The Jews of Prime Time
The Jews of Prime Time
The Jews of Prime Time
EDMUND CONNELLY
INTRODUCTION
I
n the wake of the turbulent sixties, one could do worse than identify a
change in the prime-time television lineup to mark the beginning of the end
of the dominance of people of European heritage in the United States. For
in the early 1970s, the “hayseed” shows about the heartland and the American
Majority vanished from the three major networks’ evening offerings and
were replaced by decidedly more ethnic fare. In a few short years, essentially
all-white shows like The Beverly Hillbillies, The Andy Griffith Show/Mayberry
R.F.D., Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction gave way to “hip, urban” shows that
“pushed the socially engaged agenda into the ethno-racial arena.” In place of
Andy Griffith and Don Knotts, viewers were now watching characters from
“ethnicoms” in shows like Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, and Chico and the
Man.4 Alongside these shows came socially conscious sitcoms often critical
26 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
of mainstream values, led by Norman Lear’s All in the Family. What did all
this mean for representation of life in modern America, and where has it led
in the ensuing thirty-five years?
Perhaps Wilmot Robertson was right when he wrote about the dispossession
of majority white Christians in modern America. The present essay focuses
on one aspect of that dispossession: the role of prime-time television, which
in the years 1960–2000 was possibly the most powerful medium in existence
for delivering scripted cultural messages to the American masses.
To understand the changes that have been made on the small screen, it
is necessary to focus on who the people are that have been in a position to
make those changes and who have, in fact, been making them. We find that
the primary producers of this form of anti-majority cultural representation are
essentially the same group as that producing media images more generally.
That the members of this group are not themselves drawn from the majority
has had a critical impact on the final products Americans see on TV.
Readers may suspect that the group in question is composed largely of
immigrant Eastern European Jews and their descendants, an argument that has
been made by TOQ contributor Kevin MacDonald. In the paperback preface to
The Culture of Critique, MacDonald describes the Hollywood aspects of a wider
culture struggle between Jews and Gentiles. The kings of Hollywood branched
out easily from their first visual mass medium into the electronic media of
radio, and then, as technology advanced, into television. The same themes
and conflicts evident in a hundred years of Hollywood film can therefore be
found in TV offerings as well. For a few crucial reasons, though, television
was late in explicitly addressing them.
We are fortunate to have not only extensive studies of “the Jewish invention
of Hollywood”5 but insightful scholarship into the role of Jews in the creation
of television fare as well. For instance, we have Jonathan and Judith Pearl’s
The Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal of Jewish Themes and Characters (1999);
Vincent Brook’s Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom
(2003); David Zurawik’s The Jews of Prime Time (2003); and Paul Buhle’s From
the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture (2004).
These books delineate and discuss the scores of Jewish programs and charac-
ters featured on American TV in the last three decades, with names familiar to
even the most casual TV viewer: Mad About You, Northern Exposure, The Nanny,
Friends, Brooklyn Bridge, Dharma and Greg, The Larry Sanders Show, and most of
all, Seinfeld.
I. JEWS ON TV
In their book The Chosen Image, the Pearls offer a fascinating look at the
Jewish themes Americans have been exposed to by prime-time TV. There
have been portraits of bar and bat mitzvahs, Jewish weddings, anti-Semitism,
Chanukah, and, of course, the Holocaust. “Jewish matters,” the Pearls write,
Fall 2006 / Connelly 27
“have driven story lines, shaped characters, defined issues, and made appear-
ances on countless TV shows throughout the decades. Indeed, the presence
of Jewish themes on television has been a constant throughout the history of
television. From its earliest days until today, the great reflector of American
life has simply recognized the active place of Jews within that life.”6
In the same year that The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres disappeared
from television screens, All in the Family made its debut, placing before the
American people a completely different representation of American character
and culture. Jewish liberal Norman Lear had created Archie Bunker, who
became a beloved icon for millions of television viewers. In an important
sense, Archie’s primary role was to usher out the older era of a white, male-
dominated America, represented by people like himself, and to instruct this
soon-to-be disestablished class in the manners and attitudes befitting a new,
multicultural America, one in which blacks could own their own businesses
and homosexuals could come out of the closet.
