I used to know Andrew Adler. When I worked at the Atlanta Jewish Times, he was the newspaper’s former managing editor. He’d come to our office periodically to have his start-up Jewish newspaper designed by our art department. It was an odd arrangement, and it didn’t last long, as he positioned his Maccabiah Press as a competitor to the Jewish Times.

Like the name of his publication, Andrew’s journalism was a bit tone-deaf, a touch parochial and essentially superficial.

Along with these fairly harmless sins I now suspect he has one that can be crippling for a serious journalist: an inability to see the big picture.

That could be why Adler, as  publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, wrote a column last week in which he suggested that Israel might want to consider assassinating President Obama. The text of his “Publisher’s Letter” is here.

Adler subsequently apologized and explained that he wrote what he wrote “just to see what kind of reaction I would get from readers.”

It turns out the reaction has been “overwhelmingly negative,” Adler told JTA.

If there’s a learning moment in any of this, it might be in the overwhelming revulsion Adler’s column caused. Most people, regardless of their politics in the U.S. or Israeli contexts, still have their heads screwed on the right way.

That’s a cause for hope as American Jews as a group move to the right on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as their position hardens on what Israel must be willing to do for a negotiated peace, and more often people are willing to demonize those they disagree with.

In the American context, as Chemi Shalev wrote in Ha’aretz, Andrew Adler’s column is part of a larger movement which seeks to delegitimize Obama as president.

Adler’s crazy and criminal suggestions are not the ranting of some loony-tune individual. They were not taken out of thin air. Rather, they are the inevitable result of the inordinate volume of repugnant venom that some of Obama’s political rivals, Jews and non-Jews alike, have been spewing for the last three years.

In such an atmosphere murder may seem to someone as the only possible course to take. That’s what happened in 1996, back when Andrew Adler was launching his Maccabiah Press,  when a Jew assassinated Yitzhak Rabin after a Tel Aviv peace rally.

Yes, this may be a learning moment, and we may become better for it. It may also be a reminder why we don’t shout “fire” just to see the reaction.

Jan 24 –

Following Andrew Adler’s resignation, J.J. Goldberg wrote this fine piece in the Forward. What made Adler “wander so far off the reservation?” Goldberg writes. “The answer is, he didn’t.”

Jerome Rubin, a co-founder of LexisNexis, has died.

The Washington Post obituary says that “his parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia.”

Eve Arnold with Marilyn Monroe during the filming of 'The Misfits', 1960 Photograph: Eve Arnold/Magnum Photos

Twice in today’s obituaries the phrase “born to Russian immigrants” appeared. One was for screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, who was 111 years old (the third-oldest person in California) and who was “born in New York to Russian immigrants.”

The other was photographer Eve Arnold (only 99), who was “born Eve Cohen to Russian immigrant parents in Philadelphia.”

Every time I read that someone was “born to Russian immigrants” the voice of correction in my head shoots back, “Jewish. She was Jewish. Say it with me: Jewish.”

When did Russian become a euphemism for Jewish? It’s like when you read about someone being flamboyant, you know the writer means gay. My guess is that Eve Cohen’s parents didn’t leave Russia because they were Russian, but because they were Jews who were sick of anti-Semitism and were trying to get away from the Russians.

And I say that as the son of a Polish immigrant and grandson of Russian immigrants.

Amazing.

Baby bump.

Shared sacrifice.

Occupy.

Blowback.

Man cave.

The new normal.

Pet parent.

Win the future.

Trickeration.

Ginormous.

Thank you in advance.

Maybe because of the worlds I inhabit, I’ve never heard of trickeration (from football) and pet parent. And I hadn’t realized how omnipresent amazing has become — “Many nominators mentioned [amazing's] over-use on television when they sent their entries,” according to the LSSU webpage, “mentioning ‘reality’ TV, Martha Stewart and Anderson Cooper. It seemed to bother people everywhere, as nominations were sent from around the U.S. and Canada and some from overseas, including Israel, England and Scotland.

“Every talk show uses this word at least two times every five minutes. Hair is not ‘amazing.’ Shoes are not ‘amazing,’” Martha Waszak wrote to LSSU.

