Reckless Jew that I am, I muscled my way into the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Lower Manhattan despite multiple reports of virulent and conceivably lethal anti-Semitism. Projecting an unvarnished Semitism, I circled the place, encountering nothing and no one to suggest bigotry--not a sign, not a book and not even the guy who some weeks ago held up a placard with the instruction to google the phrase "Zionists control Wall St."  Google "nut case" instead.

Before you send your note of thanks to Cohen, wait until he gets to his real point:

This right-wing attempt to discredit both the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Democratic Party's hesitant embrace of it is reprehensible. It's made possible, however, because no one this side of the Moon knows precisely what the Occupy Wall Street movement is trying to do. On a daily basis it marches off to some location to highlight what we all know--that Wall Street guys are rich--and their slogans suggest a tired socialism that is as repugnant to me as the felonious capitalism that produced the mortgage bubble and the impoverishment of millions of Americans.

Cohen goes on to call Occupy Wall Street "a destination for the aimless...a tourist attraction with the usual vendors, the usual zaftig young women doing the usual arrhythmic dance, somehow missing the beat of many drums." It is also

a media event that has captured the flea-thoughts of many Americans...an incoherent articulation of anger at the institutions that have failed us, including--by way of both self-pity and self-flagellation--the media. It seems, above all, a conspiracy to have left-leaning writers make jackasses of themselves by imparting grave and grand meaning to what is little more than a vast sleepover.

For good measure, Cohen makes the argument that the right-wing smears of OWS are derived from the left:

The imputation of anti-Semitism, however, adds gravitas to this lighthearted event. The smear is in deadly earnest, a reminder that the devious tactics of the Old Left have been adopted by the New Right. (No accident, maybe, that the practitioners are the descendants of lefties.)

Well, he was on the right track with that first paragraph.

But the smear was just part of the anti-Soros crusade Beck is carrying out on his national radio program and his Fox News show, portraying Soros as an "puppet master" who operates behind the scenes to destroy America as we know it and bring on a new international order. The language and imagery Beck employs in his attacks on Soros has provoked charges of  anti-Semitism from the Daily Beast's Michelle Goldberg, among others. According to Goldberg:

Soros, a billionaire financier and patron of liberal causes, has long been an object of hatred on the right. But Beck went beyond demonizing him; he cast him as the protagonist in an updated Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He described Soros as the most powerful man on earth, the creator of a "shadow government" that manipulates regimes and currencies for its own enrichment. Obama is his "puppet," Beck says. Soros has even "infiltrated the churches." He foments social unrest and economic distress so he can bring down governments, all for his own financial gain.

Goldberg leaves little doubt about whether she thinks Beck’s broadcasts are anti-Semitic--she calls them "a symphony of anti-Semitic dog whistles"-- but she allows that Beck may not fully understand the historical the terms and images he is dealing in:

It's entirely possible that Beck has waded into anti-Semitic waters inadvertently, that he picked up toxic ideas from his right-wing demimonde without realizing their anti-Jewish provenance.

Whatever the case, it's not the first time Beck has been linked to anti-Semitism, or at least to anti-Semites. As Media Matters has observed, Beck's reading list, the roster of books he recommends to his viewers and listeners, includes titles by notorious anti-Semites:

On June 4, Beck took to the radio waves and told his audience all about this wonderful book he was reading called The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots. According to Beck, this book, from 1934, was proof that "McCarthy was absolutely right," and evidence that even back before McCarthy went on his Red hunts, people in America shared Beck's concern about the Communist infiltration of the country. "This is a book--and I'm a getting a ton of these--from people who were doing what we're doing now."

As it turned out, The Red Network's author, Elizabeth Dilling, was one of the anti-Communist movement's great anti-Semites. The book itself blamed "revolutionary Russian Jews" for the rise of anti-Semitic German fascism and called "racial intermixture" a communist plot. Dilling would go on to attend Nazi rallies in Germany and nickname Dwight Eisenhower "Ike the kike." Beck was unapologetic, instead making himself the martyr, saying that "the left" was calling him "a Jew-loving Nazi sympathizer."

On September 22, Beck went on Fox News and introduced his viewers to another book, called Secrets of the Federal Reserve, pulling a quote from it to attack Woodrow Wilson. The author of Secrets of the Federal Reserve was one Eustace Mullins, who passed away earlier this year. His obituary in his hometown paper began as follows: "Nationally known white supremacist and anti-Semite Eustace Mullins of Staunton, described in 2000 by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a one-man organization of hate, died Wednesday in Waller County, Texas, at age 86."

