Last week, comedy legend Larry David shocked much of the country by devoting one joke in his Saturday Night Live monologue to noticing that his fellow Jews were overrepresented in the ongoing Harvey Weinstein-inspired sexual-harassment scandals.
Similarly, Jews tend to disproportionately figure in validating and promoting hate hoaxes. But few know this because David-style criticism of any Jewish tendencies toward self-indulgent behavior is punished in modern America.
Indeed, the ADL says it exists to “to put an end forever to…ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.” In essence, Jews are off-limits to satire. Yet being vulnerable to criticism encourages us to behave better, which is why people like Weinstein and Greenblatt are able to run amok for so long.
There actually are a certain number of classic hate crimes committed each year by whites against nonwhites. But these usually involve lowlifes and the cops come down on them like a ton of bricks, so the stories don’t because national causes célèbres.
In contrast, a high proportion of the cases in the national media turn out to be absurd. For example, when The New York Times a year ago was promoting the idea of a “wave of hate” following Trump’s victory, its top-featured case was from Lindenwood U. There a jolly Polynesian lady rugby player had jokingly assembled a “wall” of tennis shoes to divide her half of the dorm room from that of her Mexican roommate. The outraged Mexican coed called campus security.
But lining up sneakers toe to heel isn’t illegal, yet.
America has tens of thousands of social scientists. Yet as far as I can tell, not one has ever studied quantitatively what percentage of nationally publicized “hate incidents” turn out to be misleadingly fallacious.
This ought to be the highest-priority social science question in America, but it’s likely to remain off-limits for objective study.
