So you are interested in learning about the Zohar?  A great introduction to the Kabbalah comes in the form of Rabbi Larry Kushner’s first fictional novel, Kabbalah: A Love Story. I just finished it and recommend it highly.  The story weaves its characters together with important elements of religious philosophy and Iberian Jewish history.  It also successfully links Jewish mysticism with the rationalist cosmology of Einstein’s concepts of space-time.  I was drawn into the dual love stories whose temporal juxtaposition is at the core of the mystical thesis of the novel, and also a central tenet of the mystical unity of Kabbalah.

I know Rabbi Kushner from our synagogue because he is the Emanu-El Scholar in-residence at the Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco.  We have been fortunate to have him with us for several years, and I was delighted to discover in the novel some personal touches that other congregants who have worshipped with Rabbi Kushner will also recognize.   

Excerpts from two of my favorite passages are below:

                                    REINAFIDANQUE 

I understand now.  The botzina d’qardinuta is the seed point of beginning,and the alma d’ahtay is the mother-womb of being.  Botzina d’qardinuta, it is the flash of light.  Alma d’ahtay, it is the unattainable and ultimate womb.  But these two must become one.  You are the darkness; I am the spark.  Botzina d’qardinuta and alma d’ahtay.   

…

"Then what do you mean when you talk about God?"

"There are two ways to understand our relationship with God.  The first is classic theism . . .  In that model, God can be represented as a big circle.  . . . And you a little circle below it. . . . there is another model.  It has a more Eastern ring, but it has been around in Western religion, too.  In this model God is still a big circle. . . . The little circle . . . still represents you, but . . . it is within the big circle of God.  You would call this mystical monism.  It’s all one and it’s all God.  God is simply all there is.  And therefore, the separateness of anyone or anything is illusory because everything is a manifestation of God!  God is the ocean, and we are the waves."

I’ve been reading Vali Nasr’s outstanding book, The Shia Revival, and was struck by a comment he makes in the introduction that ties directly into Nick Kristof’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times, "Looking for Islam’s Luthers".

The Shia Revival is required reading for anyone who wants to understood the roots of the centuries-old blood feud between Sunnis and Shiites.  It is particularly relevant in providing historical context for the current power struggle between these Arab ethnic groups inside Iraq.  Nasr writes eloquently and develops an insightful thesis into the motivation and tactics driving the Iranian theocracy’s strategic manipulation of the Iraqi, Syrian, and Lebanese players in the region (not to mention the U.S.) in the region.

In the introduction, page 23, Nasr makes a very important statement that may be lost to rationalists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins:

"Religion is not just about God and salvation; it decides the boundaries of communities. Different readings of history, theology, and religious law perform the same role as language or race in defining what makes each identity unique in saying who belongs to it and who does not."

Kristof’s column today makes a very important point in relating the ascendancy of religion in our time to social alienation:

"Islam is on the rise for many of the same reasons evangelical Christianity is surging: they provide a firm moral code, spiritual reassurance and orderliness to people vexed by chaos and immorality aorund them, and they offer dignity to the poor."

I would add to this that social fragmentation has been accelerated by the rapid pace of technological change since the beginning of the Internet age ten years ago. In the globalized Internet era, which is the breeding ground for the alienated, super-empowered individual, this quest for order and meaning becomes more and more urgent.  Anger and frustration can play out through nihilism, or they can lead to reform.

Kristof’s column focuses on Islamic feminism as a harbinger of reformist thinking in this religion. He concludes on an optimistic note:

"All this underscores that Islam is much more complex than the headlines might suggest.  The violence and fundamentalism gets the attention– and should be more loudly condemned by ordinary Muslims– but we would be close-minded ourselves if we ignored the more hopeful rumblings that are also taking place within the vast Islamic world. . . including, perhaps, steps toward a Muslim Reformation."

Like Nick Kristof, I am anxious to hear moderate voices reclaiming control of the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish faiths. 

I have received some thoughtful comments on my book review of Letter to A Christian Nation by Sam Harris.  This post is in response to those comments.

