JEWISH INFLUENCE IN THE MASS MEDIA
“While Turrell was the head of communications for the WB television network, he
began a religious odyssey that transformed he and his family into observant
Jews. Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways. In April, he was promoted
to the top communication slot for all of Turner Broadcasting which includes TNT,
TBS Superstation, the WB Network, Cartoon Network, Turner Classic Movies,
Turner South and Boomerang, the CNN News Group Networks, which includes
CNN/U.S., CNN Headline News, CNNfn, Accent Health, CNN Airport Network,
College Television Network (CTN), CNN Radio Network, CNN.com, CNNfn.com,
CNNfyi.com and MyCNN.com and Nascar.com. With all the recent claims [by
Jewish lobbying organizations] of CNN‘s alleged media bias against Israel, it will
be interesting to see how Turrell handles the position.” [JEWSWEEK, 2001]
The aforementioned Weinstein brothers “run a company [Miramax] that released more movies than any other in the U.S. in the year 2000 and had the eighth-largest box-office receipts.” “After Disney paid $60 million for Miramax in 1993,” notes New York Magazine, “[Harvey] Weinstein spent his time buying his way to the Oscar platform and getting in touch with his inner thug by screwing over far more delicate artistic sorts … But all the legendary bad behavior [by him] cannot obscure an objective fact: Harvey Weinstein is a cultural good. Pulp Fiction, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, and Shakespeare in Love have all become a part of the national narrative, framing the way people dance, talk, and fight … [Weinstein] is a pushcart peddler who is more than happy to put his thumb on the scale when the old woman is buying meat,’ says [fellow Jewish] producer Saul Zaentz. ‘He has not qualms about it … ‘People say, ‘Are you tough?’ I say: ‘Facing [Jewish Hollywood moguls] Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, you know, Stephen Spielberg … Why the hell would you have to be tough in this industry to survive? Those guys are just a walk in the park?'” [CARR, D., 12-03-01]
(Among Weinstein’s most recent projects — like so many Jewish moguls — is one with a Holocaust theme (this one based on a piece of fiction by Jewish novelist Leon Uris, Mita 18.) “‘I’m preparing to direct a movie about the Warsaw Ghetto. About Jews kiling fucking Germans in great numbers,’ he says with enthusiasm.”) [CARR, D., 12-03-01]
As Carl Hiaasen wrote, in his 1998 volume Team Rodent — How Disney Devours the World:
“In December 1997 Disney chairman Michael D. Eisner exercised company
stock options that brought him $565 million in a single swoop. The notion of
attaching such a sum to one man’s job is both obscene and hilarious on its face,
yet it’s pointless to debate whether or not Eisner deserves it. He got the dough.
It happened in the same month that Business Week chose Disney’s board of
directors as the worst in America. The reason: Many seemed to have been
handpicked not so much for their business expertise as for their loyalty to the
autocratic Eisner. Among the company’s directors are his personal architect, his
personal attorney, the principal of his children’s elementary school, and seven
current and former Disney executives ‘Fantastic’ is how Eisner has described his
choices for the board. But critics say it’s a meek and malleable group. That’s
precisely what was needed to sit still for the ludicrous $75 million platinum parachute
given to Michael Ovitz [also Jewish] as compensation for fourteen whole months as
president of the Walt Disney Company.” [Hiaasen, C., 1998, p. 38-39]
Jewish publisher Paul Krassner wrote the following, in delight, about what he believed to be massive cultural changes in America with the (symbolic) death of Walt Disney — a tearing down of hypocrisy and illusion. In context here, however, his words ring as an indictment of the Jewish take-over not only at Disney, but throughout American culture where formal “WASP” values of genteel civility have been replaced by brash, vulgar, Freudian, in-your-face Jewish ones:
“[Walt] Disney’s death occurred a few years after Time magazine’s famous ‘God is Dead’ cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had indeed served as God to that whole stable of imaginary characters who were now mourning in a state of suspended animation. Disney had been THEIR Creator and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I contacted Wally Wood and, without mentioning specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage. Pluto was pissing on a portrait of Mickey Mouse, while the real, bedraggled Mickey was shooting up heroin with a hypodermic needle. His nephews were jerking off as they watched Goofy fucking [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 142] Minnie Mouse on a combination bed and cash register. Dumbo was simultaneously flying and shitting on an infuriated Donald Duck. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were peeking at Daisy Duck’s asshole as she watching the Seven Dwarfs groping Snow White. The prince was snatching a peek at Cinderella’s snatch while trying a glass slipper on her foot. The three little pigs were humping each other in a daisy chain. Jiminy Cricket leered as Tinker Bell did a striptease and Pinocchio’s nose got longer … [This] became so popular that I decided to publish it as a poster. The Disney corporation considered a lawsuit but realized The Realist was published on a proverbial shoestring, and, besides, why bother causing themselves further public embarrassment? They took no action on me, and the statute of limitations finally ran out.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 142]
“The Arab nations — and the Islamic world in general — have become the new
stock enemy, a powerful and unreasoning force in True Lies (1994), Executive
Decision (1995), GI Jane (1997) and The Siege (1998) — in which Bruce Willis
rounded up Arab Americans in an attempt to stop a Hezbollah-type terrorist
group blowing up New York. Even The Insider (1999) — a film about corruption
in the tobacco industry, for heaven’s sake — tacked on a Syrian prologue in which Al
Pacino took on a pack of mad-ish mullahs. And Rules of Engagement? This film is
absolutely off the scale,’ says Hussein Ibish, communications director of the
American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Commitee, a Washington-based pressure
group. ‘I’ve never seen anything quite so vile. I felt like I was being physically
beaten, which is a reaction I’ve never had encountering a work of art. It was
mind-bogglingly vicious. I’m amazed that a major American entertainment company
would actually release such a thing.” [SWEET, M., 7-30-00]
Debbie Reynolds, another “shikseh” innocent, notes he drug world of her Jewish husband, singer Eddie Fisher:
“After his stint in Vegas, Eddie came back to Los Angeles to do a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with Andre Kostelanetz. He had arranged for me to attend the show with Irving Berlin and General David Sarnoff, the founder of RCA, which owned NBC. There were often a number of much older, very successful men around Eddie, including Eddie Cantor, who is generally credited with having discovered him … (REYNOLDS, D., 1988, p. 101) … Whenever Eddie was working, he was surrounded by people. Milton Blackstone, Eddie’s manager was always there, along with several of Eddie’s childhood pals — like Joey Forman and Bernie Rich — who were now part of what was, I would soon learn, the inevitable entourage … (REYNOLDS, 1988, p. 101)… The night at the Bowl there was also a strange man whom I had seen briefly in passing every night at the Sands. A frumpish-looking character, always in an unpressed navy suit. He was sinister, like a Vincent Price character in a murder movie. ‘This is Dr. Max Jacobson,’ Joey said as the doctor extended what was a warm, yet clammy hand … ‘He just gives Eddie a vitamin shot before the performance, to give him a little more energy … It’s just vitamins. Gives you a lift. We all get ‘em. Even Milton, You should have Eddie get the doc to give you a shot sometime.” [REYNOLDS, D., p. 101] [All these men described by Reynolds were Jewish. Max Jacobson is the notorious doctor who led many Hollywood stars to drug addiction, injecting them with amphetamines.]
Here’s what Jewish author Susan Bluestein Davis (husband of late movie star and drugs/AIDS burn-out Brad Davis) notes about Hollywood and cocaine:
“[In the late 1970s] Like any hot actor, Brad had an aura, a frenzy about him, and wherever he went, people feted him with cocaine. At parties, meetings, dinners. The drug was everywhere and used by everyone, from stars and directors right down to the lowest grip. Everyone had it supplied. Meetings would be taken and cocaine was part of the refreshments. It was on every set, often written in as a soft expense on the film’s budget. And not just for people you read about in Variety, but friends, agents I had known in New York who were now out in Los Angeles setting up their own agencies, their own production companies — these people used it as if it were nothing.”[DAVIS, S, 1997, p. 81]
“were also well represented among New York’s theatrical producers, and burlesque
in particular was notable for the presence of Jews among producers, managers, and
entertainers … The visibility of Jews in these industries nourished Christian
fears that commercial culture in the metropolis would become even more
corrupt and corrupting than it already was. Their association with an entertainment
world built around the commodification of sexuality seeemed to sustain a
preexisting paradigm of antisemitism that fused prejudices regarding
Jewish greed and sexual immorality in the conviction, as historian Edward
Bristow had phrased it, that Jews ‘organized widespread conspiracies to
corrupt and pollute the Christian world.’ In the United States, as in Europe,
many Christians subscribed to the view that Jews were so avaricious
that they would permit neither legalities nor morals to stand in their way
of their accumulation of wealth.” [FRIEDMAN, A., 2000 , p. 141]
Friedman also notes the main reason for eventual Jewish religious activism in some anti-obscenity groups — fears of anti-Semitism:
“Some of New York’s Jewish religious leaders also became more vocal in debates
about obscenity during the 1920s and 1930s. To a greater degree than Protestants and
Catholics, however, their participation came in response as much
to the existence of anti-obscenity campaigns as to the existence of obscenity. Rabbis
entered into anti-obscenity activism in the attempt to counter Christians’
perceptions of Jews as a different, alien, and more primitive people, by
demonstrating that they shared the ‘Christian’ morals of their Protestant
and Catholic brethren and by trying to control the behavior of other Jews.
Prompted by the concern that Christian condemnations of obscenity
might fuel antisemitism (and vice versa), they sometimes joined in such
condemnations in self-defense. For Jews, anti-obscenity activism became a
strategy for protecting the Jewish community by policing it.” [FRIEDMAN, A.,
2000, p. 140-141]
Jewish comic and eventual TV superstar Milton Berle recalls Adler’s brothel:”When I had a night off from the Paradise, John Garfield [the actor, born Julius Garfinkle], who was a good friend, and I went over to Polly Adler’s for dinner. Sure, the world knew Polly as a [brothel] madam, but her friends knew her as an intelligent woman, fun to be with, and a good cook. After dinner, Polly excused herself because she had to make some telephone calls to arrange for girls for her clients. John and I were talking when I said, ‘I don’t know about you, Julie (his real name was Jules), but I feel sort of horny.’ John thought he might feel the same way, so we spoke to Polly about it, and she said she could get us two of her $100 girls — Polly handled only the best — and send them around to wherever we said. John and I went our separate ways to await our deliveries. When the doorbell rang at my place, there was Carole [a woman Berle had been dating and already having an affair with].” [BERLE, M., 1974, p 186]
A little earlier, “the most famous madam in turn-of-the century New York was Rosie Hertz. Saving enough from her own prostitution, she and her husband, Jacob, opened several brothels on the Lower East Side during the 1880s … The epitome of the ‘white slaver,’ Hertz was called by one judge the ‘godmother for prostitutes.’ Another critic considered her ‘as much a public feature of the lower East Side … as the Brooklyn Bridge.” [GILFOYLE, T., 1992, p. 295]
The Associated Press further noted in 2001 that Gold Club owner Steven Kaplan (club manager: Norbert Calder) was
“accused of building a $50 million fortune in part by providing prostitutes
for celebrities. Atlanta’s Gold Club is one of the most profitable nude clubs
in the country, popular among convention-goers and visiting celebrities.
Federal investigators say it is also a high-priced brothel that pumps cash into
the Gambino crime family … [The Federal indictment against Kaplan] says
Kaplan ordered more than 20 beatings of people who did not repay loans
at high rates of interest.” [COURT TV, 4-2001]
The most famous “sex club” in history (prospering in the 1970s and 1980s before the AIDS epidemic) is probably Plato’s Retreat, based in New York City. Its owner was also Jewish: Larry Levenson. As Jewish scholar David Allyn describes it:
“First of all, you have to picture the Ansonia Hotel, which is a late 19th century
wedding-cake of a building in the heart of the upper west side in New York. In
the basement of the Ansonia was Plato’s Retreat, then the world’s most famous
sex club. Men and women would stroll about the Ansonia lobby in nothing but
towels. In the club, they would have sex with possibly a dozen or so people
in a single night. Plato’s Retreat represented the commercial version of what was
happening in people’s apartments and living rooms across the country.”
