Tag Archives: hollywood

Weinstein Syndrome

weinstein_syndrome

Weinstein’s Complicity Machine:

‘One phone call and you’re done.’ ‘I’m Harvey Weinstein — you know what I can do.’ ‘I am a man who has great resources.’ ‘I have ears and eyes everywhere!’

The producer Harvey Weinstein relied on powerful relationships across industries to provide him with cover as accusations of sexual misconduct piled up for decades.

Harvey Weinstein built his complicity machine out of the witting, the unwitting and those in between. He commanded enablers, silencers and spies, warning others who discovered his secrets to say nothing. He courted those who could provide the money or prestige to enhance his reputation as well as his power to intimidate.

Mr. Weinstein’s final, failed round of manipulations shows how he operated for more than three decades: by trying to turn others into instruments or shields for his behavior

Many knew something or detected hints, though few understood the scale of his sexual misconduct. Almost everyone had incentives to look the other way or reasons to stay silent. Now, even as the tally of Mr. Weinstein’s alleged misdeeds is still emerging, so is a debate about collective failure and the apportioning of blame.

The studio chief once paid a gossip writer to collect juicy celebrity tidbits that Mr. Weinstein could use to barter if other reporters stumbled onto an affair he was trying to keep quiet. He was so close to David J. Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns The Enquirer, that he was known in the tabloid industry as an untouchable “F.O.P.,” or “friend of Pecker.” That status was shared by a chosen few, including President Trump.

Mr. Benza and Mr. Weinstein were exploiting a longstanding system of favor-trading between the press and the movie business. Gossip writers need a stream of insider scoops, industry beat reporters need exclusives on the next big deal and glossy magazines need celebrities who can drive newsstand sales. Mr. Weinstein, who wanted glowing coverage, could provide that and more.

The Weinstein brothers used “fear, intimidation, psychological and emotional abuse” on their executives, male and female, said Amy Israel, Miramax’s former co-head of acquisitions. “As a spectator to the abuse you were silenced by the fear that you would become the next target,” she said. “The only alternative seemingly was to quit — to throw away everything you had worked so hard for and walk out the door.”

Weinstein is a microcosm of Hollywood, and Hollywood a microcosm of jewing. Weinstein’s behavior is perfectly typical of jew moguls, just as the basic mechanics of Weinstein’s power and corruption, the networking, the alternation of reward and punishment, is used by jews as a group to co-opt and/or destroy anyone who might thwart them.

Weinstein was able to carry on for as long as he did exactly because he is a member of a larger criminal tribe, whose methods he shared, and whose mutual protection he still enjoys. Indeed, across time and space Weinstein’s tribe has operated Weinstein-wise, as an ethnic gang – a widely-dispersed, obsessively-organized, now skulking, now screeching, genetically-related mafia. But in comparison to any other form of ethnic gangsterism jewing is far more insidious, more virulent, more chronic. Unlike others, the jews have repeatedly infiltrated and manipulated hosts so completely that they’ve repeatedly managed to privilege themselves and legalize their gangsterism.

Controlling the narrative, the perceptions, the thinking, the morality of their host has been integral to jewing. Properly understood, jewing is part pretense, part practice; part denial, part celebration; part carrot, part stick; part hidden, part in-your-fucking-face-and-whattaya-gonna-do-about-it-goyim. Jewing is parasitism so “successful” that none dare call it parasitism.

Jews Debate Whiteness

in_case_of_emergency_jew

Non-White critics of the recent Hollywood remake of Wonder Woman, specifically the casting of former Miss Israel Gal Gadot in the lead role, prompted an argument among jews whether Gadot and jews more generally are “white”.

Nothing about their exchange will surprise regular readers here, but it may help educate Whites who are just beginning to grapple with identity, race, and the jew problem. Under the current anti-White/pro-jew regime most Whites are conditioned to be more comfortable hearing jews complain about “anti-semitism” and their White problem, rather than the other way around. So here you go, this conversation is for you.

If you can look beyond the superficial details – this actress, this movie, in 2017 – what you’ll get here is a glimpse of jewing across space and time. It’s easy to imagine the countless similar debates jews have had in their shtetls and ghettos over the past millennia – though instead of Whiteness at these times and places they would have been arguing about whether or not Babylonianess, Egyptianess, Greekness, Romaness, Spanishness, Russianess, or Germaness was good or bad for the jews.

The links are presented in chronological order. Most of the articles are referring and responding to each other, so the excerpts below capture the most relevant, least redundant portions of the exchange. Even so, it’s a long read. If at any point you get bored or nauseous then by all means skip to the end where I’ll sum up the key points.

The back-and-forth started (seemingly out of the blue) a few months before focusing on and expanding around Gadot.

24 Jan 2017, Dani Ishai Behan, timesofisrael.com: Are Jews A People of Color?:

For as long as we can remember, our people have always occupied a racially “ambiguous” position in North America. Although at first we were considered ‘Asiatics’ alongside other West Asian ethnic groups (leading to numerous attempts at denaturalizing us), lobbying efforts would eventually expand the definition of White to include Middle Easterners and North Africans. However, a political climate has emerged in recent decades wherein our racial status is once again mired in bitterness and uncertainty.

All throughout history, the racial othering of Jews has led to some pretty horrific results, so it is understandable why some would prefer to leave race/ethnicity out of the equation altogether. But at the same time, conceptualizing Jews as either “white” or “just a religion”, as many of our detractors are wont to do, helps to perpetuate a culture of antisemitism on the anti-racist left. That is to say, if we are “just white people with funny hats”, then we are perforce not “really” an oppressed group, thereby enabling anti-racists to retain their credentials without having to listen to Jews or take our concerns seriously. This construct is also inextricably tied up in antisemitic politics, reifying notions of Jewish “privilege” along with the (incorrect) aspersion that Israel’s re-establishment was a “white colonial” project, implying that Ashkenazic Jews (who made up the majority of pre-1948 Zionist olim) are foreign interlopers with no real roots in the region and whose attachment to the land is, at best, inauthentic, inorganic, and exclusively religious in nature.

Another argument that is frequently made is that a large percentage of us have white-ish appearances, but this is fairly common among all Levantine groups, not just Jews. Moreover, fair skinned Latinos, Iranians, Pashtuns, and Native Americans aren’t exactly rare either. This is called “white passing”: the ability to blend in and escape some of the more immediate effects of non-whiteness while still suffering from the marginalization and othering that non-Jewish minorities experience. To put it another way, looking white is not the same as being white.

I’ve heard all of the arguments for Jewish “whiteness”, but I have yet to hear one that is truly convincing.

1 June 2017, Matthew Mueller, comicbook.com, Wonder Woman: There IS A Person Of Color In The Lead Role:

Yep, with a quick google search, it turns out that Gal Gadot is not actually Caucasian, but is in fact Israeli.

Gadot was born in Rosh Ha’ayin, Israel, and served in the Israeli Defense Force for two years before winning Miss Israel in 2004. Yes, she won Miss Israel, but she isn’t a person of color? You get why that doesn’t make sense, right?

