Is Jim Cramer Jewish?

Google the question, “Is Jim Cramer Jewish?”  Go ahead—about 500,000 web surfers already have.  For a long time, the first result to pop up was a forum entry at stormfront.something-or-other, the Internet’s safe harbour for Frustrated White Males.  The entry offers only this question, “Does anyone know if Jim Cramer is Jewish?”

Let’s resolve the deep mystery about whether a brash, media-savvy Harvard-educated financial expert with an East Coast accent and a last name derived from the German word for “peddler” is—SHOCKING!—Jewish.  Um, yes, he is.

But here’s the white Aryan dilemma—so is Jon Stewart.  It wasn’t stormfront.hate or the Klan who outed Cramer, it was The Daily Show host who took Cramer to the ethical woodshed. And Stewart is not, in fact, a descendant of the House of Stuart or the younger brother of Martha.  He was born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz.

So there you have it: Jews can be immoral (we’re talking about you, Mr. Shenanigans) and Jews can be moral crusaders.  Jews can be ideological warmongers (Did someone say Doug Feith?  Never mind, I thought I heard something.) and Jews can be at the forefront of fighting against wrongheaded wars (Robert Greenwald,  Sen. Russ Feingold). Jews can be dangerous demagogues fomenting hatred (Avigdor Lieberman) and Jews can be heroic peacemakers (Yitzhak Rabin).

I apologize if that short circuits any FRM’s black-and-white thought process, but it is the complicated truth about Jews, about Christians, about Muslims, about any group, race, religion or nationality. Cramer and Stewart, as I quickly and not too elegantly wrote in an earlier post, actually represent twin poles of Jewish thinking. To see them in conflict Thursday night was actually NOT, as the Stormfront denizens likely see it, yet another sign of Jewish chicanery.  It was a sign of Jewish complexity, with, you know, a few good jokes thrown in, too.

For more of our Cramer v. Stewart coverage, click here.