When Catholic priests molest kids, it is always pointed out that they are Catholic priests. When Hollywood Jews and rabbis molest, their identities should be pointed out too.
Shirley Temple writes in her book Child Star: An Autobiography of multiple incidents in which Hollywood Jews tried to molest her.
At 11 years old, Shirley met with with the Jewish producer, Arthur Freed, at MGM. He pulled his putz out:
“I have something made for just you,” he continued, fumbling in his lap. “You’ll be my new star!” That phrase had last been used when I was three years old in “Kid in Hollywood.”
Obviously, Freed did not believe in preliminaries. With his face gaped in a smile, he stood up abruptly and executed a bizarre flourish of clothing. Having thought of him as a producer rather than exhibitor, I sat bolt upright. Guarded personal exposure by both brothers and Father had maintained me in relatively pristine innocence. Not twelve years old, I still had little appreciation for masculine versatility and so dramatic was the leap between schoolgirl speculation and Freed’s bedazzling exposure that I reacted with nervous laughter.
Disdain or terror he might have expected, but not the insult of humor.
“Get out!” he shouted, unmindful of his disarray, imperiously pointing to the closed door. “Go on, get out!”
Shirley’s mother got similar treatment from Louis B. Mayer in the other room:
Mother and I were en route home before I spilled my executive-suite saga. Expecting her to be startled or angry on my behalf, I was surprised when she had her own tale to tell. Not only had Freed cut a figure, so had Mayer.
Ushering Mother to an overstuffed couch, Mayer returned behind his desk and mounted a long-legged chair, a vanity which gave him increased stature while seated. Wiping his eyeglasses on a silk handkerchief, he recounted how admiringly he regarded her. Every child should be so lucky to have such a mother, he purred, a real mother, yet someone sexy and refined. Usually solemn, his eyes glinted. Surely she could recognize real sincerity when she saw it. Never forget, he continued, at MGM we are a family. We take care of our own.
Slipping down off his chair, he approached the sofa and sank down beside her, uttering a contented sigh.
Surely she was the most unique mother in the world, he said. Someone who should be a star in her own right. He grasped her hand, pulling her toward him.
Mayer’s opinion of his personal prowess was rumored to be overblown, but not the power of his office. Reluctant to test either, Mother picked up her purse and retreated out the door, walking backwards.
Her autobiography contains many such stories.
Hardly the mogul he aspired to be or sometimes chose to pose, Wizard shoveled compliments in my direction, covering everything from appealing looks to yet-unrealized dramatic potential. Toward midnight the group thinned out and he offered to walk me to my own compartment. Only two ways to go on this train, he laughed, and I’m going yours.
As I turned in my opened doorway to say good night, he roughly shoved me back inside and slammed the door shut. In one hulking maneuver he toppled me onto the bunk previously made up by the car porter. The swiftness of his attack shocked me from my head to my high-heeled pumps, one of which fell off. his breath was heavy with a sickly aroma of whiskey, and with his free hand he was fumbling at his clothing.
Good God! I thought. I’m going to be raped!
“Look, I’m going to be a big executive,” he said. “We’re going to have to get along.” He held up both palms in a gesture of inevitability. “What I had in mind was just a workplace formality.”
“It may be in your contract, but not mine.”
“Sex is like a glass of water,” he went on, using the clinical tones of a doctor diagnosing an affliction. “You get thirsty, you drink. You want sex, you have it.”
…After dinner, as we prepared to depart, I went upstairs alone to retrieve my coat from his wife’s bedroom. The Wizard followed, stepping softly. Just as I was lifting my wrap from her bed, he suddenly seized me from behind. With a quick twist, he spun me around and backwards on top of the piled fur coats.
For a second time I found myself an unwilling entry in a wrestling match. Exasperating and abusive though it was to me, his actions disgraced his charming wife, only steps away with her guests, and was a gross effrontery to my husband. Yelling “Murder” would have further inflamed a dangerous situation. Pushing up on his chin with both hands, I flexed a knee and struck with all my might, a blow which proved that microsecond lust can be switched off as quickly as on.
