Luke Ford

Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein of the Simon Wiesenthal Center write for Newsweek:

Now comes word that a landlord in Vienna is “offended” by the display of an Israeli flag inside a window of an apartment first placed there in celebration of Israel’s participation in the Eurovision songfest. The landlord also informed the Jewish tenant that to avoid eviction he must not only take down the flag but also remove his mezuzah (the small case holding Biblical verses) affixed his doorposts.

Balancing the rights of one person in a democracy to display his pride in a member state of the U.N. with another citizen’s right to hate ought to be fairly easy to sort out for the authorities. But this is 2015 Europe, where the rights of Jewish citizens are not always protected.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I don’t recall the Simon Wiesenthal Center protesting Jews chanting “Death to the Arabs!”

Did these rabbis publicly protest Jews spitting on Christians in Jerusalem?

In their Jewish nationalism op-eds against Gentile nationalisms, do these rabbis ever note that Torah makes no provision for non-Jewish citizenship in a Torah state of Israel?

There is no mitzvah in Judaism to fight anti-Semitism. This bullying of Austria by these rabbis has no precedence in our sacred texts.

Why should a landlord not have the right to make the rules for the use of his own property? Why would any nation want its citizens flying the flag of a foreign power? Do these rabbis seriously think that Israelis would be more tolerant of a Palestinian flag waving in a Jewish-owned home rented to Arabs?

It seems like chutzpa to me that these rabbis can get an op/ed in Newsweek protesting a solitary guy in Austria exercising his property rights.

Report:

Jerusalem Post reporter Melanie Lidman tweeted pictures of two members of the Israeli Knesset, Aryeh Eldad and Michael Ben Ari, taking shots of vodka and attempting to burn a Palestinian flag outside the U.N. headquarters in Jerusalem. Police tore the flag away before it could be lit up, reportedly worried that such an act would incite riots, Lidman tweeted. Another group of protesters began chanting “There will never be a Palestinian state!”

I take it for granted that Esau (sometimes) hates Jacob just as Jacob sometimes hates Esau. Jews will always have different interests from non-Jews. It seems to me like an impossibility for any other group to have identical interests with Jews (or blacks or Muslims or Chinese, etc). Therefore, it is inevitable that will always be conflict to varying degrees between Jews and non-Jews.

The two rabbis write:

But Austria has never come to terms with its role in the Holocaust, leaving it with a trifecta of Jew hatred: traditional anti-Semitism, the new virulent anti-Israelism and the so-called secondary anti-Semitism caused by the Holocaust itself.

Jews have never come to terms with their role as Stalin’s willing executioners. Jews have never come to terms with their roles in the Soviet Union’s genocides. This is not weird or peculiar to Jews or Austrians. No group likes to come to terms with its defects.

Have Jews come to terms with the million Jews in America prior to 1950 who were communists and socialists? (Nathan Glaser, 1967) Have Jews come to terms with all the American scientists who passed nuclear secrets to Joseph Stalin were Jewish? Have Jews come to terms with a Jewish spy (Jonathan Pollard) stealing the crown jewels of America’s nuclear secrets and giving them to Israel which then traded them to America’s arch-enemy, the Soviet Union, for the release of Soviet Jews?

Do you think the direction of America’s culture is positive? If so, you can thank Jews. If you think the sum of America’s entertainment industry is positive, you can again thank Jews. If you think Hollywood is destructive, you can blame Jews. If you think the disproportionate role that Jews have played in promoting minority rights (blacks, gays, trannies, Muslims, etc) in the West at the expense of the white Christian majority is a good thing, you can thank Jews. If you think America becoming more multicultural and more divided is a good thing, you can, in part, thank Jews. If you think these trends are bad, you can blame Jews.