Most of all, this new, multicultural America was one in which Jews and all
things Jewish had a new-found prominence. “By the end of his twelve years on
prime-time television,” the Pearls inform us, “Archie Bunker, America’s best-
known bigot, had come to raise a Jewish child in his home, befriend a black
Jew, go into business with a Jewish partner, enroll as a member of Temple Beth
Shalom, eulogize his close friend at a Jewish funeral, host a Sabbath dinner,
participate in a bat mitzvah ceremony, and join a group to fight synagogue
vandalism.”7
Cultural historians and other astute observers have seen clearly that this
shift in focus from America’s majority Christian whites to a broad cast of
minorities was far from inevitable, for humans themselves construct all cultural
products. Although the vast majority of the important players in determining
TV programming were Jews, they were at first reluctant to project themselves
and their concerns too directly into what appeared on broadcast TV, at least
for the first few decades of American television. This was the “too Jewish”
conundrum that American Jews had earlier encountered—and conquered—for
literature and film.
David Zurawik takes this as his starting point in The Jews of Prime Time,
asking, “What is ‘too Jewish’ yet not Jewish enough?” Answer: “the strange
history of Jewish characters on prime-time network television.” The incongru-
ence to which he refers comes from the fact that nearly all the top TV execu-
tives and producers were Jewish, yet they were ambivalent about portraying
their own high status or that of Jews in other important areas of American life.
To illustrate, he begins with an interview with Jewish comedian Al Franken.
Zurawik’s direct access to Franken and TV mogul Brandon Tartikoff provides
an inside view of Jewish thinking on the “too Jewish” issue.
Tartikoff was concerned about a sketch on NBC Entertainment’s highly
popular Saturday Night Live show, in which actor Tom Hanks plays the fictional
28 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
almost exclusively around the Jewish male courting the Gentile female, or, as
critics so lovingly referred to her, the shiksa. Of the shiksa, one critic wrote:
In the 1990s, it seems that the mother of every fictional female on television
is advising her daughter to find a nice Jewish boy. And the daughters
are listening. From hour-long dramas, “Sisters,” “Chicago Hope,” and
“Murder One,” to 30-minute comedies, “Mad about You,” “Cybill,”
“Partners,” “Bless This House,” “The Single Guy,” “The Larry Sanders
Show,” “Friends,” “Love and War,” “Seinfeld,” and “Murphy Brown,”
Jewish men are dating—and marrying—Gentile women in numbers far
exceeding any other interethnic relationships currently on television.
The most likely reason for such images, the critic argues, is that Jewish men
run Hollywood.9 But do Jews really have that much power in television?
From its origins, Hollywood has been stamped with a Jewish identity,
but nobody else was supposed to know about it. But somehow, no
matter how thorough the attempt to suppress or disguise it, Jewishness
is going to bob to the surface anyway.
Stephen J. Whitfield10
Mogul Hollywood
Hollywood has always been a Jewish milieu. This fact has been well docu-
mented by Neal Gabler, Michael Medved, Ben Stein, and others who have
chronicled Hollywood’s initial and continuing Jewish makeup and sensibility,
however masked it may at times be. In his 1988 book An Empire of Their Own:
How the Jews Invented Hollywood, author Neal Gabler celebrates the period of
Hollywood’s founding through the end of the studio and mogul era, thus
buttressing the belief that “The American Dream—is a Jewish invention.”11
Indeed, as Medved documents:
The storefront theaters of the late teens were transformed into the movie
palaces of the twenties by Jewish exhibitors. And when sound movies
commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion of
Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent agencies
were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the industry’s
business and Jewish doctors ministered to the industry’s sick. Above
all, Jews produced the movies.12
Social scientist and media gadfly Ernest van den Haag adds further comments
to how power is employed and how Jews in particular use it, in this case with
respect to cinema’s younger sibling, television:
The Jewish cultural establishment goes far beyond the strictly intellec-
tual and academic milieu. It is spread throughout the communications
industry and thereby enters almost every home in America. Hollywood
30 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
has always been a largely Jewish institution…On the other hand, the
television industry was founded and staffed by a much later generation
of Jews.13
What are the consequences that flow from this state of affairs?
