Elon, boychik, welcome to the tribe!

Elon, my man! Bagrisn aheym mayn bruder! Welcome home, my brother!

Oh sorry, Getting ahead of myself. Last Monday, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, visited Auschwitz and declared himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

As someone who is not aspirationally but actually Jewish, that is a slow pitch right down the pipe. A guy’s gotta swing.

Judaism is a great religion. That fact often gets lost, what with all the people hating us and wanting us dead. Great food. Great traditions. Not a lot of rigid rules, except for the Orthodox.

But is Jewishness something one “aspires” to? Does anyone need to aspire? The bar is very low. You wanna be Jewish? Be Jewish. It’s not like anybody’s going to stop you. Buy a pair of candlesticks. Say Sabbath prayers.

You don’t even have to do that. In my book, you’re Jewish if you say you are.

Which Musk pretty much did. Though he seems to think Judaism is something you get from close contact with others, like pink eye.

“Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” Musk said. “I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like, Jewish by association.”

It doesn’t work like that. Having Christian friends doesn’t make me Christian, I hope. Rule of thumb: If you’re using your friends from a certain group as a human shield to deflect charges that you’re actually a bigot who hates that exact group, then you probably are.

Which reminds us: Musk’s remarkable theological self-transformation doesn’t spring from nowhere. It was last November, not that long ago, particularly when discussing a faith that goes back to ancient Babylon, when Musk declared the idea of Jews — then a people quite apart from himself — pushing “hatred against whites” while welcoming “hordes of minorities” to be “the actual truth.”

To his surprise — isn’t he supposed to be some kind of business genius? Because me, I’d have seen that coming (savviness; an alleged Jewish trait) — the X advertisers started bolting in droves. Leading to Musk’s in-the-trenches conversion.

Supposedly. Skepticism is another Jewish quality. So let me roll my eyes and be so bold — again Jewish, though we call it chutzpah — as to point out that Musk doesn’t really want to be Jewish. Rather, he’s reading from the “Heck, I’m Jewish myself” playbook, a cliche among haters.

Think. What other controversial public figures declared their sudden Jewishness? Musk’s not the first. We Chicagoans shouldn’t have to grope for an example. How about Louis Farrakhan?

He turned hatred for Jews into a kind of side hustle — whenever media attention wandered from his stemwinder speeches, he could reliably snag a little attention by focusing on the Jews’ supposed plots against him. (And what inept plotters Jews seem to be! We’re like the Keystone Cops. Blundering after Farrakhan for decades and yet there he is, age 90, and we haven’t got him yet.)

Farrakhan occasionally professed a change of heart. Like in 1996, when he announced his father’s parents were Jewish.

“I believe that in my blood, and not in a bad way,” he told The New Yorker. “Because when I was a little boy I used to love listening to the Jewish cantors in Boston. They had a program, and every week I would listen. I was struck by the cantor, and I’ve always loved the way they sing or recite the Torah.”

Funny, that tone of nostalgic respect for Jews never worked its way into the Founder’s Day speech. A pity, because antisemitism really hobbled Farrakhan. A reminder: Haters end up hurting themselves as much as anyone else. Ballyhooing bigotry is why the social media platform Musk paid $44 billion for in October 2022 is now worth maybe $10 billion.

Don’t expect a Musk bar mitzvah anytime soon. Like his buddy Donald Trump, Musk has a long history of saying stuff that never happens. Musk came to Chicago in 2018, remember, held a news conference with Rahm Emanuel announcing the high-speed underground train he was going to dig from the Loop to O’Hare. Never turned over a tablespoon of earth.

He can jawbone about his aspirations to being Jewish. But if Musk takes as much as a mouthful of gefilte fish, I’ll be surprised. If Musk really wants to help the Jews, he’ll stay gentile. Jews need Elon Musk like a hole in the head.