[BOOKMARK, 2000]
[Chaim Bermant notes a little more about Will Hays and the tearing down of popular mores: “The Jewish dominance of Hollywood did not, of course, pass without comment. By the end of World War I it became clear that the cinema was becoming, if it had not already become, the supreme influence in the cultural life of America, affecting its tastes, its habits, its outlook. There was a growing clamour — to quote the words of one influential pressure group — ‘to rescue the motion pictures from the hands of the Devil and five hundred un-Christian Jews.’ To defend themslves against such criticism, Mayer, Laemmle, Goldwyn and the other un-Christian Jews grouped themselves into the Motion Pictures Prodducers and Distributors of America Inc., and invited Will H. Hayes to preside over them. In doing so they were not merely attempting to buy-off criticism, they were buying respectability.”] [BERMANT, C., 1977, p. 102]
The Fleischer brothers also created Popeye, and many other characters in the 1930s. In fact, “Jews represent 80 percent of the pioneers and leaders of the comic book industry.” [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1979, p. 118] In the molding of popular American culture, Mad magazine (publisher: William Gaines. Editors Al Feldstein and Harvey Kurtzman. All Jewish. Kurtzman formerly worked for the communist paper the Daily Worker.) [HEILBRUNN J., 6-01] Mad’s “most popular artists” were also Jewish: Mort Drucker and Al Jaffee. [GOODWIN, G., 2001, p. 159] Mad magazine was influential in creating a new kind of adolescent. “Americans of Jewish background,” note Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter,
“developed a direct and important influence on adolescents and even pre-
adolescents in othe ways. Starting in the 1950s, Mad Magazine developed
wide popularity among this group, and, as Marie Winn had pointed out,
it played a significant role in ‘the move toward free expression among
children; its relentless exposure of parental dishonesty caused shock
waves and reaction among its young readers.’ From the beginning
Mad‘s editors have been Jewish and, as they themselves would agree,
hostile to the American civic myth.” [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982,
p. 108]
Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel created Superman. Bob Kane created Batman; Stan Lee created Spiderman and The Hulk. Jewish all. [ETKES/STADTMAUER, 1995, p. 128] Stan “the Man” Lee “revived Marvel Comics. He invented the superhero as anti-hero … A 1965 college poll conducted by Esquire … revealed that student radicals ranked Spider-Man and the Hilk alongside the likes of Bob Dylan [also Jewish] and Che Guevara as their favorite revolutionary icons … The outsider hero had arrived as the most celebrated figure in youth culture, and Marvel had him.” [HEILBRUNN, J., 6-01] Head of DC comics (Superman, et al)? Also Jewish: Jenette Kahn (1998).
The Jewish Forward noted the Jewish dimension to the comics world and the blockbuster movie Spiderman in 2002:
“Sure, Spiderman’s great. He’s a nebbish who happens to have super-human
powers. He’s got radioactive blood, he detects trouble with his Spider sense,
he catches thieves just like flies, all while smashing box-office records by taking
in $114 million his first weekend as a movie star. According to Dan Raviv,
however, the real heroes of Marvel Comics are the two Israeli men at the
company’s helm, Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter and Avi Arad. In this real-life drama,
they’re the two little guys who wrestled Marvel away from sparring billionaires,
transforming a bankrupt company into a highly profitable one. Exactly how
two underdogs beat seasoned tycoons at their own game is the kind of fairy
tale that movies are made of, and it makes for interesting reading in Raviv’s
latest book, ‘Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel
Comics Empire and Both Lost’ (Broadway Books). The good guys are the
immigrant owners of a small toy company — albeit one with exclusive rights
to license Marvel toys. And the bad guys are two titans of finance: Ronald
Perelman, the Revlon chief and takeover artist who ran Marvel into bankruptcy,
and corporate predator Carl Icahn [both Perelman and Icahn are also Jewish]
— a model for Michael Douglas’s character in ‘Wall Street’ — who attempted
a hostile takeover. In the end the Israelis, predicting the Marvel superheroes’
ability to jump from comic book pages to the silver screen, unexpectedly seized
control of the company … The story of Marvel is a Jewish one indeed. Founded
in 1939 by Martin Goodman, Marvel was a part of the so-called “golden age”
of comics, when hordes of young Jewish writers and artists, most of them
struggling immigrants’ sons, created armies of imaginary superheroes like
Superman and Captain America, whose mission was to wage war against Nazis
and their ilk. At Marvel in particular, the key players throughout the decades,
including Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Lieber — better known as Jack Kirby
and Stan Lee, the creators of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man in the early 1960s
— have been almost exclusively Jewish.” [KEYS, L., 5-10-2002]
Cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Al Capp (the author of L’il Abner; Capp’s original name was Alfred Gerald Caplin), Herblock (Herb Bloch), Ralph Bakshi, Rube Goldberg, illustrator Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, Nicole Hollander, and many others are also Jewish. Isador (Fritz)Freleng was the “creator of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety Pie, Speedy Gonzalez, and the Pink Panther.” [ETKES/STADTMAUER, 1995, p. 128] “To my mind,” says Stan Sulkes, echoing legend about Jewish history, “no one is more Jewish than Bugs Bunny. Or more resourceful. Surrounded by enemies, he survived by his wits, thwarting all the Elmer Fudds of this world unwilling to let him live in peace. Happily, I’m not alone in that view. Another transplanted New Yorker recognizes Bugs’ ethnicity too. ‘It was no accident,’ observes David Gilner, director of Libraries for Hebrew Union College, ‘that his animator was Fritz Feleng, and his voice supplied by Mel Blanc — both of whom were Jewish.” [SULKES, S., 4-21-97]
A former major in the Israeli army reserves, Ranan Lurie (now living in the United States) is the “world’s most syndicated political cartoonist;” he is featured in 106 countries and 1,100 newspapers. [LIEBENSON, p. 13CN, 21] Betty Cohen even is president today of the Cartoon Network, the cable TV channel that has 60 million subscribers in 144 countries throughout the world. [POLLAK, S., 1-7-00]
Cartoonist Albert Hirschfeld (who once worked for the communist magazine The Masses) has appeared, for over seven decades, “frequently and prominently on the pages of the New York Times. He has published several cofee-table volumes, and a Manhattan gallery, Margo Feiden, deals exclusively with his drawings and limited edition prints … Twice during the 1990s he received commissions for postage stamps.” Will Eisner “made an important name for himself both as the father of his own comic strip and as developer of ‘instructional’ comics.” His company, American Visuals, has contracted for organizations as diverse as the Girl Scouts and the American Dental Association. [GOODWIN, G., 2001, p. 151, 154]In the 1950s, the Jewish-dominated comic book industry raised familiar issues — public concern that they were influential in the degradation of popular morals and values. In 1955-56 the U.S. Senate held investigations into the matter, releasing a report entitled “Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency.” The Senate document noted that
“on first impression, the present comic book industry would seem to comprise
many different publishing firms with no apparent relationship to one another … On
closer scruutiny, however it is found that the picture is entirely different … The
676 comic book titles [that were examined] are published by 111 companies
owned by only 121 persons or families in addition to 1 corporation … The
majority of the publishers maintain editorial offices in New York City.”
[U.S. Senate, 1955-56]
Subsections of the report included “Techniques of Crime Taught by Crime and Horror Comics,” “Criminal Careers as Glamorous in Crime and Horror Comic Books, and “Defenders of Law and Order [Are] Frequently Represented as All Powerful Beings Who Kill and Commit Other Crimes to Defend ‘Justice.'” Jewish comic book entrepreneurs who are singled out by the report include direct-mail advertiser Samuel Roth “who has for many years been engaged in using the mail to advertise lewd and lascivious material,” and Alex Segal who “testifed that ‘by mistake’ one of his trays of addressograph plates bearing the names of 400 children was routed to the publisher of sex literature.” In the listings of owners and distributors of comic book businesses, among the best known are Marvel Comic group (owners: Martin and Jean Goodman) and Archie Comic Group (owners: Maurice Coyne, John Goldwater, and Lewis H. Silberkleit). [U.S. SENATE, 1955-56]
Mad magazine’s William Gaines also produced “the greatest of the under-the-covers-with-a-flashlight genre.” These comics, featuring new explorations of gore, include Tales from the Crypt, Weird Science, Shock Suspensestories, Frontline Combat,
“and a few other titles [that] made the struggling company profitable and Gaines a
fully employed pop culture mentor of the first magnitude. But this upstart Jewish
kid was soon put out of business by a crusading psychiatrist from the old country,
a nasty bunch of Senators, and a coalition of PTA and American Legion, sheriffs
and bishops, editors and aldermen. The Comics Code that was created to deflect
the heat couldn’t help Gaines. The slander was so thorough that his books were
returned unopened by retailers even after the Code seal was applied. By the end
of 1954, after just a four year run, the EC [Gaines’ company] comics were all gone,
except for the satirical Mad.” [TEBBEL, J., 1999]
As Jacob Heilbrunn notes, in a review of a book about comic books by scholar Bradford W. Wright,
“EC comics offered something of a precursor to the upheaval of the 1960s,
questioning authority before it became fashionable to question anything. In perhaps
the most notorious panel printed by EC comics, a murderous baseball team
plays a midnight game with the limbs and entrails of a victim. Little was left to the
imagination … Another issue depicted a man hodling a bloody ax in one hand and a
woman’s severed head in the other. ‘Corpses in various states of decay and reanimation,’
Wright says, ‘regularly adorned the covers.’ ‘A commercial expression of cultural
defiance ,’ he writes, ‘EC brilliantly perceived the alienated generation among
young people and recognized youth dissatisfaction as a marketable commodity.’
The reaction came quickly. By 1948, Catholic schools were conducting bonfires
of comic books … Soon enough, William M. Gaines, the publisher of EC, found
himself facing off against a Senate investigative committtee headed by Estes
Kefauver. It was a rout. Kefauver delcared that a panel in the July issue ‘seems
to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar.
