{"id":77,"date":"2010-09-24T11:18:48","date_gmt":"2010-09-24T11:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/shalom-fidel.html"},"modified":"2010-09-24T11:18:48","modified_gmt":"2010-09-24T11:18:48","slug":"shalom-fidel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/shalom-fidel.html","title":{"rendered":"Shalom, Fidel!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I’ve never been a fan of Fidel Castro, but I can’t help feeling a certain tribal glow of appreciation for his warm remarks to the Atlantic<\/i>‘s Jeffrey Goldberg about the Jews and their state. Goldberg reported<\/a> them first a couple of weeks ago, and mused<\/a> on how at odds they are with current global leftism a couple of days ago. <\/p>\n

Part of the explanation for the old Communist’s philo-Semitism may be a bit of personal identity politics: He seems to think he has Jewish antecedents, and that may even be true<\/a>. But equally, Castro’s ideology harks back to the days when the left–including the Zionist left–was hostile to religion. Israel in its early days was a pretty socialist state, and was embraced by the Socialist International as such (don’t tell the Tea Party).<\/p>\n

We’ve come a long way from then to a time when a Castro wannabe like Hugo Chavez plays religious footsie<\/a> with Venezuelan evangelicals and steps out<\/a> with the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The fact that the latter was the intended recipient of Castro’s words is more than a little interesting. Not that I expect it, but it would nice if the Fidel’s contemporary acolytes were led to ponder what they are doing in bed with some of the world’s leading theocrats.  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve never been a fan of Fidel Castro, but I can’t help feeling a certain tribal glow of appreciation for his warm remarks to the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg about the Jews and their state. Goldberg reported them first a couple of weeks ago, and mused on how at odds they are with current global leftism…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nShalom, Fidel! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/shalom-fidel.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Shalom, Fidel! - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’ve never been a fan of Fidel Castro, but I can’t help feeling a certain tribal glow of appreciation for his warm remarks to the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg about the Jews and their state. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}