By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Not only is the Hannukah menorah going to light up with brilliance this month, but Twitter has also lit up with some hilarious Hannukah humor.
“I plan to start saying a hearty ‘Molotov!’ to all my Jewish friends,”
Jeff Chu, a reporter at Fast Company, tweeted the other day, after learning that Wisconsin’s current Governor Scott Walker once — in an earlier political career — mistakenly signed a letter to a Jewish constituent “Thank you again and Molotov.”
And Chu’s tweet was just part of a vast army of tweets on the topic.
If this sounds like a bad joke or the start of a Jewish humor column, well, it’s not a joke but yes, this does make for a good Jewish humor story.
First the back story: A reporter at The Capital Times newspaper in Wisconsin, Jessie Opoien, recently wrote a news article about Republican Governor Walker and his inadvertent “Molotov” gaffe. Her story went viral via a series of Twitter tweets like Jeff Chu’s post above, and it also caught the attention of her network of fellow journalists at Muckrack, a website for reporters worldwide.
Her article was headlined “The political pitfalls of cultural crossover: Scott Walker edition” and already it’s part of modern Jewish lore now.
“Navigating a religion or culture you weren’t brought up in can be challenging, to say the least,” Opoien wrote.
“It’s something most politicians find themselves doing at one point or another, though, whether it’s in relating to constituents or appealing to donors.”
She explained that Governor Walker is the son of a Baptist preacher and has always been a friend of the Jewish community in Wisconsin.
In earlier days, before becoming governor, when Walker was a Milwaukee County executive, he exhanged some holiday emails with a Jewish man named Franklyn Gimbel, a Milwaukee attorney and chairman of the Wisconsin Center District.
As Opoien explained it, Walker told Gimbel his office would be happy to display a menorah celebrating “The Eight Days of Chanukah” at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, and asked Gimbel to have a representative from Lubavitch of Wisconsin contact Walker’s secretary, Dorothy Moore, to set it up.
The letter is signed, “Thank you again and Molotov.”
Of course, he — or most likely his secretary who typed the letter — meant to write “mazel tov” but it is entirely possible that in this internet age of AutoCorrect and SpellCheck and other kinds of automatic spelling correction apps that the machine did it, and not the governor or his secretary.
Yes, I blame the machine.
But it’s a funny story and one for the culture books.
The gaffe was a completely hilarious, honest mistake. I love it.
*
Bloom, based in Taiwan, is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer. Your comments on this article may be placed in the box below or sent to the author via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com