Is that in good taste?’ ‘I think so,’ was all Gaines could answer.” [HEIBRUNN, J.,
6-01]
As Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman notes: “David Hebditch and Nick Anning, researching the pornography business in the mid-1980s, report that ‘some industry insiders claim that porn in the United States is essentially a Jewish business.'” “If this is so,” adds Gertzman, with a little spin control for Jewish economic endeavors, “it is because Jews have for a very long time cultivated the temperament and talents of the middlemen, and they are proud of these abilities.” [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 289]
were mailed from the conservative Pennsylvania Dutch area: GERTZMAN,
J., 2000, p. 287] ]; publisher Edward Mishkin; Jack Valenti,
Samuel Roth is noteworthy in the pornography trade for many reasons. Although some might portray him as a free speech hero, he pirated editions of both James Joyce’s Ulysses and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, to the protest of both the Joyce and Lawrence estates. Imprisoned twice, 1937-1939 and 1957-61, Roth was labeled “the dirtiest pig in the world” and “the louse of Lewisburg [prison]” [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 219] Roth in 1936 “received the most severe prison sentence possible under the law for brazenly using the Postal Service to distribute flagrantly obscene books … Roth was the most often incarcerated, the most feckless, and quite likely the most resourceful booklegger of his time, challenging moral and legal authorities with a quixotic bravado.” [GERTZMAN, J., 1999, p. 22] Other “chief mail-order erotica dealers were Esar Levine and Benjamin Rebhuhn.” [GERTZMAN, J., p. 26] Both served prison terms on obscenity charges. “Great ‘art erotica’ suppliers” included Jake Zeitlin, Harry F. Marks, Ben Abramson, and David Moss. [GERTZMAN, J., 1999, p. 61] Alleged Jewish porn pushers at a Congressional investigation of the New York pornography system included Irving Klaw (“self-styled King of the Pin-ups”), Edward Mishkin, and Abraham Rubin. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 278] Martin Kamin was a “supplier of of borderline erotica.” [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 177] Other “offenders” in the erotica trade included Earl Marks, Solomon Malkin, Alex Field, Henry Klein, Raymond Thomson, Al Picker, Joseph Seiffer, Max Gottschalk, and David Moss. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 31] Jewish erotica book publishers included William Faro, Panurge, Falstaff (“Falstaff gave special prominence to the work of Iwan Bloch,” also Jewish, “the father of sexology”) [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 193], Robin Hood House, the American Anthropological Society, American Ethnological Press, Jul-Mar, Julian, Risus, Biblion Balzac, Pickwick, Parnassus Book Shops, Abbey, Allied Book, Emerson, Pioneer and Franklin. [GERTZMAN, J., 2000, p. 192-193]
Jewish scholar Jay Gertzman, whose own uncle’s bookshop was once raided in Philadelphia, [GERTZMAN, J., p. 287] notes that Jews built the “erotica” book business in New York (the heart of American publishing) and that there was an
“absence of any single ethnic group of erotica dealers in New York City prior to
the Jewish presence … In several cases, the erotica dealer’s relatives were business
partners. One could trust uncles and brothers, and possibly no one else … The
underground printing of many banned erotic classics … was the work of two brothers,
Adolph and Rudolph Loewinger; another pair, David and Jacob Brotman, was
responsible for a large part of the lubricious under-the-counter pamphlets and
paper-bound books [moral watchdog groups] decried as flagitious. Jack Brussel, Sam
Roth’s partner at the start of the latter’s career, enlisted the aid of his first wife …
Benjamin Rebhuhn’s office manager was his nephew, and his wife was listed as
director of the Falstaff Press Inc. Esar Levine and his brother Benjamin, close friends
of the Rebhuhns, were editor and business manager, respectively, of the Panurge
Press.” [GERTZMAN, J., p. 29, p. 30]
By 1939, according to a major anti-smut organization, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 28 of 32 people arrested that year in New York City for obscenity-related law-breaking were Jewish (the number may have been even higher: two of the 32 did not have their religion/ethnicity listed. [These figures are cited by Gertzman, who accepts them as credible. [GETZMAN, J., 2000, p. 29]
As Gertzman notes, in classical Jewish outsider-insider terms,
“Erotica dealers formed a tight-knit, and therefore persistent, resourceful, and
resilently successful entity. They were easy to stigmatize as a group [by non-Jews]
set apart from the majority, even if they had the same goals and methods of doing
business as general book dealers. In New York at least, during the period from
1880 to 1940, many were members of Jewish immigrant families. Jewish erotica
dealers seem to have become prominent in the field soon after the eastern
European immigrants began arriving in record numbers in 1880.”
[GERTZMAN, J., p. 28]
The Jerusalem Post concluded a review of Gertzman’s book about the Jewish dominated smut-trade like this:
“Gertzman himself acknowledges towards the end of his book that his uncle
once ran the most notorious ‘dirty bookshop’ in Philadelphia. For that
matter, Sam Roth’s grandson is none other than Prof. James Kugel, the eminent
Bible scholar at Harvard University. If there’s a more complicated and
surprising tribe on earth, I’ve yet to hear about it.” [NESVISKY, M., 3-9-00]
There are many other Jewish public figures, in various fields, that might merit addition to a Luke Ford-like list of Jewish assault upon dominant culture morality. In literature, homosexual Allen Ginsberg’s 1950s-era obscenity trial in San Francisco about his poem “Howl” (another landmark in popular culture) escalated him thereafter to fame. As Ginsberg’s Jewish ideological nemesis, “neo-Conservative” Norman Podhoretz, notes:
“As the 60’s wore on, I came more and more to see all this [hippie era] as a
new kind of plague … I ended with a lament for the victims it had claimed
among the ‘especially vulnerable’ young … [There were] shades of antinomian propaganda
Ginsberg had done as much as anyone else in America to spread … Ginsberg
was also fulsomely praised as a pioneer of the gay-rights movement, which indeed
he was. Yet so far as I have been able to determine, no one thought to draw
a connection between the emergence of AIDS and the rampant homosexual
promiscuity promoted by Ginsberg (with buggery as an especially ‘joyful’
feature that is described in loving detail in poem after pornographic — yes,
pornographic — poem. And I could find only one mention (in the Weekly
Standard) of Ginsberg’s active sponsorship of the abominable North
American Man Boy Alliance (NAMBLA), an organization devoted to the
legalization of homosexual pedophilia. (‘I don’t know exactly how to define
what’s underage,’ he once explained, quickly adding that he himself had ‘never
made it with anyone under fifteen.’)” [PODHORETZ, N., 2000]
The 1966 (Jewish comedian) Lenny Bruce trial was also one of the trials of the 20th century. [GOODWIN, E., 1995, p. 301] He and Cafe Au Go Go owner Howard Solomon were eventually found guilty of obscenity. Bruce’s “chief attorney, Efraim London, [was] a veteran of more than 250 censorship and obscenity cases … The verdict seemed to unhinge Bruce. He became obsessed with appellate litigation. Those legal wheels were still grinding when, on August 3, 1966, he was found dead in his Hollywood home, a hypodermic syringe nearby. An autopsy revealed the presence of morphine. Death was recorded as accidental.” [KNAPPMAN, E., 1995, p. 301-304]
A good friend of Lenny Bruce was Paul Krassner, editor of the satire magazine, The Realist, self-described as “the hippest magazine in America.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 44] Krassner was also Jewish. Another Jewish close friend, Lyle Stuart (born Lionel Simon) was editor of “an anti-censorship tabloid called Expose … Lyle became my media mentor and my unrelenting guru.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 32] Krassner’s autobiography explores his adventures and influence in the so-called 1960s-born “counterculture.” Krassner also began writing a column for Stuart’s magazine called The Independent, which also featured the sexual works of Albert Ellis, eventually anthologized as Sex Without Guilt. [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 32] “When I had been working for Lyle [Stuart],” says Krassner, “Ralph Ginzburg was preparing An Unhurried View of Erotica. I recommended that Lyle turn down the opportunity to be copublishers, which he did. Nevertheless, he guided Ginzburg through the book’s publication — finding him a typesetter, a printer, a distributor, a mailing house, and when the Post Office seized Ginzburg’s mailing piece, Lyle sent attorney Martin Scheiman to Washington to obtain release of the mailing.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 97] (This ring of publishers/writers also includes William Gaines, also Jewish, head of a comic book dynasty [see later discussions of him and Mad magazine, and the U.S. Senate attacks upon his products’ content.)
“An Italian magazine, Playman, had published full frontal nude photos of Jacqueline Kennedy taken on a Greek island by the grace of a telephonto lens. Lyle Stuart brought the issue from Italy and gave it to Al Goldstein, who reprinted the photos in his raunchy tabloid, Screw. Then Larry Flynt published a five-page spread in Hustler.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993,p. 237] Krassner is proud enough of his following observation, which he shared with Lenny Bruce and in his autobiography: “One time we were walking around and passed a newstand where, on the cover of Newsweek, there was a photo of Caroline Kennedy, the president’s young daughter. I commented: ‘She probably plays with herself with a bobby pin.’ ‘What a great image,’ Lenny said. ‘Can I have that [for my comedy routine]?'” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 68]
Krassner notes the tenor of The Realist, the magazine he ran and founded: “Campus bookstores were banning The Realist. Students whose parents had burned their issues often wrote in for replacement copies, but I was publishing material that was bound to offend. For example, Madalyn Murray was a militant atheist who was challenging the constitutionality of compulsary Bible reading in pubic schools, and she concluded her article: ‘I feel that Jesus Christ is at most a myth, and if he wasn’t, the least he was, was a bastard, and that the Virgin Mary obviously played around as much as I did, and certainly I feel she would be capable of orgasm.'” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 50]
Krassner eventually moderated Playboy magazine’s “Playboy Panel.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 60] Despite accepting the Feminist Party Media Workshop Award in 1974 [p. 228] as publisher of The Realist, he eventually became publisher of Larry Flynt’s Hustler pornography magazine. Krassner [with Hustler editor Bruce David] presided over a controversial Hustler cover that shows “a woman’s body being stuffed into a meat grinder upside, down, so that only her legs were still showing … The cover was destined to become an unofficial symbol of male oppression at feminist rallies. In fact, when I attended a feminist conference with an old friend, Jane Bode — whose book on rape, Fighting Back, had just been published — she asked me to walk in separately from her and we would meet later … [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 246] … My main editorial regret [as publisher at Hustler] was that I hadn’t been able to publish that ‘Jesus and the Adulteress’ photo spread. The nearly life-size poster which was supposed to be included as a pull-out centerfold would instead remain on my wall as a memento of those six months at Hustler. There was Jesus, a generic barbershop-calendar Jesus, looking reverently toward the sky as he covered up the prone Adulteress. Her head was bleeding from stones that had been cast upon her. And she was showing pink. Sweet, shocking, vulneable pink … Although Hustler had been accused of exploiting women, actually it was guilty of exploiting men’s addiction to pornography.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 250]
Among the many articles Krassner oversaw during his time at Hustler was Marilyn Katz’s “abortion rights” discussion. “In another building a few blocks away, [his own] The Realist shared offices with Flynt’s conspiracy researchers, Mark Lane and Donald Freed.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 239, 240]
In the early years of the twentieth century, warring against Victorian era morality, Jewish “anarchist Emma Goldman also fostered a new permissiveness; she toured the country, lecturing on subjects as ‘The Limitation of Offspring’ and “Is Man a Varietiest or a Monogamist?’ She challenged feminists who advanced chastity, insisting that liberated women faced more danger from too little sexual experience than they did from too much.” [LEIDER, E.M., p. 49] In the early 1890s, Goldman “became the lover of [Alexander] Berkman and after a while, of his artist friend, Fedya, as well. The three lived communally… Even certain radicals found Emma’s honesty on matters of sex hard to tolerate.” [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10, 11] Goldman even once attempted to work as a prostitute to raise the money to buy a gun for an assassination. [SHULMAN, A., 1970, p. 10]
Speaking of prostitutes, perhaps the most influential as the most “famous prostitute in the world” is Xaviera Hollander, whose 1971 book The Happy Hooker was a best-seller. (Hollander’s “first fiance’s name was Frank Apfelbaum … he transformed himself into Frank Allen.”) [HOLLANDER, X., 2000, p. 39] A daughter of a Holocaust survivor/Dutch psychiatrist, it was her father “who instilled in her a love of Yiddishkeit and a passion for Jewish culture.” “She began running a high-end brothel out of a brownstone on the Upper East Side,” notes the Jewish ethnic magazine, Moment,
“where her clients included a man who asked a lot of questions, soon arousing
Hollander’s suspicion. The man turned out to be Eric Kohn, a Jewish journalist
researching a book. The two decided to collaborate on an autobiographical
account of Hollander’s life, and one year later The Happy Hooker exploded onto the
the scene — eventually selling 16 million copies … Addicted to diet pills and unable
to control her kleptomania (‘I got orgasms from stealing,’ she says), she was
arrested for stealing a $40 nightgown. That theft, coupled with the fact that she was
a confessed crinial in the States, led her to eventual deportation and divorce …
Businessman Arnold Blitz, a friend of Hollander’s, has this to say: ‘Xaviera
is not an ambassador for Jewish culture — but for Jewishness.” [LIPKIN, L.,
FEB 2001]
In 1924, two eighteen-year-old men from very affluent families in Chicago, Nathan Leopold and “his friend and lover Richard Loeb,” made international news for what was then popularized by its sensationalism as the “crime of the century.” Psychiatrist David Abrahamsen notes that the men
“kidnapped fourteen-year old Bobby Franks, and Loeb beat him to death. They
stripped the body from the waist down, and although the evidence is inconclusive,
one or both of them probably performed a sexual act on it … In the perspective
of all that has happend since the 1920s, the murder of Bobby Franks hardly
qualifies as the crime of the century, as it was seen then. But at that time the brutality
and senselessness of the act exploded like a bomb in the public consciousness. People
began to realize that society was changing in some frightening way. The youth
of the two murderers (this was the beginning of the tidal wave that came to be
called juvenile delinquency), the sexual undercurrent of their crime and the fact
that theirs was the first major trial to use the testimony of psychiatrists on
the background and state of mind of a defendant made an indelible
impression on the millions who followed the sensational case in the newspapers.”