First, pascalsview is all about Pascal’s view– it is a personal blog driven by "feelings" and "opinions".  That is why I started this blog two years ago and why I write it. Everything I have to say in this Internet forum, by design, is driven by my feelings.

Second, I do believe Sam Harris is insightful, and, as a rational human being myself, I agree with much of what he writes.  But, unlike Sam, I do believe in God.  This does not disqualify me from rational discourse, nor does atheism disqualify Sam Harris from participating in a discussion on religion.  But I believe Harris overreaches because, in my view, he could make his points effectively without being disrespectful and insulting to people who believe in God and religion but aren’t religious fundamentalists.  What do I mean by this?

For example, I do not think it is necessary for Harris to describe the Catholic Church as "..the very institution that has produced and sheltered an elite army of child-molesters…"  That doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize that there are many priests who are child molesters.  In fact, the Church has been plagued with plenty of other ethical problems for centuries– read William Manchester’s outstanding A World Lit Only by Fire to learn of papal sponsored orgies at the Vatican with the participation of nuns and priests during the Middle Ages. 

In my opinion, Harris makes the same point over and over again, which feels like "shrieking" to me, without moving toward a solution that could work in the real world.  The underlying issue that links religion with fanaticism and dogmatic denial of the obvious has everything to do with the use of ideology by elites to wield power over the masses.  The works of philosophers from Machiavelli to Nietzsche to Marx clearly link religious dogma to the wielding of power.  Religion has been used for subjugation for thousands of years.  Even a casual observer can recognize that innumerable crimes against humanity have been done in God’s name.

I believe that it is worth encouraging people of faith who are not fanatics to take the center of power away from fanatics within their own faith.  I believe that, though very challenging, this may be more feasible and less of a stretch than asking people to renounce their religions, which are an important source of values and identity for most human beings, in the name of reconciling the many contradictions of faith.

By stirring the pot with his own fiery rhetoric, this may be exactly what Sam Harris is doing.  It certainly has gotten an interesting dialogue going, and my posts on Sam Harris have been the most widely read posts in the history of my blog to date. 

For that, I thank Sam and my readers, and I thank the commenters for their thoughtful opinions. 

There is something terribly disturbing about Sam Harris’s latest libretto. I met Sam at a seminar/retreat that we jointly attended earlier this year, and he thoughtfully sent me an autographed copy of this new manifesto, for which I thank him.  I didn’t read his 2005 New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, but I definitely get the picture of where his head is after spending some time with him and reading "Letter to a Christian Nation." 

Sam Harris advocates the end of faith and wants to put a stop to all religious worship. He sees this as the only way that the world will ever experience lasting peace. Like many rational people, Harris demands an end to the tragic contradictions thrust upon us by those (particularly Muslims) who choose death in the name of doing God’s will. He is outraged by people of any faith who anoint themselves the arbiters of right and wrong in the absolutist vacuum of radical religious fundamentalism and then impose their will on others. He is a rationalist, pure and simple.

But, after reading his book, I am left feeling that he is a fanatic rationalist who leaves no room for nuance or interpretation. In his writing, Harris appears to feel so alone in his rationalism that he is compelled to shriek at his audience, using blasphemy and insults to get a reaction out of people of faith.

As I read "Letter to a Christian Nation", which one can easily do in an hour and a half, I started to feel that the author, perhaps deliberately, perhaps despite himself, transforms his monologue into the same fanatical, fundamentalist, incomprehensible dogma that he so thoroughly denounces.

I find it hard to believe that any person of faith will agree with or be converted by his diatribe, but, if you take some time to consider individual elements of this angry polemic, you can see that he does make some good points.

In my view, Sam should have opened the book with one of his conclusions:

"I would be the first to admit that the prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. Still, the same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century." (page 87)

This would at least make you think that he is not entirely out of touch with reality himself.

To his credit, Harris makes important points such as:

"One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not—that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral—that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings." (p25)

And he backs points like this up with crystal clear examples such as (1) the mindless controversy over creationism and intelligent design versus evolution; and (2) the millions of HIV deaths in Africa that the Church ignores by categorically prohibiting education about HIV prevention through condom use.

But he goes too far in his condemnations and loses the powerful punch that some of his examples carry when he concludes:

"We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity—birth, marriage, death—without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is." (p 88)

Sam Harris joins the rest of us who are not radical fundamentalists in fighting the same battle that Maimonides fought in the 1100’s, the battle between rationalism and faith. In his writings, Maimonides, a physician and a philosopher, a Jewish Rabbi and an advisor to Muslim Caliphs, succeeded in finding a place where religion—that which cannot be explained by scientific observation—co-exists with rational thought. We should all be working to find that middle ground of tolerance and pluralism while recognizing that the vast majority of religious radicals of any faith are never going to be turned away from their intolerant, myopic tunnel vision.

As long as religious absolutists have unfettered access to increasingly powerful weapons and are able to take the middle ground away from the rest of us—the world is unlikely to be harmonious or peaceful. But shrieking about how this is a stupid contradiction isn’t going to make it better either. I reject Harris’ assertion that interfaith dialogue is "profoundly unlikely" to "heal the divisions in our world." (p. 86).

On the contrary, the alternative to dialogue is more death. I’d rather keep trying to find a way to get along with my fellow man than throw in the towel on bringing together the rich diversity from thousands of years of human history that is embedded in religious affiliation.

In my view, by having and sharing faith, we may some day find that we do, indeed, all drink from the same river.

I am just getting into my summer reading list, and so far, I have read a couple of short books and am digging into a fascinating historical biography:

Night, by Elie Wiesel.  I understand that this powerful first work by Wiesel is receiving a resurgence in attention.  It is a must-read and will remind everyone why Israel exists, why the collective Jewish psyche is the way it is, and continue to raise the questions that haunt us about intolerance and man’s capacity for unspeakable evil.

Everyman, by Philip Roth. I am not a big Philip Roth fan.  This brief story about the end of a Jewish man’s life in New York/New Jersey and his regrets was short enough for me not to hate it.  It’s one of those books that you see other people reading and already forgot why you read it.

The Orientalist, by Tom Reiss. I am in the middle of this one, and it is great.  This book is a hard-to-imagine true story about the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew born to an oil-wealthy family in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the beginning of the 20th century.  Nussimbaum not only became a best-selling author, he transformed himself into a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany, and died toward the end of World War II from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the foot.  The historical context during the collapse of Czarist Russia is superb–  I didn’t know that Stalin started out as a revolutionary in Baku– and the personal interviews with some of the last survivors of Baku’s oil-boom and Bolshevik revolutionary bust are fascinating.  Read this one!    

Wikipedia defines Ijtihad as follows:

Ijtihad (Arabic اجتهاد) is a technical term of Islamic law that describes the process of making a legal decision by independent interpretation of the legal sources, the Qur’an and the Sunnah. The opposite of ijtihad is taqlid, Arabic for "imitation". A person who applied ijtihad was called a mujtahid, and traditionally had to be a scholar of Islamic law or alim. The word derives from the Arabic verbal root jahada "struggle", the same root as that of jihad.  The "t" is inserted because the word is a derived stem VIII verb.

The common etymology is worth noting, as both words touch on the concepts of struggle or effort. In the case of form VIII verbs, this means to "struggle with oneself", as through deep thought. Ijtihad is a method of legal reasoning that does not rely on the traditional schools of jurisprudence, or madhabs.

In early Islam ijtihad was a commonly used legal practice, and was well integrated with the philosophy of kalam, its secular counterpart. It slowly fell out of practice for several reasons, most notably the efforts of the Asharite theologians, who saw it as leading to errors of over-confidence in judgement.

Al-Ghazali was the most notable of these, and his "The Incoherence of the Philosophers" was the most celebrated statement of this view.
It is debated whether Al-Ghazali was observing or creating the so-called "closure of the door of ijtihad". Some say this had occurred by the beginning of the 10th century CE, a couple of centuries after the finalizing of the major collections of hadith. In the words of Joseph Schacht: "hence a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one could be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in religious law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all." This theory has been put in question recently by Wael Hallaq, who writes that there was also always a minority that claimed that the closing of the door is wrong, and a properly qualified scholar must have the right to perform ijtihad, at all times, not only up until the four schools of law were defined. What is clear is that long after the 10th century the principles of ijtihad continued to be discussed in the Islamic legal literature, and other Asharites continued to argue with their Mutazilite rivals about its applicability to sciences.

Another very succinct definition of ijtihad that I find appealing profers that ijtihad represents a struggle within the mind to comprehend the wider world.

The absence of ijtihad in Islam means the absence of critical thinking. Based on my reading of Maria Menocal’s important book"The Ornament of the World", which I have reviewed separately in this blog, ijtihad was prominent in Islam for hundreds of years—in particular during the Golden Age of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula from roughly the year 700 to 1200.  Toward the end of the 10th century, the doors of independent thinking in Islam were deliberately closed, largely for political reasons (Wikipedia notes this as well).  The Iberian city-state of Cordoba, in what is now modern Spain, had 70 libraries in the 11th century, and the Islamic Sunni world had 135 different schools of thought.  These libraries were shut down and these schools were reduced in number–  the Sunni schools shrank from 135 to 4.

A contemporary and tragic example of the need for ijtihad was published by the Middle East Media Research Institute on February 23rd:

The ritual of "the stoning of the Devil," which is part of the Muslim Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), ended this year with the deaths of 363 pilgrims in a stampede that occurred when 600,000 Muslims gathered prior to the ritual, which by tradition must begin at midday.

"This rigid outlook has become a dangerous problem in the method of interpreting, reading and applying the [sacred] text. The problem exists [not only with respect to the Hajj but] also with respect to other essential issues that concern the modern Muslim who wants to adhere to his religion but also [wants] to march with the times… Most clerics… talk a great deal about opening the gates of it ijtihad [i.e. independent judgment in religious ruling], and about creating a climate of renewal. But in practice, they seldom do this, [since] this would require a systematic effort of interpretation that goes beyond the repeated dissemination of an ancient hadith…"(2)

Ijtihad may start with applying common sense to save lives in religious rituals, but it shouldn’t stop there.  In my view, the major challenge facing the Muslim world, Arab and non-Arab, is to find a non-violent way to transform honor into dignity.  Mainstream literal interpretation of the Qur’an prevents Islams entry to modernity, despite a powerful historic record of the application of critical thinking to scripture during the Golden Age of Islam. Perhaps ijtihad can help save lives at the Hajj and build new bridges of understanding between the three monotheistic faiths that are recognized with respect in the Qu’ran.

On August 3, 1492 Luis de Torres set out on the adventure of a lifetime– the discovery of the New World with Christopher Columbus.  But, in addition to generally being apprehensive about this uncharted journey’s risks, I think that Luis was very depressed and had mixed feelings about representing Christian Spain as part of the Columbus expedition.  Just a few weeks prior to setting sail, Luis de Torres was forced to leave his homeland because he was a Jew.

A few interesting facts about Luis–

Luis joined the expedition as Columbus’ translator because he, like every well-educated Christian, Muslim, and Jew in Al-Andalus (Spain), was fluent in Arabic– which was the principal language for the conduct of commerce and scholarly research in  philosophy, religion, and the sciences.

Luis de Torres and every other Jew on the Iberian peninsula had to leave the country (or convert to Christianity, more on this later), as a result of the historic edict expelling the Jews from Christian Spain signed by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand on March 31, 1492, just three months after the capitulation of Granada to the two monarchs. Granada (home of the Alhambra palace which I visited this past July) was the last remaining Islamic state in Spain and had enjoyed protection from the Christian monarchs for 250 years.

Luis de Torres was the first person to engage in a diplomatic mission between the Europeans and the native Americans of the new world–  when Columbus unexpectedly reached Hispaniola (modern day Cuba) instead of Arabic-speaking Mongols in India, he sent Luis de Torres to meet with the Taino tribal chief.  Luis therefore has the distinction of being the first European diplomat to meet with a native American leader.

I found this personally amusing because I was born and raised in Puerto Rico; the Puerto Ricans are descendants of the Tainos; I learned all about their history in elementary school; and practically the entire congregation of Shaare Tzedek (my childhood synagogue in Puerto Rico) consists of Cuban Jews.  So how’s that for a small world?

