The trouble with Jewish paranoia
My mother is convinced that the Coen brothers are self-hating Jews. Her evidence: Only one attractive woman appears in “A Serious Man,” their uber-Jewish film.
Had she seen the rest of the filmmakers’ oeuvre, of course, and taken the trouble to list all of the attractive women they cast, she might have realized that they max out at about three per movie—and usually fewer. But lack of proficiency in the Coen brothers’ work is the least of my mother’s problems. Like many other Jews, she is too quick to cry wolf when it comes to anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism exists, but we need to recognize where it begins and ends—especially when it comes to the entertainment industry. A certain cohort of Jews seems to believe that all artists, filmmakers and writers who depict flawed Jewish characters are anti-Semites. Anything can seem anti-Semitic, racist or bigoted if we try hard enough, and whenever Jews show up in books or movies, other Jews immediately take notice and start looking for anything with a whiff of Jew-hatred. They often end up creating a problem that was never there in the first place.
This paranoia sometimes plays out on a larger stage. Last year, in what has become a trend, Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League took issue with the visuals in former Pink Floyd bass player Roger Waters’s show “The Wall,” claiming that the images accompanying one of the songs, “Goodbye Blue Sky,” were anti-Semitic. The show juxtaposed images of Stars of David and dollar signs, each falling separately from a plane, through which Waters meant to critique Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. The falling Stars of David followed similar images of crosses and crescents dropping. Foxman, however, admonished Waters for choosing “to use the juxtaposition of a Jewish Star of David with the symbol of dollar signs,” which he said “could easily be misunderstood as a comment about Jews and money.”
Having heard about Foxman’s statement, I laughed when I went to see the show. Foxman had missed the point, taking the images entirely out of context. Waters’ point was explicitly political, and had nothing to do with stereotyping an ethnic or religious group.
This does not mean that we should give offensive images a free pass. When my friend went to get a tattoo, I couldn’t help but notice that the tattoo artist was wearing a sweatshirt with the SS logo. While I thought it best not to say anything—because he was in the middle of putting a permanent mark on my friend’s arm—I did not know what to think of the whole situation. On the one hand, a sweatshirt like that struck me as saying, “I do not care much for Jews.” But on the other hand, did the SS logo make this guy an anti-Semite? I knew that the tattoo artist had close friends who were Jewish, and my roommate—who doesn’t roll on Shabbos—has a Grateful Dead poster on his wall that features the two parallel lightning bolts.
In that tattoo parlor, I had to ask myself the same question that Foxman should ask himself when he reacts viscerally to something that could be anti-Semitic: Does this come from a place of hatred? More often than not, the answer is no. Sometimes jokes are just jokes. Sometimes anti-Semitism has nothing to do with the image or word in question. While non-Jews must be attentive to Jewish sensibilities, it is not our job to censor the world and we cannot expect the world to censor itself for us. At the end of the day, we need to relax. Most people, in fact, are not out to get us.
Jordan Freiman is a senior at the University of Maryland, majoring in English. He is an editor of the Maryland Mitzpeh, the school’s Jewish publication.