Simply put: LOOKING White, doesn’t mean you ARE white

1 June 2017, S.I. Rosenbaum, twitscreech, starts here:

oh my god ok OFFICIAL EXPLANATION OF ASHKENAZI ETHNICITY: 1/????

When modern racial categories were being invented in Europe ~1492, they stuck Ashkenazim and Sephardic Jews in a separate category.>

Up til WW2 Ashkenazim were viewed by whites as a racial category distinct from “white” and “colored.” >

In the U.S, Ashkenazim have been assimilated to some extent to WASP culture and gradually afforded “white” status (on a conditional basis)>

We have many of the privileges of “regular” whites. Probably the best way to think of Ashkenazim in America is “white passing.” >

But even when we’re “not white” we’re not “of color.” We revert to that separate racial category outside the “white/colored” dichotomy. >

2 June 2017, Noah Berlatsky, forward.com, Why Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman Is White / Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman Is White — Let’s Not Pretend Otherwise:

The whiteness of “Wonder Woman” doesn’t seem up for debate. And yet, some have decided to debate it. An argument has been bubbling underground on social media that Gal Gadot, who plays the title role, is actually a person of color. It was aired in full by Matthew Mueller at comicbook.com. “Gal Gadot is not actually Caucasian, but is in fact Israeli,” Mueller announces confidently. He then goes on to chastise POC critics for not recognizing her casting as triumph for diverse representation.

Mueller doesn’t actually have much of an argument. He mentions a Times of Israel blog post which points to the history of Jewish oppression and waffles back and forth on whether Jews might be considered POC. But mostly Mueller just announces “Gadot is Israeli!” like a magician pulling a piece of lint out of a hat and trying to convince you it’s a rabbit.

Mueller can get away with this slapdash approach because race is itself such an incoherent concept. Mueller argues that “Caucasian” equals “white,” as if whiteness is an actual ethnicity or regional background.

But the truth is that whiteness isn’t a biological or historical truth; it’s a fuzzy, culturally determined category that has fluctuated widely over time. At various historical moments and in various places, Irish people, Eastern Europeans, Southern Europeans, and, of course, Jews, have been excluded from the category of “white people.” It may seem ridiculous to say that a nationality like “Israeli” is non-white—but Donald Trump racialized the nationality of Mexicans during the 2016 campaign. Whiteness isn’t a formally defined, logical system. It’s a blunt instrument designed to enable some people to hurt others. As such, it doesn’t have to be particularly elegant or well made.

In this context, the best definition of white people is simply “people who are considered white.”

Perhaps the clearest sign that Gadot is white, though, is Mueller’s own argument. The fact that some groups who were once seen as non-white have become white and successful is a constant talking point for people who don’t want to deal with ongoing racism. Robert Kennedy famously pointed to the success of the Irish to deflect James Baldwin’s criticisms of racism in the United States. The very incoherence of whiteness becomes a way to defend whiteness. “Our ideology makes no sense; therefore we can’t actually be oppressing you” is a ridiculous argument, but a consistently popular one.

Gadot is white. But that’s not to say that Jews face no discrimination. On the contrary, Gadot’s casting illustrates the quieter, ongoing failures of Jewish representation in superhero films. As I’ve discussed here before, Hollywood seems constitutionally incapable of casting a Jewish actor to play a Jewish hero whose Jewishness is narratively acknowledged. Gadot can be Wonder Woman only if she sets aside her Jewishness as a visible identity. Heroism is only available as a reward for assimilation.

The Wonder Woman film challenges the idea that only men can be heroes. But it accepts the conventional wisdom that says that, to be a hero, you must disappear into whiteness. That’s a message that hurts people of color. And it’s a message that ultimately hurts Jews who are not people of color as well.

4 June 2017, Dani Ishai Behan, timesofisrael.com, Yes, Ashkenazi Jews (Including Gal Gadot) Are People of Color:

Jews are a historically persecuted and displaced Middle Eastern ethnicity indigenous to Israel, as well as one of the oldest and most continuous victims of European colonialism. However, the “anti-racist” left is generally hostile to Jews (particularly Ashkenazim aka Jews who wound up in Central and Eastern Europe as a result of colonialism) identifying as Middle Eastern, as a people of color, or even as a minority at all.

Now let us take a look at the history and heritage of Ashkenazi Jews. An indigenous people of the Middle East, Ashkenazi Jews were driven out of their homeland by European (and later Arab) colonists and taken as slaves to Europe where they were consistently regarded as savages, periodically massacred, and excluded from society on the grounds that they are a foreign, non-Christian, and non-European (or in the words of our European oppressors: Oriental/Asiatic) presence on European soil. The above-mentioned race categories created during the Inquisition were really a direct response to the possibility that the Spanish crown hadn’t successfully expelled ALL of the Jews and Moors in their midst. As such, an edict called “limpieza de sangre” (“purity of blood”) was made law, wherein anyone of non-European descent (i.e. Jewish or Arab-Moor) was given the ultimatum of conversion to Christianity or death. And even those Jews who did convert were still viewed with suspicion, and treated as second class.

The acknowledgement that Ashkenazim are non-European/non-white, which really dates all the way back to the pre-Christian era, continued to pervade Western society into the Enlightenment era and beyond. A few choice quotes from some of the more notable European philosophers (as well as some who are less notable) should prove instructive….

Behan here quotes past remarks on the jew problem from several prominent White men, whom he calls “anti-semites” because they recognized jews as alien and/or harmful to their people.

Furthermore, in this new era of political correctness, and with full knowledge that Jews stood much to gain from the Western left’s newfound respect for indigenous rights and protection of disadvantaged minorities, those whose hearts continued to smolder with antisemitism changed course and cast Jews as “white Europeans”, thereby allowing them to continue ostracizing us a backwards, oppressive, powerful, and malignant force.

Back to Rosenbaum, she goes on to assert that Ashkenazim enjoy all of the “regular privileges” white people do, which is false. She is conflating the ability to pass (a common trait for certain POC groups, especially other Middle Easterners – Jews aren’t “special” here) with actually being white, despite her earlier concession that they’re not the same thing.

Granted, some Ashkenazim – as well as some non-Ashkenazim – do have ambiguous or ostensibly “white” facial features, which are mainly the result of Cossack rapes during pogroms, and can therefore camouflage themselves, but a very large number cannot. As can be seen in the link I just posted, many either have a “Jewish” appearance, or a full blown Middle Eastern one. Moreover, having to hide one’s ethnic background just to be treated as a “normal” human being is not privilege, because white people (*actual* white people, not Jews, Arabs, etc) don’t have to do this. They don’t need to change their names, or flatten their noses, or bleach their skin, or straighten their hair, or take their kippahs off, etc. The fact that Ashkenazim, and white passing Jews in general, need to *work* just to be seen as regular people really says it all, and many (if not most) don’t even have the ability to do that. It’s simply not comparable.

More to the point, Jews are perhaps the oldest victims of what has come to be known as Orientalism. From the Greek and Roman colonial era where we were deemed “savages” in need of culture and enlightenment, to the evolution of these views under Christianity, to Enlightenment era Europeans openly declaring that we are Asiatics who are therefore culturally stagnant and incapable of reason, science, or progress, Orientalism has always been the bedrock of European antisemitism.

All in all, we mustn’t make the mistake of assuming Jews enjoy “white privilege” just because our experiences are not symmetrical with those of African-Americans or Hispanics, as to do so would be unreasonable, fallacious, and hypocritical (again, no other ethnic minority is held to this standard). Anti-Jewish racism looks different because the stereotypes are different. In other words, we are not viewed by society as “uneducated thugs”, but as “dishonest”, “conniving”, “clannish”, and “bloodthirsty” mongrels who control everything behind the scenes, and these racist tropes play out in the way we are treated in this country. Moreover, we are frequently profiled at airports, viewed with suspicion when we are too successful, assumed to be in control of the US government, assaulted on the streets, typecast on TV and in movies (barring a number of exceptions) as geeks, criminals, hypochondriacs, and other stereotypes, our scalps are molested for horns by strangers, and so on and so forth.

Inasmuch as a group’s non-whiteness is contingent on their history, experiences, heritage, and relationship with the concept of “white” as defined by its pioneers, Ashkenazim certainly do qualify as a non-white people.

But unlike Rosenbaum, Noah’s arguments invoke – intentionally or otherwise – the very popular antisemitic myth that Gadot (and presumably all Ashkenazim) is an ethnic European, not a Semite/Middle Easterner. And as I previously noted here, being exiled/taken as slaves to Europe and raped during pogroms after our land was taken from us does not make Ashkenazim white, or European. To brazenly conflate any portion of our people with those who tried for so long to erase us is one of the worst insults you could possibly hurl at a Jew. It is literally giving Europeans antisemites the very thing they’ve wanted all along – for us to be whitewashed and ultimately disappear.

That aside, Berlatsky himself doesn’t seem too sure of what whiteness actually is, wildly oscillating back and forth between “it’s all about appearance” and “it’s complicated”. For instance, he initially disputes the idea that whiteness “is an actual ethnicity or regional background”, only to later contradict himself within the same piece by declaring Gadot to be “white” because she is fair skinned and “European” (even though Ashkenazi Jews are not European – see above).

Jews qua Jews (barring white converts like Ivanka Trump, who make up less than 1 percent of the global Jewish population) are people of color, and the fact that this is even controversial at all sheds light on how deeply entrenched antisemitism has become as once again, the Jew is being made the “other of others”.

5 June 2017, Joel Finkelstein, forward.com, Are Gal Gadot And Other Ashkenazi Jews White? The Answer Is Complicated…And Insidious:

So, is Gal Gadot white? Is she North African/Middle Eastern and Israeli and Jewish and European and white? Is she all six of these things? Or perhaps something else? Who decides whether Jews are white, and what forces guides those decisions?

The ambiguity of Jewish ethnicity serves as a perverse weapon in hands hostile to Jewish identity. It leaves Jews historically vulnerable to anti-Semitism from extreme ideologies on both sides of the political spectrum; Jews are at once the ultimate insiders (white) or ultimate outsiders (other).

The authoritarian right, as recent studies suggest (and as any casual trip to 4Chan will confirm), couples Jewish privilege to themes of parasitism and conspiratorial, outside power. Message boards and twitter feeds everywhere on the right confirm the alarming growth of these racialized ideas at disturbing rates in right-wing social media. The authoritarian right, like the Nazis, attack the Jew as the ultimate outsider to the singular cause of ethnic nationality.

On the extreme left, Jews assume the mantle of ultimate insider. Unlike right wing authoritarian anti-Semitism, left wing anti-Semitism asserts Jewish whiteness excludes Jews from being persecuted. In this psychological fantasy, Jews emerge as powerful white insiders: the elite. Under the thin veneer of social justice, this poisonous narrative forcibly decouples Jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color. For the far left, a Jew is the ultimate white person. Stalinists decried the insider, “corrupt bourgeois nationalists” to target Jews specifically and forcibly send them to Gulags en masse and redistribute their wealth.

Being white is the new version of the insider and outsider game in identity politics.

On the right, whiteness projections transmute to a mirror opposite. The popular alt-right blogger Radix decries “the rise of a hostile Jewish elite,” a privileged other, he admonishes his readers, threatening the purity of white America itself. In light of this, it is clear that being “white” emerges as a central, modern grammar of “othering” in Jewish existence for both poles of the political extremes.

When we believe, as Noah Berlatsky argues, that “being white is really just a matter of what people see you as,” I would respectfully suggest that history and current events should give Jews pause. For the sake of Jewish life everywhere, let’s start by educating ourselves to understand dangerous nuances of whiteness and how it plays so perniciously into an anti-Semitic reality that we internalize when we believe it. Anti-Semitism, from the left and right, is the largest and most systematic global operation of persecution ever launched against a single people.

7 June 2017, Noah Berlatsky, forward.com, Why Do White People Get Mad When They’re Called White? / Why Do White People Get Mad When We Call ‘Wonder Woman’ White?

When I wrote a piece at the Forward pointing out that Gal Gadot is white, I did not expect there to be a backlash. Gadot is, after all, playing a white character; she was clearly cast because people see her as white.

The argument that she was a person of color was transparently made in bad faith; it was meant to distract from actual POC folks asking for better representation. I thought I was making a fairly uncontroversial point.

White people, though, really don’t like to be told that they’re white. The piece prompted a number of rebuttals, including one by Dani Ishai Behan at the Times of Israel and a piece by Joel Finkelstein at the Forward’s contributor’s network.

Finkelstein and Behan, though, barely mention the issue of casting. Instead, they both spiral off to argue that Jews are oppressed. Jews certainly have been oppressed in some times and places. But white Jews are not currently shut out of roles in Hollywood. If someone says, “I cannot get a job because I am discriminated against,” and you respond by saying, with Behan, “well, my ancestors may at one point have been raped by Cossacks,” you’re not participating in a good faith discussion. You’re trying to cloud the issue so you don’t have to face the particular injustice that’s in front of you at the moment.

The move to talk about something else — anything else — is, ironically, typical of the way in which whiteness defends itself when challenged. Finkelstein and Behan insist they are not white. Okay, then. Why then are they so desperately uninterested in the injustices and indignities meted out to people of color? Finkelstein says it is anti-Semitic to advance a narrative that “decouples Jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color.” But there is not a word in his piece about the causes of those other people of color, even though the conversation was originally about the fact that people of color don’t get represented as heroes in Hollywood. There is an issue facing people of color on the table. When you talk about standing with them in suffering, are you actually standing with them? Or are you standing on their necks?

The history of Jewish oppression should, ideally, be a way for Jews, white or otherwise, to align themselves with marginalized people. The legacy of anti-Semitic caricature, as just one example, should make Jewish people aware of the importance of media representation. Film and television can lead people to hate others, to ignore others, and even to doubt themselves.

Jews who are white have a choice. We can side with the marginalized, noting that Jewish safety in a white society is uncertain, and what is done to others may one day, again, be done to us. Or we can leverage our particular history of past discrimination as a rhetorical weapon against folks who face discrimination now. To do the latter, no matter one’s color or background, is to embrace whiteness.

7 June 2017, Sarah Tuttle-Singer, timesofisrael.com, I am a light-skinned Jew. I am not ‘White’:

I am a light-skinned Jew.