Secrets of the Federal Reserve details the conspiracy of German Jewish bankers to seize the wealth of the United States through the Federal Reserve. Mullins led a prolific and well-documented life of anti-Semitism and conspiracy mongering, two themes that converged when he blamed the 9/11 attacks on the Israeli Mossad.

Moreover, in May, Beck repeated one of the classic tropes of anti-Semitism. While attempting to refute a point of black liberation theology, Beck incidentally repeated the old anti-Semitic saw that the Jews killed Christ:

If he was a victim, and this theology was true, then Jesus would've come back from the dead and made the Jews pay for what they did.

As the anecdotes and evidence mount, it's harder to see Beck's repetition of the classic themes of anti-Semitism as inadvertent.

Well, on first blush, it seems to have to do with where she's from: "Coincidentally, she shares the same home town as the other two women on the court. Assuming Kagan is confirmed, all three women will hail from New York."  And why does this matter? "Spending one's formative years walking past the infamously crime-riddled Murder Hotel en route to school, as Kagan did--and, say, walking past the First Baptist Church to ballet class--are not the same cultural marinade."

To which, as a proud adopted New Yorker, I say: Huh? The "Murder Hotel" was a dilapidated residential hotel on the Upper West Side block that got its tabloid nickname from a murder that occurred there; it's not particularly infamous, but it was on the block that Kagan grew up on, and her dad helped shut it down.

But we also have ballet classes in New York City--actually, there are even famous ballet troupes based here--and, believe it or not, we also have Baptist churches here--249 of them, according to this church-locating service.  I don't know if Kagan ever took ballet class, but if she did, she could very easily have walked by the First Baptist Church on her way to them--it's at Broadway and West 79th Street, about four blocks from her house.

But this fantasy that New York City is some kind of alien world, where ballet and Baptists are unknown, is the crux of Parker's argument: "It seems remote to unlikely that a woman whose life has involved Baptist churches and ballet slippers would find herself on a track to today's Supreme Court, though that ought not to be the case."

Could it be that Parker's argument is not really about dance class, or even about New York City? That is suggested by her examples of justices whose backgrounds, unlike Kagan's, are a "help in claiming identity with ordinary people": She cites Clarence Thomas ("from a rural Georgia backwater") and Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito (each is a "the child of recently arrived immigrants"). Scalia, like Kagan, is a native of New York City, and yet, puzzlingly, he's a poster child for fitting in with regular Americans.  Could there be something else about Kagan that sets her apart from "mainstream" Americans?

Well, yes, there is something.  "More than half the country also happens to be Protestant, yet with Kagan, the court will feature three Jews, six Catholics and nary a Protestant. Fewer than one-fourth of Americans are Catholic, and 1.7 percent are Jewish." Though, again, the Catholics Scalia and Alito are held up as exemplars of ordinariness, so their religion isn't putting them outside that "mainstream"--you know, the one where people attend churches, Baptist or otherwise.

Conservatives have made a trope out of "San Francisco values"--a phrase that mainly serves to link Democrats to the most gay-identified city in hopes of attracting homophobic votes. When I hear conservative media figures going on about New York City, I hear the same thing--only with Jews instead of gays.

According to the SPLC, the weekly program's hosts, Augustín Cebada and Rafael Tlaloc, "are more than just passive enablers of anti-Semitic rhetoric:

They actively promote conspiracy theories about Jewish control of media and world governments, referring to Ponzi scheme crook Bernie Madoff as "that Jewish scam artist." Tlaloc said he felt no sympathy for Madoff's victims, many of whom were Jewish, because they were "shylocks and shysters."...

La Causa is tightly linked to La Voz de Aztlán, a rabidly anti-Semitic website based in Whittier, California. La Voz de Aztlán has been identified as a hate website by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

La Causa hosts and callers often reference La Voz de Aztlán as a credible source of information, and La Voz de Aztlán webmaster Hector Carreon has been interviewed on La Causa as a legitimate political analyst. Although a recording of that 2007 interview is no longer available in the KPFK online archives, Carreon boasts about an ongoing collaboration with La Causa on the La Voz de Aztlán website.

This would all be deplorable enough content from any outlet, but the SPLC tells us the 50-year-old KPFK not only is "the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States, according to its website," but also has a mission statement that aspires to "a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors."