Anthony Weiner is Jewish. Weiner was born September 4, 1964. Weiner was born in Brooklyn, New York on September 4, 1964, one of three sons of Mort Weiner, a lawyer, and his wife Frances (née Finkelstein), a public high school mathematics teacher. The family lived for a time in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn. His older brother, Seth, was killed at age 39 in a hit-and-run in May 2000. His younger brother, Jason, is a chef and co-owner of several New York restaurants.
Anthony Weiner is an American politician and former U.S. representative who served New York's 9th congressional district from January 1999 until June 2011. A member of the Democratic party, he won seven terms, never receiving less than 59% of the vote. Weiner resigned from Congress in June 2011, due to a sexting scandal. In May 2013, Weiner announced via a YouTube video that he would run for mayor of New York City in 2013.
Regarding the Jewish Anthony Weiner's second sexting scandal in July-August 2013, an article by Jodi Kantor in the NY Times compared Anthony Weiner's fall from grace (and that of Eliot Spitzer and San Diego Mayor Bob Filner) with Philip Roth's Portnoy's character:
When Politics Catches Up With ‘Portnoy’
By JODI KANTOR
THE plots and details seem lifted from Philip Roth or the early work of Woody Allen. Anthony D. Weiner, the Brooklyn bar mitzvah boy and would-be mayor whose intimate anatomy has now become a matter of public broadcast. Bob Filner, proud son of Forest Hills, Queens, whose California dream of a life — history professor, congressman, San Diego mayor — was undone by so much alleged lechery that the city he governed established a hot line for victims.
“I haven’t read a novel in 30 years, I’ve lived one,” Eliot Spitzer said in an interview. His version: the city boy with perfect LSAT scores, who was once called a potential first Jewish president and would now count himself lucky to be elected city comptroller.
Nearly half a century after the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” politics is finally catching up with fiction, as libidinous, self-sabotaging politicians are causing grimaces among fellow Jews and retiring outdated cultural assumptions — that Jewish men make solid husbands and that sex scandals belong to others. “What’s wrong with Jewish men today?” Josh Greenman, opinion editor of The Daily News, recently tweeted.
The scandals are also leading to an unusual merging of political and religious questions that could help determine the outcome of the New York primary. That vote will take place on Sept. 10, right between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, bringing to vivid life the High Holy Days themes of repentance and forgiveness. During this year’s Days of Awe, New York Jews will literally render judgment on Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Weiner: as the liturgy goes, who will be degraded and who will be exalted. In rabbinic sermons and at holiday meals, they will debate questions like: If former president Bill Clinton can be absolved, can Jews extend similar treatment to two of their own? Do the sages, or the voters, feel that the slate can ever truly be wiped clean?
The confluence of scandals is an accident of timing; Jewish men have gotten themselves in trouble since the days of King David. But a cluster of scandals within one group tends to arouse the insecurities in its collective psyche; when David A. Paterson, then the governor of New York, and Representative Charles B. Rangel, a Harlem Democrat, were embroiled in simultaneous allegations of impropriety, some African-Americans feared that the leaders were targeted because they were black. Jews harbor their own historically grounded fears about reputation, acceptance and negative stereotypes, and those anxieties have flared recently in articles in the Jewish press and in conversations about Mr. Weiner, Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Filner.
On a recent Friday night, after Mr. Filner announced he would not resign, Rabbi Michael Berk of Congregation Beth Israel, San Diego’s largest synagogue, tore into him from the pulpit. “I’m sure I’m not the only Jew who is embarrassed,” he said. In a later interview, he expressed relief that to his knowledge, Mr. Filner is not a member of a synagogue.
Evangelical Christian politicians who cheat often raise questions about hypocrisy, especially if they preached piety in public and disregarded it in private. When Jewish politicians fall, they shatter different expectations, particularly that American Jews need to work together to preserve respectability and fireproof against anti-Semitism. Embarrassing the community is a grave transgression, defined in the Talmud as a “chilul Hashem,” or desecration of God’s name. In a poll conducted in early July by The New York Times and Siena College, Jews were substantially tougher than other primary voters on both Mr. Weiner and Mr. Spitzer, a reversal of the usual vote-your-kind rules of city politics, with 51 percent of Jewish Democratic primary voters expressing unfavorable impressions of each of the two candidates.
Even though Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Weiner are not terribly alike — the former prosecutor and governor running for a relatively modest position, and the provocateur with a thin legislative record who dreams of being mayor — many Jewish voters regard them in a similar light. Erica Jong, whose sexually frank novels make her possibly one of the least prudish voters in New York, said she could not forgive Mr. Spitzer. “It’s bad for the Jews, and it makes the anti-Semites say, ‘See, I told you they’re animals,’ ” she said. She considers sex a private matter in Jewish families: only after her father died did she discover that he had been a frequent visitor to massage parlors.
Similarly, when Mr. Weiner stopped in Flatbush, Brooklyn, last week at a kosher soup kitchen, an unnamed woman called him “a piece of dirt.” “I’m an observant Jew, and we want nothing to do with the likes of Anthony Weiner,” she added.
But Mr. Weiner’s latest waves of troubles may be helping Mr. Spitzer, making his comeback look more dignified, his sins less exotic. Shimon Rolnitzky of Der Shtern, a Yiddish-language magazine, said many fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews are planning to vote for Mr. Spitzer in part because they see his penance as more sincere than Mr. Weiner’s. Mr. Spitzer, a wealthy, assimilated Jew who never had a bar mitzvah, must now continue to ask forgiveness from a group he never identified with much. Though he is a member of Emanu-El in Manhattan and has also attended High Holy Days services with his parents at Central Synagogue in Midtown, he still does not seem at ease talking about faith.
Asked if Jewish faith or clergy helped after his fall, he demurred. Though he spoke at the time with Rabbi David M. Posner of Temple Emanu-El, he said: “I don’t remember specifically if my conversations with him were pivotal in any particular way.”
Some younger Jews say that they do not shudder over every wayward member of the tribe, that they don’t feel the same horror their parents once experienced over figures like Bernard L. Madoff, the Ponzi scheme king; David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam killer; or Joel Steinberg, convicted of manslaughter in the 1987 death of an illegally adopted daughter. Every prominent Jew who falls from grace cannot be a tragedy, “because we just have too many of them,” said Alana Newhouse, editor in chief of Tablet magazine. In recent weeks, Ryan (The Hebrew Hammer) Braun was suspended from the Milwaukee Brewers for using banned substances, and SAC Capital Advisors, the giant hedge fund run by Steven A. Cohen, was charged with insider trading.
Besides, as the country grows more ethnically scrambled, it is no longer easy to tell who should be proud or ashamed of whom. Many Jews say they felt relief upon learning that George Zimmerman, who shot Trayvon Martin, did not share their faith. Eric Garcetti is the first Jewish mayor of Los Angeles, but that is not very well known because his father, a former district attorney, is a Mexican-American with an Italian surname.
Some Jews even make the case that the Spitzer, Weiner and Filner stories are signifiers of integration, acceptance in an era in which the United States has at least 10 senators with some Jewish background and Jewish mayors of its three largest cities.
“Jewish politicians have achieved the standing and stature to be embroiled in classic American sex scandals,” said Matthew Hiltzik, a public relations consultant who worked with Mr. Spitzer on his 1998 attorney general race. “Some would say this is great news.”