I am not “White.”

Because Jews are a people — in many colors — from deep ebony all the way to alabaster — who can trace their DNA to a little strip of land no bigger than a fingernail.

And we are not “White.”

And just as science and genetics back this up,** historically in America we’ve been treated as non-White.

It’s true — we aren’t discriminated against the same way as People of Color.

And I am NOT comparing our experience to the systemic and systematic discrimination and outright persecution that many people continue to face in America to this day.

And it’s true, we DO enjoy White Privilege to a large extent… that is, until people find out we are Jewish and then that can change in a quick slither across the face — whether it’s a joke about how rich we must be, or a comment about how we must not be “fully Jewish” because we don’t have a big nose or dark hair or horns or some bullshit, or “is it true you drink Christian blood.”

And I am not looking for sympathy or acceptance or recognition — and to be very clear, I DO NOT identify as a person of color nor would I ever compare my experience to the violence and suffering many continue to suffer to this day.

But I am not White.

I am a light-skinned Jew.

And if you negate my family’s experience as non-whites who were treated as non-whites by Whites, if you deny the discrimination and persecution my people have experienced in America over the years — some systemic, some isolated, but all real and pervasive, then you are erasing our history as Jews in America and there’s a word for that: anti-Semitism.

**If you take the ancestry DNA test and you’re Eastern European Jewish, your results will be “ashkenazi Jewish” – NOT Eastern European.

8 June 2017, Avital Norman Nathman, kveller.com, Are Jews White? Here’s My Answer:

To say Judaism is complex, particularly when you place it in the context of history, is an understatement. As a people, we’ve been “othered” for most of our existence. There’s always been a king or führer or government who has seen to that: to remind us that we’re not like the majority, that we’re supposedly less than, different, and separate. This idea has essentially been imprinted into our DNA over the years.

Because others have defined us by our differences, it’s natural that we too—as a people—seek some definition of who exactly we are. This debate has been happening way before Gal Gadot, and I don’t think there’s an end to it in sight. Is Judaism a religion? An ethnicity? A race? All of the above? I understand why we grapple with these questions continuously because they hit at our identity: Who are we? What are we?

So are Jews white? The question in and of itself is super restrictive and exclusionary. We first need to look at the very real fact that Jews of color exist (despite the fact that Judaism in general has a problem with remembering that). Jews of color are people of color. They’ve got it going on double: Judaism and being a visible person of color.

But people like me? I’m white passing. When somebody looks at me—despite my frizzy curls and prominent nose—I’m read as a white woman. I experience and benefit from as much white privilege as the next white woman. This matters when it comes to me walking down the street, in retail situations, or interacting with the police. Sure, my obviously ethnic name might raise a prejudiced flag if I’m applying to a job or something else, and micro-aggressions are real. But in the majority of my day-to-day life living in America? I am white and experience all the benefits that come with it, regardless of my Judaism.

So… I’m white. But yes, I’ve experienced anti-Semitism (that time in high school when my boss called the cash register the “Jewish Piano” was fun). I’ve had the fear in my heart when Jewish Day schools were being targeted with bomb threats since my son attends one. And I won’t even get into the anti-Semitic dreck I’ve been assaulted with on social media. So yes, I can definitely understand the desire to be as far removed from “white” (aka the folks who perpetrate all of this) as possible.

However, I can experience all of that and still benefit from the infrastructure set up by years of white supremacy. White privilege and anti-Semitism can occur simultaneously. Yes, that’s incredibly frustrating, but that’s also reality. One does not negate the other.

Checking off “white” on a census or acknowledging how I benefit from white privilege doesn’t negate or erase the very real way Jews have been (and still are) treated. It does not cover up my ancestry—how my Bubbe survived the Holocaust along with her family while living in the woods of Poland in underground bunkers and in barns; how my grandfather survived a handful of concentration camps before being liberated from Dachau. How both of them witnessed and experienced unimaginable horrors simply for being Jewish. I’m a first generation American Jew that grew up bilingual. I get that for all intents and purposes I am an other, and that my privileges could be snatched away from me under certain set of circumstances.

My history is real. The history of our people is real. But my place—as a white passing woman—in current society is also real. It is up to me to balance the two,to use that privilege and benefits gained by white supremacy to change the current system where people of color are the ones being hurt by systematic racism and oppressive infrastructure. Because when it really comes down to how I identify, the Jew in me realizes that acknowledging my privilege today enables me to take care of those around me, using what I’ve got.

13 June 2017, Tamar Herman, forward.com, What Gadot As ‘Wonder Woman’ Means To This Jewish Woman / The Gal Gadot Representation Conversation We’ve Been Missing:

Gal Gadot is as white, as I am. That level of whiteness is (sometimes) disputed as Ashkenazi Jews have, at least in recent American history, become the Schrodinger’s cat of racism. Which was why when someone erroneously claimed that Gadot is a person of color, it raised a lot of hackles, particularly because Wonder Woman had no lead characters of color.

Gadot isn’t just another white woman on screen, and it’s dismissive to say so. We wouldn’t be having debates about Ashkenazi heritage in 2017 if that were true. Gadot (and myself) are privileged in this day and age based on the color of our skin. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have the result of thousand of years of racism raging through our bloodstreams, and minds, filled with suffering and not being allowed to participate in mainstream society.

For the first time that I can recall, I was watching a visibly Jewish woman, speaking with an accent audibly tinged with Hebrew, aka the sound of Judaism for thousands of years, depicting a warrior who fights not just for herself, but for the greater good. It didn’t matter that Gadot was playing a fictional demigoddess built on Greek mythology. Every time I looked at her, every time she spoke, the thought, “Wonder Woman is Jewish!” raced through my mind.

16 June 2017, Mark Tseng-Putterman & Rebecca Pierce, forward.com, Gal Gadot Is Not White, Say Jews Of Color / What Jews Of Color Hear When You Say Gal Gadot Isn’t White:

Many have argued that while Gadot’s Diana is a strong female character, the film flattens womanhood to white womanhood, mostly showing a white woman moving through a white world and reminding woman of color that victories for white women’s representation often don’t make room for meaningful intersectionality.

This critique, largely put forth by black women, has been dismissed wholesale with claims that Gadot, an Israeli Jew of Ashkenazi heritage, is in fact a woman of color.

However, in the Jewish community, the controversy over Mueller’s article reignited a conversation about Jewish racialization and whiteness. As Jewish people of color working for racial justice and liberation in the United States, Israel, and Palestine, watching this conversation tiptoe around questions of white supremacy while centering the perspectives of white Ashkenazi Jews has moved us to intervene with our own perspectives.

The discourse has been suspect, often conflating race, ethnicity, nationality, and genetics. Besides Mueller’s nonsensical claim that Israeli is a race rather than a nationality (which obscures the oppression of racial minorities in Israel), his uncritical use of the term “Caucasian,” a pseudo-scientific term popularized by 18th century race scientists, sets us up for a conversation dependent on the logics of disproved race science rather than contemporary realities of politics, power, and privilege.

