In a discussion of new atheists generally, a group in which we can pretty safely locate Jerry Coyne, David Klinghoffer notes that Coyne offers “credentials as a “cultural Jew” or “apostate Hebrew,” which – in some places – is way more respected than being a chief rabbi, in terms of what you are expected to just plain know. But, says Klinghoffer,
I’ve never come across an instance where he wrote anything of even seeming substance about his ancestral religion, which is my own. It’s not even as if he had launched a crude, vulgar attack on Judaism like he did on Catholicism in his now celebrated debate — well, it’s celebrated by Dr. Coyne, anyway — with theistic evolutionary Catholic scholar John Haught.
Oh, that …
Because he’s the most “Jewish”-flavored of the New Atheist leading lights, I look at Coyne’s blog with some regularity. The only time that I can recall his having anything to say about Jewish matters, it was to attack a purported group of “Jewish creationists,” a group that had several hallmarks, for anyone not utterly tone deaf to Jewish religious culture, of being a hoax, presumably a Darwinist jest. So with Jerry Coyne it doesn’t even get to the point where a fellow Jew could say to him “You don’t understand my religion.”
Which is just as well. He doesn’t understand Catholicism either, but has happened to notice it in passing …
Here’s Coyne’s Jewish creationists post, and Klinghoffer’s identifying it as a hoax.