It always perplexed me to hear that anti-Semites would Jew-bait by calling someone a Christ-killer. If they truly believed us capable of deicide, did they really want to get on our bad side?

But seriously.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a bigoted taunt or too, but never the dreaded messianic murder libel. I did, however, hear about the pain it caused a relative as a young child to be excluded from a birthday party by Catholic kids who used that epithet. Imagine taking a bum murder rap with no resources to hire Alan Dershowitz.

Mel Gibson’s 2004 “Passion of the Christ” rode the deicide parade all the way to the bank, raking in a cool half-billion for the man whose denials of anti-Semitism would later be undermined by his rantings on the way to the Hollywood drunk tank. It’s evidently a relic of that stale controversy that’s still on sale on the edgy Web site Jewlicious, which offers you the opportunity to brand yourself a “christ killer” by buying one of their t-shirts.

You can rest easy while offending both Jews and Christians because, according to the Web site’s disclaimer, the message it sends is:

“Don’t go hating anyone for being a “Christ Killer” since according to Christianity everyone who believes in Jesus is in fact a “christ killer.” Still offended? Read the following interview in Jewsweek which was republished on the Taglit-birthright israel Web site. If after all that, you still don’t get it then clearly, you sir are a moron.” (Links evidently expired.)

Moron might better apply to anyone who thinks casual beholders of this t-shirt will get the joke and understand the nuanced explanation above, or that they’ll think you are cool and trendy for wearing it.

Here’s what the ADL said when I asked for a reaction:

“The t-shirts are certainly in poor taste, and we can understand why they are offensive to some.  But it is a free country, and in this country one can make it their business to be offensive.  Jewlicious Apparel has a right to sell them.  The consumer also has a right to make a choice, to either buy and wear the shirt, or to reject its message.

“We hope that people of good sense will do the latter.”

In heavily Orthodox American communities, they have a special named for Thanksgiving:

Thursday.

That’s too bad. Aren’t we as a people all about gratitude, looking at the bright side, the glass half full and all that? Isn’t it practically a Jewish axiom that “things could always be worse?”

Still, people tear their kishkes out about enjoying a secular holiday. Google “Is Thanksgiving Jewish?” and you’ll get an astonishing 13,800,000 results.

If it makes you happier, call it Hakores Hatov Day. And if you need halachic sanction to help you enjoy your turkey without a side order of guilt, take heart in the fact that numerous prominent halachic decisors have ruled that it is a secular holiday. For example, the revered Rav Moshe Feinstein in 1980 essentially gave it a shrug and a “why not?”

“Since it is clear that according to their religious law books this day is not mentioned as a religious holiday and that one is not obligated in a meal [according to Gentile religious law] and since this is a day of remembrance to citizens of this country, when they came to reside here either now or earlier, halakhah [Jewish law] sees no prohibition in celebrating with a meal or with the eating of turkey. One sees similar to this in Kiddushin 66 that Yanai the king made a party after the conquest of kochlet in the desert and they ate vegetables as a remembrance.” [Hat tip to myjewishlearning.com]

Of course, the Rav cautions, the feast should not be seen as an imperative akin to festive meals on Purim or Passover. So there is no commitment to God to eat turkey.

Your mother-in-law, on the other hand, is another story.

In a previous post I wrote about the hundreds of photos in my basement and pondered what will one day become of them.

Now, the same question applies to some 30 years worth of photo prints, most of them black and white, that have accumulated in The Jewish Week’s office. The office manager wants to be rid of them to make more room. To me, it’s akin to forgetting history.

The majority of the archive consists of licensed prints from photo agencies, or headshots of people who are dead or irrelevent now. But there are inevitably some hidden gems. Just at the top of the pile I found some shots of a young Wolf Blitzer from the days he was a Jerusalem Post reporter, when CNN wasn’t even anyone’s dream.

I tried to get the Center for Jewish History interested in the collection. Their representative determined it was useless to them because of all the copyrighted material that couldn’t be resold. These prints are from a bygone era in which they had to be reshot by a Velox machine and fixed to a page. These days the image is downloaded, inserted into an InDesign document  and then PDFed to the printer. The actual photo never touches anyone’s hands.

But there was a time when those dusty old file cabinets were a centerpiece of the production operation, and staff writers and editors would spend much of their deadline time sorting through them looking for a suitable shot to bring an article to life.

So the archive is as much a part of history as the events and people they depict. Maybe I’m overly sentimental. But I think it would be a tragedy if ended up as landfill.

Know anyone who is interested? Email me at adam@jewishweek.org.