Her encounter with George Jessel:
We were standing a pace apart, eyeball to eyeball. In one swift movement he opened his trousers and, with a sudden reach, encircled me with one arm, his face, droopy and baggy-eyed, looming directly into mine. I could feel his other hand groping to lift my shirt. Hard on the heels of the Wizard, this new assault seemed unreal, but little could I do but thrust my right knee upward into his groin. A blow enthusiastically pointed for his chin, it effectively knocked us apart. Pain, disgust, and hate flickered across his face, but I felt no mercy. More and more the adult movie business seemed populated with a bunch of copulating tomcats.
There are three ingredients needed to make a perfect obituary: a peculiar life, an anticipated death (hence: ample time to write the thing), and at least one story about tap dancing. So you knew going in that the New York Times obituary of Shirley Temple Black, who many people were sad to learn had died Monday night (but also, briefly, happy and surprised to learn had been alive up to that point), was going to be sensational.
Like a precocious Depression-era child dancing with a black man on down the stairs of a pretend house, it did not disappoint.
There were details you might expect, like a brief survey of the various horrible ways in which the parents of Shirley’s characters were killed in her films, so that she could emerge a plucky orphan (suicide, plane crash, shipwreck, hit by a car while carrying her birthday cake, etc.), and a funny anecdote about how Shirley’s 12th birthday party was marked by her discovery of the fact she was actually 13 (her mother realized early on that while a 6 year old who can do the rumba is really something, a 7 year old who can do the rumba is just kind of blah).
But, like all of the greatest obituaries, there were also a few surprises. For instance, even if you already knew that, the year she turned 4, Shirley appeared as a cutie sexy adorable sensual baby in what the Times describes as "a series of sexually suggestive one-reel shorts" titled "Baby Burlesks" (like this one), you might be surprised to learn that Shirley and her fellow professional toddlers were disciplined by being forced to sit on a block of ice in a windowless box:
When any of the two dozen children in “Baby Burlesks” misbehaved, they were locked in a windowless sound box with only a block of ice on which to sit. “So far as I can tell, the black box did no lasting damage to my psyche,” Mrs. Black wrote in “Child Star.” “Its lesson of life, however, was profound and unforgettable. Time is money. Wasted time means wasted money means trouble.”
Then there was the time the novelist Graham Greene was sued by her studio for libel, after he decried Shirley’s “mature suggestiveness” and “well-shaped and desirable little body” in a negative review of her film “Wee Willie Winkie.” (Greene had previously speculated that the actress was a 50-year-old dwarf pretending to be a child.)
Years later, a meeting with an MGM producer culminated in his exposing his genitals to a 12-year-old Shirley (and then banishing her from his sight).
On her first visit to MGM, Mrs. Black wrote in her autobiography, the producer Arthur Freed unzipped his trousers and exposed himself to her. Being innocent of male anatomy, she responded by giggling, and he threw her out of his office.
Temple became engaged to her second husband, Charles Alden Black, 12 days after meeting him, the same year she officially retired from showbusiness (at age 22). She said that J. Edgar Hoover’s lap was the most comfortable she ever sat on. In later life, she served as the U.S. ambassador to Ghana and to Czechoslovakia. Her first real film contract (two weeks; $150 per; with Fox) stipulated that she provide her own tap shoes.
By Shalom Goldman, Duke University, May 24, 2013:
But Catholics are not the only American religious minority beset by clergy sexual scandals and by conflicts between hierarchy and laity. As Mark Oppenheimer noted in a New York Times article last month, no American religious group seems free of sexual scandal.
A group that has been particularly hard hit with scandals this past year is the Orthodox Jewish community in its many forms. Just as ninety percent of American Catholics reject Church teachings on birth control, over ninety percent of American Jews (who either belong to Conservative or Reform congregations or are unaffiliated) reject Rabbinic Judaism’s teachings about the regulation of sexual behavior, especially when it comes to “family purity.” This euphemism refers to abstinence from sexual activity during a woman’s period—and at least a week beyond it. In Orthodox Jewish law men are forbidden all physical contact with their wives during a woman’s extended period of “menstrual impurity.” Thus many Orthodox households, and all Ultra-Orthodox households, have “separate beds” in the bedroom—so that the couple can sleep together, or apart, as the woman’s menstrual cycle determines.
