In the course of his wide-ranging fantasies, the hero of James Joyce's Ulysses imagined himself invested with the scarlet mantle and gold chain of the Lord Mayor of Dublin. To Joyce, Leopold Bloom's dream was doubly fanciful because-he was a Jew−and what chance would a Jew have of becoming major of Dublin town?
Last week the notion proved not so fanciful at all. Dublin, which is 95% Roman Catholic, got its first Jewish mayor: Robert Briscoe, 61, a leader of Dublin's small community of 5,000 Jews. The Irish saw nothing incongruous about Alderman Briscoe's selection (which was...
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