A tiny number of influential Jews will represent all Jews in the non-Jewish mind in the same way that the tiny number of Muslim terrorists represent Muslims in non-Muslim minds. Few Jews are radical but many radicals are Jews and this will shape how non-Jews regard Jews. Few Jews were communists but many communists were Jews. Few Jews are big capitalists but many big capitalists are Jews. Few Jews are important in Hollywood but of the important people in Hollywood, about half are Jews. Ergo, what these tiny numbers of Jews in important positions do that affects the world will shape how Jews are treated akin to the way Muslim terrorists affect the way Muslims are treated.

Only a tiny number of Nazis executed the Holocaust, yet that genocide profoundly shaped how Germany was viewed post 1945 because the media and academia focused on it as history’s greatest crime. Only a tiny number of Jews carried out Stalin’s genocides, but because this is never mentioned in the media and rarely in academia, it has had little effect on how Jews are viewed.

Jews are no more eager than any other group to come to terms with the bad things they’ve done.

There is nothing in being a rabbi that makes them expert in Austrian politics, property rights, and culture.

Jews want to be a separate nation and simultaneously enjoy all the privileges of belonging to any nation where they choose to take up residence just like many powerful men want to get married but still play the field. This approach will inevitably cause conflict and tragedy (both in the world and in the home). In a free country, Jews will dominate because of their superior intelligence, industry and cohesiveness. Non-Jews, however, do not like to be dominated by superior Jewish intelligence, industry and cohesiveness, so they preserve their Gentile lands and their Gentile cultures by all means necessary, including the persecution of Jews.

The two rabbis conclude:

One landlord does not a nation make, but its leaders’ failure to denounce another outrageous attempt to drive Jewish identity underground will only add another sordid chapter to a nation’s unresolved anti-Jewish legacy.

So unless the state interferes with the landlord’s right to the use of his own property in the way he sees fit, then Hitler has won? This tiny choice by a landlord in the use of his own property is “outrageous”? How is Austria’s “unresolved anti-Jewish legacy” any different from Judaism “unresolved anti-Gentile legacy”? Different groups have different interests. Jews see themselves as a separate people. All strong in-group identity, including the Jewish identity, creates suspicion of and hostility towards outsiders. The stronger the Austrian in his uniquely Austrian identity, the more likely he is to have negative feelings towards Jews just as the stronger the Jew in his Jewish identity, the more likely he is to have negative views of non-Jews. Haredi Jews tend to have more negative views of Gentiles than do Modern Orthodox Jews who in turn have more negative views that Reform Jews who in turn have more negative views than completely secular Jews.

How would Jewish landlords in Jerusalem react to non-Jewish Jerusalem tenants posting Christian or Palestinian symbols on their doors? Do you think Jewish landlords might have a problem with a goy tenant posting of a cross or a PLO or Hamas flag above a door? If I were a landlord in Israel, I would not want my non-Jewish tenants publicly displaying the flags and symbols of other countries and religions. The Torah makes no provision for non-Jewish citizenship in the Jewish state of Israel. The Torah makes no provision for the free practice of any religion in Israel but Judaism. Yet these rabbis feel free to demand that the goyim not act in the same way that the Torah commands Jews to act in the Jewish state.

The story of Purim celebrates Jews’ escaping from destruction at the hands of their enemies. Near the end of the Purim story, 75,000 enemies of the Jews are slaughtered. Purim is a joyous Jewish holiday. Not many Jews feel bad about the slaughter of their enemies. So why should Jews expect Austrians to feel bad about the slaughter of their enemies?

Different groups have different interests. The interests of Jews and the interests of Austrians frequently clash. It is probably in the Jewish interest for Gentile countries to be multicultural and tolerant of separatist minorities such as Jews. It is in the interest of Gentile countries, however, to be cohesive. I can’t think of any example in history where Jews exceeded 5% of the population of a Gentile country and there wasn’t tremendous hatred of Jews.

