I am an Orthodox rabbi sadly denouncing one of the box office hits of 2004. No, it’s not Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.”
The movie causing me distress is a Rosenthal/Tenenbaum production starring Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand.
I am reluctant to name the movie on account of the implied vulgarity of its title. In spite of having several Jewish producers and Jewish stars, this film’s vile notions of Jews are not different from those used by Nazi propaganda.
You should know a little about this offensive excuse for entertainment. It is a sequel to “Meet the Parents” (2000), in which we followed Pam Byrnes as she introduced her Jewish and nerdy boyfriend, Greg, to her parents.
This sequel shows the Byrnes visiting their daughter’s future in-laws. The movie depicts Greg’s conspicuously Jewish parents as sexually obsessed degenerates. Nice people, but depraved.
Along with their son’s bar mitzvah talit, or prayer shawl, they have preserved the foreskin from his circumcision. In reality, Jews treat the foreskin with reverence and bury it rather than turning it into a joke. There are many more vile examples of Jewish people being defamed in this horrible excrescence.
I loathe movies that perpetuate hideous stereotypes about racial, religious, or ethnic groups, no matter how funny they may seem. And I cannot see how racial bigotry is lessened if perpetrated by blacks or anti-Semitism is diminished if delivered by Jews.
Unwholesome perception
This movie defames Jews in a way I haven’t seen since Woody Allen, who at his worst is breathtakingly hostile to Judaism.
It is not only in movies that Jews besmirch Jews as sexualizing the culture. Ruth Westheimer told The New York Times of her love for Judaism, Israel and the Jewish people. Meanwhile, as Dr. Ruth, with her grandmotherly appearance and her Jewish accent, she titillates her audiences with shockingly explicit sexual advice.
Radio shock-jock Howard Stern intersperses his displays of dehumanizing depravity with a stream of “Oy veys” as if compelled to highlight his Jewish ethnicity.
Jerry Springer, widely known as the Jewish former mayor of Cincinnati, normalizes depravity by projecting a deviant sub-culture and its cheering hooligans right into America’s living room.
A few years ago, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal gushingly profiled a Jewish pornographer whose stage name is Ron Jeremy. Jeremy proudly admits to have acted in or directed over 1,500 porn videos.
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.
I am not suggesting that Americans of Jewish descent should conceal their 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 is the result of anti-Semitism perpetrated by Jews, not non-Jews.
By now, some Jewish readers will be cringing. You might be cursing me for making public the role 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 to try to solve the problem. And it is a problem. 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.
An excerpt from Adolf Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” shows how that evil megalomaniac roused his nation against the Jewish people:
“Was there any form of filth or profligacy, particularly in cultural life, without at least one Jew involved in it? What had to be reckoned heavily against the Jews in my eyes was when I became acquainted with their activity in the press, art, literature, and the theater…. It sufficed to look at a billboard, to study the names behind the horrible trash they advertised….”
It does not excuse Hitler or his Nazi thugs for us to acknowledge that this maniacal, master propagandist focused on a reality that resonated with the educated and cultured Germans of his day.
The sad fact is that through Jewish actors, playwrights and producers, the theater of Weimar Germany linked Jews and deviant sexuality in all its sordid manifestations as surely as Broadway does today. Much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the wars.
About 20 years ago, Leonard Peikoff wrote a book called “The Ominous Parallels” in which he described how Germany’s cultural decline helped bring the Nazis to power.
With haunting precision, Peikoff proves how similar is America’s cultural decline.
Comedian Bill Cosby has rightly condemned black entertainment that glorifies destructive behavior. By contrast, the movie “Barbershop” (2002) limned a loving portrait of a hard-working African-American family valiant struggling to achieve nobility in the face of formidable challenge.
In the same year, Nia Vardalos made her hilarious “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” demonstrating love for her warm-hearted and decent relatives.
Contrarily, we Jews routinely depict ourselves as repugnant caricatures. Why do my colleagues in Jewish communal leadership never condemn this anti-Semitism? For if it is not anti-Semitism, what is?
Ah, but wait. Abe Foxman, the leader of the Anti-Defamation League, a famous Jewish defense organization that exists to stop the defamation of the Jewish people, recently denounced in the Jerusalem Post one of the most profitable movies of 2004 for its “vile notions of Jews.”
Was he describing the sequel I am refusing to name? No, he was referring to Gibson’s “The Passion.”
It would be foolish not to realize that most decent Americans today feel more viscerally outraged by the assault on decency than they are by our possible complicity in the killing of Christ 2,000 years ago.
Because so many of the most prominent cultural trashers possess Jewish names and proclaim Jewish ethnicity, it becomes a Jewish responsibility to condemn the vulgarity by means of which they defame Judaism.
We can’t stop the Woody Allens and Howard Sterns; and in a nation that enshrined free speech, maybe we oughtn’t to try. However, we could redeem ourselves by protesting them instead of dissipating valuable energies and priceless goodwill by endlessly protesting “The Passion.”
Radio talk show host and author Rabbi Daniel Lapin is president of Toward Tradition.
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