[ABRAHAMSEN, D., 1983, p. 41-42]
“openly gay sexologist, who founded a famed Berlin institute that studied sexual
behavior and sold sex aids in its gift shop, [and] embodied the Nazi’s most-despised
attributes … [The] founding of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee [is]
believed to be the first organization devoted to the legal rights of homosexuals and
other sexual minorities … ‘In a sense, he was the founder of gay liberation as a kind of
political, legal movement,’ [says Jewish scholar David] Biale, ‘He’s a very
important figure in gay history’ …In 1919 … Hirschfeld established his Institute
and Museum of Sexology. A former mansion was divided into consulting offices,
study rooms, laboratories and a large museum devoted to every aspect of human
sexuality, especially the ‘Derangements of the Sexual Instinct’ … [Some visitors]
left accounts of the strange exhibits and vast array of erotic artifacts and aphrodisiacs
found in one of Berlin’s most curious atttractions. The institute was one of the first
cultural organizations liquidated by the Nazis, who destroyed the building and its
contents.” [KATZ, L., 6-6-97]
as the hero of the avant-garde.” [LAPIN, D., 1999, p. 2]
Such Jewish influence is common in popular culture. In 1995 Jewish fashion media mogul Calvin Klein came under fire by critics who compared his clothing “ads to child pornography.” [GIROUX, p. 16-17] The Israeli Nakash brother, who own the Jordache jeans company, pushed daring new levels of “lewd” imagery in their own ad campaign. [BYRON, p. 34-35] The Jewish Bulletin had a feature on famous Jewish homosexual fashion mogul Isaac Mizrahi in 1998:
“Viewers saw little-known sides of Mizrahi in ‘Unzipped,’ the 1995 documentary
about him. Filmmaker Douglas Keeve was, at the time, in a relationship with the
designer. In one scene, Mizrahi put a sheer scrim behind the catwalk and had
models change their outfits in full view of the audience. That kind of chutzpah
gave viewers insight into his bold personality … ‘To this day the designer
remains active in Jewish charities. ‘I do what I can,’ he says. ‘I’m a zealot, a
real lover of the Jewish faith.” [SCHLEIER, C., 1-2-98]
Then there is Jewish fashion photographer Helmut Newton. “It is impossible to deny the impact he has made,” noted England’s The Independent in 2001,
“on fashion photography in particular … To radical feminists, Newton is the
antichrist. This is the man who photographed a woman on all fours with a saddle
on her back, and another sitting on her underwear or an unmade bed, with a gun
in her mouth … Newton’s vision is fuelled by sex, status, power and, above all,
voyeurism … Small wonder, then, that much of the photographer’s most successful
imagery has become far more famous than the garments he has chosen
to photograph … Newton’s influence is everywhere … In the Sixties and Seventies,
Newton’s decadent vision may have been labelled ‘porno chic,’ but today the rest
of the world has finally caught up with him and it’s just plain chic. There is
barely a stylist, photographer or designer working in fashion today who can
fail to acknowledge Newton as an influence … Helmut Newton was born to
middle-class Jewish parents in Weimar Berlin in 1920, and the decadent spirit of that
place at that time is imprinted on his work … Accusations of misogyny are still
constantly made against Newton’s work.” [FRANKEL, S., 5-9-01]
In 2001 Rabbi Ira Korff complained that “the suggestiveness in the media these days is increasingly irresponsible — it’s really pornography — and its been bothering me more and more.” Korff should know what he’s talking about. He is the former president of National Amusements Inc., which owns Viacom, the second-largest media conglommerate on earth (controlled by Jewish mogul Sumner Redstone). “Korff,” notes the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “says the worst purveyor of violence and profanity on TV is Music Television (MTV,) which is owned by Viacom. But he adds, ‘I have no interest in attacking Viacom, and MTV is an ethically run business.’ After all, much of his own wealth was made while serving as president and later consultant to National Amusements Inc.” [HAUSMAN, T., 6-22-01]
Arnold Shaw notes some 1960s-era New York Jewish influence in the rock music world:
“The Fugs, a New York city group led by Tuli Kuperberg and Ed Sanders, are
generally regarded as the first underground group. Political and pornographic …
they worked at shocking and repelling … They received virtually no airplay, since
disk jockeys woried that the pronunciation of their name would be offensive.
Although appearances frequently prompted people to walk out on them,
they did secure a recording contract … [including Golden Filth] … With a
name taken from a pornographic paperback, the Velvet Underground helped
make underground Rock largely a New York phenomenon. Led by Lou Reed
[also Jewish] (b. early 1940), the group became part of Andy Warhol’s
Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia show, in 1966. The subject of Reed’s
songs eliminated airplay for the records they made: heroin, in ‘I’m Waiting
for the Man’; cocaine, in ‘Run, Run, Run’; sado-masochism, in ‘Venus in Furs’;
and transvestitism, lesbianism, and homosexuality in other songs.” [SHAW, A.,
1982, p. 396]
From France, singer Sergio Gainsbourg [born Lucien Ginzburg]
“is still most famous in Britain for his number one ‘Je t’aime moi non plus‘: the
scandalous anthem which was in the British charts 30 years ago. He and
[actress Jane] Birkin simulated their lovemaking so effectively that the
single was banned by the BBC and formally condemned by the Vatican
…Yet Gainsbourg is the greatest popular musician France has ever produced …
Echoes ofhis favourite technique, of murmuring profanities against
a delicate and beautiful harmony, can be heard in many contemporary
records, not least the later work of Leonard Cohen … Towards the end of his
life, the singer’s media apparances beame ritual provocations: in one
television broadcast, he subjected a veteran paratrooper — horrified
by Gainsbourg’s dub version of the Marseillaise — to a torrent of
obscenities, pausing only occasionally, to inflate condoms. On another notorious
live show, sharing a platform with a young Whitney Houston, Gainsbourg,
then 58, turned to the presenter Michel Drucker and declared, in English,
‘I want to fuck her.'” [CHALMERS, R., 1-4-00]
“The rest of the country,” once joked Jewish comedian Woody Allen, “thinks of us [New Yorkers] as homosexual Jewish communist pornographers. I think of us that way, and I live here.” [BROWN, A., 11-2-97] When Jewish White House intern Monica Lewinsky became sexually involved with President Bill Clinton, she shared the following joke to him: “Why do Jewish men like to watch pornos backwards? So that they can watch the prostitute give back the money.” [FORWARD, 10-23-98, p. 1] “I’m such a sex machine,” begins controverial radio talk show host Howard Stern’s autobiography, ” I could take a piece of wood and turn it into something erotic, something sensual, something perverse.” [STERN, H., 1995, p. 3]
Despite Jewish pre-eminence in the porno world, it’s not kosher to face this issue squarely. So how did feminist Susan Griffin examine — like so many – the issue of Jews and pornography, in her 1981 book Pornography and Silence? She didn’t mention them at all, except as a forum for railing at length about Jews as victims of “anti-Semitic” stereotypes, and forcing a link between sexual pornography and anti-Jewish hostility (both from the same reservoirs of sick minds). “And yet it is precisely because of the madness of the anti-Semitic or pornographic idea,” she declares,
“and precisely because it is a delusion, that it must assault reality and try to
change it. A man ‘believes’ in anti-Semitic propaganda, or the pornographic
ideology, because the illness of his mind REQUIRES that he believe these ideas
to be true. Yet illness is of its very nature resistant. Thus, when a madman is
told that he does not see the world correctly, and when he is given evidence
against his prejudices, he will refuse to see the truth, and he will even distort this
evidence to support his own delusion. But most significantly, he will even change
reality so it supports his mad idea of the world. This is what anti-Semitism and
pornography requires of their believers. THE DELUDED MIND MUST TRY TO
REMAKE THE WORLD AFTER AN ILLUSION.” [author’s emphasis] [GRIFFIN,
S., 1981, p. 121]
Griffin has more to say about this subject, using the innocense of Jews as an attack upon the pornographic (anti-Semitic) mind:
“The same mind [of Adolf Hitler] that dreamed of itself as the bearer of culture
conceived that its nemesis, the destroyer of culture, was the Jew. As a shadow
to the fantasy of Aryan dominance, the anti-Semite invented an enemy of awesome
proportions. In the fabricated document known as ‘The Protocols of the Elders of
Zion,’ the anti-Semite imagined a congregation of Jews who meet in a cemetery to
plan the death of Aryan culture. Of course, a pornographic image lies at the center
of this imagined plan. Thus the imagined Jews in the imagined cemetery contrive a
lurid plot to ‘demand marriage between Jews and Christians.’ Together they enjoy the
idea of defiling Gentile women. And as the meeting adjourns, a huge and shapeless
golden calf emerges from the tomb to symbolize the materiality of the Jew, just as
the fear of matter and mortality have emerged from the mind the anti-Semite in this
fantasy of evil power.” [GRIFFIN, S., 1981, p. 175]
Even Judy Blume, a well-known Jewish writer of children’s books, is “routinely” listed among America’s “most censored U.S. authors” for testing moral boundaries. Outraged parents continually raise complaint. In 1997 alone, there were nine efforts to take her books for children off library shelves, particularly for undercurrent sexual themes. Blume’s juvenile book Deenie, for example, addresses masturbation, and Forever includes a penis named Ralph. [WOULFE, M., 7-20-98; JENKINS, E., 4-13-99, p. 134] Famous Jewish novelist Judith Krantz notes that “My most famous piece [while a writer for Cosmopolitan], about which I’m still asked, was called ‘The Myth of Multiple the Orgasm,’ inspired by a book by a general practitioner Dr. Rubin, who insisted that any woman who settled for less than fifty orgasms during a single sexual session was being cheated.” [KRANTZ, J., 2000, p. 236]
What about Anton LeVay’s influence upon modern morals, particularly in attracting alienated youth? LeVay, born Howard Stanton Levey, and known as the “Black Pope,” founded the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 and was bathed with media attention. Creating a web of lies about himself, “‘he has constructed,’ noted one reporter, ‘a personal history untruthful in every fact that can be verified.'” [GRACE, K., 7-28-97] “‘His Satanist’s Bible’ (1967) proposed a sub-Nietschean philosophy wherein might equals right, and immediate self-gratification constitutes the chief duty of man. ‘Be simply animal man,’ the Satanist’s Bible instructs, ‘hate your enemies, and if someone smites you, smash him … Susie Atkins, one of [Charles] Manson’s knife-wielding groupies, blames La Vey for her descent into depravity and murder.” [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 11-11-97, p. 25] More than a million copies of Levey’s books have been printed. [LOS ANGELES TIMES, 11-8-97, p. 8]
LeVay, who died in 1997, notes the Church of Satan’s web site, was “a self-loathing man of Jewish descent who embraced fascism toward the end of his life.” [CHURCH OF SATAN/1] His own daughter, Zeena, notes that he “routinely beat and abused those of his female disciples with whom he had sex, forcing them into prostitution as part of his ‘Satanic counseling’ and collected their earnings. In 1986 [Levey] was a passsive witness to the sexual molestation of his own grandson by a long time friend.” [CHURCH OF SATAN/2]
The traditional Jewish animosity towards Christianity is reflected by Levey in almost cartoon form. Levey’s Church of Satan teachings are of course antithetical to those of Christianity. “Behold the crucifix,” wrote Levey, “what does it symbolize? Pallid incompetence hanging on a tree … [Levey’s book] advocates ritual masturbation, rites ‘to summon one for lustful purposes or establish a sexually gratifying situation,’ as well as rites ‘to cause the destruction of an enemy'” [HARPUR, T., 3-5-97, p. A7] “For more than a decade,” notes the St. Louis Post Dispatch, in evaluating Levey’s influence,
“scholars have noted a growing interest in Christianity’s archenemy of goodness.