Douglas Rushkoff, a proud Jew and the author of Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism, says: “The thing that makes Judaism dangerous to everybody, to every race, to every nation, to every idea, is that we smash things that aren’t true. We don’t believe in the boundaries of nation states, we don’t believe in these ideas of individual gods that protect individual people, these are all artificial constructions and Judaism really teaches us how to see that. In a sense, our detractors have us right in that we are a corrosive force, we’re breaking down the false gods of all nations and all people because they’re not real and that’s very upsetting to people.”

It doesn’t bother me that some Jews don’t want to come to terms with their past. No group does. Not even Austrians. Every group, except pathological whites, puts their group interest first. Every group views itself as the center of the world.

In a 2006 lecture, Tom Wolfe said: “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world – so ordained by some almighty force – would make not that individual but his group…the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”

Every strong group identity brings with it, as a general rule with many individual exceptions, lessened concern about outsiders.

These two rabbis from the Simon Wiesenthal Center abuse the language of universal morality to try to get an unfair tribal advantage by keeping the goyim on the defensive and uniting Jews with a message that much of the world hates them. Pre-Traumatic Syndrome is what much of American Judaism consists of these days (but this finds little basis in Torah). The religion of the Holocaust is a great living (but finds no basis in Torah). There’s no business like Shoah business.

The only honorable forms of argument are to contest an opponent’s facts or logic. The two rabbis don’t bother with honorable forms of argument, however. They just heap on the “anti-Semitic” slur against Austria without ever considering similar anti-Gentile currents in Jewish life.

“Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is director of interfaith affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

The headline on this Newsweek essays is: “An Anti-Semitic Incident Adds to Austria’s Shame”

Do the authors regard negative views and acts by Jews against non-Jews as adding to Judaism’s shame? To Jews’ shame? To Israel’s shame? What limits on property rights do the rabbis propose? The inference from this essay is that anything anti-Jewish should be crushed but the rabbis apparently have no concern about anti-Gentile acts and attitudes among Jews.

Michael Medved (1996, 37) writes that “it makes no sense at all to try to deny the reality of Jewish power and prominence in popular culture. Any list of the most influential production executives at each of the major movie studios will produce a heavy majority of recognizably Jewish names. This prominent Jewish role is obvious to anyone who follows news reports from Tinsel Town or even bothers to read the credits on major movies or television shows.”

The name of Medved’s book here was Hollywood vs America. In other words, Jewish Hollywood vs America. How much effort have these two rabbis given to combating Jewish Hollywood’s frequently hostile attitude to Gentile America?

All nationalisms require discrimination. If you love your group, it means you put other groups second. Jews are no exception to these rules.

From The American Interest:

Will there ever be a TV show that portrays Christians as normal, decent, struggling and complicated human beings? Certainly not in ABC’s new line-up. Reviewing the premiere of “GCB” for the Washington Post, Elizabeth Tenety describes what passes today for serious, empathetic programming about people of faith:

After mom Amanda Vaughn loses her Ponzi-scheming husband in a sexual rendezvous-induced car accident, the former “mean girl” moves with her two children from California to her “God-often-speaks-to-me-through-Gucci” mother’s house in Dallas…

[The show] is one part Church Lady, one part Desperate Dallas Housewives.

Carlene Cockburn, played by Kristin Chenoweth, is Vaughn’s high school nemesis and the show’s faith-filled antagonist, delivering witty one-liners…and Dallas diva-ness in a series that alludes to the excesses of Christian culture and depicts how religion is used, at least in some circles, to justify immoral behavior.

Any racial or ethnic group in this country as negatively portrayed on primetime TV would be up in arms–and rightly so. To be clear, Via Meadia does not object to the depiction of religious hypocrisy, an all-too-common phenomenon that is certainly worthy of dramatic treatment. Rather, we take exception to the fact that Christians in the media are almost uniformly shown as hypocrites, idiots, bigots and so on. As Tenety rightly asks of “GCB” (by now, you can guess the acronym), “where is the Christian love?”