Reactionary pieces in The Times of Israel were not much better. Dani Ishai Behan and Sarah Tuttle-Singer alluded to particular Jewish genetics that prove Jews are a people of color, with Tuttle-Singer writing that “we are not white…science and genetics back this up.” The irony that, in an attempt to brand the “antiracist left” as anti-Semitic, Behan and Tuttle-Singer are parroting the same racial pseudoscience that Nazi Germany used to differentiate Jews from “Aryans,” appears to be lost. The myth that race has a genetic or biological basis was roundly refuted in a necessary Haaretz piece in which Ruth Schuster reminded commentators “there is no gene for ‘race’.”

What is the political impulse behind white Jews refusing to be named as white? Clearly, as the derailment of the original conversation about representation of women of color in film shows, it is not out of political identification with people of color. And while Behan bemoans the “troubled” relationship between the “‘antiracist’ left” (scare quotes his) and the Jewish community, branding those who question Jewish complicity with white supremacy as anti-Semitic make clear he is not interested in engaging racial justice movements in good faith. As with the American Jewish institutions that cut ties with the Movement for Black Lives over the latter’s inclusion of Palestine liberation in its policy platform, the derailment of the conversation about Wonder Woman and POC representation by white Jews reminds us that the antiracist left does not have an anti-Semitism problem so much as many in the Jewish community have an anti-racism problem.

Lastly, as Black and Asian American Jews living and organizing in the United States, we are struck by the utter exclusion of the perspectives of Jewish people of color in the conversation. Despite our active engagement and prior writings on the topic, the discourse surrounding Gadot has been primarily white Ashkenazi Jews talking to one another. We question the centering of white Jews as experts on issues of Jews and race as Jewish people of color who necessarily understand the intersections of anti-Semitism and white supremacy based on lived experience. Meanwhile, the vitriolic response we have received when we have shared our voices — including being likened to Holocaust deniers — reflects the realities of racism within the Jewish community. If white Jews are people of color, what does that make us? The combined exclusion and vitriol directed towards our voices and perspectives reminds us that ironically, there is no room for Jewish people of color within a white Jewish racial frame that casts itself as non-white.

Let me start by pointing out that this neurotic talmudic exchange is a perfect example of two jews having three opinions about what’s best for the jews. It’s a semi-coded argument about Whites and Whiteness, conducted by jews on all sides. Though some dance around it more than others, all of them agree there is a fundamental difference between Whites and jews. They all identify themselves entirely positively as jews, and all regard Whites entirely negatively.

All these jews are perfectly fluent in the thought and language of anti-White “anti-racism”. The debate is more of a collegial intra-tribal conversation. It touches on virtually every Frankfurt School/Critical Theory/identity politics/semitically correct term or idea ever weaponized for use against Whites. Key words: othering, oppression, privilege. Key concepts: us versus them, who/whom.

To put it in something akin to their own terms, what these jews are discussing is intersectional jewing. As I’ve previously noted (here and here) “anti-racist” jewing has metastasized into something so baldly anti-White that it is beginning to blowback and interfere with the jewing of the jews who are still dissimulating as White.

What these jews are disagreeing about here is the narrative, how to jewsplain all this duplicitous jewing in some way that doesn’t place any blame on jews. Their problem lies in the apparent conflict between two big lies they have promoted: the idea that jews are White, and the idea that Whites are privileged and “racist”.

Some jews – like Behan, Mueller, and Tuttle-Singer – are relatively frank in describing Whites as enemies. They see no value in encouraging the conflation of jews with Whites. Other jews – like Berlatsky, Nathman, and Herman – favor maintaining the pretense, arguing that in the balance jews benefit from their transracial fraud. They insist they are “white”, or that goyim mistake them as such, but express no shared interests with Whites. On the whole they are more apt to express sympathy and see common interests with other non-Whites.

It is no surprise that the mixlings – Behan and Tseng-Putterman and Pierce – make the plainest distinction between jews and Whites. They’ve chosen their chosen halves. Nor it is any shock that the most visibly jewy jew – Berlatsky – likes the “jews are white” mask. He appreciates that jews can thus white-wash their jewing.

Of all this intersectional jewing the most emblematic moment was the two “anti-racist” people of discolor oyveying lamely about all the other jews being too “white” and taking the genetic/biological basis of race, and specifically jewry, for granted. Indeed, it is through hybrids that jewry’s virulence is most clearly expressed. The jew oppression narrative mutates and squirts about in awkward ways as the parasite manages various hosts, and crosses over to new ones, all necessitated by its very own zionism-for-me-chaos-for-thee jewaforming activity.

Finally, notice that none of the articles linked above mentions that jews run Hollywood and created the comic genre from which Wonder Woman and many of the more recent popular films derive. Herman’s emoting almost spills the beans. Most goyim don’t realize it, but the comic/Hollywood superhero is a jew metaphor, it’s how jews imagine themselves.

11 June 2017, Nathan Abrams, haaretz.com, The secret Jewish origins of Wonder Woman:

Jews sought invisibility and had to earn their “whiteness.” It was only begrudgingly bestowed upon them when they had assimilated to the point of no longer being perceived as a threat by mainstream society.

But all of this misses the point. Superheroes all have a coded Jewish history, whether they were invented by Jews or not. To paraphrase the great American comedian Lenny Bruce: If you’re a superhero, you’re Jewish even if you’re goyish.

Like all the other jews, Abrams propounds a typical jew version of history, portraying his toxic tribe as having no agency and thus no responsibility for anything even as he describes everything as springing from and revolving around them.

Takes a Kicking and Keeps on Licking

Mel Gibson’s Career — Why He Deserves Another Chance In Hollywood, by Allison Hope Weiner, Deadline|Hollywood, 11 March 2014:

As a journalist who vilified Gibson in The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly until my coverage allowed me to get to know him, I want to make the case here that it is time for those Hollywood agencies and studios to end their quiet blacklisting of Mel Gibson. Once Hollywood’s biggest movie star whose film Braveheart won five Oscars and whose collective box office totals $3.6 billion, Gibson hasn’t been directly employed by a studio since Passion Of The Christ was released in 2004.

For those who are skeptical, I understand. For the longest time, I disliked Gibson and thought he was a Holocaust-denier, homophobic, misogynistic, racist drunk. I wrote as much in articles for EW and the NY Times. And whenever I wrote about him, I would get irate calls from his representatives saying I didn’t know him.

It developed into something that felt like friendship, which doesn’t often happen with investigative journalists and the subjects they cover. Odder still was that it happened with a man disdained by my colleagues, friends and my family, who, like me, are observant Jews. At this point, Gibson’s career had gone all kinds of wrong, starting with that 2006 DUI arrest, when he told that cop that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Four years later, he sounded positively unhinged and racist in surreptitious recordings of an angry phone exchange between Gibson and ex-girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva — the mother of his infant daughter. The whole world heard him shout abusively at her and make racist remarks.

Since then, I’ve gotten to know Gibson extremely well. I thought it would be difficult for him to have a friend in the media, but he has been surprisingly honest and trusting. As a lawyer-turned-reporter, I have no problem asking tough questions, even of friends. Gibson never wavered or equivocated when I confronted him, whether the subject was his drinking, his politics, his religion or his relationships with women. It soon became clear that my early journalistic assessment of him wasn’t right.

