Jewhoo!

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As I went down the list, it occurred to me that, for one who had been to temple maybe five times since Bush was President (there was more reason to pray then), I was inordinately gleeful to see such a Who's Who of Jews. So I decided to contact the site's newly-installed editor, Stan Comet (a rare Jewish name). Reached at his office in San Francisco, he assures me that it is a common experience.


LENNY BRUCE Jewish, but you already knew that	ROBIN WILLIAMS Not Jewish, but some people think he is

"I always had a minor hobby of noting whether a famous person was Jewish," Comet admits. "It's a hobby that's shared by many Jews. There is usually at least one new book per year on the market of famous Jewish celebrities, as well as scores of books on Jews in particular times and places -- some scholarly, some general. Jews in the Far West, Jews in Medieval Spain, etc. Jews like to read about Jews. A lot of other people do too."

Jewhoo began in May 1997, founded by Fade to Black owners Mike Page and Chris Williams. "Mike Page grew up in a heavily Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn," Comet notes. "He tells me that when he traveled around and moved to New Jersey, he realized the world was a great deal less Jewish. He conceived the idea for the site and the name one day while driving in his car. Whether divine intervention had anything to do with it -- I do not know. Chris isn't Jewish, as one might guess."

Some months after Jewhoo went up, it was redesigned to look like Yahoo. ("Yahoo is well aware of the site and has expressed no objection," says Comet, who happens to be a lawyer.) Visitors were invited to submit names of famous Jewish persons in a variety of categories. Since neither Page nor Williams had the time to do fact-checking, visitor submissions mostly went up on the site as submitted. That, predictably, resulted in many errors.

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