The Reverend Richard Woods, a Dominican who relates theoogy to popular
culture, traces the upward curve [of interest in Satanism] from 1966, the year
that Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan made its debut in San Francisco. The
same year brought the release of Rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levine’s movie about
about a woman who gave birth to the devils’ child. In the early 1970s, the book
and movie ‘The Exorcist’ titillated millions.” [The film The Exorcist was
directed by William Friedkin, also Jewish]. “[SCHJAEFFER, P., 2-5-89]
As Earl Grollman has observed:
“Although [Sigmund] Freud was considered a non-believer [of Judaism] and even
stated his disavowals of the rituals and rites, he did feel that he retained the best
attributes of the faith. Numerous biographers noted that his home life was warm and
loving, that learning occupied and extremely high priority and that he had a strong
feeling of identification with other Jews. Even his doctrine concerning the powerful
drive of sexual urges grew out of Freud’s interpretation of the basic ingredients of
Jewishness.” [Grollman, E., 1965, p. xxv]
In 2001, the Jewish Bulletin noted the case of Rabbi Leslie Alexander who
“has made it her mission to turn Jews on … ‘Judaism is about giving pleasure
to one another and having no qualms or inhibitions about it … When a Jew goes
before God, they are going to have to answer for every pleasure they didn’t take
We, as American Jews, are saddled with a Christian sexual perspective which
doesn’t at all reflect Jewish ideas. We have all this moral baggage about who we are
sexually; none of that is Jewish … We spend so muuc time as a society trying to
free ourselves from sexual mores. If we had just learned from our own tradition, we
wouldn’t have to try …The Jewish texts are very blunt and direct [about sex] …
Teaching it is lots of fun. My students usually say, ‘Whoa! They really said that?”
[GOLDSMITH, A., 11-23-01]
“Alexander,” notes the Bulletin, “remembered once reading a text in which a rabbi is telling a group of other
rabbis about the various things he would consider sexual perversions. ‘And
then, at the end of his speech the rest of the rabbis told him he was wrong’ ….
In addition to loving the ‘racy’ nature of the subject, Alexander enjoyed teaching
about Jewish sexuality because it’s a way to pique people’s interest in Judaism.”
[GOLDSMITH, A., 11-23-01
“Robin was part of an entire group of young privileged hookers Alex had dubbed
‘the JAP [Jewish American Princess] Pack.’ They loved nightclubs, Porsches,
Versace, and coke, mostly went to UCLA on and off, hated the idea of working
at a real job, and could only soak their parents for so much.”] ADAMS, A., 1993,
p. 55]
In 2001, a Jewish community in England made the news when a “stag night with three strippers performing ‘sexually explicit acts'” was held at a synagogue (Finchley Synagogue’s Kinloss Suite) … Some of the funds raised was supposed to be for a Jewish charity. [ZERDIN, J., 2-9-01]
Jewish American Paul Cowan noted this anecdote about looking for his Jewish identity in Israel in 1982:
“I had an enemy in Beersheba, a man named Itzhak, the city’s leading stud.
He’d been a gigolo on the French Riviera, had run drugs from Israel to Syria,
and now owned his own bar, a place called the Barsheba, where you could often
find the sort of brawls that seemed so exciting in American Westerns. He was
always stealing women. I had a particular grudge against him because he had
seduced Pam, an Englishwoman I was dating, made her a hostess at his bar,
and had then become her part-time pimp.” [COWAN, P., 1982, p. 108]
[See also “White Slavery” chapter]In 2001, Israel’s state-run television station elicited outrage from women’s groups when it broadcast “a video clip of an attacker beating a naked woman whom he had allegedly raped … The president of the Na’amat women’s organization … said in a a letter .. that she hoped [the station would not] compete for ratings through the use of violence and pornography.” [HAAS, D., 2-16-01, p. 2] In 2000, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi claimed that “film producers [in Israel] are tracking down actors who look like current Egyptian stars, and using them to shoot porn flicks in Israel. The films are then imported to Egypt and sctreened for paying customers … [Film actress] Yusra Alawi told reporters she is asking her attorney to obtain copies of the films and to pursue legal action against those reponsible.” [BOULWARE, J., 6-7-00]
At his Internet web site, Ford elaborates in a section entitled Jews. “Secular Jews,” he writes,
“play a disproportionate role throughout the sex industry … Leading modern
Jewish pornographers include Ron Braverman, John Bone, Wesley Emerson,
Paul Fishbein, Herbert Feinberg AKA Mickey Fine, Hank Weinstein, Lenny
Friedlander, Bobby Hollander, Rubin Gottesman, Fred Hirsch and his
children Steve and Marci, Paul ‘Norman’ Apstein, Steve Orenstein, Jack
Richmond (Legend CEO), Theodore Rothstein, Reuben and David
Sturman, Ron Sullivan, Jerome Tanner, Armand Weston, Sam and
Mitch (Spinelli). Jews accounted for most of the leading male performers of
1970s and ’80s. Hebrew studs include Buck Adams, Bobby Astyr (Bobby
Charles), R. Bolla (Robert Kerman), Jerry Butler (Paul Siderman),
Seymore Butts (Adam Glasser), Roger Caine (Al Levitsky), David
Christopher (Bernie Cohen), Steve Drake, Jesse Eastern, Jamie
Gillis (Jamie Gurman), Ron Jeremy (Hyatt), Michael Knight, William
Margold, Ashley Moore (Steve Tucker), David Morris, George Payne,
Ed Powers (Mark Arnold aka Mark Krinski), Harry Reems (Herbertg
Streicher), David Ruby, Herschel Savage (Harvey Cowen), Carter
Stevens (Mal Warub), Marc Stevens, Paul Thomas (Phil Tobias), Marc
Wallice (Marc Goldberg) Randy West (Andy Abrams) and Jack
Wrangler … Jewish female performers include Avalon, Jenny Baxter
(Jenny Wexler), Busty Belle (Tracy Praeger), Chelsea Blake, Tiffany Blake,
Bunny Bleu (Kim Warner), J. R. Carrington, Lee Carroll (Leslie Barris),
Blair Castle/Brookle Fields (Allison Shandibal), Courtney/Natasha/Eden
(Natasha Zimmerman), Daphne (Daphne Franks), Barbara Dare (Stacy
Mitnick), April Diamond, Jeana Fine, Alexis Gold, Terri Hall, Heather
Hart, Nina Hartley (Hartman), C. J. Laing (Wendy Miller), Frankie
Leigh (Cynthia Hope Geller), Gloria Leonard, Traci Lords (Nora Louise
Kuzma), Amber Lynn, Tonisha Mills, Melissa Monete, Susan Nero,
Scarlett O. (Catherine Goldberg), Tawny Pearl (Susan Pearlman), Nine
Preta, Tracey Prince, Raylene, Janey Robbins (Robin Lieberman), Mila
Shegol, Alexandra Silk, Susan Sloan, Annie Sprinkle (Ellen Steinberg),
Karen Summer (Dana Alper), Cindy West, Zara Whites (Amy Koolman),
and Ona Zee (Ona Simms) … Why do Jews dominate porn?” [lukeford.com]
“[Jewish] pornographer Seymour Butts,” says Ford,
“attributes the large number of Jews in porn to the desire for profits. Jews
gravitate towards money … If four people compete for a job, and three of them
are goyim [non-Jews], the Jew, all things being equal, will get the job.
That’s the way I work. If I’ve got three actors going for a part, and one
of them is Jewish, and they’re all in the same ball park … sue me.” [lukeford.com]
(Note: As the parameters of what constitutes “morality’ shifts wider decade by decade, any definition of pornography constitutes a controversial subject. On today’s terms, pornography, to this author’s sensibilities, is not the public depiction of sexuality itself, but rather the exploitation, debasement, robbing of dignity, devaluation and even ruthless dehumanization of the most intimate of human connections: frail emotions, human weakness, vulnerability, and the act of love and intimate human tenderness despoiled for public entrepreneurial profit).
your freedom of speech.” [GERRARD, N., 1-28-96, p. 15]Indeed, the very pardigm of the marginalized and popularly despised pornographer rests comfortably upon the Jewish “outsider/victim” model. Both Jew and pornographer commonly ascribe to themselves attributes of moral nobility against a perceived repressive society: in both cases the enemy is Christian culture/values where sexual expression has been traditionally devalued. In the porno context the enemy is configured as prudishness. The struggle of the Jew and pornographer is, in this world view, a struggle against oppression; both Jew and pornographer are declared to be innocent of moral wrongdoing. Their common goal is conceived merely as the struggle for freedom. This, and recent efforts in the (traditionally despised) pornographic world to reinvent itself as heroic is noted by Carina Chocano:
“If sex in our culture were not so ‘steeped in shame and guilt’ they argue, and if
the sex and pornography industry were not marginalized, then pornography would
cease to reflect harmful attitudes, rear its had out of the gutter, and provide, as
one of the panelists [at the First Annual World Pornography Conference] put
it, ‘masturbatory catharsis for the masses.’ ‘That stuff is bullshit,’ retorted
Glasgow Phillips, an author and critic [of pornography], ‘To make money in
this business you have to exploit,’ he says,’ and it’s so easy to do. I mean,
you are aware of how many dumb sluts there are in this town [Los Angeles]?
You just cast them.” [CHOCANO, C., 1998]
Feminist Diana Russell angrily assailed Strossen’s Defending Pornography, saying:
“Nadine Strossen’s objective in Defneind Photography is to destroy the
reputation and achievements of the feminist movement against pornography.
To this end, she dishes up the same tired old caricature of us as anti-sex
prudes, pro-censorship, and in collustion with the right wing … Strossen’s
book was enthusiastically feted by the media not because it’s so brilliant but
because she’s president of the American Civil Liberties Union (an organization
that has increasingly become a watchdog for the interests of pornogarphers).
