Was Ken Lay Jewish?

The #1 question my readers have been asking me lately is if Ken Lay was Jewish. And it's a legitimate question since he was so active in his local church, his parents were devout evangelicals, and he looks so Jewish... GEEZ people, the answer is "NO" he was NOT Jewish! Remind me not to hire any of you as detectives.

The funny thing is, there are two types of people who are just dying to know whether Lay was a member of the tribe. The first group are Anti-Semitic types who want to believe that every thieving CEO is a Jew, (we've had our share, no doubt, but the latest round of corporate crooks has been pretty Jew-free. Lay, Skilling, Scrushy, Ebbers, Rigas are all gentiles. Fastow is Jewish, and sadly he tried to use his casual interest in Judaism to get him off the hook, but that didn't work). So for those Jew-hating types, this will not be the easy-level "blame it on the Jews" conspiracy to blog about. Too bad.

Of course, the funnier category of person curious about Lay's religion is the type of Jewish person like I sometimes am; the kind who worries that every jerk in the news might be Jewish and will feel a lot better when it's clear that he or she is not. The Jewish propensity for embarrassment knows no bounds. I still think my parents are very embarrassed about my little accidents during potty training, (they talk about them enough), and my sister absolutely still thinks she can "shame" me over things I did when I was 11.

Let me give my fellow embarrassment-prone Jews a little piece of advice. FORGET ABOUT IT!!! Those who hate us have plenty of material, both real and imagined to work with. If you're embarrassed by Jewish crooks, be embarrassed because they hurt people, not because it may help the Jew-hating cause. Oh, and by the way, Jew-hating is currently celebrating its 5800th anniversary year! Congratulations on that, maybe the Anti-Semitism will work out better for you than everyone else who tried and died horrifically. Maybe you'll get lucky and die comfortably in a mental hospital like Ezra Pound.

Luckily, there is no Jewish connection to the #2 most-asked question I get these days which is: "Do you have nude photos of Heather Mills?"

I'm not saying I do or don't... but that's a whole different category of embarrassment.