Actually, we don't know "what Jewish Identity has meant in the past"--especially in the United States. The controversy over the title of the PBS series--"Jewish Americans" versus "American Jews"--tells us so. Only in America, and only fairly recently (since the Second World War) have Jews enjoyed the historic luxury, whether they are religious or not, of full acceptance in a country with a non-Jewish majority.

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I've always been interested in the seven deadly sins--in purely intellectual fashion, of course--because so many of them are not sins at all unless taken to excess and extremes. Pride, for example, is not necessarily a sin (or a moral offense, in secular terms) in my book, but it can be an enormous moral failing when it leads to a reckless overestimation of one's abilities and a reckless undervaluation of the cost to others. Does anyone remember a president who declared, "Mission Accomplished," and the huge death toll that came afterward? This was nothing more than overweening pride--the sort of pride that makes you stupid--in action.

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One of the few good things to be said for the inordinate length of the primary process is that in due course, a man who has received a huge amount of press coverage--a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who seems both humorous and "authentic"--reveals himself to be a humorous and authentic ignoramus. That is precisely what happened when Mike Huckabee suggested that we "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." (Huckabee also revealed himself to be as ignorant about lucid sentence structure as he is about constitutional history.)

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