The fact that Strossen professes to be a feminist gives her a lot more clout
than man would have doing the same dirty work for a dirty industry.” [RUSSSELL,
D., SUMMER 1995]
There are apparently no limits to the reshaping of sexual morals. In 2001, Princeton professor Peter Singer (“son of Viennese Jews who escaped to Australia in 1938, shortly after Hitler’s invasion”) [NASAR, S., 4-10-00, p. A1] made national news, and national ridicule, for a book review he authored at an online magazine, Nerve. The title of the piece was Heavy Petting, where he endorsed bestiality, including lines like this: “Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing his penis against them … In private, not everyone objects to being used by his dog in this way, and occasionally mutally satisfying activities may develop.” [BILLUP, A., 4-2-01] The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette featured a poignant editorial about Singer, an expert on “bioethics,”and the broad implications of such thoughts from the Ivy League college:
“[Peter Singer is] a Princeton professor of bioethics who wants to know when the
sexual revolution is gonna start revolting again. He’s ready to get it on with
the animal kingdom … He was brought to Princeton with much fanfare by that
university’s president, Harvey Shapiro, who also happens to head up the President’s
National Bioethics Advisory Committee. Yep, these guys are shaping national
policy. Ethical policy.” [ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE, 4-8-01, p. J4]
(In similar terms, Jewish scholar Michael Govrin describes the holiest of Jewish places: “Jerusalem, God’s bride, His place of desire, is always an erotic place of masculine desire. Jerusalem is the biggest harlot of all places, the world’s cunt exposed on all the television screens, in an ongoing peep show, day and night. And yet, in the classical paradox of desire, everyone has his Jerusalem virginal and pure, defiled only by the others’ abusive and defamatory biographies of her.”) [GOVRIN, M., 200]
In 1998, a conference on sexuality was held at the State University of New York at New Paltz; it was sponsored by the college’s women’s studies program. “What apparently must be called the highlight of the conference,” noted the Clarion, “was the performance of [Jewish lesbian performer] Shelly Mars, a stripper from
a bisexual bathhouse. During her performance, ‘Whiplash: Tales of a Tomboy,’
which featured her simulating sex and screaming obscenities, Mars collided with
the crotch of auddience member Peter Shipley, chairman of a private educational
group called the National Catholic Forum. Shipley’s pen went into her nostril, and
Mars fell back shouting that she was bleeding. Then she removed her pants and
blouse and exposed herself.”[CLARION, FEB 1998]
Other prominent Jewish porno performers include Randy Becker (“steamy nude pinup boy for the gay community”) [GERSTEL, J., 5-22-97, p. B10] and Ron Jeremy. As one Canadian newspaper noted in 1999, “With 1,500 films to his credit over a 22-year career, Ron Jeremy is one of the most prolific and famous porn stars in the history of the business.” Jeremy describes himself as a “good Jewish boy” who started out as a schoolteacher with a Master’s degree in special education. [GRIWKOWSKY, F., 12-8-99, p. 38] (On a more modest scale, in 1994, a New York policewoman, Carol Shaya, “born in Israel to a Jewish father and Catholic mother,” made the news for posing nude in Playboy.) [HALL, A., 7-11-94, p. 2, 21]
In 1998, Rabbi Shmuel Boteach, although underscoring that he distances himself from pornography, even clocked in when an excerpt from his book, Kosher Sex, in Playboy magazine. [DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10-26-98, p. A9] In 2001, Boteach sued an Internet dating service, MatchNet.com, a firm he was commissioned to represent. Joe Shapira and Alon Carmel, founders of MatchNet.com, are Israelis, as is Ami Shafrir, another developmental partner in the Internet firm. However, “the heart of Shafrir’s business empire was another company with headquarters in the Wilshire Boulevard Building: Amtec Audiotext, an operator of telephone sex lines that he says generated revenue of $60 million in its best year, 1995.” Shafrir is also the landlord for MatchNet, in Beverly Hills. Matchnet divisions include Americansingles.com and Jdate, the latter of which “one of every 10 Jewish singles in the United States uses it and … the site has been responsible for 300 marriages in its four years of operation.” Rabbi Boteach was eventually approached by another Israeli, Daniel Nicherie, himself once convicted of bank fraud, who “who told the rabbi that Mr. Carmel and Mr. Shapira were pornographers who had been sued nearly 40 times.” “The intrigue [surrounding MatchNet.com],” noted the New York Times, “stretches from Beverly Hills to Israel to the German stock market. The characters include a phone sex entrepreneur, the former convict who took control of his business and a disbarred lawyer obsessed with exposing the underbelly of the online dating industry.” [ELLIN, A., 2001]
[ADULT VIDEO NEWS, JUNE 2001]
Then there is Abby Ehmann who “pledges to meet the tastes of fetishist and spectators who come to her regular Saturday night party, Click + Drag at Club Mother” in New York City. She edits ‘Extreme Fetish” magazine, “dubbed the best alternative sex publication in New York by TimeOut magazine. She is on the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression, an organization that fights restrictions on free speech, and she is a writer and a performer.” [KAKOULAS, M., 6-26-00]
Elsewhere, CNN notes the Gold family’s British-based Ann Summers sex shop chain “offers customers the opportunity to shop of lingerie and sex aids in their home homes [via meetings like Tupperware parties] … Chief Executive Jacqueline Gold may be responsible for Britain’s sexual revolution. The Ann Summers concept of targeting women was her brainchild … ‘We certainly have contributed to changing people’s attitudes to sex, certainly the women’s attitudes,’ she said.” [CNN, 9-10-98]
Another young Jewish Internet pornography mogul is Great Britain’s Benjamin Cohen, the 18-year old founder of JewishNet (sold for 300,000 pounds) and CEO of cyberbritain (“its subsidiaries include the pornography portal, huntforporn.co.uk, and the adult search engine, dotadults.com.”) [LEVITT, L., 1-19-01, p. 9] dotadults.com was “the UK’s first adult search engine.” Cyberbritain Executive Directors include the Jewish enclave of Gerry Defries, Benjamin Cohen, Alex Defries and Daniel Ickowitz-Seidler. Non-Executive Directors include Gary Sterns (CEO of London Jewish News Ltd), Steve Masters, David Green, and Richard Cohen. [M2 PRESSWIRE, 1-2-01]
Still another major Internet pornographic Cohen — not to be confused with Benjamin — is Stephen. This second Cohen was successfully sued for stealing the Internet URL “sex.com” from a man named Gary Kremen. Kremen had never envisioned the domain name to be a pornographic home. Cohen, after forging papers to seize the site, and developing an elaborate take over scheme, built sex.com into the premiere Internet smut base, grossing $100 million a year. As the online journal “wired.com” notes about Cohen’s history and character:
“Cohen was convicted in 1991 for posing as a lawyer in a bankruptcy court in
a scheme to bilk an elderly woman’s creditors out of $200,000. According to
to court records, Cohen assumed the identity of several attorneys, forged
phony deeds and cashiers checks, and attmpted to hide the woman’s assets …
Cohen was sentenced to 46 months. It was his second conviction. In 1975,
he was found guilty of grand theft and check kiting … Within eight months of
his prison release, Cohen controlled [by fraud] the Sex.com domain name …
By the late ’80s, Cohen had set up a real-world meeting place for French
Connection swingers at a home in Orange County, California. Hundreds of
couples met at ‘The Club’ on Friday and Saturday nights to swap partners.
After neighbors complained, police arrested Cohen in 1990 on charges of
operating a sex club in a residential zone … In January 1996, [Cohen’s
group] unveiled its bid to buy a Nevada brothel called Sheri’s Ranch and
transform it into a $100 million ‘adult fantasy resort.’ Named Wanaleiya,
the Polynesian-themed resort would feature 500 exotic women who ‘would
not hesitate to see to your comfort and pleasure.'” [BICKNELL, C., 4-13-99]
Then there is Steve Hirsch, who owns Vivid Video. “Of all its achievements,” notes Los Angeles magazine,
“Vivid is most famous for refurbishing the appearance of the video box, wrapping
it in the glossy-art look of a fashion advertisement that masks its raunchy contents.
Single, Ferrari-driving Hirsch, who has built up the biggest-selling adult-film business
in the Valley based on the idea of the old Hollywood studio system, seems equally
‘packaged.’ Talking to him is like interacting with a TelePrompter–his well-rehearsed
CEO lines (“It is important for us to make quality product, work with the best models, get
our message out”) seem scripted by drones in next room. ‘He’s very intelligent,’ says
every competitor of Hirsch’s, yet after asking him for his thoughts, you can’t help
wondering what Hirsch is really thinking. Unlike [non-Jewish pornographer Russ]
Hampshire, Hirsch did not start out in fast food. In the late ’70s, his father quit a job
as a stockbroker to create one of the first X-rated video-distribution companies in the
[San Fernando] Valley [today, the premiere pornography production center on
earth]. Hirsch worked in his dad’s warehouse after high school and founded
Vivid with a partner in 1984. He was 23 years old. Today, Hirsch’s father
works in Vivid‘s sales division, his sister Marci heads production, and Hirsch–who
is known for aggressively entering and dominating new markets–sits poised to conquer
the new DVD technology that could eventually replace the video format, as well as
mainstream the adult-film industry once and for all.” [GARDETA, D., 12-98]
Then there is Steven Orenstein, head of a major porno production firm called Wicked, like many, based in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley (the premiere pornography production zone on the planet):
“Like [fellow Jewish pornographer Steve] Hirsch, Orenstein was introduced
to the business by a parent. In his case, it was his mother, a bookkeeper, who
took a job in accounting at an adult-magazine business and then later helped her
son secure work at the same company. (Today, she does the books at Wicked.)
Also like Hirsch, Orenstein came up through the industry, working a series of jobs
until he struck out on his own, forming Wicked in 1993.” [GARDETTA, D., 12-98]
And we dare not omit Susan Block from the long list of Jewish sex entrepreneurs. Block, a self-described “sex expert,” has an online porno site where she revels in a furious sex hustling and narcissim, herself modeling scanty outfits and apparently living out her porno portrait fantasies (caption to one photo: “Here Dr. Block is in her ‘Cyberstars’ push-up bra, thong panties and sheer robe ensemble’). And here, at this Internet version of her Dr. Susan Block Institute for the Erotic Arts and Sciences, Block lists media commentary that describes her as “America’s hottest sex therapist,” an “X-rated alternative to Leno, Letterman, and Nightline” (she has a cable TV show), and “a happily-married, religiously aware Jewish woman.” [http://www.drsusanblock.com]
In 1998, reporter Carol Lloyd described the public opening of Ms. Block’s “Sex Institute”:
“There must be an explanation for the scene taking place just five feet away. A blond,
large-breasted woman and a massive black man are fornicating with methodical, casual
self-consciousness, like two body-builders pumping iron after an injury. He is on top,
banging away unhurriedly, holding himself away from her with two knuckled fists
planted on either side of her hips. She doesn’t touch him but fidgets with a silver
vibrator while preening at the small live audience and the roving, carnivorous camera.
The peanut gallery continues with its kibitzing, trying to make sense of how such
an explicitly sexual spectacle — the climax to an evening of broken taboos — can
be so deeply, utterly unsexy. The event seemed too good to pass up. Dr. Susan
Block, a sex celebrity who is, among other items on a groaning résumé, an advice
columnist, a maker of videos bearing such titles as ‘The Fine Art of Fellatio,’ the
author of ‘The 10 Commandments of Pleasure,’ the holder of a doctorate in
philosophy, a radio and cable access talk-show host and the cleavage-friendly
poster child for all things sex-enlightening and self-promoting, was throwing a
Valentine’s Day party to celebrate the opening of her new sexual institute, located
in an old 1920s speakeasy in the heart of downtown L.A.’s art, fashion, financial
and convention district … Max, Susan Block’s self-declared publicist, footman,
butler, husband and sex slave, offers to show me the art … ‘We’ve got everything,’
he says proudly, then segues into interview mode. ‘I’m the most prosecuted publisher
in America. I’ve been prosecuted 20 times and I’ve spent 18 months in jail.’ He ticks
off the charges on his fingers. ‘Industrial espionage, rack ordinances (I put the first
pair of tits on the streets of L.A.), conspiracy to publish.'” [LLOYD, C., 2-18-98]
“Made for a mere $24,000 in 1963, Herschell Gordon Lewis’ infamous Blood
Feast is regarded — when it is regarded at all — as the absolute nadir of
exploitation cinema. Original publicity posters, declaring the film ‘more
grisly than ever, in blood color,’ promised its audience they would ‘Recoil
and Shudder’ when witnessing ‘the Slaughter and Mutilation of Nubile
Young Girls — in a weird and horrendous Ancient Rite! … Even Herschell
Gordon Lewis has talked about the limitations of the actors’ abilities and the
fact that the script stresses gore at the expense of plausibility and coherence —
there is something to be said for the film’s transgression of classical
cinema’s barriers and limitations … The film opens with an attack on a young
girl in the bath. Ramses [the villian] pokes out her eye with a sword, then
hacks off her legs and wraps them in newspaper. His second victim, Marcie
(Ashlyn Maretin, Playboy Playmate of April 1964), is making love to
to her boyfriend on the beach when she is attacked and murdered; her brain
is removed, still quivering. A third girl (Astrid Olsen) is stalked to a motel
where Ramses pulls her tongue out of her mouth with his bare hands … At
the time of its first release, Blood Feast was reviewed extensively in Time,
Newsweek and Variety, to almost universal distaste. Ever since, it has
atttained the status of a cult classic as ‘the infamous first gore film’ and
‘the original splatter film’ … As for the less respectable face of horror — the slasher
movie — the narrative foundation for this highly ritualized and formulaic tale
are laid bare for the first time in 1963, in the story of Fuad Ramses and his
Blood Feast … [which] stands as the ur-test for a long tradition of
slasher and stalker film. To pick up once again on the psychoanalystic
metaphor, Blood Feast is the ‘primal scene’ of the slasher film genre …
Put in its simplest narrative terms, Blood Feast is the story of a blood-thirsty
fiend, who sets about killing and mutiliating a series of sexually attractive,
pubescent females one-by-one until only a single girl in the chain remains alive.”
