When Victims Rule (pdf)

JEWISH INFLUENCE IN POPULAR CULTURE (PT. 2)
in later life Hammer reverted back to his Jewish roots, choosing the bar mitzvah
name Avraham Ben Yehuda Maccabee. [EPSTEIN, p. 21]
Wealthy British Jewish media mogul Robert Maxwell was in some ways a
Hammer clone. Maxwell also was once a courier and money launderer for
Soviet Russia, [DAVIES, p. 7] later becoming a fabulously rich and particularly
corrupt capitalist. [See “Maxwell” in the index]
Yet another such (American) ideological chameleon is Harvey Wasserman
– former hippie, socialist, SDS member, co-founder of Liberation News Service,
and author of the popular anti-establishment Harvey Wasserman’s History
of the United States. By the late 1980s Wasserman was president of his
family’s Wasserman Uniform and Shoe Company, selling Mace and other
equipment to police departments. [CHAFETS, p. 185-187]
Wasserman too – the former universalist activist and radical for a common
humanity – has, in later life, made the familiar pilgrimage back to Jewish tribalism,
saying:
“I’ll admit something that’s a little strange – I feel more comfortable
around Jews. I know that’s strange, considering the life I’ve led, but it’s
the truth. I feel more comfortable. I was amazed to discover that I wanted
to have children with a Jewish woman. It’s completely inconsistent
but that’s how I feel.” [CHAFETS, p. 189]
Wasserman’s common-law wife is even more chauvinist, raising the familiar
shield of the Holocaust to deflect direct exposure of her naked racism, remarking
that the father of her children
“had to be a Jew. Harry’s great, I love him. But even more important,
I could trace his family all the way back to his great-grandparents, and
all of them were Jews … I could never have a child with a gentile, or
someone with gentile blood. You see, somewhere in his genetic history
there could be someone who put my family into the gas chambers.”
[CHAFETS, p. 191]
What about the sleazy television talk-show host Jerry Springer, son of
Holocaust survivors? “I’ve never changed my politics,” he says today. A journalist
adds that “Mr. Springer likes to say [this] about his transformation from ‘60s
anti-establishment idealist to talk-show high sleazio … He sees the media criticism
of his show as the ultimate bias of elitism and racism.” [LIPPERT, B., 5-3-
98, p. D6] This is a man who “lives in a 91st floor penthouse apartment overlooking
Lake Michigan in Chicago’s ritziest neighborhood and is ferried to and
fro in a chauffeur-driven limo.” [CAREY/WITHERIDGE, 11-2-98] Wealthy
New York theatre mogul Joseph Papp? “From the age of fifteen till he was in his
early thirties, Joe had been a Communist.” [EPSTEIN, H., 1994, p. 16]
And what are we to make of the strange leftist universalism of prominent
Jewish author Arthur Koestler and the psychological currents behind it? The
(Jewish) Forward notes that a professor of Jewish studies in England, David
Cesarani,
924