“The word has been overused to describe things only slightly better than mundane,” wrote Alyce-Mae Alexander. “I blame Martha Stewart because to her, EVERYTHING is amazing! It has lost its ‘wow factor’ and has reached ‘epic’ proportions of use. It’s gone ‘viral,’ I say! ‘I’m just sayin’!’ “

The outrage has grown to the point where there is now a Facebook page called “Overuse of the word ‘Amazing.’ “

I was part of an online discussion yesterday with a guy who felt the Banished Word List is the product of an elite professoriate trying to police the speech of regular people. My impression is that nominations to the list are made by regular people, and that far from being attempts to muzzle free speech and free thought, nominations and comments are made in a lighthearted spirit. We all use at least some of these cliches. The List of Banished Words helps us hear ourselves talk, and decide whether there will be blowback, or just a response; whether we want to make another Occupy Wall Street reference, or come up with a new way to be clever; and if something is really, truly, undeniably amazing.

I wrote about last year’s list here. And I offered my own list here in 2009.

And, as they say in Public Radio Land, you’re invited to join the conversation.  (I’ll take my response off the air.)

So here is my list of the top 9 books I’ve read in 2011 — fiction and non. (I wasn’t able to come up with a 10th that still resonates with me.) Only two were published this year, but that’s what reading for pleasure is like.

Non Fiction

City Boy, by Edmund White (2009), is White’s memoir about life in the rough and randy NYC of the ’60s and ’70s. White amiably fills the pages with beautiful insights into art, the people he knew and the new paradigms of identity and relationships that gay liberation tried to bring into the world.  The first part of Chapter 1 is so wonderful it should be read aloud:

“In the 1970s in New York everyone slept till noon…” it begins.

Life, by Keith Richards. Here is the rare guy who got to do his thing, and overall seems to have enjoyed it. As a book, Richards’ life is a fun ride, although things get thin after 1980. Sure I was thrilled to read how he plays those songs, but do I care how he makes bangers and mash? Still, A natural storyteller as well as musician, he manages to share his pleasure with the reader.  After I read the book I read Greil Marcus’ review, which fleshed out shortcomings that I had only sensed. (“Richards needs a Dominican retreat to get away from his Jamaican retreat.” Cry me a river.)

“Positively 4th Street,” by David Hajdu. (2002) Dylan is a nerdy creep. Joan Baez is a narcissistic channeler for Joe Hill. Her sister Mimi is sweet and ethereal and too young to have been swept into the folk music pantheon. Mimi’s lover-then-husband, writer-turned-musician Richard Fariña, always a half-step behind Dylan, pulls the couple into the folk-rock mainstream. Easily the most engaging of the four main characters in this history of the folk boom, Fariña was the kind of guy who would meet you in a bar for drinks, and you’d walk out hours later having agreed to a grandiose plan to write a joint novel.

“Dylan was offensive in that he would really be rude to people, and Dick wouldn’t really be rude to people. But Dick was like, ‘Look at me — here I am. Dig me!’ Dylan was like, ‘Look all you want. You’ll never see me.’ “

The First Tycoon,  by T.J. Stiles. (2009) I loved American history when I was growing up, but had an aversion to Captains of Industry like steamship and railroad pioneer Cornelius Vanderbilt. But the story of “The Commodore” was instructive to me in this time of teetering economics. Vanderbilt was among the first to understand the power of the abstract economics of capitalism: corporations, the stock market, competition and monopolies. He constructed his railroad empire as much in the board room and on data as on the ground of running tracks.  His relentlessness over some 80 years makes for a biography that doesn’t flag.

Secret Historian,  by Justin Spring. (2010) The fascinating biography of  the American writer Samuel Steward who began his career as a novelist in the circle of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas and later reinvented himself as tattoo artist Phil Sparrow. As Phil Andros he wrote gay porn. Steward was a lifelong journal keeper, who kept detailed notes of his sexual experiences which he provided to researcher Alfred Kinsey. Born at the beginning of the 20th century and dying at the start of the AIDS epidemic, Steward’s remarkable life is a reminder of how awful things were for gays, of the price paid for being in the closet — or for not being in the closet.

Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris. (2010) Even in decline, Theodore Roosevelt was more vital, more vivid than most people. This is the last of Morris’s trilogy on the 26th president. It begins with the set piece of Roosevelt’s post-White House African big game hunt in 1910. It follows through endless election seasons, including a failed run for president in 1912, the disastrous Amazon expedition of 1913, and Roosevelt’s energetic lobbying for national preparedness in the run-up to World War I. Between it all, Roosevelt wrote, wrote, wrote. A late-life magazine profile was titled, “The Most Interesting American.” In Morris’s telling, that description is certainly accurate.

Fiction

History of the Siege of Lisbon, by José Saramago. (1996)  On the potency of words and imagination, and the Christian conquest of Muslim Portugal. A milquetoast proofreader alters a historical text with the addition of a single word and his life changes, as he struggles to re-imagine the history of his city to conform to his emendation, and win the woman he loves.