Contemporary television and film producers go out of their way to paint moving, sympathetic portraits of everyone from bullied gay teenagers to sex addicts and Mafia wives, but somehow run up a massive empathy deficit when it comes to men and women of faith. And the occasional show that attempts to seriously grapple with religious themes, like NBC’s excellent “Kings” — which brilliantly retold the biblical story of King David in a modern setting — are poorly promoted and quickly canceled.

Christians, like other groups, will have to organize and work to get fair treatment from the media. Respect isn’t something they give you out of pity or a sense of justice. It is something you earn by thoughtful and effective organization and action, both political and cultural.

And if you want something done right, it’s often best to do it yourself. Christians and other faith groups maligned by the entertainment industry might look to the example of Israeli productions like Srugim. The show, a dramedy which realistically and sympathetically portrayed the lives of young religious Jews, was produced by filmmakers trained in the religious Ma’aleh film school and won the Israeli equivalent of the Emmys.

The vicious denigration of people of faith by so many cheap television programs and cheesy films is not and should not be something religious people take for granted or ignore. Other groups have changed the way they are portrayed in the media by a combination of shrewdly applied pressure and by promoting and developing talent within the community that can replace prejudice and schlock with compelling drama and true to life work.

If Christians don’t do this for ourselves, nobody will do it for us. It is time to stand up.

Cory Copeland writes:

“I’m not scared of you ‘cause I got God by my side. And He told me that you ain’t worth nothin’… and He wants me to smite you. She-devil…that’s what you are. You’re the devil and I’m the angel of God …’cause God loves me. He don’t love you. ‘Cause you ain’t worthy of God’s love. You ain’t worthy of nobody’s love.”

This bit of dialogue was spat during the last three minutes of Orange is the New Black’s season 1 finale as antagonist Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett tried to stab protagonist Piper Chapman with a wooden cross that had been sharpened to a point.

Yeah…

It’s a hard scene to digest and an even more difficult one to fathom actually happening. And while this is certainly an extreme example, it’s the type of behavior the writers of scripted television and films seem to assign any Christian characters they deem worthy of screen time.

Judgmental, ruthless, ignorant, empty of understanding or grace and with a heavy Southern accent—this is how the entertainment industry chooses to portray a large majority of Christians. Whether it’s a comedy such as Community, a “dramedy” like Orange is the New Black or an off-the-deep-end drama like Scandal, it just does not matter. If there’s a Christian character bouncing around, more than likely they’re going to viciously judge, ridicule, argue with or straight up murder the faithless, more secular characters, all while sporting a straight-from-the-trailer-park Southern accent.

But why?

Why is it that a very large majority of fictional Christian characters fed to us by mainstream media are so completely and insanely dogmatic?

Why is it that a very large majority of fictional Christian characters fed to us by mainstream media are so completely and insanely dogmatic? There is no grace, no understanding, no forgiveness in these characters.

Even on a show with lighter fare like Community, where the singular Christian character isn’t as rigid or downright mean (or Southern) as other shows, Shirley Bennett’s faith is still frequently played as a flaw.

Why are these types of character models accepted as the norm when representing today’s Christian?

REPORT: The 5 Worst Portrayals of Christians in Films

Gee, why does Hollywood portray Christians so negatively? I can’t figure that out. Why the anti-Christian bigotry? Is there a nation putting out entertainment with an unresolved anti-Christian legacy?

