When Ignorance and Prejudice and Fear Walk Hand in Hand

Back in the 1990s, I was teaching a media analysis course at Emerson College, and one night, after class, a student from Saudi Arabia had a question he needed to ask me. He was a very good student, and I was expecting a question about one of the readings. But what he really wanted to know about was the secret. I wasn't sure what he was referring to, so I asked him to elaborate. "The secret," he said. "We all know that the Jews run the media. How do they do it? What is their secret?"

He was serious. He had been taught all his life that "the Jews" were a powerful, often-sinister force in the world. And he was told, "the Jews" exercised their influence in secret-- they controlled the banks, the world economy, and of course, the media. Since I was perhaps the first Jew he'd ever really met in person, I guess he thought I'd teach him the magic words or the mystical handshake or whatever it was that allowed us to be so diabolical yet so influential. 

But, alas, I wasn't able to be much help. Truth be told, the Jews really don't control the media. There may have been a time circa 1911 when there was only one movie studio and it was owned by Jews, but historically, media outlets were always owned by a wide variety of folks-- and in the US, the majority of those owners have tended to be White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Were there some Jews who owned newspapers or magazines or radio stations? Yes, of course. Did some Jews own TV stations or movie studios? Absolutely. And were some Jews presidents of networks? Sure. But did Jews control entire industries? Nope, not true-- no matter what my student was told. 

But myths like that one refuse to die. As recently as last week, someone suggested to me that the US government feels obligated to support Israel because of "how powerful the Jews are in the world." (However you feel about Israel, somehow I don't think that's the reason.) And there are other enduring myths about "the Jews" (always "the Jews"-- as if we're a monolithic group that thinks alike, and acts alike). The whole time I was growing up, I heard lots of jokes about "cheap Jews." According to the popular culture, "the Jews" were greedy and their god was money. Examples were everywhere: Judas in the New Testament, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the character of Shylock the Jew in The Merchant of Venice... (Interestingly, Shakespeare probably never met an actual Jew in his life-- they had all been forcibly expelled from England in 1290, after more than a century of brutal antisemitic persecution. But he certainly met the stereotype: he created Shylock, the moneylender, a man who loved money more than he loved his own daughter.)

It doesn't take much to reawaken some of the old stereotypes, and social media hasn't helped-- some platforms (thanks, Elon) have willingly embraced the haters, and allowed them to spread old hatreds to a new generation, sometimes with deadly consequences. And some extremist politicians (on both sides) have been happy to blame society's problems on "the Jews." Meanwhile, it doesn't take a war in the middle-east for some folks to lash out at "the Jews." In fact, it's a tactic used by autocratic leaders all over the world for centuries.   

During a recent Senate hearing on worldwide threats, FBI Director Chris Wray said that while Jewish Americans are about 2.4% of the American public, they account for something like 60% of all religious-based hate crimes. That's not a number that makes me feel very encouraged. I grew up at a time when antisemitism was on the wane, compared to how it was during the Nazi era; but it was still a part of the culture, and I worried that it might come back. Agreed, things are nowhere nearly as bad as they used to be. But it doesn't take much for bigotry to recur... if we allow it... and if we remain silent when, as the late Neil Peart put it, "ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand."