The Daily Show with Jonathan Leibowitz
Jon Stewart a relic of antisemitism? Ron Rosenbaum thinks so.
“Dear Jon Stewart,” he writes in Slate, “I want you to change your name. Back to Leibowitz.” He is referring to Stewart’s birth moniker, Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz.
Many of us have stories about how our family names were hacked into Americanized semblances of the original after our ancestors left their old countries. My great-grandfather’s Rosenzweig became Rosen to fit on a New York boxing marquis, or so goes the family lore. Yarrow, my married name, might have once been Yarovetsky outside of Kiev at the turn of the century, but now, nobody knows for sure.
Rosenbaum is looking for high profile Jews, namely Stewart, to “reject the rejection of their ancestry and the WASP-ification of their names.”
Rosenbaum appeals to Stewart’s knack for stripping the pretenses from the personas of celebrities and political big shots on his show, then asks that he turn this strategy on himself by reclaiming his ethnic name. Rosenbaum goes on to say that Stewart asserts his Jewishness in every other discernible way in the name of comedy — his bar mitzvah referencing, bubbe-teasing, occasionally Yiddish-accented joshes pander to tribe members and the seculars alike.
Stewart was named the most trusted man in news in a recent Time magazine poll, though their 9,409-person sample of voters seems too small call Stewart the new Walter Cronkite.
Will Stewart make the switch? Slate has offered him a forum. We’ll keep you posted.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