It is within these same Jewish communities that consider themselves bound by such laws that sexual abuse scandals have recently come to light. The variety and magnitude of these scandals, though on a scale far smaller than those in the Catholic Church, have sent shockwaves through the Jewish world. What the results will be is hard to predict. For, unlike Roman Catholics, Jewish religious communities are not unified in their religious rules, behaviors, or attitudes. Rather, they are divided, contentious and famously argumentative. Behind the headlines of recent sexual scandals there have been some strange synchronicities between the Catholic and Jewish incidents.
On the same day in late 2012 that the charges against Bishop Mahoney were detailed in a lawsuit filed against the Los Angeles archdiocese, a State Supreme Court Judge in New York sentenced Nechemya Weberman, a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburgh, Brooklyn, to the attention-getting sentence of 103 years in prison. Weberman’s victim, an eighteen-year-old Hasidic woman whom he had been abusing for six years (under the pretext of being her “therapist”) had implored the judge to impose the maximum sentence. He fulfilled her request.
In the six years that she was abused, this Hasidic young woman did not remain silent about her situation; she complained to family members and school authorities. But she could not break through the wall of silence imposed by her ultra-Orthodox family, school, synagogue, and community. State Supreme Court Justice John C. Ingram praised the victim’s “courage and bravery in coming forward.” Sadly, though, the perpetrator’s and victim’s own community, the Satmar Hasidim of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Kiryat Yoel, New York, have not displayed the same courage and bravery in confronting abusers in their midst. To the contrary, like their Catholic clerical counterparts, they have tried to keep the lid on news of this and other emerging scandals.
That sexual abuse could be hidden, and news of it suppressed, within the Satmar Hasidim (American Judaism’s most separatist community) is not that surprising, since most of its members have little contact with the outside world.
A much greater scandal erupted when – a few months after the revelations about Weberman the Ultra-Orthodox “therapist” – a pattern of sexual abuse, deception and cover-up at Yeshiva University was revealed. YU is the flagship institution of Modern Orthodox Judaism. Reports of abuse were revealed to the press by an intrepid journalist and activist, Mordechai Twersky. Now living in Israel, Twersky was himself abused while at the Yeshiva high school—and he had been petitioning YU’s leaders to address the issue for over a decade. It seems that his patience finally ran out.
In contrast to the separatist and anti-modern tendencies of the Satmar Hasidim, the Orthodox Jews affiliated with Yeshiva University pride themselves on their openness to modernity. YU’s motto is Torah Umada—Torah and Science—an explicit embrace of both tradition and modernity. One would expect that a community that fully embraced modernity would be able to face such revelations in a direct and rational manner.
The revelations about Yeshiva University concern rabbis and male students at Manhattan Talmudic Academy, the boys’ high school affiliated with Yeshiva University.
These young men (close to forty cases have emerged to date) had been abused by their teachers in the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties.
The Y.U. case came to public attention in December 2012 when the New York Jewish newspaper, The Forward, broke the story. In that same period, stories about covered-up cases of sexual abuse at prep schools—Horace Mann and Deerfield, among others—appeared in the press. Forward journalist Paul Berger reported that “Yeshiva University for years ignored students who claimed that they were sexually abused by two former staff members at Y.U.’s high school for boys in Manhattan.”
While many American Catholics now seem open to criticism of their own communities, and of their clergy, no matter how elevated the status of the clergyman, spokespersons for Jewish communities, reluctant to wash their laundry in public, have been fiercely protective of clergy and teachers.
The Forward has been descrying the reluctance of Y.U. faculty and students to demand action by their university. This past month a graduate of Y.U. called on the school chancellor, Rabbi Norman Lamm, to resign. But Lamm is not only the university’s chancellor, he is also its Rosh Yeshiva, the institution’s spiritual leader. Voices calling for Lamm’s resignation, though, are few; for the most part, the Modern Orthodox Jewish community has been silent. Of the thousands of Y.U. graduates appealed to in an email petition, only 250 were willing to hold the university leadership accountable.
Both Catholics and Jews are minorities within the United States (Catholics forming one-quarter of the U.S. population, and Jews two percent). Members of both religious communities have confronted religious prejudice in Protestant America. Yet it seems that the smaller the minority, the more protective its reputation and leadership.
