Is Timothy Geithner Jewish? No

No, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama's former secretary of the treasury, is not a Jew.

Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Peter F. Geithner of Larchmont, N.Y.

According to the Times, he is married to Carole M. Sonnenfeld and has two children. The Rev. Thomas Keehn, a United Church of Christ minister, officiated at his wedding in 1985.

On 11/22/2008 I received an email reply from Geithner's father-in-law, Prof. Albert Sonnenfeld, confirming that, "Geithner (is) not Jewish, (he was) raised Episcopalian, but (is) hardly religious now."

The reference in Wikipedia that previously (up to 11/2008) said he is a Jew - was removed. See the discussion.

Update 5/14: Geithner has a new book: Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises and was profiled in the Times magazine.

(Reposted.)

Video: Geithner Denies Krugmans Criticisms

"Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner responds to Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's critique of President Obamas bank bailout with NBCs David Gregory on Meet the Press."

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Video: Hey Paul Krugman v. Tim Geithner in a Funny New Hit Song

Paul Krugman v. Tim Geithner in a new pop song.

A Talmudic Dispute Between two Rabbis of our Economy, Tim Geithner and Paul Krugman

The Talmudic blogger relishes a crisp, clear Talmudic debate between two leading authorities.

The ancient rabbis who disputed, for instance, the order of the rituals of the Sabbath meal, based their opinions on competing theories and expressed their preferences for practice in concrete prescriptions. Do things this way and not that way. Yet always, the rabbis engaged in clear disputes over processes with the same intention - to serve the best interests of the people of Israel.

So it would appear the rabbis of our nation's economic theory are engaged right now in an intense dispute over the order of the economy.

Rabbi Tim Geithner (no, he's not Jewish, see our post) representing a legitimate and learned stream of thinking, says do things according to the theory and prescriptions of a plan which he presented in its fine details here in a WSJ op-ed ("My Plan for Bad Bank Assets").

Rabbi Paul Krugman (yes he is Jewish, but that is beside the point here) representing an alternate sage and respected way of logic, says no, do not do things that way, because it is bad in theory and in action, a case he presented in its refutation here in a Times op-ed ("Financial Policy Despair").

Both masters, utterly critical and argumentative in their presentations, wish to serve the interests of the nation. Their wisdom deserves our study.

And ultimately, like the Talmud, our blog here just canonizes and analyzes them, but does not resolve the outcome of the disputes.

Tzvee Likes the Google Translation Machine

We found traffic to our blog coming from a European blog called Lucerna wikipedie. So to find out what they were saying about us we turned to Google Translate. There we were told to "Enter text or a webpage URL."

The neat choice that I found recently is "Detect language" - the first on the source drop-down menu on the Google Translate page. In the case of the blog in question, I did not originally detect myself that the blog was written in Czech - so the automatic detection was more useful than trial and error.

In some languages the translation engine is not especially thorough and I suspect not entirely accurate. Certainly the style of the translated result lacks fluidity. But for my purposes it is usually fine. I'm curious to know how people use my blog posts. In particular I want to see if antisemites are misusing content that we post, not that there is anything we can do about that, to paraphrase the famed Jerry Seinfeld qualifier.

The link in this case is from a Czech Wikipedia centric blog to our Tzvee's Talmudic Blog post regarding Timothy Geithner, where we established by our own independent research that contrary to information that had been posted in Wikipedia, he is not Jewish.

While we were on the subject - we have added the Google Translate gadget to our blog. It's on the side in the right hand column of every page now.--->

This makes our webpage instantly available in other languages, it offers instant access to automatic translations of our content.

It's nice to see the blog in Hebrew! Try it.......--->

Also try the Google "Translated Search" page, available as one of the tabs at Google Translate.

That's a facility that is a bit more complex. It offers some promising assistance. In a rare case of technical writing Google actually tries to explain what "Translated Search" does for you as follows:

How does this work?
1. Search for Dubai tours from English to Arabic.
2. We translate your query into "جولات دبي" and find Arabic web page results.
3. Finally, we translate the Arabic web page results back into English for you.

Other things you can search for
St. Petersburg restaurants - (Санкт-Петербург рестораны) in Russian pages
Beijing apartments - (北京公寓) in Chinese pages

Is General Eric K. Shinseki Jewish?

No, General Eric K. Shinseki is not a Jew.

President-Elect Obama has nominated this Asian-American to the post of Veterans Affairs secretary adding to the diverse character of his proposed cabinet. Shinseki was born to a Japanese American family in Hawaii.

The AP observes, "In Obama's eight Cabinet announcements so far, white men are the minority with two nominations — Timothy Geithner at Treasury and Robert Gates at Defense. Three are women — Janet Napolitano at Homeland Security, Susan Rice as United Nations ambassador and Hillary Rodham Clinton at State. Eric Holder at the Justice Department is African American, while Bill Richardson at Commerce is Latino."

In fact, none of these nominees to the cabinet is Jewish. Several of Obama's proposed White House staff members are Jewish.