The New Jersey Jewish News reports:
She made headlines in the 1990s as a business associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton who defied prosecutors investigating the controversial land deal known as Whitewater.
She spent two years behind bars in connection with that case on charges including fraud, conspiracy, and contempt of court.…
Susan McDougal also happens to be a Southern Baptist …
“It was a terrible thing to watch [the Jewish women prisioners] being harassed,” said McDougal. The proselytizers “wanted the Jewish women to come to prayer meetings and kept telling them they weren’t being saved. Even though I grew up as a Baptist, I was not comfortable with that right-wing sort of thought, and the Jewish women really welcomed me,” she said last week, speaking by cell phone from her home in Camden, Ark., some two hours south of Little Rock.
So, in an act of defiance that McDougal said is emblematic of much of her life, she asked prison officials to identify her as Jewish rather than Christian.
“My statement was, ‘If you’re going to be harrassing these other people, you’re going to be harassing me, too,’” she said.
McDougal began attending Jewish services at the prison, eating kosher food, meeting with the Jewish chaplain, and even learning to bake hallah.
“She said, ‘I’m going to be Jewish, too, as a statement of conscience,’” said Kriegel. “She is an incredible person.”
When McDougal was transferred to the federal detention center in Los Angeles … McDougal said she was pressured by the warden to cease identifying as a Jew. “He could not believe a good Southern Baptist girl could do such a thing,” she said. “It was really the first time I was ever talked to in an anti-Semitic way.”