MacDonald notes that “Jewish contributions to entertainment and the
media have often had the function of promoting positive images of Judaism
and multiculturalism and negative images of Christianity and European ethnic
interests and identification.”14 Cursory as well as in-depth analysis verifies
this claim. Take, for instance, the Pearls’ conclusion to their exhaustive inves-
tigation of Jewish images on television, The Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal
of Jewish Themes and Characters:
Since the inception of network television half a century ago, hundreds of
popular TV shows have portrayed Jewish themes. Such topics as anti-
Semitism, intermarriage, Jewish lore and traditions, Israel, the Holocaust,
and questions of Jewish identity have been featured in a wide range of
television genres…What is the television image of Jews and Judaism that
emerges from this fascinating wealth of programming? In nearly every
instance, the Jewish issues have been portrayed with respect, relative
depth, affection, and good intentions, and the Jewish characters who
appear in these shows have, without any doubt, been Jewish—often
depicted as deeply involved in their Judaism.15
One interesting outcome of the Jewish-controlled portrayal of religion has
been “the unraveling of the TV-melded Christmas-Chanukah holiday” into one
where Chanukah can stand on its own merits. In an episode of Frank’s Place,
for example, when a non-Jew is invited to a Chanukah dinner at the home of
lawyer Bubba Weisberger, the audience is treated to a lengthy and positive
account of the holiday, one “without any thought of Christmas.” On an episode
of the 1992 WIOU
WIOU, “Chanukah held center stage. The defacing of a Chanukah
menorah in a public park by anti-Semitic thugs became the occasion for series
regular Willis Teitlebaum” to explore his feelings and Jewish identity. This
linkage of Chanukah with anti-Semitism was also the theme of an episode of
Sisters, when vandals attacked a Jewish restaurant.16 Here, then, is the privi-
leging of a minor holiday of a small but powerful minority, while at the same
time the Jew-as-victim message is reinforced.
The themes of anti-Semitism and Jewish victimhood have been and continue
to be openly or subtly woven into story lines across the board, but the most
urgent reminders of Jewish victimhood have come in the form of scores of
highly graphic televised Holocaust specials, beginning with NBC’s 1978 airing
of the four-part miniseries Holocaust, which was seen by up to one hundred
million Americans. In addition, notes historian Peter Novick,
the Anti-Defamation League distributed ten million copies of its sixteen-
page tabloid, The Record, to promote the drama. Jewish organizations
successfully lobbied major newspapers to serialize Gerald Green’s
novelization of his television play, or to publish special inserts on the
Fall 2006 / Connelly 31
If the average American were asked if a culture war was currently being
waged in America, the significant number likely to answer in the affirmative
would point to the ongoing liberal-conservative split, or, as it is now more
commonly known, the battle between the blue states and red states. Were one
to posit that Jews were waging an equally vitriolic (and not totally unrelated)
war on majority Americans, there would likely be strenuous denials. In fact,
however, leading intellectuals have described such a war—or kulturkampf—in
minute detail.
John Murray Cuddihy argued in his 1974 book, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud,
Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, that, at least since the
Enlightenment, a significant segment of Jewry has considered itself to be at
war with the Gentile world and has acted accordingly. He wrote, “the ordeal
in question involves the pain felt by newly emancipated Eastern Jews who
began to realize that the Christian societies of Western Europe had overtaken
them culturally, financially, artistically, and intellectually.” According to
Cuddihy, the Jewish response to this trauma has been anger and “vindictive
objectivity”; worse, “they continue unabated into our own time because Jewish
Emancipation continues into our own time.”19
Just as Cuddihy shows how the Jews of the title have prosecuted their war
on Gentiles in terms of psychoanalysis, class struggle and structuralism, he also
shows how it is being waged more recently, for example in American fiction
of late 1950s and 1960s. He could probably have found endless examples in
the decades of televised cultural messages as well.
