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Eye on Hollywood: Reel Bad Anti-Semites

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Originally posted on August 20, 2008.

In my last column, I wrote that the Hollywood depiction of the Holocaust “was the result of a complex narrative full of sudden stops, starts and dead ends.” For instance, immediately after the war, Hollywood was far more interested in something closer to home for American Jews than the Holocaust: anti-Semitism.

This was addressed forcefully in 1947, when there was obvious coordination in addressing barriers against Jews moving into the American mainstream. First, Laura Hobson, daughter of two Jewish socialist immigrants, wrote “the runaway bestseller” Gentleman’s Agreement, a novel about social anti-Semitism. Not surprisingly, the Jewish-owned New York Times featured a book review which called it “required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this perilous century.”

Within months, a polished film version starring Gregory Peck was released (this film too failed to mention the Holocaust). In addition to taking home Best Picture for that year, it also won Best Supporting Actress and Best Director, along with a slew of nominations. The same year also saw Crossfire, another film about anti-Semitism. 

For a variety of reasons, the theme of anti-Semitism largely disappeared from movie screens after this, emerging only sporadically in films of the late sixties. When it did reappear, it was as a tangential subplot, though still obvious and important. For instance, Woody Allen inserted such a scene into Annie Hall (1977), which a film critic described thus:

The difference between Annie’s background and Alvy’s upbringing is brought into sharp relief in this short but memorable scene juxtaposing a dinner with Annie’s family and a meal chez Singer. The split-screen scene illustrates the huge gulf between the two cultures, both of which are ridiculed. Allen’s comic condemnation of both exaggerated extremes pits the stifling, superficial Halls, who quietly speak about swap meets as they pick at their skimpy meal and sip cocktails, against the vulgar, emotional Singers, who gobble a vast dinner as they argue loudly. Although Alvy may be embarrassed by his uncouth family, he shows even greater disdain of the cold, repressed, bigoted Hall clan. Annie’s brother Duane, played by Christopher Walken, is actually psychotic, and a mean-faced Grammy Hall is blithely described by Annie as “a real Jew hater.”

Then in the 1982 hit Porky’s there is a subplot that has newcomer Brian Schwartz bullied and challenged to a fight by Tim, one of the Porky’s gang. Losing the fight to a Jew, Tim is berated by his father, Hollywood’s stock Southern redneck, who himself picks a fight with teenage Brian. Ashamed, Tim intervenes and beats up his own father, thereby becoming Brian’s friend. Asked to explain his physical prowess, Brian says, “When you’re Jewish, it’s either fight or take shit.” Read more

Eye on Hollywood: Reel Bad WASPs

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Originally posted on August 7, 2008

Today the leisure suit of the mid-to-late 1970s is rightly ridiculed. Many things were askew in those years of economic “malaise” and high interest rates. Most importantly for whites, the 1960s cultural revolution had settled into a prolonged assault on the cultural image of whites.

Needless to say, Hollywood was an enthusiastic participant in this assault. An interesting example is the movie Caddyshack, starring Chevy Chase. Caddyshack is doubtless a trivial movie, but it has been heralded as one of the funniest movies of all time, and it continues to be shown endlessly in TV reruns.

Although the point is presumably lost on the vast majority of its audience, the real narrative of the movie is the Jew-as-outsider “comically” assaulting the WASP-as-insider. The setting of Caddyshack is apt, for the private country club represented one of the last bastions of WASP privilege.

Jewish resentment over WASP snobbery toward upwardly mobile Jews continues to rankle among Jews. For example, Jacob Heilbrunn emphasizes this resentment as a key motivator for the neocons who have been so influential in the current Bush administration. The early neocons attempted “to overturn the old order in America …. There were the fancy clubs, the legal and financial firms that saw Jews as interlopers who would soil their proud escutcheons and were to be kept at bay. Smarting with unsurpassed social resentment, the young Jews viewed themselves as liberators, proclaiming a new faith” (p. 28). The same could be said of Jews in Hollywood, doubtless including Harold Ramis, the director and a co-screenwriter of Caddyshack.