House of Meetings, by Martin Amis. (2006) The first book by Amis I ever read, and the first of two that I read this year.  An intense, grimly absorbing exploration of Stalinism and the Gulag and a probe of the Russian mentality, reflected in the lives of two brothers.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. This is the only book listed on the Washington Post’s “Best of” list that I’ve read. It’s also the first of Patchett’s books that I’ve read, and I found its story of hide and seek in the Amazon jungle, with its twists and revelations, neither shallow nor deep. The character of overbearing, manipulative Dr. Annick Swenson, though, is a fascinatingly drawn study of  ego and will. Glenn Close could play her in the movie.

That’s my list. Please add your top 9 books of the year, or top 10, or 5…

Looking over the brand new Microsoft Bob, Connare realized that “cartoon dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman.” And Comic Sans was born as a remedy.

Suddenly I was noticing Comic Sans everywhere. In newsletters. On flyers. In emails and YouTube videos. People turn to it as they turn to any cliche. Using Comic Sans indiscriminately this way is tacky, like a bad hairpiece.

Comic Sans is as hated as anything ubiquitous could be — see here and here. The Onion has had its say on the Comic Sans hilarity factor. And this parody shows Hitler’s reaction to Comic Sans.

Now comes “I’m Comic Sans, Asshole,” which Lori Rice, who knows more fonts than anybody I know, has brought to my attention.  Written by Mike Lacher and published in McSweeney’s, the piece is a rant from a font on steroids. It aims to put some muscle behind Comic Sans’s runaway popularity.

But that’s just part of the joke. Comic Sans was created to be a touch of whimsy in the garden. The people who use it as their serious default font are just blowing dandelion seeds around.

St. Bernard: Keep on expiating.

In his review in Tablet of “Philosemitism in History,” edited by Adam Sutcliffe and Jonathan Karp, Adam Kirsch made clear to me why people who Love the Jews are so creepy:

“…closer to the bone is the saying that ‘a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who loves Jews.’ That formulation helps to capture the sense that philo- and anti- share an unhealthy interest in Jews and an unreal notion of who and what Jews are.”

That unhealthy interest is what is perverse about Christian Zionists of the fundamentalist kind. It’s why Washington Post opinionaire Dana Milbank called the news that Sen. Joe Lieberman was going to join Glenn Beck’s rally in Israel in August a shande.

Milbank wrote: “Beck’s descriptions of his event as a gathering and a restoration echo his Mormon faith’s theology: there will be a ‘Gathering of Scattered Israel’  in which Jews return to the Holy Land and are converted to Christianity as part of ‘the restoration of all things’ and the Second Coming.”

For this we should send a thank-you card?

If so, one for Saint Bernard is long overdue. In his review, Kirsch quotes Saint Bernard warning the Second Crusaders not to slaughter Jews like the First Crusaders did:

“The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world, so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere the living witnesses of our redemption.”

It’s a bit like the punchline of the joke in which the Jew asks God if the Jews were really the chosen people: Would you mind loving someone else for a change?

I hear that statement periodically, but you don’t stop to think seriously about what it really means until someone is employing sharp instruments so close to your brain.

What would be the implications of using 100 percent of our brains, of being able to do everything we do now — only more of it?

If  we were using all our brains, could we remember everything — even where we dropped our keys?

Could we do two completely different things at the same time, say landscape painting while changing our engine oil?

Would we all be good at math?

Would we all be chess masters? Could we play polyrhythms? Order in French?

And would we be able to rent out space in our brains to others?

The idea that we only use a tenth of our brains seems to mean that we live falling short, that we die unfulfilled, guilty of some moral weakness — “He was such a promising boy, but he only used 10 percent of his brain, so what do you expect?” Such disappointment.

We can take some comfort in the fact that the 10 percent idea isn’t true. As early as 2004, Scientific American published a debunking article,   “Do we really use only 10 percent of our brains?” Perhaps the magazine forgot about it, because in 2008 it published another article, “Do People Only Use 10 Percent Of Their Brains?“

The answer to both questions seems to be no. But I’m not sure I want to tell my barber that.

The Zeta Psi fraternity at the University of Virginia (its motto: “We aim to turn out into the world self-respecting, original-thinking, self-controlled, purposeful gentlemen”) reportedly serves a pledges-only meal consisting of dog food, matzah balls, gefilte fish and soy sauce.

I don’t know whether to call the ADL or see if there’s kosher-for-Passover Alpo and serve it at my seder.