[BROTTMAN, M., 1997, p. 79-80]
And what of the personal ethical life of Mr. Lewis? He was “an ex-college professor with a Ph.D in English and the self-styled ‘Wizard of Gore,’ [who] lost most of his capital in the courts when he was arrested for his part in a fraudulent car rental agency, along with a series of other mail fraud convictions, including a fake abortion referral agency and a phony gas-saving device. The arrest brought his filmmaking career to an abrupt end.” ]BROTTMAN, M., 1997, p. 180]
More recently, Zalman King, “the soft-core impresario,” has produced, among other films, Female Perversions (directed by Susan Streitfield) and Striptease (directed by Andrew Bergman). [MILLAX, J., 5-23-97, p. 5] He also created the “popular erotic drama series, ‘The Red Shoe Diaries,’ for Showtime cable television. “I don’t consider this soft porn,” he told a reporter, “I would just call it erotic filmmaking.” [MENDOZA, N., 6-27-93, p. 75]
“wrote the book on promotion; famed for PR gimmicks and publicity stunts;
owes success to low-level made-in-Rome spectacle-film Hercules, starring
‘Mr. Universe’ Steve Reeves.” [ARONSON, S., 1983, p. 187]
The creator of Fritz the Cat, “the world’s first X-rated cartoon?” [DIAMOND, J., 7-6-92] Also Jewish: Ralph Bakshi, born in Palestine before it became Israel. And as Jewish commentator Barbara Amiel notes about filmmaker David Cronenberg:
Then there is British filmmaker Mike Leigh (changed from Lieberman), “dubbed Europe’s best filmmaker by an American distributor.” Leigh, who has has “12 full-length films to his name, together with dozens of theatre and television plays, plus lucrative television commercials for McDonalds,” is
“the master of the grungy, the squalid, the sexually menacing and the sexually
dissolute … Young Mike himself joined a Jewish youth movement, went
to Israel and worked on a kibbutz … Leigh presents his audience with lavatories,
excrement and urine, farting, vomiting, abortions, nudity, graffiti-infested lifts,
cannibalism, and, in his play Babies Grow Old … your actual kitchen sink.”
[KAUFMAN, G., 2-11 96]
“Jews take a less critical view,” noted the surveys’ researchers, “of homosexuality, abortion, birth control and pornography than do Gentiles.” [PAULSON, M., 7-15-2000, p. B2] (Not surprisingly, the producers of herisque, “push the boundaries” gay sitcom for Showtime in 2000 were Daniel Lipman and Ron Cowen). According to another (1994) survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, Jews are also the most sexually promiscuous ethnic group in America. According to their responses, 34% of American Jews have had sex with more than 11 partners by age 18! [HALBERSTAM, p. 141] (As non-Jewish journalist Ross Wetzsteon notes: “I’ve always been attracted to Jewish women — in fact, every long relationship I’ve ever had, including my marriage, was with a Jewish woman … With WASPs, the code seemed unbreakable — first date kiss at the door, second date clumsy feel in the car, etc. etc., so you sensed your sexuality was rigidly sculpted; with Jews, on the other hand, it wasn’t a matter of ‘an easy lay’ — it was the feeling that whatever was going to happen sexually between you would happen, clumsily, perhap, but at least spontaneously.”) [WETZSTEON, R. SEPT 6-10, 1998]
Chaim Bermant explains traditional Jewish views about sex like this:
“One could also discern in some of the anti-Jewish agitation [in early 20th
century Christian Europe] more than a passing undertone of sexual
jealousy. The Jew, as we have seen, was thought to be in league with the
devil and prone to every variety of dark practice, and what could be darker
or more devilish than sex? (The Jew, in ancient times at least, also had an
extravagant idea of the sexual tastes and aptitudes of the gentile. The
Talmud, for example, decreed that one shouldn’t stable one’s ass with
a non-Jew in case it should be buggered). That the Jew had and has
a robust sexual appetitte is well attested from even the most cursory
readings of the Bible, the Talmud, and more recent, if less sacred,
texts. ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ is the first commandment in the Torah
and what was traditionally regarded amongst Christians as a sordid if
necessary act was raised by the Rabbis to the level of a holy sacrament.
But as the Rabbis themselves were to lament, it was carried to unholy
lengths.” [BERMAN, C., 1977, p. 29]
A survey of Jewish Americans in 1989 also noted that “nearly one in five respondents” elicited “skeptical responses” about the existence of God, while “in the general American population, over nine out of ten affirm a belief in God.” [WERTHEIMER, J., 1993, p. 63]
“Within the intellectual and artistic communities, Jews were also
far to the left of their non-Jewish colleagues in the 1930s and
1950s, and far more active in supporting communist or ‘progressive’
causes. As Jews moved into the professions, government service,
the media, and academia, they served as a radical leaven for these
groups and for the ever larger number of Americans coming into
contact with them.” [ROTHMAN/LICHTER, 1982, p. 331]
were Jewish] [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 331]
Dore Schary, prominent Hollywood mogul and national chairman of the Anti-Defamation League from 1963-69, was among those with FBI files as a “strong communist sympathizer.” As Laird Wilcox notes:
“John Sanford, a Communist Party member and Hollywood writer who taught
with Schary at the Progressive Educational Center in Hollywood, CA, sees Schary
as somewhat lesss principled. When Sanford’s wife, Maggie, refused to testify
before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Schary went after her:
‘Mention a few names. What does it hurt? Mention the names of people who’ve been
named already.’ Sanford observed that Schary was ‘one of the biggest pricks in the
business.'” [WILCOX, L., 199, p.. 63]
As Milton Plesur notes about the Senator Joe McCarthy communist “witchhunt” era:
“In 1952, before the Senate censured McCarthy, a Gallup Poll demonstrated
that 56 percent of Catholics and 45 percent of Protestants approved of
McCarthy and his tactics, but that 98 percent of the Jews considered him a menace
to the country.” [PLESUR, M., 1982, p. 135]
In 1999, the Gay Financial Network announced its list of the the “most influential Gay and Lesbian Corporate Executives.” At least four of the top six ranked were Jewish, and they were all influential media moguls:
1) Kathy Levinson, president and COO of E*Trade
3) David Geffen, the CEO of Dreamworks
4) Barry Diller, the CEO of USA Networks
5) Hilary Rosen, president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association
of America
(Lower on the list was Stephen Friedman [vice-president of public affairs for
MTV]; Seth Radwell, CEO of Doubleday Interactive; David Kuhn, senior VP
and editorial director of Brill Media, and Steve Fuchs, president of Hampton
Industries] [BAIM, T., 12-9-99]
In 2001, Publisher’s Weekly reviewed William Mann’s Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1968, saying:
“Mann also covers a wide range of ancillary topics, e.g., the history and aesthetics of
set design; the rise of Los Angeles’s ‘pansy clubs,’ and the special role of Jews (who
were more likely than gentiles to be open about their sexuality).”
[PUBLISHERS WEEKLY/amazon.com, 2001]
Chairman and CEO of Canada’s first and only (2002) gay television network, PrideVision? John Levy, formerly President and CEO of Cableworks, “one of the first cable systems in Canada to launch high-spped internet acces over cable.” Levy also heads The Score, a TV sports network, and “he is the majority shareholder in Headline Media Group, Inc., the company that owns PrideVision TV.” [http://pridevisiontv.com/aboutPV/decision.htm]
“Larry Kramer [also Jewish] started ACT-UP” in 1988. [DAVIS, S., 1997, p. 192]
Reviewing a recent biography about Jewish homosexual Hollywood mogul David Geffen, journalist Taki lashed out at the huge influence on public morals exerted by the largely Jewish “Velvet Mafia,” :
“I’m not surprised to read that Hollywood is dominated by a Velvet Mafia of
rich homosexuals who demand sexual favors in return for work in the movies. In
fact I would have been surprised if it were the other way around. Those old
Mittel-Europa Jews who ran Tinseltown in its heyday established the casting -couch
practice long ago; but, as they say, at least they did it with style and with the
opposite sex. The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New
Hollywood is the title of an upcoming book by Tom King, a respected Wall
Street Journal reporter who it seems has hit pay dirt — and it’s dirt, all right —
with his expose of the unspeakable Geffen. Geffen invited King to write a book
about his amazing rise to the top, and allegedly named dozens of former
boyfriends, many of them now famous stars. Indiscretion aside, Geffen is
is a lowlife san pareil … But what bothers me is not the bestiality and arrogance
of the Velvet Mafiosi. It is the message they send out through their movies …
Geffen, of course, denies there is such a thing as a homosexual cabal,
and, typically, charges anti-Semitism. According to King’s book, [Jewish]
friends like Barry Diller, Sandy Gallin and Calvin Klein, among many others,
keep a low profile but apparantly indulge in the sexual bacchanals that go
with the territory. Alleged weekend-long orgies fueled by drugs at which Geffen and
his powerful buddies run a ‘meat market’ selecting young men for sex
are apparently described in detail in King’s opus … Hollywood has never been
a moral place, far from it, but until the 1960s and 70s it preached a hell of
a moral lesson. God, the family, patriotism, even Mom were sacrosanct.
Now it’s the exact opposite. Criminals are sympathetically portrayed, cops
always negatively; people who think same-gender sex is wrong are fascists.”
[TAKI, v.13, no. 10]
In Russia, Olga Zhuk (“I’m Jewish and I’m a dyke”) has led the recent Soviet out-of-the-closet homosexual movement. As London’s The Guardian noted in 1992:
“Olga Zhuk can claim the dubious distinction of being the only woman in the
Soviet Union ever to have been charged under Article 121 of the Penal Code –
the law that criminalises sodomy between men. It happened in November 1990,
after Zhuk and a handful of other lesbians and gay men from Leningrad took a
very deep breath and attempted to register Russia’s first ever lesbian and gay
organisation – the Tchaikovsky Foundation – with the city authorities … As president
and perceived ‘ringleader’ behind the Tchaicovsky Foundation, Zhuk was publicly
denounced in the Lensoviet and charged with sodomy. But the case never came
to court, the charges dropped after radical lawyers succeeded in convincing the
chief prosecutor that lesbians were biologically incapable of sodomising each other.”
