Quintessentially Jewish Or Quintessentially Human?

My last post on Peter Beinart's meeting with a group of Jbloggers has gotten a lot of coverage. Allison Kaplan Sommer blogged about it in Ha'aretz:

But what really won over the initially hostile bloggers happened when he was asked by a blogger who lives within the Green Line whether he should travel to his parents' house in the West Bank to give a Torah lesson on the yarhtzeit of his grandfather’s death.

In such a situation, he asked, what would Peter Beinart do? Would he go or would he boycott?

Beinart paused only briefly, then said that he would go to the family event. Politics are politics, he said, but the obligation to honor your mother and father trumps ideology.

One blogger at the meeting said that this was the moment Beinart won over the crowd, and confessed he was among Beinart's new fans. 

I don't remember writing that  I was now a fan, but I'm willing to let that slip. Philip Weiss after quoting the paragraph above asks:

A final great exchange. Read this and ask yourself, Is Beinart's response quintessentially Jewish? Or is it quintessentially human? I say, human.

I recommend you go to the post and read some of the responses which prove just how quintessentially Jewish Beinart's response really was.