Anthony Weiner

Philip Goldfeder, an aide to Sen. Chuck Schumer, will kick off his campaign for state Assembly Thursday in Howard Beach, Queens. The special election will be held Sept. 13 and will also include another race for Assembly and the closely watched contest to succeed Anthony Weiner in Congress, making it a big day for Queens politics.

Does anyone remember Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom (married to a Jewish dad) who sparked our righteous indignation few months ago, before we found ourselves judging the Anthonies (Weiner and Casey) to escape the news of wars, deficits and depressing budget cuts?

Well, I just discovered that Amy’s oldest daughter, Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld (the good one who practiced piano as per her mother’s prescribed regimen) is (gasp!) going to Harvard. She also has a blog — I suppose so she can snag a lucrative book contract of her own.

I wonder if she (little sister Lulu — the rebel — is still too young to be eligible) will be interested in participating in a new study of Asian-Jewish kids.

David Weprin, a Queens Democrat who served in the City Council and now the State Assembly, has been named by his party bosses as the candidate in September’s special election to fill the seat of ex-congressman Anthony Weiner.

Politics is the Weprin family business. David’s father Saul was the speaker of the Assembly until his death in 1994, after which his brother, Mark assumed their father’s Assembly seat (while the speaker job went to Sheldon Silver). A third brother, Michael, served as a Huntington Town Councilman.

 First, a shameless celebrity tidbit to boost this blog's Google rankings: the inter-engaged Natalie Portman (fiance is ballet dancer Benjamin Millepied) has reportedly named her new son Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. No consensus yet on whether they're spelling it Aleph or Alef. But if the Portman-Millepied family’s next child is a girl, will she be named Beth?

We intermarried Jews are breeding like crazy.

The Israel-born actress Natalie (Hershlag) Portman, who is engaged to French dancer Benjamin Millepied, apparently just gave birth to a boy.
Since Portman has said in previous interviews that she planned to raise her children as Jews, I’m assuming this one belongs to the Tribe. Who knows? Maybe she’ll even decide to invite over that Monster Mohel featured recently in the disturbingly anti-Semitic “Foreskin Man” comic circulated by California’s anti-circumcision “intactivists.”

Then there is Anthony Weiner. Among other tidbits to emerge from the past week and a half’s round-the-clock Weinergate is that the congressman’s Muslim wife, Huma Abedin, is in the early stages of pregnancy. And presumably he is the father, unless in some dramatic twist of the whole aggrieved/betrayed wife scenario, he is not.

In my liberal and uber-secular extended family, there was only one figure who cared whether my sisters and I went to Hillel or dated/married Jews: Harold (Hans) Wiener, my father’s father.

Born to a large, secular German family whose members mostly managed to emigrate well before the Holocaust (he arrived in New York in 1922), Grandpa Harold, a wholesaler of men’s undergarments, never lost his German accent. He nonetheless settled comfortably into the mainstream American Jewish life of his generation: membership in a Conservative synagogue and a B’nai Brith chapter, donations to Israel Bonds and UJA, loyalty to the Democratic party and eventually retirement in Century Village, a predominantly Jewish community in West Palm Beach, Fla.

When, just months after announcing my engagement to lapsed Catholic Joe, I got my first job in Jewish journalism, at the Detroit Jewish News, I thought Grandpa Harold would be excited, that perhaps it would compensate for his disappointment about the upcoming intermarriage.

As more Democrats call on Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) to step down in the wake of his admission of lewd Twitter behavior – and the fact that he lied about it for so long – I keep wondering if there's a double standard at work here.

After all, other members of Congress have been caught in worse sex scandals without putting their jobs in jeopardy or getting pounded on by members of their own party.