I am an Orthodox rabbi angrily denouncing one of the biggest recent box office hits. Which movie has earned my wrath? Here is a clue: it surprised everyone by selling over one hundred million dollars’ worth of tickets in its first week in theaters. No, it’s not Mel Gibson’s “The Passion.” The movie causing me deep distress is a Rosenthal/Tenenbaum production starring Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
I am sorry to see Barbra Streisand involved in such a flagrant defamation of Judaism. While she was making her film Yentl, for which I served as a consultant, she studied Judaism regularly and diligently with me. She was a warm and gracious guest on the occasions she had dinner with my family. Yentl’s nostalgic, if not altogether authentic, glimpse into 19th century Jewish life in Poland evoked a feeling of fondness for the characters; but like many ethnic Jews Streisand is largely isolated from her religious roots. In the new film to which I refer, she plays a heinous caricature of a Jewess.
If you would rather not part with good money for the privilege of seeing the Jewish people defamed, you should abstain from this movie, which I am reluctant to name on account of the implied vulgarity of its title.
Lest you suspect that I am just a grouch with no sense of humor, let me tell you a little about this offensive excuse for entertainment. The movie depicts a non-Jewish couple visiting their daughter’s future Jewish in-laws. The conspicuously Jewish parents are portrayed as sexually obsessed, constantly concupiscent degenerates. Nice people, but depraved. Even the decorations that adorn their home are suggestive.
Along with their son’s bar mitzvah talis, they have preserved the foreskin from his bris. To add to the hilarity, this souvenir makes a distasteful reappearance at an awkward moment. In reality, we Jews treat the foreskin with reverence, burying it rather than turn it into a scrapbook joke. The Jewish hosts, who exude their ethnicity, boast of their son’s inappropriate adventures with the gentile maid and grant us unnecessary glimpses into their personal lives. There are many other examples of Judaism being defamed in this horrible excrescence.
The movie defames Jews in a way I haven’t seen since the worst that Woody Allen dished up. And Woody at his worst was breathtakingly hostile to Judaism. One need only recall how many of Woody’s films portray Jews, not to mention rabbis, as loathsome liars, desperate psychotics, pathetic perverts, and ridiculously lecherous losers. If Woody Allen were not Jewish, surely every Jewish organization would have roundly denounced him. And they would have been right. The problem is that he is Jewish and they don’t denounce him. Instead they celebrate Woody Allen Week at Jewish Community Center film festivals.
It is not only in movies that Jews besmirch Jews. Radio shock-jock Howard Stern intersperses his displays of dehumanizing depravity with a constant stream of “oy veys,” as if subconsciously compelled to highlight his Jewish ethnicity. Ruth Westheimer talks of her love for Judaism, but as Dr. Ruth, with her grandmotherly appearance and Jewish accent, she titillates her audiences with shockingly explicit advice.
A few years ago, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal gushingly profiled a Jewish pornographer whose stage name is Ron Jeremy. The piece praised the huge sums he’s been paid to promote immorality. Jeremy, who proudly admits to have acted in or directed over 1,500 adult videos, cited the preponderance of Jewish men in that industry and explained, “Jewish families tend to be more liberal than Christian ones, they aren’t obsessed by the fear of the devil or going to hell.”
As if to eliminate any lingering doubt about Ron Jeremy’s Jewishness, the Jewish Journal breathlessly assured us that he planned to marry in a synagogue.
You’d have to be a recent immigrant from Outer Mongolia not to know of the role that people with Jewish names play in the coarsening of our culture. Almost every American knows this. It is just that most gentiles are too polite to mention it.
Naturally, I am not suggesting that Americans of Jewish descent conceal their ethnic identity. I am urging those for whom Judaism is a link to the eternal values of Sinai to wake up and realize how other Americans increasingly perceive us. Furthermore, we ought to recognize that this unwholesome perception of Jews is the result of anti-Semitism perpetrated by Jews rather than by non-Jews. It would seem that Isaiah’s twenty-eight hundred year old prophecy to the Jewish people has come true today — “Those that destroy you and those that wreck you go forth from thee” (Isaiah 49:17).
By now, some of you will be cringing. You may be cursing me for making public the role played by a not inconsiderable number of Jews in debasing the culture. Perhaps you subscribe to the notion that nobody has noticed. I sympathize and want you to know that I write about it only for the purpose of trying to solve the problem. Make no mistake: it is a problem, and the solution lies not in attempting to defame the critics but in stepping forward to criticize the defamers. Indeed, if we Jews do not ourselves condemn the wrong that our brethren do, others with less sympathy eventually will do so.
Not once in Mein Kampf did Hitler charge Jews with being complicit in the killing of Jesus two thousand years earlier. He knew that long-ago event, shrouded in mystery and theological profundity, would never goad enlightened people to murder. Instead, he drew attention to the inescapable fact that through Jewish actors, playwrights, and producers, the Berlin stage of Weimar Germany linked Jews and homosexuality in all its sordid manifestations just as surely as Broadway does today.
It does not excuse the monster Hitler or his Nazi thugs for us to acknowledge that this master propagandist focused on a reality that resonated with the educated and cultured Germans of his day.
Article continues at link...
