Remembering Joe Sobran

I sympathize with the desire to honor the memory of a departed friend. But I wish more of Joe Sobran's friends would not ignore his undeniable antisemitism.

In her valedictory to Joe Sobran today, Ann Coulter credits him with the following witticism:

It was Joe who came up with the apocryphal New York Times headline: "New York Destroyed by Earthquake; Women and Minorities Hit Hardest."

Given Sobran's obsession with literary authenticity, it's probably worth noting that the joke is borrowed from a much funnier joke by Calvin Trillin. In the days when the New York Post was a much more polemically liberal paper than the Times has ever been, Trillin proposed the ideal Post headline: "Snowstorm Hits City: Blacks, Jews Suffer Most."

I sympathize with the desire to honor the memory of a departed friend. But I do wish more of Sobran's friends would remember that his undeniable antisemitism was a bug, not a feature.