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.
About twenty years ago one of Ayn Rand’s protégés 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 proved how similar is America’s cultural decline. Indeed much of the filth in American entertainment today parallels that of Germany between the world wars.
Yet many Jewish entertainers routinely depict Jews in repugnant caricatures of people you’d want nothing to do with in real life. Why do my colleagues in Jewish communal leadership rarely (if ever) condemn this anti-Semitism? For if it is not anti-Semitism what is?
Ah but wait. The leader of a famous Jewish defense organization – you know the one that exists to stop the defamation of the Jewish people – did denounce one of the most profitable movies of 2004 for its vile notions of Jews. Was he describing the horrible film I refuse to name? Sadly he was not. He was referring to Mel Gibson’s The Passion.
Nearly a year after its release and with polls actually showing increased regard for Jews among the film’s audiences Jewish organizations still condemn The Passion as defamatory to Jews. Yet astonishingly they do not consider the examples I cite above as being defamatory to Jews.