The tension in Caddyshack revolved around the way the uncouth Jew played by Rodney Dangerfield upset the elite country club’s leader, played by Ted Knight, creator of the Ted Baxter buffoon from The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In Caddyshack, he reprised the role of a “vain, pompous, dim-witted” WASP. As Judge Smails, Knight was always an easy target. Read more

Anti-White themes in Hollywood movies: Jews as elite outsiders

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Hatred and [the] spirit of sacrifice . . . are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren. (Illuminations, Walter Benjamin 1968, 262)

I recently came across a very well-done video featuring Edmund Connelly’s TOO article “Reel Bad WASPs,” part of his excellent 8-part “Eye on Hollywood” series. I don’t know who produced the video, but it’s a great example of the effectiveness of this medium for getting out our ideas, with spot-on clips from the movies, and a calm, “just the facts” voice over.

It completely belies the constant refrain of the ADL that the Jews who dominate Hollywood just happen to be Jews — that their Jewish identity is completely irrelevant to American movies.

Read more

A Tale of Two Nations: Democracy in Israel, Depravity in Britain

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The Israeli journalist Benjamin Pogrund has laid it on the line: “Israel is a Jewish state because that is the will of the majority; this will not change.” Millions of Jews around the world will applaud that sentiment. I applaud it myself: Israel is a genuine democracy. But imagine a White journalist saying this: “Europe is a White Christian continent because that is the will of the majority; this must not change.”

How would most Jews react? With horror, of course. What’s good for Jewish Israel isn’t good for White Christian Europe, which must open its borders to the world and abolish itself in a flood of non-White, non-Christian vibrancy. The Jewish vision for Europe is simple: it must undergo a “transformation from monolithic ethnic-based nation-states into heterogeneous nations built on citizenship.”

Those are the words of Barbara Lerner Spectre, an energetic Jewish activist who works hard to keep Sweden at the forefront of that transformation. And Sweden has certainly been transformed: from a peaceful, female-friendly White nation into one full of non-White rioters and rapists (and here).

Perhaps that’s why Ms Spectre calls the transformation “treacherous.” She seems to think that rape at levels that were inconceivable in Sweden prior to the immigration onslaught is a price worth paying for Sweden’s transformation from monolith to multiculture. But how do Israelis react to the first tremors of such vibrancy? Read more

The Nicholas Winton Kindertransport Myth Comes Off the Rails

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Visitors to Prague railway station are often intrigued by the group of bronze sculptures that stand on Platform One. It is a forlorn scene — a bespectacled man holding a crying child, a sad-looking little girl and a battered suitcase.

These striking figures form the Sir Nicholas Winton Memorial Sculpture and tell the story of the Czech Kindertransport and in particular the “British Schindler” who spirited 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia to London in 1939 from under the noses of the German invaders.

More than any other living Jewish person, Sir Nicholas Winton, who has just turned105, represents Britain’s most famous living link to the Holocaust. Since his story was rediscovered by the BBC, he has been lavished with honours, knighted by the Queen and is now a nominee for a Nobel Peace Prize. The torrent of books, films and documentaries about him seem to be never ending.

This week he was honoured again at a magnificent ceremony in Prague Castle where the wheelchair-bound retired banker received the highest award that the Czech Republic could bestow — the Order of the White Lion, presented by the Czech President himself.

It was a splendidly Ruritanian affair. Sir Nicholas was flanked by an honour guard, serenaded by a choir and orchestra, and met by a handful of the tearful survivors of those journeys holding pictures of themselves as children in 1939.

