c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) OK, so George Allen won’t be returning to the U.S. Senate in January, and chances are he’ll never occupy the White House. But, at the end of what had to be one of the worst weeks of his life, the Jewish newspaper the Forward named Allen the 51st member of its annual Forward 50 list of the most influential American Jews.

It was the Forward that earlier this year revealed the Virginia Republican’s Jewish roots, and Allen’s flustered response may have contributed to his narrow defeat and the Democratic takeover of the Senate.

In being named to the list in the Nov. 10 issue of the venerable New York-based Jewish weekly, Allen joins a raft of rabbis, scholars and philanthropists, as well as “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, “Borat” star Sacha Baron Cohen and actress Scarlett Johansson, who Forward editor J.J. Goldberg says happens to be both Jewish and the most beautiful woman in the world.

The Forward 50 includes five top picks. In no particular order, they are “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart; Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Ruth Messinger, president of American Jewish World Service; Arnold Eisen, the incoming chancellor of the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of New York; and paired together, Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel and New York Sen. Charles Schumer who, respectively, chaired the Democratic campaign committees in the House and Senate.

The list includes the leaders of important Jewish organizations, like David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; and Foxman. There are also more familiar names like writers Philip Roth and Elie Wiesel, and, making her first appearance, Barbra Streisand, who, the Forward notes, far from hiding her Jewishness, “built a career by daring the public to mock her.”

Aside from Allen, there are some more obviously Jewish politicians, like Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat who won re-election this year as an independent, and Emanuel and Schumer. Actor Jeremy Piven, who plays the endearingly hyper and obnoxious Hollywood agent Ari Gold on the HBO series “Entourage,” also joins the list; Piven’s character is based on Rahm Emanuel’s kid brother, Ari.

Perhaps not unexpectedly, the Forward 50’s sports section is thin, consisting only of UCLA point guard Jordan Farmar and baseball’s Shawn Green. Green’s refusal to play on Yom Kippur got him on the Forward list two years ago as a Los Angeles Dodger; he made it this year because his trade to the New York Mets gave many Jewish Mets fans special reason to kvell (beam with pride).

“Borat’s” Cohen went Mel Brooks and “Springtime for Hitler” one better, turning his faux documentary of the American journey of a clueless, anti-Semitic Kazakh journalist, Borat, into a sometimes uncomfortable comic masterpiece. Cohen, an observant Orthodox Jew who spent a year on a kibbutz in Israel, is British. But Goldberg said he was able to add him to the list, which is limited to members of the American Jewish community, when Cohen put money down on a house in Los Angeles.

The Forward said Stewart (formerly Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz) “may have done more to turn public opinion against the Iraq war … than any other media figure in America today.” And Johansson, the Forward says, “seems to have cured Woody Allen of his shiksa fetish,” referring to Allen’s previous preference, in Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, for non-Jewish female leads. Johansson, the daughter of a Danish father and Jewish mother with Bronx roots, starred in Allen’s last two films, “Match Point” and “Scoop.”

Some obvious candidates have never made the list, like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“He’s so deracinated,” said Goldberg. “He doesn’t do anything Jewish.”

Ditto Alan Greenspan, who, Goldberg said, was, before his retirement as chairman of the Federal Reserve, “probably the most powerful Jew in the world, but doesn’t do anything Jewish.”

Which brings us back to George Allen.

Last August, when Allen used the term “macaca” to refer to an Indian-American cameraman at one of his campaign appearances, the Forward, aware that the term was North African Jewish slang insult for dark-skinned Africans, investigated. Soon after, The Forward revealed that, in fact, Allen’s mother was a Tunisian Jew, which, under Jewish law, makes Allen Jewish. Allen, who was raised Presbyterian, responded clumsily to the news, and it may have cost him.

But the Forward, in adding him to its list, drew a broader lesson:

“What Allen, 54, ultimately makes of the discovery, only time will tell. But Allen’s back-story _ the tale of how his mother, Etty, a Tunisian-born Jew, escaped the Nazis and vowed to leave behind her Jewishness _ offers a sobering lesson for all of us. Nobody knows how many thousands or millions of Jews decided during World War II to discard the identity that Hitler had pronounced a capital crime. Some have since returned to their origins. Others never looked back. All of them are part of us, even the junior senator from Virginia.”

The Forward list of most influential American Jews:

TOP PICKS

_ Arnold Eisen, scholar

_ U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

_ Abraham Foxman, Anti-Defamation League

_ Ruth Messinger, American Jewish World Service

_ Jon Stewart, comedian

POLITICS

_ Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser

_ Matt Brooks, Republican Jewish Coalition

_ U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif.

_ U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.

_ U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla.

IDEAS AND ACTIVISM

_ Jill Jacobs, rabbi

_ Dennis Ross, diplomat

_ Susan Tuchman, Zionist Organization of America Center for Law and Justice

_ Mikey Weinstein, Military Religious Freedom Foundation

RELIGION

_ Sharon Brous, independent rabbi

_ Elliot Dorff, Conservative rabbi

_ Richard Joel, president, Yeshiva University

_ Sharon Kleinbaum, openly gay rabbi

_ Yehuda Krinsky, Lubavitch Hasidic rabbi

_ Irwin Kula, Conservative rabbi

_ Dina Najman-Licht, Orthodox spiritual leader

_ Zalman Teitelbaum, Hasidic rabbi

_ Eric Yoffie, Reform rabbi

COMMUNITY

_ Wayne Firestone, Hillel

_ Menachem Genack, rabbi

_ David Harris, American Jewish Committee

_ Malcolm Hoenlein, Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations

_ Nancy Kaufman, Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston

_ Howard Kohr, American Israel Public Affairs Committee

_ Steven Nasatir, Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago

_ Carole Solomon, Jewish Agency for Israel

CULTURE

_ Sacha Baron Cohen, comedian

_ Aaron Bisman, JDub Records

_ Carolyn Hessel, Jewish Book Council

_ Scarlett Johansson, actress

_ Jeremy Piven, actor

_ Philip Roth, writer

_ Gary Shteyngart, writer.

_ Barbra Streisand, entertainer

_ Elie Wiesel, writer

SPORTS

_ Jordan Farmar, UCLA basketball

_ Shawn Green, New York Mets

PHILANTHROPY

_ Charles Bronfman and Roger Bennett

_ Jennie Rosenn

_ Alice Rosenwald

_ Lynn Schusterman

_ Carol Smokler

_ Ronald Stanton

LAW & ORDER

_ Jack Abramoff, lobbyist and felon

_ Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, American Israel Public Affairs Committee

PLUS ONE

_ U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va.

KRE/JL END TILOVE

Editors: A shorter version of this story is also included in today’s digest, RNS-DIGEST-NOV13. The information at the bottom of this story is suitable for use as a graphic.