The story of Luis de Torres is just a minor anecdote in an important and illuminating book about religious tolerance between Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Medieval Spain. "The Ornament of the World", published in May 2002 and written by Maria Rosa Menocal, who is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale, rectified a serious hole in my knowledge of medieval history.  I’m still scratching my head about why I did not properly learn until now that the period from roughly 760 to 1492 was actually one of great learning and enlightenment in Europe– a time of significant progress in science, mathematics, and music.

When viewed from the vantage point of the religiously pluralistic society of Al-Andalus that took root under the inspired leadership of the great Umayyad prince, Abd Al-Rahman, the European world was hardly in a Dark Age during those important centuries of development.

On the contrary, poetry flourished, and the avid translation of religious, scientific and other classic philosophical texts (in particular Greek philosophy) into Arabic established the preconditions for future generations to successfully access this treasure trove of knowledge through the vast libraries of Cordoba.

At the end of "The Ornament of the World", Menocal makes some important concluding points.  I have excerpted several passages below:

The "founding father" of Western Islamic culture [Abd Al-Rahman] was in fact the survivior of a coup in Damascus that changed the course of Islamic history– and he and his descendants established themselves in Spain, where their rather promiscuous and open cultural vision and their lenient application of the dhimma covenant established itself so deeply that by the midlle of the tenth century we see … a prosperous and library-filled Islamic sopciety within which the Christian primate is not only thoroughly Arabized (which at the time meant also a level of education in the classical tradition, including Greek philosophy, that was unimaginable in the Christian West) but a respected and successful member of the Islamic community.  And the Jewish community was even more successful and prominent.

Most important, however, is that Muslims, Christians, and Jews did not have separate cultures based on religious differences but rather were part of a broad and expansive culture that had incorporated elements of all their traditions, a culture that all could and did participate in regardless of their religion. . . . It was, in other words, a culture that rejected religious or political correctness as the basis for any sort of aesthetic or intellectual value.

The first thing that this tells us is that these three religions have a shared history that is itself a part of European history and culture.  And that this was not merely a grudgingly shared moment but instead a very long and illustrious chapter in the history of the West. The fact that it eventually died– which many people point to in order to diminsih it or to claim that enmity is the only possible condition for these three monotheistic faiths– in no way negates the many rewards, social as well as cultural, of that age.

The second crucial thing it tells us is that the enemies of that kind of tolerance and cultural coexistence were always present and came from quarters within all three faith communities. . . . it was then (as it is now) clearly a matter of differing interpretation of the same scripture and the same religious traditions.

"The Ornament of the World" is an important book that is useful to any student of history and to anyone interested in understanding the roots of religious tolerance– and persecution– between the three Abrahamic faiths.  The ironic parallels between the religious conflicts that plague us today and those that defined medieval Spain may leave some feeling that much of Western society has not made much progress since 1492.  Spain, in particular, is still paying the price for violently and irrevocably excising the cultural and ethnic diversity which was at the root of its unparalleled socio-economic success for well over 600 years– during a time of intellectual darkness for much of the rest of the world.

Looking forward, I would like to think that the globalization of information and the increasing transparency in its dissemination will help the pendulum to swing faster in the direction of religious pluralism and tolerance and away from the ignorance and fear bred by orthodoxy. 

As I wonder why, until recently, I had no sense for the realpolitik and shifting alliances of the Christian warrior Rodrigo Diaz ("El Cid") or of the fact that the large body of the great Rabbi Maimonides’ work was originally written in Arabic (except for the Mishneh Torah, which was first written in Hebrew), I think that my own ignorance may be  symptomatic of the way the West treated much of Islamic cultural and intellectual history before 9/11.

Menocal usefully points out that Osama Bin Laden’s own jihadist exhortations to recapture the past glory of the Islamic empire of Al- Andalus reflect a similar ignorance of the period’s true history.  Someone should send him a copy of the book– maybe he’ll learn something, too. 

I have just finished reading a remarkable book, At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden, by Yossi Klein Halevi.  Halevi is a journalist- he is the Israel correspondent for The New Republic and a senior writer for The Jerusalem Report.  Among other publications, he has also written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.