This crystallized when we met each other’s families. It was hard to blame his family for being skeptical of a journalist, but the issues with my own family were more challenging. Gibson asked to meet them at my son’s bar mitzvah celebration. Imagine the scene: A room filled with Jews. In walks the person who, in their minds, might be the most notorious anti-Semite in America. Gibson attended alone and I can only imagine what was going through his head when he walked into the party.

Before the evening was over, he was chatting with many of my relatives, who saw a funny, kind, charming guy and not the demon they’d read about. Gutsier still, he attended our Yom Kippur break fast dinner. Anyone who has attended such a gathering knows there is nothing more imposing than making friends in a room full of Jews who haven’t eaten in 24 hours.

I’ve discussed the Holocaust with Gibson and whether his views differed from those of his father. Just as he refused to condemn his father in that TV interview with Diane Sawyer, Gibson refused to discuss his dad with me. Similar to what he told Sawyer, Gibson told me that he believed that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. “Do I believe that there were concentration camps where defenseless and innocent Jews died cruelly under the Nazi regime? Of course I do; absolutely,” he told Sawyer. “It was an atrocity of monumental proportion.” In our conversations, I took that a step further. Why, I asked him “did you say those things about the Jews starting all the wars? Where did those unkind things come from?” Gibson thought for a moment, then answered that he’d been terribly hurt by the very personal criticism of him from the Jewish community over The Passion Of The Christ. He said that while he’d been criticized for films before, this was personal and cruel. He said that when he drinks, he can be a mean drunk and “Stuff comes out in a distorted manner…” His own faith led him to make his version of Christ’s story, and he found himself being attacked for making a film that might get Jews killed, and that he was insensitive that his depiction of Jews as Christ’s killer could inflame religious tensions. He was called names by numerous Jewish leaders and a few people literally spat on him. “The criticism was still eating at me,” he told me. “This was a different kind of hammering. A very personal attack.”

Based on my exchanges with Gibson and my own reporting on his transgressions, I’ve stopped doubting him. He worked in Hollywood for 30 years without a single report he was anti-Semitic.

In his second apology on the anti-Semitic statements, Gibson promised to reach out to Jewish leaders. Gibson followed up by meeting with a wide variety of them. He gave me their names when I asked, but Gibson asked me not to publish them because he didn’t want them dragged into public controversy or worse, think he was using them. The meetings were not some photo op to him, he told me, but rather his desire to understand Judaism and personally apologize for the unkind things he said. He has learned much about the Jewish religion, befriending a number of Rabbis and attending his share of Shabbat dinners, Passover Seders and Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur dinners. I believe that effort, along with our conversations, helped him understand why Jewish people reacted as they did to The Passion Of The Christ and why there was Jewish support for the Second Vatican Council. Gibson has quietly donated millions to charitable Jewish causes, in keeping with one of the highest forms of Tzedakah in the Jewish faith, giving when the recipient doesn’t know your identity.

Gibson went well beyond a mea culpa tour. He came out of that experience determined to film the Jewish version of Braveheart. He set at Warner Bros a film about Judah Maccabee, who with his father and four brothers led the Jewish revolt against the Greek-Syrian armies that had conquered Judea in the second century B.C. That seminal story is celebrated by Jews all over the world through Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights.

While talent including director Roman Polanski (drugged and sodomized a minor, and fled), Mike Tyson (rape conviction), Chris Brown (beat up ex-girlfriend Rihanna), T.I. (weapons charge), and many others are repped by major agencies, no agency has touched Gibson since Emanuel discharged him as a WME client after those tapes surfaced and he used the “N” word. Gibson has been shunned not for doing anything criminal; his greatest offenses amount to use of harsh language.

Weiner knows that Gibson’s “greatest offense” isn’t “harsh language” aimed at women or blacks, and they aren’t responsible for his “quiet blacklisting”. Weiner identifies herself as a jew and dedicates the bulk of her words to Gibson vis-a-vis jews exactly because she understands that it is jews who have not-so-quietly blacklisted him.

The demonization and blacklisting of Gibson is a reminder that in jew-run Hollywood, talent, popularity and profitability aren’t the primary considerations – jewish sensibilities are. And Gibson will continue to be blacklisted as long as jews collectively regard him as “the most notorious ‘anti-semite’ in America”. Weiner’s explicit appeal to jews, to attempt to convince them otherwise, only calls attention to their power.

Weiner describes Gibson’s grovelling, trying to please and befriend the jews who despise him, as “gutsy”. Yet it is quite the opposite. Even Weiner’s own version of Gibson’s story comes across as serial gutlessness: Lashing out in drunken rage, Gibson bit the hand that fed him, and ever since has been licking the boot that kicks him. Weiner’s suggestion that Gibson’s problem is alcohol, or anger, or both, is also disingenuous. Though he has far more fame and fortune than most of the rest of his race, he has the same main problem. The jewish problem. He could fund and direct some wonderful films about that, but instead gives his love and money to the enemy. Whether such pathological behavior is fueled by Christian beliefs, greed, ambition, or even alcohol – it certainly isn’t guts.

As usual, the jews have tried to make themselves out as the ones who have been harmed. And as usual, this serves to distract from the harm they have done to others. In this case, their handwringing about whether Mel Gibson is or isn’t good for the jews is a distraction from the monstrous harm done by the lies, filth and poison delivered by the judaized media.

Jews Run Hollywood, Whites Get the Blame

New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, who is not Jewish, but to use her words, “I am married to a Jewish man, so I am sensitive to the representation of”how jewish Hollywood is. It doesn’t stop her from complaining that Hollywood’s movies are too “white”.

Steve Sailer quotes Dargis, reacts to her misdirected distaste like it’s a big joke, and tosses in his own sneer at “hillbilly” “white trash” for good measure. Sailer likes things like this. He calls attention to White/jew double standards without identifying them as such. Then instead of a sober lecture about “human biodiversity” he serves up a comedy schtick.

The search result in the first link in this post has been scrubbed of the blurb concerning Dargis’ jewish sensitivities, but the short synopsis that remains is relevant in its own right. Project MUSE – Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies – The Fockerized Jew?: Questioning Jewishness as Cool in American Popular Entertainment, by Samantha Baskind:

This essay examines the recent upsurge in overt Jewish identity in American popular culture, using the film Meet the Parents (2000) and its sequel Meet the Fockers (2004) as a case study to demonstrate how the Jewish Jew is no longer avoided and when portrayed does not fall victim to stereotyping. While looking at these two films together, I describe a broader evolution in media from the de-ethnicized Jew, and for that matter the de-ethnicized Jewish actor, to performers flaunting (and thereby celebrating) Jewishness in a Christian-centric society that has found acceptance of the Other. The paper also questions what about Jewishness is cool and describes how viewer subjectivities influence the perception of coolness.

