On normalizing black and Muslim antisemitism - author Gil Troy in Hollywood

If you haven't watched Dave Chappelle's controversial, monologue regarding Jews on Saturday Night Live, 12 Nov 2022, watch it here for yourself on JooTube. He begins joking about Kanye West's Jew-hateful remarks causing him brand-contract cancellations - inferring that Jews in showbiz (and business) have a coordinated influence over American culture. Mr. Chappelle allegedly hid this script in advance from Lorne Michaels the show's Jewish executive producer, supposedly switching it when on-air without Mr. Michael's knowledge. 

 

Jewish people in entertainment jobs benefits everyone - except perhaps bigots (and ironically, Israel)

American-Israeli author and historian Gil Troy

asserts Prof. Gil Troy & CNN-featured, cultural historian.

On the day that the holiday Christmas Tree and Hanukah menorah are being erected in Beverly Gardens Park, visiting Israeli lecturer and author, Prof. Gil Troy contextualizes the brouhaha over Muslim, Dave Chappelle's antisemitic remarks on SNL Saturday Night Live.

Question: Here we have had for the past month an issue of anti-Semitism - particularly Black anti-Semitism - through the mainstream press and you've written an article which appeared a terrific three four page article in the Jewish Journal this week. How is this recent incident now affecting  people's attitudes and concerns?

Gil Troy: There's been a disturbing surge of anti-Semitism. I call it Jew-hatred because anti-Semitism makes it sound too scientific makes it sound too clinical and it's very interesting. Over the last three four five years I've started hearing from my students more and more both the ones who come from Jewish Day schools and come to Israel - but also those who just come from public schools more examples of of anti-Semitism more examples of feeling outed and othered as Jews. And it's so shocking because it's a point in time in history when people are supposed to be more tolerant and what we're seeing on American campuses is that you're supposed to not have microaggressions against anybody but somehow macroaggressions are acceptable against Jews.

And these last couple of weeks people have been completely upset about the YE - I call him the bigot formerly known as Kanye West - controversy. And I'm a little bit wary because if we just focus on the celebrities we miss the what Zev Jabotinsky, the great Zionist thinker called "the anti-Semitism of things." If we just focus so much on what's happening in celebrity culture and Twitterville, we miss what's really going day to day.

With too many of my students and too many of my fellow Jews in the United States of America are experiencing us all of a sudden a certain sense that we're on trial all of a certain sense that the golden age in America is over.  . . .

(Dialogue continues in the video)

Dave Chappelle and normalizing black antisemitism

Dave Chapelle normalizing antisemitism on Saturday Night Live

Jonathan Tobin in JNS.Org: "The comedian is right that we need to stop trying to cancel and fire those who say offensive things. But his SNL monologue ignored the truth about a major source of hate.

... Chappelle’s willingness to rationalize, if not excuse, some of what Kanye West and Kyrie Irving have done—even if he was also making fun of them and their critics—sheds light on something quite important: that black antisemitism isn’t treated seriously. This is aside from the fact (the enthusiastic reaction from the SNL in-studio audience notwithstanding) that his jokes about it weren’t very funny.  ...

The main theme of his monologue, however, was about the perils that await anyone who makes the mistake of saying the words “the” and “Jews,” “together in sequence.” He began it by reading a ritual statement about opposing antisemitism, rightly noting that saying something like it would have “bought some time” for Kanye West after he had made a series of antisemitic statements and tweets.

Behind Chappelle’s teasing of West was a sense that while the rapper/fashion mogul was the author of his own troubles, those who were angry at him were also deserving of blame. He seems to think that West’s threats aimed toward Jews didn’t deserve to be taken seriously.

He took particular aim at those avoiding the issue of Jews controlling Hollywood, accusing them of being too sensitive. According to Chappelle, saying Jews run show business is, “not a crazy thing to think, but a crazy thing to say out loud.”

That extended to an even more problematic assessment of the controversy surrounding basketball player Kyrie Irving, who has been suspended by the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets for tweeting a link to an antisemitic film and then being slow and somehow vague when it came to apologies and disavowals about Jew-hatred. As Chappelle put it, “Kanye got in so much trouble; Kyrie got in trouble.”

