchens discovered his maternal grandmother was Jewish. That means according to the Jews, he's one of us. (And many of us see no contradiction between atheism and 21st century Judaism.) Hitchens came to identify as ethnically Jewish. --Dana Goldstein
