ZIONICA.com

What If Mitt Romney Were Jewish?

The Washington Post (WPO)’s Jason Horowitz reported this month that officials on Mitt Romney’s campaign don’t care much for journalistic explorations of their candidate’s religious beliefs.

One spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, has been throwing brushback pitches at reporters who write about Romney’s faith, asking if they would write similar stories about Jews.

According to Horowitz, Saul objected to sentences in an earlier Washington Post piece describing how Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, is said to have discovered the golden plates that provided the theological underpinnings of his new faith.

“Would you write this sentence in describing the Jewish faith?” she asked, providing an example: “‘Jews believe their prophet Moses was delivered tablets on a mountain top directly from G-d after he appeared to him in a burning bush.’ Of course not, yet you reference a similar story in Mormonism.”

There’s nothing wrong with Saul’s compressed description of the moment Jews received God’s law, nor is there anything wrong with the Post’s description of Mormonism’s founding in upstate New York. But because I love Mad Libs as much as anyone, I thought I would try a small experiment, substituting Jewish concepts where appropriate in a recent New York Times (NYT) article about Romney’s faith, to see if Saul’s argument makes sense.