The comedian claimed here that Irving’s support of a film called “From Hebrews to Negroes,” which claimed, among other antisemitic libels, that African-Americans are the real Jews, and that the actual Jews are frauds, was not worthy of much outrage. He went further by asserting that what followed—the list of demands placed on the athlete to get him out of hot water—was excessive.

“I know the Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world, but you can’t blame that on black Americans,” said Chappelle. “You just can’t.”

He went on to say that “a fair punishment” for Irving would be to require him to “post a link to ‘Schindler’s List.’” The focus on the player was wrong, he added, as the audience laughed, because “Kyrie Irving’s black ass was nowhere near the Holocaust.”

I don’t often agree with Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League. But he was right when he tweeted: “We shouldn’t expect @DaveChappelle to serve as society’s moral compass, but disturbing to see @nbcsnl not just normalize but popularize #antisemitism. Why are Jewish sensitivities denied or diminished at almost every turn? Why does our trauma trigger applause?”

Chappelle doesn’t seem to understand what’s really behind the controversies surrounding West and Irving. Their insults directed at Jews and attempts by those who seek to minimize or shrug them off—as was the case with the efforts of pundit Candace Owens to stand up for West—are evidence of the troubling rise of black antisemitism.

No one claimed that Irving had anything to do with the Holocaust. West’s tweet about going “deaf-con 3” against the Jews was also not the moral equivalent of Iran’s threats about wiping Israel off the map.

But they are a reflection of pop culture’s toleration of tropes of Jew-hatred that have helped generate the growth of antisemitic attitudes among American blacks. As numerous studies have shown, African-Americans are far more likely to think tropes about Jew-hatred are true than other demographic slices of the population.

It is those attitudes, and not the sort of grievances against Jews rooted in myths, which people like West and Irving cite, that are at the root of violence against Jews.

Chappelle and the SNL audience who cheered him in a Manhattan studio act as if the epidemic of violence currently being experienced by Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn happened 80 years ago in Europe. But it is happening right now, only a subway ride away in the same city in which they were sitting. And the perpetrators are largely African-Americans, not Nazis or Trump supporters.

We can attribute this to the influence of a Jew-hater like Louis Farrakhan, whom many in the world of the arts treat as a legitimate spokesperson for African-Americans, rather than an extremist hatemonger.

We can also point to the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the intersectional catechism it promotes, falsely labelling Jews and the State of Israel as white, colonialist oppressors. Sadly, that’s a movement that the ADL has supported, rather than opposed.

Black hatred against Jews persists and grows. Yet it is invisible in newspapers like The Times and erased completely in the influential pop-culture venues of network comedy shows.

The correct response to Chappelle should not be renewed calls for his cancellation. Instead, it should be to demand that such groups as the ADL, which purport to speak for Jewish interests, consistently focus on fighting the true sources of contemporary Jew-hatred, rather than on waging partisan battles on behalf of their liberal Democratic political allies.

Just as important, it is not unreasonable to ask influencers like Chappelle to start treating black antisemitism as a genuine problem, not something about which one can mock supposedly hyper-sensitive Jews for their fumbling efforts to use cancel culture against African-Americans who promote hate."

See ADL's article on "Alleged Jewish 'Control' of the American Motion Picture Industry" 1999.

Jonathan Tobin on antisemitism with Ari Fleischer

On the latest episode of Top Story, JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin discusses the latest anti-Semitism expressed and excused by the right and the left.  

JNS editor-in-chief Jonathan Tobin speaks with former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, author of a new book on media bias about how a partisan and untrustworthy press is not only destroying journalism but driving Americans further apart. Tobin and Fleischer discuss how a biased mainstream legacy media is dominated by liberals who think alike and have lost interest in objective reporting. Instead, they engage in political activism, causing them to fail to understand the rest of the country. This trend has also enabled anti-Semitism since the left-wing acceptance of critical race theory and intersectionality has both undermined faith in the media and prioritized identity politics. Fleischer also makes predictions about the midterms and the 2024 presidential election.

Rabbi Meir Kahane remains a target for those who do not understand him - 32-years after assassination by NYC's W.T.C.-bombing crew

Op-ed by Meir Jolovitz in Israel National News

He was a radical. And anti-establishment And he hated to see the Jew as victim after the bitter memory of a Holocaust when too few acted.

