Did Slate Magazine recycle my post?

Last week I wrote an article explaining that journalists are misrepresenting Matisyahu as a total novelty. Today Jody Rosen's article in Slate Magazine explains why he is unimpressed with Matisyahu's supposed novelty, for the exact same reasons outlined in my post.

Could Jody Rosen be reading my humble blog or did he come to the same conclusion as mine and also coincidentally end up using somewhat similar language? You decide:

JR's thesis: The truth is, Matisyahu isn't really a novelty—his is the oldest act in the show-business book.

IH's thesis: The numerous reviews and interviews follow a pattern; they rarely focus on the music itself--the stress is most often on his intriguing image as a ‘hasidic reggae star’, or nice Jewish boy who thinks he can make it in a primarily black genre. ... [a] lack of historical perspective on both Jewish musicians and their role in the popularization of black music is misleading.

JR: Minstrelsy dates back to the very beginnings of American popular music, and Jews have been particularly zealous and successful practitioners of the art. From Irving Berlin's blackface ragtime... jazz... generations of Jewish musicians have used the blackface mask to negotiate Jewish identity and have made some great art in the process.

IH: Jews have long been the face of black music in America. Before there was reggae, there was jazz, and from ragtime composers... the jazz stage has long featured Jewish artists... wearing blackface was an attempt by Jews to separate themselves from [...] discriminated against groups [...] Jews imitated African-Americans to accentuate their whiteness.

JR: Matisyahu is the latest in this line, and while his music is at best pedestrian, his minstrel routine may be the cleverest and most subtle yet... But as a Hasid, he has a genuinely exotic look—that great big beard and the tzitzit fringes flying—and the spiritual bona fides to pull off songs steeped in Old Testament imagery.

IH: ...it can’t be diminished that going on stage in early the 20^th century with the name Benny Goodman alone was as overtly Jewish as Matisyahu’s modern day Yiddish crying, tzitzith flying antics... If he knew he was standing in a long line of Jewish musicians who were faced with a very similar struggle...

JR: It's an ingenious variation on the archetypal Jewish blackface routine, immortalized in The Jazz Singer (1927), when the immigrant striver Jolson put on blackface to cast off his Jewish patrimony and become American.

IH: The 1927 film The Jazz Singer provides a strange example of a Jewish musician’s struggle to straddle the Jewish and pop worlds, and the conflict of assimilating into a genre dominated by African-Americans. It portrays a rabbi’s son who wears blackface to sing jazz on Broadway.

JR: If a Caribbean islander can plunder Jewish scripture and call himself a lost tribesman of Israel, why can't a Jew sing a song to a one-drop beat in a phony patois?

IH: Much of the same rhetoric is repeated today, i.e. Matisyahu’s Judaism is no imposter to Rastafarian culture because both cultures share mystical roots, etc…

JR: In 2006, Matisyahu wears Old World "Jewface," and in so doing, becomes "black."

IH: [my title] "Jewish Blackface" or "Forgive my chiming in on the Matisyahu overload." ...Which way he goes, more black or more Jewish, might very well be the defining move.

Am I seeing double because I'm still tipsy from Purim or have my words been paraphrased? I'm willing to hear that my ideas are obvious (or at least natural conclusions) so it's no wonder that JR's words would sound like mine--in which case I'll stop writing this blog and start submitting my articles into Slate!--but what are the chances that the same original idea sprouts up completely independently two weeks after the first? It’s certainly possible that Slate’s Jewish music critic does not scour the blogsphere and read up on the latest Jewish musical happenings… but is it likely?

(I'm not the only one who thinks this original, check out DovBear.
Update: Canonist thinks it's hogwash. He obiously did not read my post.)