But there is something very wrong with all this. The problem is right there in the bronze tableau at the railway station — for nothing remotely like this ever happened. Sir Nicholas was never at the railway station to see the children off, so he cannot have held any of them in his arms. Nor was he in any real danger himself. He only spent three weeks in Prague over the Christmas break in 1938 and left before the Germans arrived. Read more

Learning from the EU Experiment (I): The anti/pro-EU question should be tactical

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 Official EU propaganda: Uniting Europeans in the face of Asian, Muslim and African power?
If only. The video was later retracted as “racist.”

The European Union is one of the great political experiments of recent decades. The EU’s official motivation — founded in the hope of ending Europeans’ fratricidal wars and to unite them as a power in the face of the rising non-European world — is likely to resonate with White Nationalists. In fact, as the above video suggests, I would argue pro-EU activists often appeal to an unconscious White identity. Mainstream Europeanism appears to me in many respects to be a sort of degenerate and incoherent parody of White Nationalism.

Of course, in practice the EU today is in many respects an anti-European, ethnocidal entity. But I believe European ethno-nationalists have much to learn from its experience, both successes and failures, in fostering cooperation among different European Nations and States in our little corner of the world, despite the national veto.

European nationalist parties overwhelmingly oppose the EU, but sometimes this seems to be for the wrong reasons. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), for example, appears to be promoted precisely because it can channel ethnocentric British sentiment into a non-racialist, pro-business direction. Nigel Farage seems to consider Polish or Romanian immigration to be a greater threat than Pakistani or African immigration, whereas it is obvious the latter is unassimilable in the long-term. Thus, ethnocentric energies in Britain are harmlessly channeled against the EU rather than constructively used to oppose non-European immigration. UKIP is useless except insofar as Britain’s leaving the EU promotes a wider shake-up and inspires nationalist parties on the Continent. Read more

Jewish Journalism: A TOO Case File, Part 2

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Part 1. 

Now executive editor at the Guardian, the work of Jonathan Freedland (1967– ) may not be greatly familiar to TOO readers, at least when compared to some other high-profile Jewish journalists active in the United States. However, it is for precisely that reason that I felt he should number among the earliest of the individuals I will discuss in this planned series of case files.

Journalism and a strong sense of Jewish identity seem to run in the Freedland blood. Jonathan is the son of Michael Freedland (1934– ), a biographer and journalist who specializes in Hollywood biographies and recently produced the scathing anti-McCarthy screed Witch Hunt in Hollywood: McCarthyism’s War on Tinseltown. The basic thesis of Witch Hunt in Hollywood is that Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee were engaged in an irrational and purely “anti-Semitic” purge of Hollywood. The elder Freedland wrote: “For Communist read Jew. … The hearings were as (some would say more) anti-Semitic as anti-Communist. Hollywood was chosen for the attack because of the great publicity value the movie capital offered. It was also a great opportunity to get at the Jews of Hollywood.”[1] Freedland Senior is also one of those Jews who, as Kevin MacDonald elucidates in CofC, viewed supporters of McCarthy as “intellectual and cultural primitives.”[2]

The younger Freedland began his own writing career at the short-lived Sunday Correspondent, a London newspaper backed by Rothschild Ventures, and which also launched the career of current Newsnight editor Ian Katz. In 1990 Freedland joined the BBC, working as a news reporter across radio and television. In the summer of 1992, he was awarded the Laurence Stern fellowship at The Washington Post, serving as a staff writer on the national news section. In what almost appears like the choreography of their careers, Freedland’s Sunday Correspondent cohort Ian Katz received the same fellowship the following year. Freedland became Washington Correspondent for The Guardian in 1993, remaining in that post until 1997. On his return Freedland launched an attack on British traditions and the system of constitutional monarchy, in his Bring Home the Revolution: The Case for a British Republic (1998). One of Freedland’s primary inspirations was that he felt that, unlike most European states, America “most — though not all — of its citizens feel like they belong.”[3] The “old” Britain, symbolized in the monarchy and out of touch with its citizens, should be annihilated. Read more