Dennis Prager writes May 14, 2014:

On May 5, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in “Town of Greece v. Galloway” that the town’s practice of beginning legislative sessions with prayers does not violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
As summarized in the opening words of the ruling:
“Since 1999, the monthly town board meetings in Greece, New York, have opened with a roll call, a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, and a prayer given by clergy selected from the congregations listed in a local directory. While the prayer program is open to all creeds, nearly all of the local congregations are Christian; thus, nearly all of the participating prayer givers have been too.”
I believe it is significant that three of the four dissenting justices are the three Jews on the Supreme Court — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. So, too, one of the two women (the “respondents” at the Supreme Court level) who filed the original lawsuit against the town of Greece is a Jew. And Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee, the Union for Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and the Anti-Defamation League, had filed amicus curiae briefs in support of the women.
This is all significant because the Jewish justices, the Jewish woman who brought the suit against the New York town and all the Jewish organizations that filed briefs in support of the two respondents represent a battle that many American Jews and Jewish organizations have been waging for decades against public expressions of God and religion. American Jews have become the most active ethnic or religious group in America attempting to remove God and religion from the public square.
Why is this the case? Why have American Jews been so active in fighting any expressions of God and religion in the country that has been the most hospitable to us in our long history?
Nearly every Jew who does so will give this answer: In order to fight for the separation of church and state in America.
But let’s be honest. If there were no such concept in America — and in fact, the phrase “separation of church and state” never appears in the Constitution — most American Jews would be just as opposed to public expressions of faith.
So, then, once again: Why are American Jews so opposed to public religious expressions? Moreover, this opposition exists not only to government-sponsored religious expression. For example, many Jews are avid supporters of substituting “Happy Holidays” for “Merry Christmas” or “holiday party” for “Christmas party.”
I think there are four reasons.
One is antipathy to Christianity. Most Jews just don’t like Christianity. They associate it with centuries of anti-Semitism, and therefore believe that a de-Christianized America will be a much more secure place for them.
Second, many American Jews feel “excluded” when Christianity is expressed in public.
A third reason is antipathy to religion generally. Most Jews are little more positively disposed to Orthodox Judaism than they are to traditional Christianity.
That leads to reason four: a fervent belief in secularism. Most American Jews believe in secularism as fervently as Orthodox Jews believe in the Torah or traditional Christians believe in Christ.

Roman Catholic William A. Donohue writes in 2005:

Ever since Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and I squared off against each other on the December 8 edition of MSNBC’s “Scarborough Country,” there has been considerable chatter over my comment, “Hollywood is controlled by secular Jews who hate Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.”
Context is always important, so let’s take a look at it. Just before I spoke, Boteach mocked “The Passion of the Christ,” saying, “It really should win the World Wrestling Federation Oscar for best movie. It’s a guy for two hours being kicked, beaten, his blood gushing everywhere. It’s just a diabolical, criminal, violent mess.” Thanks, Shmuley, for being so sensitive about that “guy.”
In the same segment that I made this remark, I also said the following: “You have got secular Jews. You have got embittered ex-Catholics, including a lot of ex-Catholic priests who hate the Catholic Church, wacko Protestants in the same group….” Later in the debate, I said, “There are secularists from every ethnic and religious stock,” and when people talk about Hollywood, they are “talking mostly about secular Jews.”
In short, I did not single out secular Jews as some have said. Nonetheless, I do regret using the verb “controlled,” and that is because it suggests that there is some kind of cabal among secular Jews. That’s nonsense. But is there a segment of the secular Jewish community that is anti-Catholic? Absolutely.
The day after our debate, Boteach was kind enough to have me on his radio show to mix it up again. During the course of that conversation, I admitted that there was a segment of the Catholic community that is anti-Semitic. I then asked him if he would agree that there is a segment of the secular Jewish community that is anti-Catholic, and he denied it without equivocation. That’s also nonsense.
Now consider what the New York Times said about “The Passion” on June 24: “Significantly, in the movie industry, which tends to be liberal and secular in outlook, as well as disproportionately Jewish, few people interviewed about ‘The Passion’ said they had actually seen the movie.” Is this not a softer way of saying what I said, at least in part?
The “Today Show,” Newsweek magazine, the Los Angeles Times and other media outlets have all reported on the Hollywood animus against “The Passion.” As one Oscar-campaign veteran put it, “a lot of older Academy voters, who are largely Jewish, refuse to even see this movie.” Tom O’Neil, who is one of the most prominent students of the Oscars, recently described what happened when the Mel Gibson film was being considered by the experts: “At this religious movie, there was more cussing and swearing by Oscar voters than has ever been seen in an Academy screening before.” This says it all.
The point is that no one seriously disputes the fact that Hollywood is a heavily secular Jewish community. And while some may want to defend Hollywood against the charge that it is anti-Christian in general and anti-Catholic in particular, those who do so carry a heavy burden. It is not for nothing that Hollywood has been turning out one Christian-bashing film after another for the past few decades.
Indeed, a report released on December 16 by the Parents Television Council shows that Hollywood has a real problem with religion. The study of CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, WB, UPN and Pax contained 2,344 treatments of religion constituting 2,385 hours of primetime television. L. Brent Bozell, the president of the organization, concluded that “anti-Catholic bigotry” was “rampant” on network shows.

