Recently I discovered a relatively new food blog called Hezbollah Tofu. As the face of a self-described "Bourdain Veganizing Collective," the site got me thinking a bit more deeply about chef, author, and travel show host Anthony Bourdain. In the past, I'd written him off as annoying but relatively harmless: Narcissistic, yes, and prone to angrily shit-talking those who disagree with him (and sometimes even those who don't), but generally not someone to worry about.

I took his anti-vegetarian and vegan rantings with a big grain of kosher salt. In his book Kitchen Confidential, he writes:

"Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn...Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold."

Sticks and stones, right? Wrong. Though it had never occurred to me before, today everything became kristallnacht clear: Who else stereotyped minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit"? Who else saw minority groups as "an affront to all he stood for" and typecast them as physically weaker? Hint:

Toasting The End of The Vegans

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Anthony Bourdain Says: you're rude.I'm not going to pretend that I'm a fan of Anthony Bourdain. This is a man who has labeled all vegans as "rude" (ironic, considering he's easily one of the rudest people on television) and calls them the "Hezbollah-like splinter-faction" of vegetarians. This is a man who has said that "the sooner we asphyxiate in our own filth, the better." This is a man whose appetite is whetted by watching a live cobra have its still-beating heart ripped out, then served to him in a dish. Clearly, Bourdain and I have very different world-views and principles. Perhaps the one thing he and I agree on is that Rachel Ray is really, really insufferable.

Though I often can't stomach his Travel Channel show, No Reservations, thanks to his caustic and surly hosting (and penchant for the cruel), clearly I'm in the minority. People seem to love (maybe it's love/hate?) the guy, so much so that Food Network, home of his first television series, A Cook's Tour, has announced that they'll be reprising the series with a marathon on Christmas.

The series, featuring outspoken chef Anthony Bourdain, returns to Food Network with a Christmas Day Marathon, airing four back-to-back episodes on Tuesday, December 25th from 9-11pm ET/PT. The series will then join the primetime lineup in its new timeslot on Tuesday, January 8th at 10:30pm ET/PT.

The Christmas Day marathon includes:

9:00pm "So Much Vodka So Little Time" -- Russia
9:30pm "Dining with Geishas" -- Japan
10:00pm "How to Be a Carioca" -- Brazil
10:30pm "Stuffed like a Pig" -- France

So, there you go: order in some Kung Pao and Moo Shu and celebrate the winter solstice with Bourdain.

• Hummus is like crack to New Yorkers, really. [Ynet]
• A Feast of Jewish Learning always entails a plentiful amount of grub. How else do you rationalize the guilt over the price of admission?[Upcoming.Org]
• A blogger laments how he much he wishes he could have grown up in the 60's and fucked a lot of women. Instead, he writes a blog post about it and will most likely make sweet love to Rita Hayworth later. [Jew Eat Yet?]
• No. Food is not a lifestyle. But being the one girl who isn't sticking her finger down her throat at the Matzo Ball is just not cool. [All The Way From Oy To Vey]
• Chef Anthony Bourdain has a thing for "jamming" a can of Cheese Whiz into certain orifices and pressing hard. Hey, we're just repeating it...[Blogging Out Loud]
• There do exist female editors who work for Jane magazine who haven't had their cherries popped. Go figure! [Gawker]