“Seven Who Made A Difference In 2010”

Another leftwing Jewish newspaper doing the Jewicidal jig. What an embarrassment these sad rags are to proud Jews. The Jewish Week names Seven Who Made A Difference in 2010: "For better or worse, the newsmakers of the year," and yes, Atlas is there, in some pretty awful company like Peter Beinart and Elena Kagan — though they are well-liked, of course.

Seven Who Made A Difference In 2010 The Jewish Week

Another woman pioneer was Elena Kagan, 50, who joined the Supreme Court this summer, bringing the number of Jews on the current bench to three (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer) and adding a liberal voice to a right-of-center court.

ADVERTISEMENT

Kagan displayed her independence and interest in Judaism as a youngster, requesting the opportunity to become the first formal bat mitzvah at Lincoln Square Synagogue in 1973. Shlomo Riskin, founding rabbi of the Modern Orthodox congregation, recalled that young Kagan “felt very strongly that there should be ritual bat mitzvah in the synagogue,” and paved the way for many others.

Praised by colleagues as having strong personal skills as well as a keen legal mind, Kagan is seen as a potential consensus-builder on the court.

Pamela Geller, by contrast, has been described as one of the most “outraged and outrageous” personalities influencing public policy in the U.S.

Her website, Atlas Shrugs, portrayed Kagan in a Nazi helmet; she has written a book about the dangers of Obama’s presidency, and has called for removing the Dome of the Rock from the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Actually, the photoshop was Kagan as Colonel Klink. Appropriate seeing as how Elena Kagan's senior thesis at Princeton University, recounting the history of socialist politics in New York City, cited the theories of an influential German Marxist who notoriously switched allegiances to Nazism after Adolf Hitler attained power.

But Geller 52, a Jewish day school momis best known as one of the strongest public critics of Islam, asserting that it is prone to violence and hate, and for galvanizing opposition to Park51, the planned site of an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero.

Geller is credited, or blamed, for making the center a national and international issue this year. She was hailed by supporters as prophetic for warning of the dangers of Islam, and attacked by critics as strident and abusive in seeing no distinction between the Muslim religion and its most militant adherents.

Before walking out in anger during a Jewish Week interview this summer, she asserted: “There’s no gray area with me.”

At a moment of particularly strong polarization, in Washington and in the American Jewish community, there was little gray area in most political and religious disputes this year. Time will tell if there will be “climate change” in those discussions in 2011, but it seems certain the seven Jewish men and women cited here will play key roles in the debate.