Historian Albert Lindemann prefers an allegorical approach to this kultur-
kampf, beginning with one of the founding myths of the Jewish people, the story
of the feuding brothers Esau and Jacob (Gen. 25, 23–26). Lindemann argues
32 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
that this Jewish-derived division between Jew and Gentile has relevance from
ancient times to our own day, including a Jewish tendency (even “instinct,”
in Lindemann’s words) “to view surrounding Gentile society as pervasively
flawed, polluted, or sick.” In modern times this tendency is to be found in
ideologies such as “socialism (both Marxist and anarchist), Zionism, and
various forms of the psychiatric worldview (Freudian psychoanalysis and
related schools).”20 Remarkably, Lindemann makes these arguments with
no indication that Cuddihy’s work has informed him, suggesting a fortuitous
simultaneous discovery on the order of the simultaneous but independent
invention of calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the late 1600s.
Writing twenty-four years after Cuddihy and only a year after Lindemann,
MacDonald makes a more straightforward case for a Jewish war on Gentiles.
Applying a social identity approach, MacDonald illuminates Jews’ “very deep
antipathy to the entire gentile-dominated social order, which is viewed as
anti-Semitic.” MacDonald goes further than David Hollinger’s claim that the
increased Jewish presence in academia (and elsewhere) has resulted merely in a
generic “cosmopolitanism,” noting, “This antipathy toward gentile-dominated
society was often accompanied by a powerful desire to avenge the evils of the
old social order.” Referring to the many Jewish families “which around the
breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly
Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist
society the United States is,” MacDonald argues that there were clearly elements
of active hostility toward Middle American culture in general.21 If so, it should
be easy to find such hostility in modern TV fare.
Hostility toward Religion
It is only natural that a group should find the symbols cherished by its
perceived opponents threatening or irritating, which is a likely reason for the
perennial Jewish attacks on Christian symbols in the United States. Norman
Podhoretz admits that such heavily Jewish groups as the American Jewish
Congress and the American Civil Liberties Union often oppose Christian
beliefs in America, ridiculing these beliefs and attempting to undermine their
public position.22
This observation is consistent with the findings of Hollywood film critic
Michael Medved, who has written and spoken about the fact that so much of
what emanates from Hollywood has become shockingly anti-religious, particu-
larly with respect to Christianity. While Medved does not state it explicitly,
we are witnessing the effects of a kind of cultural hegemony being exercised
by a distinct group of Hollywood writers, producers, et al. who, as we have
seen, are predominately Jewish. Medved writes:
In the ongoing war on traditional values, the assault on organized faith
represents the front to which the entertainment industry has most clearly
committed itself. On no other issue do the perspectives of the show
Fall 2006 / Connelly 33
business elites and those of the public at large differ more dramatically.
Time and again, the producers have gone out of their way to affront the
religious sensibilities of ordinary Americans.23
Citing a 1992 study which found that “89 percent of Americans claim affili-
ations with an organized faith,” Medved describes in detail how Hollywood
has produced fare that is hostile to its audience’s beliefs. He notes that many
made-for-television movies are consistently grim regarding Christian iden-
tification. For instance, in the miniseries The Thorn Birds, handsome Richard
Chamberlain plays a tormented priest who has broken his vows of celibacy.
William Shatner, in his role as T.J. Hooker
Hooker, tracks down a “ruthless, Scripture-
spouting crook who leaves Bibles as calling cards at the scene of his crimes.”
ABC’s The Women of Brewster Place shows a preacher luring a woman to his
bed, while in one episode of Unsub “Bishop Grace” murders two teenage
girls in his congregation. NBC’s In the Heat of the Night aired an episode in
which “Reverend Haskell” expires just after enjoying an affair with one of
his parishioners. Two “Bible thumpin’ hayseeds” appear as kidnappers on
Shannon’s Deal, paired up with “a devout Christian who murders his wife and
then justifies the killing as ‘an act of God…unstoppable as a flood.’”24
Christianity has fared just as poorly on animated TV shows. Fox Television
Network’s The Simpsons featured a scene in which the family gathered around
the table to say grace, and Bart solemnly intones, “Dear God, we paid for all
this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.” A more aggressive expression of
disrespect was written into the Christmas episode from South Park entitled
“Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo.” A parody of the 1965 television special
A Charlie Brown Christmas, this episode featured human feces as the spirit of
Christmas, the obvious message being that “Christmas is shit.” What we can
see being played out in the visual media, then, is one aspect of the Jewish-
Gentile kulturkampf in modern America.