I am not upset that Jews tend to have some anti-Christian feelings and I am similarly not upset that Christians and other groups of non-Jews tend to have some anti-Jewish feelings. I don’t see how things could be otherwise. The interests of Jews and non-Jews frequently conflict. Hence there’s often going to be conflict and tragedy.

Philip Weiss writes February 26, 2013:

Below is video of the infamous “you want to work in this town?” joke about Jews running Hollywood, delivered by a teddy bear called “Ted” created by Seth MacFarlane, at the Academy Awards Sunday night. It’s getting a lot of attention. Note that the talking bear says it’s important to give money to Israel to work in Hollywood, and that Mark Wahlberg is hurt by being Catholic– before Wahlberg shuts him up.

The Wiesenthal Center is enraged. An Open Zion columnist calls it an “anti-Semitic canard.” The ADL also condemns age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes.

This is a slightly absurd conversation. The overwhelming Jewish numbers in Hollywood are no canard; and in a diverse society, people evidently want to talk about that, so they joke about it (as they joke that the Israel lobby runs Congress). JJ Goldberg at the Forward, who (while arguing defensively that the joke has the “power to kill. Right now, in today’s world, given the worldwide audience of the Oscars, it’s like shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded planet”) concedes that “the strong presence of Jews in Hollywood surely has some sociological and cultural implications.”  

If anybody can genuinely be said to control Tinseltown, it’s probably the 25 people who run the 12 main film studios—that is, the chairman (in one case, two co-chairmen) and president of each. Of those 25, 21 are Jewish, or 84%. That’s simple math. You could define “control” differently—throw in the top agents and producers, leading directors, most bankable stars and so on—and the proportion of Jews would drop, but it probably wouldn’t get down anywhere near the 50% mark. There’s a reason why Nate & Al’s stays in business.

And when Brando was called on the carpet in 1996 for asserting on Larry King that Jews “own Hollywood,” 19 of 20 top studio execs were Jewish, Goldberg says. 

The issue in my mind is whether we’re all grownup enough to talk about these things without having pogroms, and I think we are. I’ve written here before that Jewish kinship networks are important professionally; most of my work in journalism has come from Jews with whom I share culture and language (very much the way Jodi Kantor got her job at the New York Times). People have a right to discuss these matters in a critical manner: in the ’60s sociologist E. Digby Baltzell, himself a WASP, helped break down Protestant discrimination against Jews in board rooms and back rooms with a book bewailing discrimination called The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Nick Lemann also ascribed a religious character to that former establishment when he called it “the Episcopacy” in his book on the meritocracy. So– what’s good for the goose……

REPORT: Kevin Sorbo explains why more Christian movies aren’t made: Jews run Hollywood

“I sort of understand how they never want to deal with the New Testament in Hollywood, because it’s pretty much, you know, run by the world of the, um, Jewish population,” Sorbo said, chuckling. “At the same time, at least get someone that has, you know, believes that the potential is there, that it could be a real story.”