by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

I have not watched the Super Bowl (or NFL league play) for years, ever since Colin Kaepernick and his cohort of stooges and ingrates persuaded me that I despise too many of those overpaid, undereducated lunks to care. I likewise stopped watching the NBA, a league in league with Communist China, led by the worst of their egotistical China apologists, LeBron James. And I also have not watched the “Academy Awards” — the “Oscars” — for more years than I can remember. I got sick of those overpaid, undereducated louts thinking they have the right to lecture me while picking up a figurine all because they memorize lines that more talented literary artists write for them.

Happily, I cannot begin to tally all the extra hours of meaningful life I have enjoyed by giving up the NFL, NBA, and the mostly subpar movies of the past few decades. Thousands of hours that I instead have used to write for this wonderful publication, to study and teach Torah and Talmud on Zoom, and now to write books. Like my lung transplant, so has my turning my back on those who kneel during my country’s national anthem bought me extra years of productivity.

Nor do I lose out. If I am curious as to what happened in a Super Bowl, I view all the highlights in 10 minutes on YouTube. I am never curious about the men’s NBA, and my only curiosity about the women’s NBA is over which imprisoned terrorists we next will release to get another overpaid, undereducated ingrate, Brittney Griner, out of prison somewhere. If, perchance, word reaches me that a rare movie “should be seen” because of its cultural significance, I stream it.

So I did not watch Sunday night’s celebration of “star-studded” egos. I do not need to see desperately exhibitionist women on runways wearing almost no clothes to prove they have the same anatomy as women who are dressed. And as I glanced online at the nominees for best film, I compared that list to the films Hollywood used to make. F’rinstance, here are the films that contended in the Academy Awards of 1940: Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Gone With the Wind; Wuthering Heights Stagecoach; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Ninotchka; The Wizard of Oz; and Of Mice and Men. Those eight extraordinary and now-legendary films all were up for the Oscar in the same year. Compare that to the current crop of weeds. Norma Desmond, though insane, was right: It’s the pictures that got small.

Still, I recently viewed a movie that prompted a great deal of commentary in the Jewish community: Netflix’s You People. I despised every second of You People so intensely that, upon reflection, I actually like it (sort of like Columbus deciding that if he went east enough, he would end up in the west, or whatever) because it reflects the truth about hopelessly assimilated left-wing Jews who cannot get progressives to love them.

Understand first that — just as with Catholics — there are two kinds of Jews: those who actually honor and observe what it means to be a Jew (or a Catholic) and those who proclaim themselves to be Jews (or Catholics) but make a mockery of their religion and its foundational beliefs, apostates to the core, who bring shame to their religion and its adherents in the eyes of outsiders.

You People was so repulsive that, upon reflection, I appreciate it as the defining time-capsule document laying out everything that is Jewishly wrong and Judaically defective among non-Orthodox knee-jerk left-wing assimilated Jews. The premise is that the grown son of two such despicably assimilated and pseudo-progressive Jewish parents enters into a love relationship with the daughter of a Black Muslim who worships Louis Farrakhan. Isn’t that funny? A real knee-slapper. (One of the advantages of streaming movies at home is that the nearest barfing station is rapidly accessible.) The movie begins at a reform temple where godless non-Orthodox Jews are gathered on the holiest day of the Jewish year, and it all is a mockery. The “rabbi” is a mockery, and the parents are a mockery. The grown son gets propositioned at the reform temple on this holiest of days by an elderly homosexual, who is a doctor. The whole thing is disgusting. Another old geezer also talks about sex in a creepy and sordid way with this grown young man.

I have never been in a reform temple for prayers, but I know that Orthodox synagogues on Yom Kippur are bastions of awe and somber devotion. So the film quickly prepared me for what was to follow. In time, we learn that the young fellow has quit his job and instead does a podcast with an asexual Black person in which they comment on “The Culture” — a euphemism apparently for Black culture. What business does an unemployed knee-jerk leftist Jew have sitting as an expert on Black culture? Of course, self-respecting Blacks can’t stand Jewish progressives who sit as “experts” on Black culture while ignorant of their own heritage. But now it’s time to meet the parents.