Hollywood insider Benjamin Stein confirms this impression. In the 1976
essay “Whatever happened to small-town America?,” he explores television’s
consistent hostility toward rural (read majority Christian) Americans. Stein
begins by noting that “a truly great number of the people who write movies
and television shows are Jewish,” and given their largely urban upbringing,
when they create TV fare they are not telling it “like it is.”
Instead they are giving us the point of view of a small and extremely
powerful section of the American intellectual community—those who
write for the mass visual media…What is happening, as a consequence,
is something unusual and remarkable. A national culture is making war
upon a way of life that is still powerfully attractive and widely practiced
in the same country…Feelings of affection for small towns run deep in
America, and small-town life is treasured by millions of people. But in
the mass culture of the country, a hatred for the small town is spewed
out on television screens and movie screens every day…Television
and the movies are America’s folk culture, and they have nothing but
34 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
contempt for the way of life of a very large part of the folk…People are
told that their culture is, at its root, sick, violent, and depraved, and this
message gives them little confidence in the future of that culture. It also
leads them to feel ashamed of their country and to believe that if their
society is in decline, it deserves to be.25
Elite in Hollywood.”30 Never mind that Brook’s book is all about Jewish
prominence in Hollywood.
Brook follows this censure of Cash with a condemnation of Marlon
Brando for his unsettling statements on Larry King Live, claiming that Jews run
Hollywood and exploit stereotypes of minorities. “Hollywood is run by Jews,
it is owned by Jews,” he began, “but we never saw the kike because they know
perfectly well that’s where you draw the wagons around.”31 Two comments
about Brando’s observation are in order. First, Brando could easily have
added majority Christians to the list of exploited Hollywood stereotypes, as
we saw above, but perhaps his greatest insight was about the “kike.” Though
an unfortunate choice of words, it does point to the fact that we do not begin
to see in Hollywood fare even a fraction of the real doings of real Jews.
Leaving aside the touchy issue of modern Israel, we can still focus on two
crucial aspects of Jewish American behavior that are essentially absent from TV
discourse: the numerous wrongdoings of individual Jews and Jewish groups,32
and the pervasive power of Jews in media, finance, politics, education, and
a host of other important areas. Try to find a show that features the illegal
activities of an Ivan Boesky or Michael Milken or dozens of other American
Jews discussed in books like Connie Bruck’s 1988 Predators’ Ball or James B.
Stewart’s 1991 Den of Thieves.33
For detailed accounts of massive Jewish power in modern America, see
what J. J. Goldberg, current editor of The Jewish Forward, wrote in his 1996
book Jewish Power, or political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg in his 1993 The Fatal
Embrace: Jews and the State. Alone, these two instances of Jewish privilege in
acknowledging and describing Jewish power amply demonstrate the rule
about selective silence on the topic, but the greater point is that the American
TV viewer does not see any representations on television of this vast power,
unless one is willing to acknowledge the pervasive presence of Jewish reporters
(Wolfe Blitzer, Barbara Walters, Mike Wallace, Ted Koppel, et al.), talk show
hosts (Larry King, Jon Stewart, et al.), actors, comedians, spokespersons, et al.
as an indirect display of Jewish prominence and power. Where, however, is
the direct portrayal of this power? Miles Silverberg on Murphy Brown? If so,
this kind of mocking of the belief in Jewish power in the newsroom serves to
trivialize the debate, if not eliminate it completely. The absence of any narrative
of Jewish power—political, financial, academic—forces us to reconsider the
concept of “surplus visibility” and its application to American television.
