Yesterday I blogged about the televised conflict about Hollywood Jews between the Orthodox rabbi and the Jewish convert to Catholicism.
Now Rabbi Boteach blogs:
Now Coren has shoved his foot far deeper into his mouth with a personal diatribe against me.
Personal insults are the last refuge of the intellectual coward.
All Coren had to do was apologize for these nauseating insinuations and remarks. Instead, he made the matter worse by complaining that I’m short, that my office had the temerity to request kosher food from the exalted Coren and his staff, and that I refused to exit his studio when he obnoxiously demanded that I exit the very moment the cameras stopped rolling. For good measure, he made sure to gratuitously insult Oprah and Michael Jackson for their mere associations with me, as well.
For the record, there is little I can do about my height, and I apologize to Coren for offending him with my diminutive appearance. Likewise, there is nothing I can do about being kosher. I will never give it up, no matter how much he attacks me for simply asking where I might obtain kosher food since I am not familiar with Toronto. And when Coren’s show asked me to take an early morning flight to Toronto – to talk about my new book Kosher Jesus – where I was traveling for my nephew’s wedding, my office simply asked if a kosher meal could be procured since I would not be eating the whole day and, as a kosher Jew, cannot buy food in most places. Even so, they told my assistant we would have to arrange and pay for it ourselves.
As for Coren’s libel that I threatened him with disclosure of his remarks about Jews and Hollywood, the paranoid claim is laughable given that he had just made his remarks about Jews on national TV in Canada.
It is absolutely true that I refused to leave his studio after his reprehensible treatment of me and his attempt to evict me just as soon as the interview concluded, demanding to see his superiors and finally meeting a man named Matt Wolf, executive producer of Sun TV’s prime time talk shows, who turned out to be quite a gentleman.
I make no apologies for my actions. I am somewhat who fights anti-Semitism and holds those who malign my people accountable. Coren can claim from here to kingdom come that he is a friend of the Jewish community, and that may be true. But that does not excuse his odious remarks. His comments about lack of Jewish appreciation for Christians and the connection between Jews and Hollywood are the very stuff of negative Jewish stereotypes and if he was not prepared to retract them – as Marlon Brando did years ago when he too insinuated on Larry King Live that Jews control Hollywood – then I will bring the matter to his superiors. And his claim that he was only speaking about ‘liberal’ Jews matters not a toss. For the record I am a Republican who is currently seeking our party’s nomination for Congress in New Jersey’s Ninth Congressional District. But I will stand with my people, whatever their political persuasion, and will not allow them to slandered.
As for the Jewish intern of whom he speaks, how sad that some Jews appear to turn the other cheek even when their people are maligned in order to remain in the good graces of superiors.
More troubling still is Coren’s praise for Pius XII and his attempt to hold the Jews accountable for misrepresenting this most ignominious of Popes. Indeed, Sun TV cut Coren’s remarks about Pius from their online post of the broadcast. Why? And why isn’t the interview posted unedited? The public has the right to see it in its entirety.