These desperate progressives fall over themselves to show their son’s Black Muslim love interest how chill they are. Right away, the guy’s mother greets the lady by telling her she is for defunding the police. That is how this universalist talks to a Black person, as though the first curiosity on a Black woman’s mind when she meets her boyfriend’s parents is where they stand on defunding the cops. The conversation gets more cringe-worthy as the liberal Jewish parents ooze their progressivism as thick as motor oil. All the worst stereotypes play out.

And of course the Holocaust. For assimilated liberal Jews in America, all roads lead to the Holocaust — because they have nothing else of Jewish substance to discuss; they know nothing. They don’t know Torah or Talmud or Rambam’s Mishneh Torah or the Code of Jewish Law or the periods of the Tabernacle at Shiloh or the First Holy Temple in Jerusalem or the Babylonian Exile or the Second Holy Temple or the Fall of Beitar or the Roman Expulsion. They don’t know of Rashi or Tosafot or Ibn Ezra or Kli Yakar or Sforno or Rabbi Yehudah Halevi. They don’t know of the rise of the Third Commonwealth, the dynamics of the 1948 War of Independence, the 1967 Six-Day War, or the 1973 Yom Kippur War. They don’t know about David Ben-Gurion or the Haganah or the Irgun or the Lechi or Menachem Begin or Yitzchak Shamir. They don’t observe the Shabbat according to its laws or eat kosher or observe the Biblical festivals of Sukkot and Shavuot or fast on Tisha B’Av or hear the megillah on Purim. All they know is the Holocaust. And, take it from me, they barely know that either.

So, our young man, since he has no job, gives the Black Muslim lady a tiny engagement ring. In a movie repulsive with Jewish-denigrating stereotypes, how can a Jew give such a small ring? What to do? Consulting with his Black podcast partner of unknowable gender, he decides to tell the girlfriend that the ring may be small but it survived the Holocaust. They even decide, in their words, to use a “Holocausty” explanation.

In time, the parents meet, and the oh-so-oozing progressives find out that their prospective in-laws are Farrakhan worshippers. Soon, the Jews are being blamed for slavery and the whole Farrakhan litany of Jew-hating lies. And how do they respond? They don’t know what to say. They are so clueless that they are virtually Jewless. They end up apologizing for slavery and for Whiteness.

No one — and I mean no one — is more sick of Jews in Hollywood than are Orthodox Jews and Jewish conservatives in general. The Hollywood Jews mock and denigrate Jews and Judaism in their movies and TV shows as only Jews would dare. They bear leftist and globalist guilt for being affiliated, however tenuously, with an identifiable non-globalist, particularist community: Jews. They are stuck. They want so much to be accepted as Blacks and as BIPOC and as any and all other intersectional groups who are associated with “The Culture,” but the intersectionalists don’t want them.

The progressives and the DEI — Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion — crowd spit them out as “Whites,” and White Supremacists spit them out as Jews. And these bewildered and abysmally ignorant Jews do not know where they fit. Because they don’t fit. Their entire leftist universe has collapsed on them, now keeping their kids out of the colleges they attended to make DEI room for the less qualified. So these assimilated Jews work out their psychoses in the movies and TV, always portraying Jews and Judaism in the worst lights, mocking their religion, not realizing that, as they do so, they diminish themselves, too, because no matter how hard they try to flee from their heritage, they always will be viewed as Jews to the day they die. In a fitting moment in the film, the Jewish prospective groom is asked by his Black Muslim potential father-in-law what he thinks of Farrakhan, who has compared Jews to termites. The progressive self-hating Jew responds that he regards Farrakhan as the “GOAT” — Greatest Of All Time.

We live in a decayed society where very little remains sacred. Every idiot has to tweet innermost stories and post them on Facebook and YouTube. It is a form of exhibitionism that shames those who do not honor the boundary between propriety and the turpitude of our present climate. Those in Hollywood essentially post and tweet their exhibitionist self-hating psychoses on the big screen. Happily, for those of us who stream, the lavatory is only three minutes away from the TV, barf bag in hand.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: Jernej Furman on Flickr