No, this is not another one of my obnoxious attacks on the dinosaurs of the publishing industry. Just the opposite, in fact. I am more than a little surprised to discover that some people are banking on the cell phone to be the primary means of transmitting written texts electronically.

One

word

at

a

time.

Ron Rosenbaum ponders the question. But first he reveals the existence of a Borat One (TV version) and a Borat Two (dumb Hollywood version).

Call me a Borat snob. I was a huge fan of the brilliantly oblivious, appealingly clueless Kazakh “newsman” character when he appeared on segments of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show on HBO. So, there’s that Borat; let’s call him Borat One.

But then there’s the heavy-handed, frat-boy, butt-head Borat, the dumbed-down buffoon Borat of Borat the movie. The Jackass Borat. Let’s call him Borat Two. Yes, I laughed, you’ll laugh, it’s stupid-funny.

Further along in his exegesis, Rosenbaum wonders about the famous “Throw the Jew Down the Well” episode from Borat One (TV version), which he recalls from memory:

the real suspense, the real news, is the reaction of the crowd. At first, they’re hesitant, then they all begin to join in the chorus: “Throw the Jew down the well”—all but a very few.

It’s one of those moments that raise several possibilities:

1) If you scratch the surface of the average American, you find someone who’s capable of encouraging murderous anti-Semitism.

2) Americans are so friendly and nonxenophobic that they’ll go out of their way to play along with a foreigner even if they wouldn’t in their wildest dreams throw a Jew down a well. They’re just being good sports about the kooky outsider so he’ll feel at home. Maybe it’s anti-Semitism, but it’s not deep-seated Streicher/Goebbels anti-Semitism, is it? It’s more get-along, go-along anti-Semitism. (Like the anti-Semitism in Roth’s The Plot Against America.)

3) Maybe it’s get-along, go-along, friendly-to-foreigners anti-Semitism. But under the right circumstances, a substratum of this sort of jovial sing-along anti-Semitism can be transformed into something uglier.

Whether or not Borat is good for the Jews I leave to others to decide.

Laughter Sacha Baron Cohen-style is certainly good for the Jews, and for the Muslims, and for the Hindus, and for the Zoroastrians, and for the Protestants, and for the Catholics.

Did I leave anyone out?

Supermodel Bar Refaeli, who is reportedly Leonardo DiCaprio’s girlfriend, invites you to visit Israel.

(Photo: Ron Kedmi)

There are plenty of complaints about this–from Israelis who grumble that she didn’t do her military service and therefore shouldn’t represent Israel as well as from Orthodox Israeli politicians who claim people could get what she’s selling anywhere and that a tourism-promotion campaign should feature Israel’s unique historical and archaeological sites.

This campaign, of course, is a charm offensive, not an attempt to bring tourists to Israel. And it will take a lot more than that to solve Israel’s image problems—to the extent that it can ever solve its image problem. And I’m beginning to wonder.