We now enter the Nine Days of Av, Judaism’s period of most intense mourning. Hollywood has entered its biggest strike since 1960. It is a time to revisit the most disgusting Hollywood portrayal of Jews in recent memory.
A few months ago, Netflix aired a made-for-TV movie, “You People.” It was exceptionally disgusting, even for Netflix. But it was perfect for mourning what Exile has done to Jewish people who have strayed from the Torah’s core values. Exile has turned such Jews into mock caricatures of themselves. A fitting image for the Nine Days of Av, when we mourn what the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash, the Holy Temple, has done to us.
Movies in general are no longer what they were. With stark exceptions, they are pale politically correct imitations of what films once were. More than ever, the words of Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard” resonate: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.”
It has been years since I watched “The Oscars,” the Academy Awards. I don’t need to be lectured on current events by vapid celebrities whose fame is derived by memorizing words that smarter, more talented people write for them. I do not need to see desperately exhibitionist women on runways wearing almost no clothes to prove they have the same anatomy as women who are dressed. And the nominees for best film, year after year, fail to compare to the motion pictures Hollywood used to make.
F’rinstance, here are the films that contended in the Academy Awards in a single year, 1940: Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Gone With the Wind; Wuthering Heights; Stagecoach; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; The Wizard of Oz; and Of Mice and Men. Those eight extraordinary and now-legendary films all were up for the Oscar in the same year. Compare that to the current annual crop of weeds.
Still, this year’s Netflix You People remains a reference point. I despised every second of You People so intensely that, upon reflection, I actually have come to like it (sort of like Columbus deciding that if he went east enough, he would end up in the west, or whatever) because it unintentionally reflects the truth magnificently about hopelessly assimilated left-wing Woke Jews who cannot get “progressives” to love them.Understand first that there are two kinds of Jews: those who actually honor and observe what it means to be a Jew and those who proclaim themselves to be Jews but make a mockery of their religion and its foundational beliefs, apostates to the core, who bring shame to their religion and its adherents in the eyes of outsiders.You People was so repulsive that, upon reflection, it deserves to be included as a defining time-capsule document laying out everything that is Jewishly wrong and Judaically defective among assimilated knee-jerk left-wing heterodox Jews. The premise is that the grown son of two such despicably assimilated and pseudo-“progressive” Jewish parents enters into a love relationship with the daughter of an anti-Semitic Black Muslim who worships Louis Farrakhan. Isn’t that funny? A real knee-slapper already. The movie begins at a reform temple where godless non-Orthodox Jews are gathered on the holiest day of the Jewish year, and it all is a mockery. The “rabbi” is a mockery, the parents are a mockery. The grown son gets propositioned at the reform temple on this holiest of days by an elderly homosexual, who is a doctor. The whole thing is disgusting. Another old geezer also talks about sex in a creepy and sordid way with this grown young man at the same Yom Kippur reform temple service.I have never been in a reform temple for prayers, but I know that Orthodox synagogues on Yom Kippur are bastions of awe and somber devotion. So the film quickly prepared me for what was to follow. In time, we learn that the young fellow, born of Jewish parents, has quit his job and instead does a podcast with a Black person who is either male or female — I could not tell through two hours — during which they comment on “The Culture,” a euphemism apparently for Black culture.
