Will Chicago Elect Rahm – A Jew – As Mayor?
Rahm Emanuel has officially left the White House to officially prepare to run for Mayor of Chicago — and Tablet’s Rachel Shteir officially thinks he doesn’t have a hope in hell. Put differently, she thinks that a Jew has about as much a chance of getting elected in Chicago as 8-day old baby Shlomo has of keeping his foreskin. Says Shtier: Emanuel doesn’t stand a chance here because, as one longtime Chicagoan put it to me recently, he is “too Jewish” in a city that has never had a Jewish mayor and a state that has never had a Jewish attorney general, state senator, or U.S. senator, despite having the fifth-largest Jewish population of any U.S. city, according to the World Jewish Congress. “He has a potty mouth,” another bystander put it, basically repeating the sentiment. I grew up on the East Coast, but I’ve lived in Chicago for 10 years—as long as I lived in New York as an adult—and by now I am all too acquainted with this sort of thinking. Emanuel’s brash public persona, which in New
