Pardon me while I dump the vomit out of my yarmulke.
I didn't need Rick Sanchez to throw accusations of a Jewish-controlled media in my face to make me realize that some people still think we own the world. All I needed was to sit in the backseat of a beat up Ford (oh, the irony ) and get eyed up through the rear-view mirror by a lanky, brainless grad student and his Turkish gal-pal.
"Why are there so many of you in the media?" His beady eyes betrayed him; his girlfriend already told him the answer, he was just testing me. WASPs can be so sneaky sometimes.
"What?" You see, not knowing I was a twin--let alone multiples in any amount--I was grammatically confused and decided to play it from that angle. Jews can be so gracious sometimes.
"Why are there so many Jews in the media?" This time he asked point-blank.
Silly me, I answered like a reasonable, educated individual, explaining why this was a popular assumption based on a period of time when us "Joos" weren't allowed to be doctors, lawyers, or any number of other accredited "professionals" so we resorted to owning our own businesses--one of which happened to be, at first, movie theaters and then, movie studios. But, since that era is long gone, there is a virtual panoply of ethnicities, genders, sexual-orientations, and creeds (we're talking "United Colors of Benetton" here) "in the media".
The Turkish exchange student gave her protoge a sideways glance that said, "Told you she'd say that."
The two shared a knowing grin.
And I left the car.
The first thing I did when I got in the door was call the President of my campus chapter of Hillel. I told him the whole story. His grand response was a half-hearted, "Yeah, well, that's a shame, isn't it?"
Then I got the lowdown on the annual Kosher Chili Cookoff.
Today, Entertainment Weekly asked, "So, should Jon Stewart accept Rick Sanchez's apology?" after detailing Stewart's on-screen response in which he mocked Sanchez but, quite honestly, couldn't really give a damn about his accusations.
Sanchez's official statement is as pathetic as any other media persona's "official statement" about their verbal faux pas. Reading that was like listening to a nine-year old forced to say they're sorry to the kid they tortured on the playground so their guidance counselor can close the case file and get home for dinner. Say what you will about Mel Gibson, at least he actually apologized to "the Jewish community" and not just "anyone else" he "might have offended."
Jon Stewart's response is equally as pathetic. He's the kid on the playground who got punched, and he's willing to play nice in front of the guidance counselor as much as he has to, in the hopes that the bully won't follow him home and try to beat him up again. Only, this time, Sanchez was really disciplined--he got fired-- and Jon Stewart still played nice.
In the end, nothing was ever done about the two grad students who eyed me up in the backseat of their car. Nor, in a related note, was anything done about the other grad student (this time a Pakistani from Dubai) who cornered me alone in the grad student lounge and confronted me with the now-disproven "evil actions of my bretheren in Jenin".
And, in the end, Rick Sanchez's antiSemitic outburst will be lost in history's database of old information, something for our kids to find one day as they browse through the Wayback Machine.
All the while, the stereotype lives on to surface another day. Let's see; it was about two months between Oliver Stone and Rick Sanchez's matching accusations. What'll be our Hanukkah present from Hollywood this year?
Wait a minute...I thought we were in charge?
Well, then again, I guess we are as long as we keep imitating Jonny and taking it like a man.
No comments:
Post a Comment