Archive | Anti-Semitism

Rush Limbaugh made comments on his radio show (scroll down–if you find this post of great interest, you should probably read the whole three-paragraph monologue, which makes the relevant context abundantly clear) suggesting that Pres. Obama may be subtly appealing to anti-Semitism through his attack on “bankers” and “Wall Street,” and that Jewish voters, in return, may be abandoning Obama.

Abe Foxman and the ADL then issued a press release:

Limbaugh told his listeners: “To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting?  He’s assaulting bankers.  He’s assaulting money people.  And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director, issued the following statement:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

Limbaugh’s references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate.  While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans.  His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

When he comes to understand why his words were so offensive and unacceptable, Limbaugh should apologize.

Now compare the bolded “quotation” from Limbaugh’s show with what he actually said:

Look, folks, there are a lot of people who when you say “banker,” people think “Jewish.”  People who have prejudice is the best way to put it. They have a little prejudice about them. So for some people, “banker” is code word

An especially pernicious common fallacy is the assumption that if a given group is overrepresented in some field, that must mean that they dominate it, and are using their supposed “domination” to promote the group’s interests. My better half quotes this example described by historian Paul Johnson in his book Modern Times:

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia [of the Nazis about Jews] was the belief that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik? There was very little basis for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist network.

In the 1920s, Jews were indeed overrepresented (relative to their percentage of the general population) among both Bolshevik leaders and international capitalists. At the same time, non-Jews still greatly outnumbered Jews in both groups. A closely related fallacy was the assumption that overrepresentation in a field proved that the Jews involved in it were using it to promote some specifically Jewish interest. In reality, Jewish capitalists tended to behave much like gentile ones, focusing primarily on maximizing their profits. Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky were brutal totalitarians. But their gentile counterparts, such as Lenin and Stalin, were much the same. There was no real evidence that either Jewish capitalists or Jewish communists were promoting specifically Jewish interests in any systematic way. Indeed, Jewish communists in the USSR actually supported the regime’s suppression of Jewish culture and religion.

At this point, readers may be tempted to say that the crude errors of 1920s anti-Semites don’t have any relevance to us. After all, we are a lot smarter and more sophisticated than they were. Perhaps so. But similar fallacies in modern discourse aren’t hard to find, and are certainly [...]

You might have missed this, assuming that, unlike me, you don’t comb the NYT sports pages for odd little items like this. According to a report in Saturday’s paper, Irish tenor Ronan Tynan, a “a fixture at Yankee Stadium for years with his stirring rendition of God Bless America” during the 7th inning stretch, was supposed to sing at Friday’s opening game of the ALCS but was disinvited by the Yankees because of some unfortunate comments he was reported to have made the day before. Apparently, a real estate agent was showing Tynan and apartment and, jokingly, referred to other inhabitants of the building by saying “Don’t worry — they’re not Red Sox fans,” at which point Tynan responded: “I don’t care about that — as long as they’re not Jewish.”

The quintessentially New York remark – combining the Irish, the Jews, the Yankees, the Red Sox — and real estate!!

The outcry was loud and predictable. But in all seriousness – what’s really so terrible about what Tynan said? I happen to be Jewish myself (and a New Yorker to boot), and I think my antennae for serious anti-Semitic remarks are pretty well-tuned. But Tynan doesn’t like Jews – what’s the big deal when he says so? Unless you deny that Jews have any distinguishing characteristics — and no Jews I know (especially no New York Jews, for goodness sake, would say such a thing) then one has to expect that some folks aren’t going to like those characteristics — we’re too intellectual, too noisy, too argumentative, too this or too that. Tynan doesn’t want to live around us – bully for him (though he’s going to have a helluva time finding an apartment in NYC!). I know lots of people who aren’t crazy about Italians, or Irish, [...]