I don't watch much television these days (at least not as much as I used to), but I do try to make time to catch the The Daily Show. The miracle of the DVR allows me to tape the show and watch it the next day when I get home from work. The only flaw in this is that because The Daily Show tapes during the day, they sometimes wind up being a day behind the news, which makes me two days behind the news or more when I am watching it.
That being said, I only just caught Jon Stewart's Rosh Hashanah Show. Let me just say, after watching the show I ended up feeling somewhat disappointed; not only did he choose to work on a High Holy Day, he also offered a satirical tirade criticizing Congress for taking a day off during the financial crisis. I guess this was meant to be funny but to me it sounded like he was just flaunting his own absence from synagogue.
Now I'm not going to get into a Good Jew vs. Bad Jew debate and make moral judgments on how individuals decide which of the 613 laws of Judaism to follow and which to ignore. I'll leave it up to the rabbis to figure out if a guy who doesn't eat pork but plays golf every Saturday morning has better morals than a guy who attends Shabbat services every week, but puts pepperoni on his pizza. What I will say however, is that certain people have a responsibility if they, either by choice or by default, are representing more than themselves. Condeleezza Rice discovered this when she chose to go shopping while New Orleans suffered the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Whether it's fair or not, Jon Stewart — a guy who likes to talk about being Jewish nearly every other show — is a spokesperson for Jews in general.
It would have been nice if Stewart had chosen not to work on Rosh Hashanah and instead aired a rerun on Tuesday (which he did just last week). It's even possible that the decision of whether to work or not wasn't entirely up to him. And some might even argue that it's a good thing that Jews are so ubiquitous now in American culture that they don't have to worry about their personal choices being as big of a deal as say Sandy Koufax's decision not to play on Yom Kippur during the 1965 World Series. I guess I'm just saying that the statement Stewart did choose to make on Tuesday put a little dagger in the heart of this Jew who's been rooting for him for a long time.
In related news, I'm not posting a podcast today as I've been out of the office for part of the week.
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