The “upsurge in overt jewish identity” continued with Little Fockers (2010), which Dargis reviewed:

Part of what made the first movies work as well as they did — “Meet the Parents” hit in 2000, and its sequel, “Meet the Fockers,” followed four years later — was the cultural clash that dare not fully speak its name. Initially, the series only broadly winked at the reasons for Jack’s slow-burning tsuris. Was that a bagel in Greg’s pocket, or was he just glad to see his shiksa girlfriend and then wife, Pam (Teri Polo)? But when the second movie brought in Barbra Streisand and Dustin Hoffman to play Greg’s parents, any residual anxiety about the characters’ nominal cultural differences gave way to the spectacle of two legends playfully batting around the Jewish stereotypes that the stars themselves struggled against and transcended.

What Dargis calls “the cultural clash that dare not fully speak its name”, and then dances around in ewjay odecay, speaks its name quite clearly in jewish studies journals. Jews may fault everybody else for regarding them as the Other, but the truth is they freely discriminate themselves from “whites” whenever they like. When Whites distinguish ourselves from jews they act as if we’re morally or mentally defective.

Here are three more reviews of the Fockers series, with the common thread being an acute jewish awareness of the distinction between jews and Whites.

Meet the Parents: Little Fockers | SabDesi paints the Focker culture clash as one-sided “anti-semitism”:

There has always been some interesting cultural tension behind these films, an argument between race and power. Jack Byrnes (no relation, thank God) is a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male force entering the domestic arena. That’s why his character worked for the CIA for 34 years, including 19 months in a Vietnamese prison camp; he is American power brought to bear on the enemy within – the schlemiel who is stealing his princess.

Greg Focker’s fool is a very old kind of Jewish comic character – a Jew who fears life among the Gentiles. Ben Stiller is its foremost practitioner in modern movies. It was clear in the first movie that a large part of Jack’s objection to Greg was anti-Semitism, along with his contempt for his caring profession. “Not a lot of men in your profession, are there Greg?” he asked in the first movie.

The second movie went further into this anti-Semitism, with Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand as Greg’s parents, Bernie and Roz. They were hippies from Florida – a tad embarrassing but open-hearted. Roz was a flamboyant TV sex therapist; Bernie’s job was to smother everyone with kisses, especially Jack. The contrast was obvious but effective: cold eastern Protestant establishment versus warm kosher humanity. Puritans versus emigrants: no wonder Spielberg was interested.

Dannielle Blumenthal, self-described “Professional communicator fascinated by all things branding”, explains How the “Little Fockers” Brand Makes Sexism, Racism, and Anti-Semitism OK:

While the character of Roz Focker (Bernie’s wife) is supposed to represent liberated femininity, she is also portrayed as emasculating, pushy (recall the stereotype of the “pushy Jew”), and even a bit crazy. The message being that “women’s libbers” are all three of these things.

In contrast, Pam Focker (Greg’s wife) and Dina Byrnes (Jack’s wife) are portrayed as “normal and stable,” wives who know their place, don’t make “trouble” (e.g. emotional demands), and support their husbands endlessly no matter how crazy and possibly even unfaithful they act.

It is precisely Pam’s endless supportiveness, as well as her stereotypical Barbie-like beauty, that leads her to be portrayed as the “one true love” of Kevin, who pursues other women, but can never forget her. The most that Pam asks of Greg is to check on the facepainter for the kids’ upcoming birthday party, and when he doesn’t do it, she simply sighs and leaves the room.

In terms of racism, there were very few African-Americans in this movie at all, much less any in power. I saw one character playing a patient, one playing an incompetent nurse, and another on the subway train as an “extra.” Do the Fockers and the Byrnes not have any African-American friends, associates, customers, and so on? Why was the movie so “White?” I’m not saying that movies have to be advertisements for diversity but the Caucasian-ness of the movie seemed extreme.

There is another example of anti-Semitism besides the writers’ antipathy toward Roz (and Bernie) but I don’t want to give away that part of the plot.

Clearly though this is very much a movie poking fun at “WASP” culture and the difference between it and the movie’s Jewish characters. It seems like WASPiness is “idolized,” but also seen as dysfunctional, whereas Jewish culture is a kind of corrective. (Interestingly I was reading the book “Stuff White People Like” yesterday and it had a similar attitude toward WASPiness. It was also hilarious.)

Blumethal is hyper-sensitive to anti-jew slights, but like Sailer anti-White slights make her laugh.

The Fockers Trinity, by Joan Alpert:

Despite the silliness, the movies portray the shifting role of Jews in American culture. Jews have previously been portrayed as outside the majority culture; their masculinity is different than the norm; they are neurotic, weak and effeminate—a continuation of the anti-Semitic tradition that questioned Jewish maleness, says Daniel Itzkovitz, director of American Studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts and contributor to the 2006 Jewish Identity in Postmodern American Culture. The movies give an “unwholesome perception of Jews,” claims one commentator, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, an Orthodox rabbi in California, by portraying them as “heinous caricatures.”

Fockers’ writer Joe Hamburg however, defends his films’ non-Jews. They “are not anti-Semitic,” he says; it’s just that Greg “feels out of place” in a WASP world in which bulletproof Kevlar surrounding the family van is the answer to paranoia, and lie detector tests and sodium pentathlon injections are the means to truth. Life is serious. Pam warns Greg, “Humor is entirely wasted on my parents.”

Basically, the WASP, Jack, is a jerk and the Jew, Greg, is a schlemiel, and the schlemiel wins. Actually, Greg is “a post modern schlemiel,” says Itzkovitz. Although he has the attributes of the stereotypical nerdy fumbler, “American society is now identifying with him.” He adds: “Non-Jews as well as Jews are feeling unsettled in the 21st century.” They realize they are not all-powerful, like Rambo, but anxious and insecure like Greg, whose warmth, decency and caring attract Pam.

There you have it. The professional jewish bigots say, “hey, your movies are anti-jew”. The writer answers, “nope, anti-WASP”.

“[T]he shifting role of Jews in American culture” has been to steadily displace and dispossess Whites. The jew schlemiels win. The White jerks lose. That’s how and why movies like the Fockers get made. That’s why Hollywood is the way it is.

UPDATE 15 Feb 2011: Danielle “Hollywood Jew” Berrin and friends lift the veil on an Oscar-nominated “white” film, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, which they see as a jewish production with a central jewish theme.

Who does Aaron Sorkin really hate? | Jewish Journal:

While it is true that women in general do not shine in “The Social Network,” the critique is misguided, because Sorkin is quite specific as to which kind of women he is referencing, when he references them at all — and they come in two forms: Asian Americans and Jews. According to a surface reading, neither gets a pretty portrait; Asian women are depicted as attractive and easy, and Jewish women are brawling shrews.

Jewishness, in general, is a characteristic the fictional Zuckerberg and his friends are desperate to escape. At the Caribbean Night party at the Alpha Epsilon Pi house, one of Zuckerberg’s friends wryly remarks: “There’s an algorithm for the connection between Jewish guys and Asian girls: They’re hot, smart, not Jewish and can dance.” Sorkin would have us believe that, in the eyes of some Jewish men — or at least those run-of-the-mill Harvard scholars — one of the best things about an Asian woman is that she isn’t a Jewish woman. And in Sorkin’s story, Asians get bonus points for performing oral sex in public bathrooms.