In this week’s paper, my mother, Sondra Hart Dickter, tells the story of her 25-year battle with Parkinson’s disease.

She needed some help. The story that appears as our Back of the Book feature originated several years ago when my mother, with shaky but still dependable hands, wrote a few paragraphs into a notebook about her diagnosis at age 47 with this terrible disease, generally associated with the elderly, and her life since.

I knew the details, but she had never before expressed her feelings about her prognosis and the reality that this was a “progressive” illness (an oxymoron if ever there was one).

“My mother had died. I couldn’t tell my father, and my husband cried when he heard the diagnosis,” she wrote, suggesting that despite a supportive family, her mother was the only person in whom she could comfortably confide.

She handed me her essay with title “The Ancient Parkinsonian,” an homage to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a poem she apparently enjoyed. There was evident irony in the title since she was a relatively young person with an elderly disease.

After typing it into my computer, I told her I’d one day sit down with her to add more details. But although we spent plenty of time together, I never got around to doing that, and I will have to live with my guilt for not paying attention to the ticking clock.

Her speech declined over the years as decreased muscle control impacted her ability to project her voice. In July, she suffered a stroke and has been unable to speak ever since.  Weeks of speech and physical therapy after the stroke produced little, if any improvement.

Communication was my mother’s stock and trade, just as it is mine. She was a teacher, full- and part-time, for more than 30 years and loved to write stories for her grandchildren. She also inherited her father, Samuel Hart’s penchant for poetry.  She particularly liked acrostics, spelling out her children and grandchildren’s names in her work, which at one point she inscribed on wooden plaques as gifts.

In the weeks after her stroke I consulted with speech therapists about her condition. Overcoming the damage of both Parkinson’s and a stroke would be a tall order. My mother was always a fighter, but after a few weeks I reluctantly accepted that, barring a miracle, there won’t be any more spoken words from her.

But at least this week, with her story in print, I can take comfort that in a small way, I have given her back her voice.

It always makes me feel old to start a post with “When I was a kid …”

But when I was a kid it was embarrassing to be seen in public with ripped clothes. Outside of the playground, after an afternoon of rough-housing, wearing torn pants in a social setting or at school would send the message that your family is too poor to even mend the damaged garment, let alone replace it.

Today it’s all the rage to walk around with your knee protruding from a pair of jeans, and they are even sold that way. I find myself fighting with my two sons (the younger likely modeling the older) to prevent them from leaving the house that way. Inevitably I come across like the old coot who just doesn’t get it.

I guess I should be grateful that neither are interested in the more offensive trend of going around with their pants halfway down and shorts exposed, which some schools and even municipalities have tried to ban. But I’m far from enamored of the ripped look, and contemplating a ban of my own.

It used to be that people paid extra money to look better. Now you can pay top-dollar to look worse by shopping at The Gap for “distressed,” meaning pre-faded or ripped jeans, or shirts wrinkled or tied in knots.

Is it because of the recession that wardrobe dysfunction is catching on? Or is it just a fashion statement from a generation that assumes it will be able to permanently eschew office work and business meetings and work on computers at home wearing whatever they please?

In Jewish tradition, ripped clothing is a sign of mourning. We read in Megilat Esther that Mordechai, fearing for the fate of his people, rended his garments, rubbed ashes on himself and sat outside the king’s palace. After a funeral, Jewish survivors tear a garment to begin the shiva process. Some wear a black ribbon, but in stricter practice the torn garment is worn until the end of shiva.

Wearing garments of whole cloth signifies a resumption of normal behavior.

The late Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan once warned about society’s acceptance of “defining deviancy down.” What will happen to us when ripped, sloppy clothing becomes the new business suit?

“Congratulations to the Yankees on a well-purchased victory,” writes Dan Gerstein, a political consultant, on his Facebook status.

Within 24 hours this week, the highest spending politician in the world and the top-spending sports franchise both celebrated victories. Yet neither can claim a blow-out. Mike Bloomberg walked away with a 5 percent margin over an opponent who sent a tenth as much, losing some 200,000 of his 2005 supporters.

And the Yankees, who committed to $400 million for three new players alone this season, came out two games ahead of the Phillies in a hard-fought series against the defending world champions.

Maybe it’s appropriate that the city with an economy larger than many countries should be home to these free-spending public spectacles. But even though I rooted for the Yankees, I feel almost guilty feeling good about the success of a greedy corporation that just built the nation’s most publicly financed stadium. After the city sold some $941 million in tax-free bonds to build the stadium, the team spearheaded a lobbying effort to get the IRS to allow some 300 million more. The Daily News reported that the city will spend $194 million to replace 22 acres of parkland used by the stadium, far more than the $116 million originally projected. An Assembly committee has accused the team of misrepresenting costs, even as they jacked up ticket prices.

