from NYTimes.com, with necessary modifications
Okay, so, mysteries of Judith Regan's ancestry solved:
She would come home to this Irish-Sicilian Catholic family and just shout out 'penis'...
Oops. We totally shouldn't have stopped reading that Vanity Fair article at "golden vagina." (But can you blame us?) In any case, a few helpful tipsters have cleared us up on the issue of Regan's ancestry — which, by the way, we never said was Jewish, we just said could have been Jewish, and ought have been clarified either way. But she's not, and apparently Keith Kelly mentioned it in Nov. 2002 (that guy we know is Irish); a 1993 profile in the Orlando Sentinel called her "Irish-Sicilian-American"; and — the clincher — a profile in "Irish America" in 2001 (Nexis blast courtesy of Radar's Jeff Bercovici — who, interestingly, splits his own ancestry between Irish like Judith Regan and Jewish like the HarperCollins cabal). Either way, we think that it would have cleared things up for at least one reader had the NYT made note of that, and we stand by our earlier posts trying vainly to claim Judith Regan for the Tribe.
We'd be depressed at our failure to do so had we not reeled in an even bigger fish during the course of our research. Curious? You should be — follow us to the identity of our super-secret stealth Jew after the jump! Hint: It may rhyme with "Schmupert Schmurdoch."
....YES! It's Rupert Murdoch! Check this out:
Murdoch "became an American citizen for business reasons," according to Richard H. Curtiss, editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Keith Rupert was born in Melbourne, Australia, on March 11, 1931. "Rupert's father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a newspaper publisher, and his mother an Orthodox Jew," Curtiss wrote, "although Murdoch never offers that information in his biographies."Murdoch's father married Elisabeth Joy Greene, daughter of Rupert Greene in 1928. They had one son, Keith Rupert and three daughters. Later in life, Keith Rupert chose to use Rupert, the first name of his Jewish maternal grandfather.
Rupert Murdoch, Jew! I'd say "insert your own Jews control the media joke here" except for the disquieting reality of the source material, which actually, scarily thinks so: It's a site called "Jew Watch," which I originally thought was a cheeky Jewish site for categorizing and claiming Jews. As it turns out, not so much: This quote is from noted Holocaust denier David Irving, or as "Jew Watch" calls him, "the Famous & Noted Historian." Yikes. Further research has shown that most of the online sites dealing with this element of Murdoch's alleged ancestry are, er, similarly-themed ("Did Rupert Murdoch Have Prior Knowledge of 9/11?"). For these reasons ETP won't be linking to the site (but intrepid Googlers, it's easy to find, so go crazy).
This does, however, underscore our previously-made point: Namely, that the message changes considerably depending on the messenger. Judith Regan's position seemed a lot more defensible back when I thought she was Jewish, but even so, as previously mentioned, the statement she allegedly made is open to interpretation, and as a result, so, too, is the matter of whether they were anti-Semitic (and whether calling her that counts as libel). Somewhere, David Irving is relieved that he will never have that problem.
But for now, with caveats, at least until Jeff Bercovici rains Nexis down upon my head again, ETP is proud to present the newest member of the HarperCollins cabal: Rupert Murdoch, Jew. Or, you know, Jew-ish.