“That’s not what you’re going to get from an Erica,” said Olivia Cohen-Cutler, referring to the film’s only female Jewish character. Cohen-Cutler, a senior executive at ABC, is the chair of Hadassah’s Morningstar Commission, which devotes attention to images of Jewish women in the media. While most are decrying the film’s treatment of women, Cohen-Cutler sees something different in the character Erica Albright.

In the film’s opening scene, the fictional Zuckerberg is on a date with Erica, who is pretty, sophisticated and exquisitely articulate. While trying to woo her, an arrogant and socially inept Zuckerberg winds up insulting her every which way, which prompts Erica to unequivocally reject him: “You’re going to be successful and rich. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a tech geek. I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that won’t be true: It’ll be because you’re an asshole.”

But her assertiveness, while well-founded, is met with a withering take-down. Zuckerberg avenges himself on his blog, her rejection providing the impetus for the creation of “Facemash” — the beginning of Facebook.

In real life, he wrote, “[So and so] is a bitch. I need to think of something to take my mind off her. Easy enough. Now I just need an idea.”

In the movie, the fictional Zuckerberg also insults the size of her breasts — and her last name, with a subtle dig about how her family changed their name from “Albrecht” to “Albright” — the only hint that she is Jewish, though it’s never explicitly confirmed.

“In one way [the Zuckerberg character] was saying, ‘She’s a fraud because her family did this and I’m not because I’m still Zuckerberg,’ “ Cohen-Cutler said in an interview. “What you saw throughout the film was a combination of Zuckerberg’s arrogance and self-loathing related to his otherness, which played into the ‘Jewish men hate Jewish women’ continuum.”

If this were pure fiction, it might sting a little less, but unfortunately it isn’t: Zuckerberg, who might be the most eligible Jewish bachelor in the world, met his real-life girlfriend, the Chinese American medical student Priscilla Chan, on erev Shabbat at an AEPi party during his sophomore year. (According to The New Yorker, friends speculate that they will marry.)

Liel Leibovitz, a writer for the online Jewish magazine Tablet and an assistant professor of communications at New York University, believes this is just more evidence that Hollywood is undeniably and irretrievably hostile to Jewish women.

“Being ‘Jewish’ in Hollywood means adhering to the stereotype, namely the smart and shlubby person who overcomes insecurities and applies wit to get ahead,” Leibovitz wrote via e-mail. “That, of course, is a stereotype that’s great for guys, but not too great for women. While Jewish men can fit right into the ‘Jewish’ niche in Hollywood’s arsenal of preconceived notions and crumbling clichés, Jewish women cannot.”

Indeed, Erica is punished, not for being the object of the male gaze, but for subverting it by being the only character in the movie who is actually smarter than Zuckerberg. Even if her rejection is the proper comeuppance for his immaturity and arrogance, it is Zuckerberg who becomes the hero, while Erica remains the heartless wench who wounded him.

Where does this animosity toward Jewish women come from?

“I am convinced by the theory that pins the blame largely on Jewish men,” Leibovitz wrote in his e-mail. His much-read 2009 article “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” postulates that both Hollywood’s executives and its leading men prefer shiksas. Period.

In that vein, Sorkin’s script and its obvious aversion to Jewish women can be seen as an indictment of Jewish women nobody likes: the entitled Jewish American Princess and the overbearing Jewish Mother. But Erica Albright-Albrecht doesn’t fit into either of those stereotypes, even if she derives, in some way, from an archetypal Jewish feminine strength.

“I long for the day when a Jewish actress would play a Jewish character that’s just the normal, uncomplicated, unremarkable love interest who also happens to be Jewish,” Leibovitz said.

An uncomplicated Jewish woman? No wonder Sorkin doesn’t deliver. He seems, instead, ambivalent about them. He can’t stand the stereotypical figures (either on screen or from his own life), but he is also trying to imagine something different. So while Erica is reproved for her boldness, it is Zuckerberg who ends up endlessly longing for her, and an ideal that doesn’t really exist.

I suppose it’s asking Hollywood too much for two smart, good-looking Jews to run off into the sunset together. Or at least, in this case, to Silicon Valley.

“It’s too bad that this movie, which is really a testament to the brilliance and single-mindedness of someone, had to flip the bird to being Jewish,” added Cohen-Cutler, who admitted she loved the movie regardless.

Too bad, indeed. The real world is full of Jewish women whose qualities run contrary to Hollywood stereotypes. Which leads me to believe that it isn’t Jewish women that are the problem; it’s that Jewish men like Mark Zuckerberg and Aaron Sorkin are hanging out with the wrong ones.

Jews like Berrin, Cohen-Cutler, and Leibovitz are obsessed with jewishness and jewish interests. They are free to observe and opine on those interests from authoritative, paid positions without being pathologized or demonized as “racists”. They are exquisitely attuned to the most subtle cues of jewishness and what they perceive to be anti-jewish slights. They personify the “stereotype” of jewish women (and neurotic, weak, effeminate jewish males) as brawling shrews.

In contrast non-jews are not similarly obsessed or attuned, or at least are strongly discouraged from being so by the pathologization and demonization they would be subjected to should they behave in such a fashion. If they see The Social Network in racial terms at all they see it as a “white” film. The subtle slights remain, but can instead be seen through White-centric eyes as evidence that Hollywood, and the jewish shrews, are undeniably and irretrievably hostile to Whites. (The word “shiksa”, for instance, is an epithet on par with “kikess”. Jews feel comfortable using such insults, confident that non-jews either don’t understand or that those who do can be dismissed as “anti-semites” for objecting to it.)

Liel Leibovitz’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes provides more of the same hyper-aware jewish analysis:

Since the dawn of American entertainment, Jewish women were largely rendered invisible, absent everywhere from burlesque to Hollywood to prime-time television. Instead, they watched as their sons and brothers and husbands became successful producers, directors, and impresarios, powerful men who then chose to populate their works with a parade of sexy, sultry shiksas who looked nothing like their female kin.

Note that for Berrin and Leibovitz jewishness is about kinship, who a jew chooses to mate with. They do not pretend it is about religion. Their double-talk is that jewish men run Hollywood but have used their power to bash jewish women. This is an implausible rationalization offered as a substitute for the more plausible view that the jews who run Hollywood initially rendered jewish men and women alike invisible. Now that their hated competitors the WASPs have been routed jewish domination is increasingly secure, not only in Hollywood, but media in general, not to mention law, finance, education, and politics. What we are actually subjected to is “the recent upsurge in overt Jewish identity in American popular culture” that Baskind takes note of. The large number of recent films starring Ben Stiller, Adam Sandler, and Seth Rogen come to mind.

Of course through jewish eyes everything is about jews. Every situation is evaluated based on what’s good or bad for jews. Jewish dominance is never complete enough. Jewish “stereotypes” are like so many jewish Moby-Dicks, haunting jews even as they obsess over them, sniffing them out and impotently trying to slay them. Though jews are fanatically self-aware and hyper-critical the blame is inevitably transferred to someone else. They change names and get nose jobs but only because “anti-semitism” compels them to do so. They make movies portraying WASPs as buffoons, but what they actually see is cryptic “anti-semitism” glorifying “shiksas”.

No matter how self-consciously White I try to imagine being I can’t ever hope to hold a candle to such bigotry.