When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA (PT. 1)
Jews are so omnipresent in entertainment television that in 1999, when the
Anti-Defamation League took offense at some jokes at the expense of Jews on
Saturday Night Live, ADL’s director, Abraham Foxman, found himself protesting
to NBC’s head of programming, Rosalyn Weinman, and Saturday Night
Live’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels. [TUGEND, 12-19-99] Both of them,
too, are Jewish. Saturday Night Live was also criticized for anti-Semitism years
earlier for a satire sketch: a “Jew-Not a Jew” game show. The head of NBC at the
time, Brandon Tartikoff, fielded a flood of negative phone calls, noting that:
“Tom Hanks played the host. A slide of a famous personality would
appear on the screen, and the panelists had to decide whether the person
was Jewish ... It was funny, I thought – but was it anti-Semitic? All week
long, I agonized over that question, not just with Broadcast Standards
but with myself. Since I’m Jewish, I wondered if I was being too sensitive
or maybe too blasé.” [TARTIKOFF, p. 192]
(In 1998 the Anti-Defamation League even attacked a series of Superman
comic books in which Superman flies back in time to fight the Nazis. The complaint,
wrote ADL director Abraham Foxman, was that Superman “never
names the victims. The intent was to send a universal message. The result provided
offensive to Holocaust victims.” Although the word “Jew” was never used
in the comics, “the victims were shown wearing yarmulkes and prayer shawls,
had Jewish names like Mordechai and Baruch, and referred to each other using
Yiddish terms such as ‘bubeh’ and ‘zayde.’” The CEO of DC Comics, Jenette
Kahn, which produced the Superman series, was even Jewish. She responded
with a formal apology for not using the word “Jew” in the comic series).
[GOLDBERG, D., TIKKUN]
Some in the Jewish community even suggested anti-Semitic undertones in
a new Jewish-like Star Wars movie character, Ferengi, despite the fact that the
film’s executive producer, Rick Berman, was also Jewish. [WALZ, 6-8-1999]
Original Star Trek stars William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and Leonard Nimoy
(Dr. Spock) were also, in real life, Jewish, as was William Koenig (Chekov). (Nimoy’s
Jewish activism includes an integral role in getting Mel Mermelstein’s
story made as a film. Nimoy also starred in the film as the main character. Meremelstein
is a man who figured out a way to sue a “Holocaust denial” organization
that offered $50,000 to anyone who could prove that the Holocaust really
happened). [NIMOY, p. 307-308])
Jews in the mass media apparently even have subtextual dialogues with
themselves about Jewish identity in film reviews. References (anti-Semitic?) to
Jews in an Entertainment Weekly review of director Barry Levinson’s science fiction
movie, Sphere, drove him to anger, culminating in a furiously written
script (in three weeks) for his next film (Liberty Heights). This new movie expressly
embraced his Jewish heritage. The offending review, entitled “Abysmal,”
trashed, like most reviews, his earlier science fiction effort. But Levinson zeroed
in on these words by the EW reviewer:
“... Norman the emphatic Jewish psychologist [played by Jewish actor
Dustin Hoffman]. Okay, so he’s not officially Jewish [in the film]; he’s
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