As part of the prepublicity for the most recent of a series of books that have been written during the past thirty-five years about Rabbi Meir Kahane, Internet sites dedicated to Israeli or Jewish affairs offered their readers a new invective, a preview of what I consider an academic diatribe. Three decades after the murder of the controversial rabbi, it seems transparent that the intent was to disparage and disgrace the man and his memory. In doing so, the truth fell victim. The truth about Kahane. And “Kahanism.”

The most recent manifestation of several previous studies of this type was the release of Shaul Magid’s Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical. The Dartmouth College professor, who is also affiliated with the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, presents us with a 296-page assault on a man whose place in modern Jewish history will long outlive all the attempts at armchair psychiatry.

Magid targets a reading audience which knows neither the real history of radical Jewish politics of the 1960s, 70s and 80s America, nor of the nationalist politics in Israel from 1970 through 1990. His study – of a man and his impact – offers a portrait that works only if one is unaware of the political, social, and psychological dynamics that fueled that generation of political activists – and their movement.

This work, to my mind, contains historical mistakes, non-facts written as facts. Space prohibits a detailed cross-examination which would expose research whose conclusion was already know, but the author describes what he sees as historic facts in such a manner that any reasonable reader will see how they corroborate his thesis.

Rabbi Meir Kahane was a radical. He was anti-establishment. But he also hated to see the Jew as victim. And he employed the bitter memory of a Holocaust that raged when too few acted. He too-often saw the world as black and white, and he responded accordingly, and angrily. He became the resident militant rabbi against an American backdrop whose landscape had become politically-charged. True, True, And true. In the face of societal and political issues affecting Jews, if Rabbi Meir Kahane did not exist – someone needed to invent him.

And, it seems, if one couldn’t find an author to castigate him – someone needed to invent one. Every number of years. Now, we have the most recent iteration with the publication of Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical.

Rabbi Meir Kahane was indeed controversial. Because he needed to be. Because no other American Jewish spokesman gave a damn about the growing anti-Semitism that targeted so many Jews in the streets of New York. And because too few others had addressed the issue of the persecution of Soviet Jewry for fear that they would upset those establishment people who preferred quiet diplomacy. The same diplomacy exercised by Franklin Roosevelt’s court Jews.

The problem that the rabbi confronted then – more than fifty years ago when he established the Jewish Defense League – was the trouble he caused when his actions made noise. But it was a noise that needed to be heard.

Of course Rabbi Meir Kahane wasn’t the only innovator among Jews who stood up, historically, to rebel against anti-Semitism. But he was a voice representing a small minority – of another minority. As others before him had been. His heroes were Ze’ev Jabotinsky, Yosef Trumpledor, Menachem Begin, Shlomo Ben Yosef, Dov Gruner, Meir Feinstein, and their compatriots of the Irgun and Lehi in Eretz Yisrael.

It was their memory that motivated him – this too-small select group of modern Jewish warriors whose names were sadly unknown, or unspoken, in too-many Jewish homes. Certainly not in America. It was not, as Magid’s book would intimate, some psychobabble about the Black Panthers in New York or Chicago. For the rabbi – not yet a radical – it was about Jews standing up to be counted. However few.

But establishment Jewish leadership attacked him – vilified him – because if he was right, then they were wrong.

We recall that Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, in the pre-State days, had denounced Ze’ev Jabotinsky as 'Vladimir Hitler'. Not because Jabotinsky was, as others had argued, history's most misunderstood Zionist. It was because his methods were considered extreme (read: unpopular, and sometimes militarist) by the Jewish establishment. And of course, tragically, history proved him right. Yes, Jabotinsky was right.

In Israel – during this period, the exploits of Rabbi Kahane in America were viewed, in the circles that mattered, as brazen. And heroic.

In the Soviet Union – the exploits of Rabbi Kahane and his JDL “hoodlums” were seen as brazen. And heroic.

In the poor sections of New York – where the ADL was not found – JDL leader Rabbi Kahane was seen by the frightened and forgotten senior citizens who his JDL members protected, as brazen, and heroic.

But, in the opulent offices of the American Jewish leaders – he was seen as brazen; and the enemy.