borat myspace The ADL identifies Baron Cohen as an observant Jew. I'm not sure what that means but it seems less revealing than the subject of his Cambridge dissertation, namely the role of Jews in the American civil rights movement. In any case, this comic has a distinctively Jewish sensibility. As sociologist John Murray Cuddihy notes in The Ordeal of Civility, his classic account of newly enlightened Jewish thinkers assimilated into the modern world, Marx, Freud, and Claude Lvi-Strauss were all similarly obsessed with the raw, the coarse, the vulgar, the naked and exposing the way in which these things were sublimated by the civil niceness of Western culture. So too, Borat who might add the superstitious, the stupid, the sexist, and the xenophobic to that list. borat myspace