What business does an unemployed knee-jerk leftist Jew who does not even know his own culture have sitting as an expert on Black culture? Of course self-respecting Blacks can’t stand Jewish “progressives” who sit as “experts” on their Black culture while ignorant of their own Jewish heritage. But now it’s time to meet the parents.The desperately “progressive” reform-temple-affiliated Jewish mother and father fall over themselves to show their son’s Black Muslim love interest how Woke and accepting they are. Right away, the guy’s mother greets the lady by telling her she is for defunding the police. That is how this universalist talks to a Black person, as though the first curiosity on every Black woman’s mind when she meets her boyfriend’s parents is where they stand on defunding the cops. The conversation gets more cringe-worthy as the Woke Jewish parents ooze their “progressivism” as thick as motor oil. All the worst stereotypes play out.And of course the Holocaust. For assimilated liberal Jews in America, all roads lead to the Holocaust — because they have nothing else of Jewish substance to discuss; they know nothing. They don’t know Torah or Talmud or Rambam’s Mishneh Torah or the Code of Jewish Law or the periods of the Tabernacle at Shiloh or the First Holy Temple in Jerusalem or the Babylonian Exile or the Second Holy Temple or the Fall of Beitar or the Roman Expulsion. They don’t know of Rashi or Tosafot or Ibn Ezra or Kli Yakar or Sforno or Rabbi Yehudah Halevi. They don’t know of the rise of the Third Commonwealth, the dynamics of the 1948 War of Independence, the 1967 Six-Day War, or the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They don’t know about David Ben-Gurion or the Haganah or the Irgun or the Lechi or Menachem Begin or Yitzchak Shamir. They don’t observe the Shabbat according to its laws or eat kosher or observe the Biblical festivals of Sukkot and Shavuot or fast on Tisha B’Av or hear the megillah on Purim.
All they know is the Holocaust. And, take it from me, they barely know that either. So, our young man, since he has no job, gives the Black Muslim lady an itsy-bitsy, embarrassingly small tiny engagement ring. In a movie repulsive with Jewish-denigrating stereotypes, how can a Jew give such a small ring? What to do? Consulting with his Black podcast partner of unknowable gender, he decides to tell the girlfriend mendaciously that the ring may be tiny — but it survived the Holocaust. They even decide, in their words, to use a “Holocausty” explanation.In time, the parents meet, and the oh-so-oozing Jewish “progressives” find out that their prospective in-laws are Farrakhan worshippers. Soon, the Jews are being blamed for slavery and the whole Farrakhan litany of Jew-hating lies. And how do they respond? Fittingly, they don’t know what to say. They are so clueless that they are virtually Jewless. They end up apologizing for slavery and for Whiteness.No one — and I mean no one — is more sick of Jews in Hollywood than are Orthodox Jews and Jewish conservatives in general. The Hollywood Jews mock and denigrate Jews and Judaism in their movies and TV shows as only Jews would dare. They bear leftist and globalist guilt for being affiliated, however tenuously, with an identifiable non-globalist, particularist community: Jews. They are stuck. They want so much to be accepted as Blacks and as BIPOC and as any and all other intersectionalist groups who are associated with “The Culture,” but the intersectionalists don’t want them.The “progressives” and the DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — crowd spit them out as “Whites,” and White Supremacists spit them out as Jews. And these bewildered and abysmally ignorant Jews do not know where they fit. Because they don’t fit. Their entire leftist universe has collapsed on them, now keeping their kids out of the same colleges that they once attended before “Affirmative Action” quotas cut the numbers of Jews in the Ivy League in half in one decade to make room for the less qualified. So these assimilated Jews, screenwriters and actors, work out their psychoses in the movies and TV, always portraying Jews and Judaism in the worst lights, mocking their religion, not realizing that, as they do so, they diminish themselves, too. Yet, no matter how hard they try to flee from their heritage, they always will be viewed as Jews to the day they die. In a fitting moment in the film, the Jewish prospective groom is asked by his Black Muslim potential father-in-law what he thinks of Farrakhan, who has compared Jews to termites. The “progressive” self-hating Jew responds that he regards Farrakhan as the “GOAT” — Greatest Of All Time.We live in a decayed society where very little remains sacred. Every idiot has to tweet innermost stories and post them on Facebook and YouTube. It is a form of exhibitionism that shames those who do not honor the boundary between propriety and the turpitude of our present climate. Those in Hollywood essentially post and tweet their exhibitionist self-hating psychoses on the big screen. As they shame themselves, they remind us what it means to live in Exile, in a world where the Third Beit HaMikdash has yet to be built where it assuredly will be, on Mount Zion, on the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem Eternal. In the meantime, they can stay on strike as long as they like. I will not miss theor self-hatred.
Adapted by the writer for The Jewish Press from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