given the highest media visibility, usually to the exclusion of views held
by large dissident sectors of the populace. The “dominant shared values
and beliefs” that are supposedly the natural accretions and expressions
of our common political culture, are not shared by all or most…although
they surely are dominant in that they tend to preempt the field of opinion
visibility…In sum, media owners—like other social groups—consciously
pursue their self-interest and try to influence others in ways that are
advantageous to themselves.38
It is given “the highest media visibility” by being shown repeatedly on
television. Such repetition is necessary for conditioning an uncritical audience
to the message at hand. Media experts note, “There is little reason to believe
that a single film or even group of films significantly influences audiences’
views over the long haul.” If, however, a constant and unwavering message
is broadcast repeatedly, “it is reasonable to believe that such presentations
will affect audiences to a significant extent.”39 Or, as Margaret Miles puts it,
“No one film has iconic power, but the recurrence of similar images across
films weaves those images into the fabric of the common life of American
society…We get, at a subliminal and hence utterly effective level, not the
narrative but the conventions of Hollywood film.”40 If movies can achieve
this, imagine the power of television, which most people, including children,
spend incomparably more time watching than film.
By way of an elegy for the American Majority, I note the conclusion
MacDonald drew in 1998 about the Gentile response to the sustained ideo-
logical attacks on its culture and value. He believes that avoiding open ethnic
strife in America means that “at least some ethnic groups be unconcerned that
they are losing in the competition. I regard this last possibility as unlikely in
the long run.”41 At least for the present, it appears that majority Americans
are indeed all too unconcerned about losing the competition, perhaps because
they are so busy watching television and, to play on a title from Neil Postman,
“amusing themselves to death.”42
ENDNOTES
1. Ernest van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique (New York: Stein and Day, 1969), 129.
2. “Is Hollywood Too Jewish?,” Moment (Aug. 1996): 37.
3. “Seriously Spielberg,” in Lester D. Friedman and Brent Notbohm, eds., Steven Spielberg
(Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 171.
4. Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 49. Incidentally, The Beverly
Fall 2006 / Connelly 39
Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Petticoat Junction were all creations of Jewish Paul Henning.
See Paul Buhle, From the Lower East Side to Hollywood: Jews in American Popular Culture
(New York: Verso 2004), 263 (n. 39).
5. Neal Gabler coined this phrase for An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented
Hollywood (New York: Crown Publishers, 1988).
6. Jonathan Pearl and Judith Pearl, The Chosen Image: Television’s Portrayal of Jewish Themes
and Characters (Jefferson, North Caroline: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999), 229.
7. Pearl and Pearl, The Chosen Image, 5.
8. David Zurawik, The Jews of Prime Time (Hanover and London: University Press of New
England, 2003), 2–6, 62–63. Paley’s dominance in the industry was such that for many
years Paley’s CBS took in 85 percent of the total profits for all three major networks.
9. Alina Sivorinovsky, “Images of Modern Jews on Television,” Midstream 41:9
(December 1, 1995): 39–40. It is interesting to note that the shiksa theme, as an internal,
gendered Jewish narrative about the Jewish male’s sexual conquest or attainment of
the Gentile woman, appears as unproblematic, which is odd considering how sensitive
interracial and interethnic sexual encounters have been in American history. Modern
scholars tend to strongly condemn views of women as sexual objects. For example,
one finds abundant accounts (and condemnations) of instances where white males
portray and possess Asian women as sex objects. This theme is apparent from Madame
Butterfly to scores of Hollywood films, and has been unpacked in works such as Mari
Yoshihara’s Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002) and “re-education” documentaries like Picturing Oriental Girls
and Slaying the Dragon, where the trope of a masculine, dominant West and feminine,
submissive East is interrogated.
10. Stephen J. Whitfield, American Space, Jewish Time: Essays in Modern Culture and
Politics (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1996), 151.