Halevi’s book is an intensely personal account of his quest for peace between Arabs and Jews in Israel. His version of interfaith dialogue takes him on a journey from his Jerusalem home into West Bank Sufi mosques to meet with mystic sheiks and participate in the secretive rite of zikr, to practice meditation in obscure Christian monasteries whose monks celebrate Shabbat and sing in Hebrew, and to remember the Armenian genocide with exiled Armenian Christian monks who live in cloistered isolation deep within Jerusalem.

At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden captures the paradoxes of Israel, of orthodoxy, and of religious pluralism in a very palpable manner. I have quoted below some of my favorite passages:

"I am a part of the Israeli majority that is ready to offer almost any concessions for real peace, to end the pathological hundred-year war between Arabs and Jews that threatens to draw the world into cataclysm.  The journey described in this book—my attempt, as a religious Israeli Jew, to encounter the devotions of my Christian and Muslim neighbors—was the ultimate gesture I was capable of offering for peace.

… Even if we managed one more Israeli miracle and fashioned the Jews into a people that learned to respect its own diversity, how would we integrate the one million Arabs among us?  For Israeli Jews, the founding of the state was an act of redemption, a movement from holocaust to rebirth; for Israeli Arabs, that process was in effect reversed.  How could we create one nation from Jews who celebrated Israeli Independence Day and Arabs who mourned it?  Our notions of the Israeli future were hardly less antagonistic.  Arabs were demanding a de-Judaized Israel, a state that would accommodate its citizens into a neutral national identity; Jews insisted on an Israel that remained heir of the Jewish story and protector of the world’s Jewish communities.  Both expectations were just, but they were irreconcilable.

The land was too crowded and intimate to sustain such contradictory visions of it s most basic nature and purpose. In my better moments, I could appreciate the vital insights of each of our ideological camps. Israel’s contradictions, after all, were being fought within me. I loved the biblical landscape but was ready to share it with the Palestinians; I hated the occupation but didn’t trust the Arab world to let us live in peace. I was at once a religious Jew and a democrat; I wanted a Jewish state that honored its roots and a modern state that honored all its citizens.

I believed it was no coincidence that Israel was an intense meeting point between democracy and tradition, East and West. Our contradictions were the stuff of our spiritual work, perhaps the purpose for which we had been returned to this land. Somehow, we had to overcome our absolutist instincts and learn to contain opposites. And so I refused to take sides, nurturing my confusion and inhabiting an uneasy center in which Israel’s paradoxes clashed. I saw in my journalistic work an extension of my spiritual challenge as an Israeli: to find truth in every voice.”

This is a great book—if you are interested in interfaith dialogue, you need to read it. I hope to meet Yossi Halevi in person on my next trip to Israel.

I’ve read several great books this summer that I recommend.  They include:

1776 by David McCullough– but for outstanding individual efforts in that fateful year, we might be pledging allegiance to the Queen today.

La Sombra del Viento by Carlos Ruiz Zafon  (available in English as The Shadow of  the Wind) — a fictional mystery novel set in Barcelona at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the advent of fascism in the country.  You won’t want to put it down.   

A Concise History of Modern Painting by Sir Herbert Edward Read– an outstanding and opinionated journey through modern painting.

Bill Maher’s new book, New Rules is, among other things, a relentless tirade against the current establishment.  It is also funny. Truth may be stranger than Maher’s free associations, however.

His new rule, Chief Wannabe (page 33) reads as follows:

If you have to tell me what fraction of you is Native American, you’re not really an Indian.  There’s a word for people who claim to be one-quarter Indian: Puerto Rican.

Well Bill, I hate to pop your bubble, but since my French-Canadian mom is 1/4 Iroquois, I am 1/8 Iroquois AND I was born in Puerto Rico, which makes me both Puerto Rican and part Native American– and proud of it. That ignores my Romanian and Jewish elements– my ethnicity makes things a bit too complex for a sound bite.

The real question is whether Bill Maher wears a Soylent Green t-shirt (I do) (see Assisted Leaving, page 55).

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