Yesterday, there was a link on Expecting Rain to an article called “Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob.”

If you don’t have the patience to click on the link and read the article, let me summarize it: The writer asserts as a premise that Jews, in their synagogues, are taught that “Jews are to rule the world and all the peoples” and that it “is the duty of every Jew to further that work.” He asserts that the young Bob Dylan was given a messianic impulse along these lines by the rabbi in Hibbing who prepared him for his Bar Mitzvah. Dylan, he says, eventually set about trying to achieve his aim by subverting folk music: “discarding the content for Jewish themes while retaining the outer forms.” He asserts that “the Jewish world organization,” conscious of what Bob Dylan was doing, helped nurture his messianic image by means of their control over the world’s media. Bob’s gospel period, he tells us, was in fact just another part of his ongoing strategy to Judaize America (or actually the whole world, I suppose). He finishes by saying, “Long after the fact there are still few who get it.” Indeed!

In short, then, it’s a piece of screwball Jew-hating screed. And it’s gotten thousands of hits thanks to being linked on Expecting Rain — and on the first day of Yom Kippur, no less, although it was published back in June of this year.

I didn’t happen to notice it yesterday, but it was brought to my attention in an e-mail last night by reader Dovid Kerner, who tells me that he sent the following to the webmaster of Expecting Rain, Karl Erik Andersen:

Regarding your posting the link to ‘Exhuming Bob X: Lubavitcher Bob:

I love your website but this one shouldn’t have been posted - it’s really written with an virulent anti-Jewish slant. Here the reply I left on the site:

<< Is it true that, as you say, there is a "Jewish world organization" which realized they had something in Bob Dylan and gave him maximum publicity?

And are Jews taught, as you write, that they "are to rule the world and all the peoples"? Or does the Biblical term 'chosen people' mean that Jews are to set an example for the rest of humanity? (I just finished a whole day in synagogue (Yom Kippur) and don't recall praying for us Jews to "rule the world".

Your claims sound vaguely familiar- the Protocols ring a bell here.

Shalom and Happy New Year,
Dovid >>

I think you should post an apology/warning to your readers regarding the matter.

Otherwise, thank you and keep up the great work!

As of this time of writing, the guy who posted the original article hasn’t published Dovid’s comment (which doesn’t really surprise, and the guy deserves to be ignored) and Karl Erik has not either taken down the link to the anti-semitic article, nor added any note about it. This disappoints.

…

Addendum 10/11/2008: Thanks to Karl who has responded on Expecting Rain this morning, saying that RWB isn’t happy with the link, but that “I trust that most readers will sift what they read through their own filters and see through it.” Well, most will, of-course, but it seems to me that there are sometimes qualifying or descriptive notes put beside links, and at a minimum this one would deserve something like that, so that perhaps some fifteen year-old kid out there reading it knows from the outset that responsible people believe it is nutso.

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