In lieu of a corporate sponsor, they ought to call it Taxpayer Field.

At the same time the Yankees got their tax break, Gov. Paterson was unable to get legislative approval for a property tax cap because the money from struggling homeowners was too important for funding our schools and social services.

If Bloomberg spent $90 million, he paid $161.56 for his 557,059 voters, or $1,787 for each of the 50,342 voters that gave him the victory. It’s his honestly earned money to spend, and has spent far more than that on philanthropy. But there are those who say he could have done as much good for the city, or more, by donating it.

“Forty thousand people in homeless shelters!” shouts Alex Pareene in a breathless non-endorsement of Bloomberg on Gawker.com. ” Bloomberg could personally buy every single one of those people an apartment in a vacant Williamsburg luxury condo building and still have enough left over to bribe a City Council member into supporting his fifth term.”

It’s a futile pursuit to tell people who have money how to spend it more wisely or nobly. But during the Yankee tickertape parade and the Bloomberg inauguration, I’m sure I won’t be the only one wondering what their combined $490 million could have meant for medical research.

As of this writing, the race for Nassau County executive is too close to call.

But seriously, who really cares? All the action is in New York City, where I spent an even four decades of my life, and where, for the first time since 1985, I was not able to cast a vote for mayor yesterday.

I’ve previously detailed my adjustment to small-town life, but this is the first citywide election since my ambivalent exile from the five boroughs (I can still hear Marty Markowitz say fuhgetaboutit). Working in Manhattan, I still have a strong interest in the city’s politics and fiscal condition (commuter tax, anyone?), so It felt strange to watch Election Day go by without having a say in the outcome.

Some argue that journalists should never vote in the elections they cover to avoid being partisan. “When you’re assigned to a candidate for senator or governor, oftentimes you ride in their van,” writes Mike Allen in the Politico. “When they’re tired, you’re tired. When you’re hungry, they’re hungry. When they’re sick, you’re sick. I just wouldn’t feel right about hanging out with — and writing about — a candidate after rendering a secret thumbs-up or thumbs-down.”

But that sounds more like a social consideration than an ethical one. The fact is that journalists, as necessarily analytical people, will inevitably form an opinion about which candidate is better for the job, even if they keep it to themselves, and whether or not they express that preference in the voting booth. So who is really served by abdicating that right? There is a bigger problem with journalists who hang out too much with candidates and their staffs getting too cozy and eventually losing the desire to ask tough questions. But that’s another story.

I had my opinion about who was the better choice in this election, but in the end the only outcome I really prayed for was that the victor would be readily apparent in time for our new Tuesday night deadline. In the end, it was nearly 11 p.m. when we felt comfortable that the Bloomberg wins story would hold up and we wouldn’t end up with a reprise of Dewey Defeats Truman.

Having now covered five New York elections for The Jewish Week, I can say that this was the least exciting of them. While Mike Bloomberg has created some Jewish controversy in the past with his political alliances and appointments, in the end the referendum on his tenure came down to the question of whether it was nice to use his power to extend term limits. While still more exciting than Nassau County politics, that’s a relatively boring campaign issue.

And given how raucous and divisive some of those other New York issues tend to be, there is something nice to be said about that.

If mankind is truly made in the image of God, I like to think that the Creator enjoys some of the same pleasures we do.

Maybe that’s why He arranged for a World Series this year uninterrupted by Shabbat or Yom Tovim, which is not always a given.

I’ll leave it up to wiser minds than mine to explore the history of Jews and baseball or delve into the more spiritual meanings of the Yankees’ return to the Fall Classic after a long drought and their being on the verge of championship number 27.

All I can say is, Go Yankees!

I won’t pretend to be a die-hard fan. I barely watched one regular season game this year, and my lifetime attendance total is an unimpressive 2 (including one at the new stadium this summer.) But I have not missed a pitch of the World Series, watching most of the games with my friends Rafi and Steve, as well as my oldest son Zack. The fact that the teams are very well matched (despite the 2-game lead for the Yanks, each game has been a battle) is almost as exciting as the calendar that allowed for complete immersion in the series.

If God loves the underdog and the downtrodden, maybe the Phillies will get a reprieve tonight. But either way. I’ll be grateful for at least five nights of distraction and excitement, a good, clean-knock down drag-out on the diamond that we stressed-out New Yorkers deserve.

And don’t feel too bad for the good people of Philadelphia. There’s always last year.