Sarah Silverman, actress, comedy star and reigning Semitic queen of lefty politics, has been a very busy woman lately.
As most of us know, Silverman's face and accompanying potty mouth have been the centerpiece of a series of successfully viral pro-Obama YouTube videos.
Her high-profile activism began in 2008 with The Great Shlep, a campaign aimed at convincing young Jews to travel south and convince their Floridian grandparents to put Barack Obama over the top in that state.
This past July, she made her debut move in the 2012 presidential race when she made her infamous indecent proposal to "scissor" Sheldon Adelson. In that video and an accompanying "Scissor Sheldon" website and campaign, she offered dubious sexual favors (and demonstrated the scissors position with her dog ) to the 78-year-old billionaire if he would withdraw his $100 million contribution to Mitt Romney and give it to Obama. As the campaign wears on, she hasn't held back, asking her 3.4 million followers on Twitter whether Romney performs a certain sexual act (not the same move she offered Adelson. )
Her latest video offering, called Let My People Vote, uses the usual Silverman combination of engaging smile, barbed obscenities and Jewish self-reference to criticize the new laws in several states requiring a photo ID to vote, which Democrats are protesting, and pushing Obama supporters in those states to get the appropriate identification. Like the Adelson video, this one is also accompanied by an informative website, and is part of a campaign funded by the Jewish Council for Education and Research, which states that it is a SuperPac unaffiliated with any specific candidate.
Now there's not a lot about Silverman's style or language that you'd expect an Orthodox rabbi to approve of, especially one who writes for a conservative Jewish publication. But one Rabbi Yaakov Rosenblatt really let it fly in a Jewish Press column titled "An Open Letter to Sarah Silverman," hitting way below the belt. Ostensibly, the justification for his very personal attack on her was the title of her video. He said "Let My People Vote" offended him by "framing" her views in "biblical language" and "traditional Jewish terminology."
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