Last week, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan revealed a fairly well-known “family secret” to the world – that Jews usually spend their time off every Christmas Day chowing down on chow mein, munching on moo goo gai pan, gobbling up General Tso’s chicken and savoring similar delicacies in Chinese restaurants and carry-outs across this greasy galaxy.

Cantonese? Szechuan? Hunan? Fujian? Shandong?

They all sound good.

Chopsticks? Silverware? With our nimble little fingers?

We don’t care. Just bring it on.

Perhaps some folks in the deepest hollows of West Virginia or the furthest reaches of the Philippines jungle brush have never heard of this phenomenon, but most of us chuckled when we heard about Ms. Kagan’s remarks to the Senate committee reviewing her nomination. After all, it’s a popular in-joke that we all like to reference every now and then, just like catching a mindless flick on X-mas. (“What else is there to do when you’re Jewish?”)

But in my family, we’ve usually gone on our annual Yuletide pilgrimages to Greek bistros, which like their Chinese counterparts tend to be open on the day that the world observes the birth of, well, you-know-who. (I believe that’s because some Greeks celebrate Christmas on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany. Or maybe they’re simply astute businesspeople who know that Jews will be eating out in droves that day.)

Perhaps the question shouldn’t have been how Ms. Kagan spent last Christmas but how Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), her interrogator, spent Chanukah last year? Did he get Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from spinning a dreidel too many times? Did he get a nasty stomach ache from noshing on so many oily latkes?

And how did those Chinese and Greek restaurateurs fare during the Festival of Lights? Did they burn their fingertips lighting the menorah all those days? Did they grow hoarse from singing “Ma’oz Tzur” so many times?

Maybe the real question is why do Lindsey Graham or any other members of the United States Senate really care how or where Elena Kagan spent Christmas last year, even if it was the day on which an act of terrorism was planned (and thankfully foiled)?

Should Ms. Kagan have darted out of Wong’s Chinese Restaurant on 86th Street, drove several hundred miles to Detroit’s airport, and personally tackled and arrested the 23-year-old Nigerian “underwear bomber”?

Was there a point or purpose to Mr. Graham’s odd query? Not to sound too conspiratorial or paranoid, but what did the good senator really want to know? That Ms. Kagan is Jewish (which is no secret at all) and doesn’t spend much time in church or caroling on Christmas as a result?

That she doesn’t know all of the words to all of the stanzas of “Silent Night”? Is he looking to share a steaming plate of vegetable egg foo young with her at David Chu’s next Christmas Day?

Maybe I’ll find the answers to these questions someday on a little slip of paper in a fortune cookie.

The Jew, Jews, were once but a tiny blue dot dog-paddling in a ummm puce (fuchsia?) sea of non-Jewishness in America, progressive vmtciis of a forward-facing narrative firmly rooted in the Holocaust and a mythological long-term exile actually suffered by no-one.But then they overcame the hostility of the American convention towards Jew, Jews, and the world was a better place until, to their horror, they discovered that all of Judaism was now but a tiny blue dot in a green see of non-Jewishness in the Middle East.And, so, the Jew, Jews of America dusted off their progressive vmtciis cloaks, eased the weight of mythological long-term exile back onto their shoulders, remembered the Holocaust and told the Palestinians to stop whining about the past and to just get on with life, because healing old wounds helps no-one and it’s all just working for vengeance .The End.  (But not really, not yet.  They haven’t bombed Iran.)

This is a shoddy piece of mendacity by Mr. Feiler, and one that fully justifies Tolstoy’s comment from an 1871 letter that “All newspaper and journalistic activity is an intellectual brothel from which there is no retreat.”

Does Feiler provide a single quote from the hearing about which he is writing? No. How about a link to the transcript or a video of the alleged “incident?” Again, no.

Why is it always the “white guy” that Mr. Feiler finds threatening? Not so long ago it was a white guy who supposedly accosted him and his family at Fort McHenry. And then there was the solitary white guy with a Confederate flag bumper sticker that Feiler claims he saw when he was day-dreaming in a traffic jam one day with nothing better to do than think about replaying the Civil War.

In this case, does Feiler need to be told that nominees to the Supreme Court, a lifetime appointment, appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and are questioned by members of that committee? Does Feiler need to be told that this process is mandated by the United States Constitution?

Strange, then, that Feiler describes Lindsey Graham, whom he dutifully identifies as “(R-SC),” as Ms. Kagan’s “interrogator.” It would be hard to imagine that any current writer at The Jewish Times would have used this particular word to describe the despicable demeanor and line of questioning of the (white, Democrat) Senators who harangued, harassed, and humiliated Clarence Thomas. No, had Feiler been writing back then, you can be sure “(D-DE)” would not have followed then-Senator Joe Biden’s name.

In fact, both the transcript and a video of Senator Graham’s exchange exist online, and, far from being in any way threatening as Feiler imagines or pretends, the discussion produced a lighthearted and humorous moment.

However, the substance of the issue is this: Ms. Kagan has precious little in terms of legal writings on constitutional issues or actual judicial experience to commend her as a Supreme Court Justice. Weighing a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land against her exceedingly thin resume, it would be foolish and irresponsible to deem any serious question put to her as out of bounds. 

Kagan is on the record in favor of unisex bathrooms at Harvard, and she apparently forced Harvard’s health insurer to pay for sex change operations for staff and students. It is certainly more important to know that Kagan supports the “right” of 18-year-old kids to permanently self-mutilate without parental approval or even knowledge than how many Chinese pork dumplings she scarfs down on Christmas Day.

Far more critical and revealing than her tenure at Harvard is her work in the Clinton administration, where she herself, working as one of the president’s lawyers, deliberately and knowingly altered expert medical testimony concerning partial birth abortion for political purposes. Such behavior is recognized as a serious breach of ethics by the legal profession, and by itself ought to cause her nomination to be withdrawn by the White House or rejected by the Senate. Simply stated, Elena Kagan is not fit to sit on the United States Supreme Court for the next 30 to 40 years.

Finally, it is interesting to compare George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers with Obama’s of Kagan. Like Kagan now, Ms. Miers had no qualifications to justify Senate confirmation. The huge difference between these two nominations is that many, many Conservatives opposed Miers, and Bush, on principled grounds. Needless to say, Obama faces no such opposition to Kagan’s nomination from his friends on his side of the aisle.

This is what we see here from Mr. Feiler: pure partisan cheer-leading. Readers should not be diverted by Feiler’s attempt to propagandize an innocuous exchange in a public hearing into some sort of threat of white, Southern anti-Semitism. Feiler tosses out this red-herring, hoping it will divert people from asking the right questions about Kagan’s non-existent qualifications.

If Feiler is serious in his support of Kagan, let him write on the correctness of her positions. He can start with unisex bathrooms and sex change operations at Harvard. And then let him really show his courage by writing a column on how partial birth abortion is not infanticide. Let him also cite expert medical testimony about instances where partial birth abortion is “necessary” to protect the life of the mother. Other than Kagan’s quasi-legal but fully partisan political opinion, it will be interesting to see what Feiler is able to find.

At some point, common respect for the truth ought to cause the name of this publication to be changed to “The Infrequently Jewish but Consistently Left-wing Times,” and what better time than the present?