11. Quoted in Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 1.
12. Gabler, An Empire of Their Own, 1–2.
13. Van den Haag, The Jewish Mystique, 141–142.
14. See http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-derbyshire.html#2nl
15. Pearl and Pearl, The Chosen Image, 5.
16. Pearl and Pearl, The Chosen Image, 32–39.
17. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1999), 210. Novick notes that Jewish agencies separately targeted Gentile
and Jewish audiences, and in the case of the ADL, they appear to have engaged in
deliberate deception, where the study guides for Jewish children emphasized Christian
anti-Semitism and denigrated assimilated Jews.
18. In the early hours of July 28, 2006, Gibson was pulled over for possible drunken
driving. Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy James Mee, who is Jewish, made the
arrest, after which Gibson was quoted as blurting out “a barrage of anti-Semitic
remarks about ‘f—ing Jews,’ including the claim that ‘the Jews are responsible for all
the wars in the world.’“ Finally, Gibson asked the officer, “Are you a Jew?” (Gabriel
Sanders, “Gibson’s New Line: Forgive Me, Foxman, for I Have Sinned…,” The Jewish
Daily Forward, August 4, 2006).
19. John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss and the Jewish
Struggle with Modernity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2nd ed., 1987 [1974]), 68.
40 Vol. 6, No. 3 The Occidental Quarterly
20. Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 13–15.
21. Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish
Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1998), 85–86.
22. Podhoretz in Commentary (1995): 30, cited in MacDonald, The Culture of Critique,
148.
23. Michael Medved, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional
Values (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 50.
24. Medved, Hollywood vs. America, 80–81.
25. Benjamin Stein, “Whatever Happened to Small-town America?,” The Public Interest
(Summer 1976), 22–23. In a later book, The View from Sunset Boulevard: America as
Brought to You by the People Who Make Television (New York: Basic Books, 1979), Stein
shows how Norman Lear had an extremely negative view of (Gentile) rural America:
“In TAT, Norman Lear’s production company, two shows set in small towns have
appeared within the last two years—‘Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman’ and ‘Fernwood
2Night.’ In both shows, what Marx called ‘the idiocy of rural life’ comes across power-
fully. The small Ohio town of Fernwood, not quite rural and not quite industrial, is
full of bigots, Klansmen, quacks, hillbillies, and religious frauds” (72).
26. Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1979), ix-xi.
27. See http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/books-derbyshire.html#2nl.
28. William Cash, “Kings of the Deal,” The Spectator (October 29, 1994): 14.
29. Joe Sobran, “The Buchanan Frenzy,” Sobran’s (March 1996), 3. Though Cash found
defense in the form of his Jewish editor, Dominic Lawson, he nonetheless was the
target of strident rebuke from the American side of the Atlantic.
30. Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here, 171.
31. Marlon Brando, Larry King Live, Friday, April 5, 1996.
32. For example, in 2002, the Anti-Defamation League settled a lawsuit in which
it was accused of spying on San Francisco–area activists. The ADL’s chief intel-
ligence-gatherer in the Bay Area, Roy Bullock, was linked to San Francisco police
inspector Tom Gerard, who later pled no contest to a charge of illegally accessing
government information. (Bob Egelko, “Jewish Defense Group Settles S.F. Spying
Suit,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 2002). In another case, in 2001, a federal
judge upheld most of a $10 million defamation suit against the ADL for labeling a
Denver-area couple as anti-Semites. (Marc Perelman, “Judge Slams ADL for Hurting
Couple Tarred as ‘Anti-Semites,’” The Forward, April 13, 2001.) Two senior employees
of another important Jewish group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), were fired after being accused of passing classified U.S. information to the
government of Israel. According to documents, the two employees are policy director
Steve Rosen and senior analyst Keith Weissman. (Dan Eggen and Jerry Markon Markon, “2
Senior AIPAC Employees Ousted,” Washington Post, April 21, 2005, A8). In addition
to AIPAC’s problems with this scandal, a robust controversy has broken out over
the level of clout held by the institution. John Mearsheimer, a West Point graduate
and now distinguished professor of political science at the University of Chicago,
and Stephen Walt, academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, are
credited with arguing that “a small group of Israel’s supporters inside and outside of
Fall 2006 / Connelly 41