[MCKENNA, N., 3-31-92, p. 21]
As Yechiel Eckstein, also a rabbi, further noted in 1997:
“Hollywood’s impact on our popular culture is profound and undeniable …
More often than not, filmmakers seem to go out of their way to depict people
of faith in the worst possible light. And while Jews and Judiaism are, by
and large, portrayed favorably and reverentially, Christians, particularly
Evangelical Protestants and devout Cathlics, do not fare so well. One is
left with the distinct impression that Hollywood has a very real and pervasive
anti-Christian bias. How else do we explain the fact that Christian clergy —
when they are portrayed at all — are usually shown engaging in morally
reprehensible behavior? Or the fact that Christian symbols are associated with
characters who prey upon society? Or that the crimes of various antagonists are
shown to be religiously motivated? In Primal Fear, for example, the local
archbishop is murdered by one of the waifs he exploited in his self-made
porn films. The lead character in Priest is shown in a homosexual tryst with a
The sadistic nurse in Misery wears a cross; the rapist in Eye for an Eye sports
one as well. A killer played by Harry Connick Jr. in Copycat repeatedly invokes
the names of Jesus. Christian beliefs and symbols are often belittled by Hollywood
producers and writers. The cherished symbols of faith are put to blasphemous uses.
Indeed, if there is a Christian character in a film, he is usually depicted as a fool,
a liar, a cheater, a diabolical murderer or a crazy person … Could Hollywood
producers ridicule and malign Christians with impunity if the Christian community
organized its own equivilant of the Anti-Defamation League?” [ECKSTEIN, Y.
2-14-97, p. 4] (Executive Producer of Primal Fear? Also Jewish. Howard Koch, Jr.).
Other noteworthy anti-Catholic films from Hollywood include The Runner Stumbles (1979) about a priest who falls in love with a nun and then goes to trial for her murder, Monsignor (1982) about a Catholic prelate who works with the Mafia, Agnes of God (1985) starts out with a nun giving birth to a baby and then killing it, The Penitent (1988) where the lead character joins a brutal Catholic cult, Last Rites (1988) where a priest gets involved in murder and the the criminal underground, We’re No Angels (1989) where two prison convicts escape and pretend to be priests,and The Pope Must Die (1991) which heralds everything from a Pope “harem” to illegal arms deals. Anti-Protestant movies include Crimes of Passion (1984) about a despicable skid-row evangelist, Poltergeist II (1986) features a deranged preacher, The Vision (1987) about a Christian cult that plots to take over the world, Light of Our Day (1987) about a fraudulent minister, The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) about a group of Christian fundamentalist fanatics who rise to political power in the U.S., and The Rapture (1991) where a born-again decides it’s her religious duty to murder her own child. [O’BRIEN, P.; citing MEDVED, 2000/2001, p. 290-295]
Mainstream Hollywood’s drastically different portrayals of Christianity and Judaism today is noted by Jewish film critic Michael Medved:
(This quote, by the way, is from an article about Davidson by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency entitled “Award-Winning Theatre Director Likens His Role to That of a Rabbi”).
Peter Novick notes a similar story in 1964: a play (The Deputy) about Pope Pius XII and his alleged silence about the Holocaust:
“Almost all Jewish organizations, particularly the Anti-Defamation League
and the American Jewish Committee, were heavily involved in interreligious
dialogue, whose agenda was ‘make nice’ and ‘can’t we all just get along?’ The
Deputy was definitely not nice, not a contribution to getting along. Catholic
spokesmen publicly and privately called on their Jewish dialogue partners to
put pressure on the Jewish producer and director to cancel the play, or at
least to join them in denouncing it. Implicitly they were saying that if the shoe
was on the other foot — if what was at issue was a play sullying the reputation
of the world’s most venerated Jewish leader — Jews wouldn’t hesitate to call
on them.” [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 143]
“A former Jewish publisher, Paul Krassner, of Larry Flynt’s pornography magazine, Hustler, notes that “My main editorial regret [as publisher] was that I hadn’t been able to publish that ‘Jesus and the Adulteress’ photo spread. The nearly life-size poster which was supposed to be included as a pull-out centerfold would instead remain on my wall as a memento of those six months at Hustler. There was Jesus, a generic barbershop-calendar Jesus, looking reverently toward the sky as he covered up the prone Adulteress. Her head was bleeding from stones that had been cast upon her. And she was showing pink. Sweet, shocking, vulneable pink … Although Hustler had been accused of exploiting women, actually it was guilty of exploiting men’s addiction to pornography.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 250] He also notes the anti-Christian theme with his friend, Jewish comedian Lenny Bruce: “And so Lenny decided to dedicate his book [How to Talk Dirty and Influence People]: ‘To all the followers of Christ and his teachings; in particular to a true Christian — Jimmy Hoffa — because he hired ex-convicts as, I assume, Christ would have.” [KRASSNER, P., 1993, p. 63]
Krassner also noted one of his first acts when he took over at Hustler:
“I didn’t know how long I would last as publisher of Hustler, so when editor Bruce David showed me around the next morning, I began exercising power immediately. The cover of the April 1978 issue — the one that would NOT feature a woman — was scheduled to be a teddy bear wearing a negligee. I changed it to an Easter bunny nailed to a crucifix, with a basket of painted eggs toppled over in the foreground, and assigned a staff writer to write a piece on ‘The Commercialization of Easter.'” [KRASSNER, Pl., 1993, p. 234]
“Two or three times he has passed on a script that has portrayed Jews
negatively. ‘I can’t stop it from being made, but I’m not going to be the person
who brings it forth, ‘he says. In a simiar vein, he mentions a Showtime film — he
doesn’t want the name printed — in which the director was planning to cast an
‘idenifiably Jewish character’ in the patently villainous role. ‘I didn’t want
a Jewish guy playing such a virulently hateful character,’ Offsay admits.”
[SCHLEIER, C., 5-29-98, p. 34]
Samples of Jewish-themed programs from Offsay include a play “about the way in which a Jewish family copes with the possibility of a gay child being born,” a 1943-era Warsaw uprising story, and ‘Rescuers: Stories of Courage’ “about non-Jews who risked their lives rescuing victims of the Holocaust.” [SCHLEIER, C., 5-29-98, p. 34]
During World War II, despite the fact that Jews were a tiny American minority, they were amply represented as soldiers in movies: “There was the all-but-obligatory inclusion of Jews in Hollywood platoon rosters: a Feingold in Bataan, a Weinberg in Air Force, A Diamond in Pride of the Marines, a Jacobs in Objective! Burma, an Abraham in Action in the North Atlantic, and a Greenbaum in The Purple Heart.” [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 33]
One of the comedians in the British group Monty Python, Terry Gilliam, noted what happened to one character in their movie The Life of Brian:
“We cut Otto out …[Monty Python member] Eric was very keen to cut it
and I think it was because he was living in Hollywood and worried about
offending ‘Jews who run Hollywood’ or because he works in Hollywood
and half his friends are Jewish. I don’t know. I thought, ‘This is crazy. We
made a film to offend everybody! If we’re going to offend the Christians,
come on! We ended up cutting it out …” [HEARST NEWS MEDIA]Although Jews played a dominant role in Hollywood (and American) communism, including Soviet espionage [see earlier citations; Hollywood Jewish communist screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., estimated, for example, that two-thirds of the Communist Party members in Los Angeles were Jewish] [GABLER, N., 1988, p. 331], Jewish organizations were active in lobbying the largely Jewish film community to keep that depiction off the movie screens. As Peter Novick writes,
“Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the sixties, worked on
a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of Jews with
Communism in the public mind. Thier principal co-operative venture was the
‘Hollywood Project,’ in which they jointly employed a West Coast representative
who lobbied movie producers to avoid any unsympathetic reprsentations of Jews.
A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The producer
of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist character had a ‘name
that can even remotely be construed as Jewish.'” [NOVICK, P., 1999, p. 95]
Fearing the spread of anti-Jewish hostility (especially in the context of a Hitler-style fascism), Jewish organizations were also influential in policing Hollywood film content in the 1930s. Rabbi William H. Fineshriber, for example, “who became active in film industry affairs in the early 1930s on behalf of the Reform Central Conference of Amreican Rabbis,” took personal credit for convicing MGM to abandon a proposed film called It Can’t Happen Here. [HERMAN, F., MARCH 2001, p. 66] As Felicia Herman notes about this era:
“Although the ADL [Anti-Defamation League ] and AJC [American Jewish Committee]
occasionally corresponded on their own with film industry figures, by far the
closest relationship between a Jewish organization and the Jews in the film
industry existed through the LAJCC [Los Angeles Jewish Community Committee].
Leon Lewis, the former national secretary of the ADL, had created the LAJCC
in 1934 as an autonomous, self-appointed umbrella organization of local
representatives of all of the major national Jewish organizations as well as local
Jewish social and communal leaders. Many of the LAJCC’s members enjoyed
personal and professional links to Jews in the film industry, and a week after the
LAJCC’s founding, the organization created a Motion Picture Committee comprised
of prominent Jewish studio executives like Irving Thalberg, Jack Warner, Joseph
Schenck, and Harry Cohn. These men reguarly met with with Lewis to discuss film
issues relevant to the Jewish community and to contribute funds to the LAJCC’s
work in ferreting out local antisemites and Nazi sympathizers. Lewis thus became
the point man for Jewish-Hollywood relations, and often at the behest of ADL and
AJC, he utilized the connections fostered by the LAJCC’s Motion Picture Committee
to try to shape films with Jewish content.” [HERMAN, F., MARCH 2002, p. 68]
A planned film about Hitler, entitled Mad Dog of Europe, was eventually shelved after Jewish concern about Jewish predominance in Hollywood and how such a movie could backlash Jewish interests. “The film’s would-be producers were all Jewish,” says Herman,
“and the film made particular reference to Nazi antisemitism. Upon investigating the
project, Jewish leaders concluded that the script was ‘so fanatical’ that ‘there may be
a very unhappy kickback from it. They therefore utilized many of the tools at their
disposal to prevent the film from being produced. The Jewish efforts to stop Mad
Dog of Europe received little public attention, just as Jewish leaders desired: as much
as they could, they kept their dealings with the motion picture industry a quiet affair,
attempting to stave off the charge that the Jews were ‘controlling’ Hollywood.”
[HERMAN, F., 2001, p. 69]
The Judeocentric, ardently pro-Israel Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles also plays today a significant role in censoring prospective movies with Jewish themes or characters. As Josh Spector notes:
“Rabbi Abraham Cooper is not your typical Hollywood power broker. But a
a thumbs down from Cooper and his colleagues at the Simon Wiesenthal
Center recently proved enough to convince Paramount Classics to back
away from a potential distribution deal with this year’s Sundance grand
jury prize winner, The Believer [about a real-life Jew who became a neo-Nazi
leader], proving just how influential special interest groups have become in the
Hollywood machine … Parmount’s decision to consult the rabbi and his
colleagues at the Wiesenthal Center is not unprecedented. The Los Angeles-
based organization has been active in the entertainment industry for a number
of years, often reviewing scripts and consulting with filmmakers and studios
on Jewish-related productions … ‘This is a nightmare,’ [The Believer‘s
director/writer, Henry Bean, who is Jewish] said, ‘The fear of political correctness
is encroaching on every aspect of the artistic process.'” [SPECTOR, J.,
2001]
Brian Viner, of theEngland’s Jewish Chronicle, notes how Judeo-centric themes in the Sopranos show can be turned to even slander Native Americans:
“Fans of the ‘Sopranos,’ the sublime television series about the lives, love and psychotherapy sessions of New Jersey mafiosi, currently shown here on E4, will be aware that there is just one Jewish character: Hersh Rubin, trusted adviser or consiglieri to the godfather, Tony Soprano. In the latest episode, the Soprano family henchmen became aggravated by a campaign among Native Americans to besmirch the name of the genoan Christopher Columbus. But Hesh sides with the Native Americans — a Jew must always take the side of the oppressed, he said, and the Old World discoverers led by Columbus had done some terrible things, such as giving the Indians blankets deliberately infected with smallpox. Then, however, a Native American associate made the mistake of comparing Columbus with Hitler. Hesh saw red. The Holocast, as an example of evil, was way out on its own, he said. He accused the man of ‘covert anti-Semitism.’ The Native American protesting strongly, was asked to leave his house. This scene was doubtless inspired, at least partly, by the readiness of some Jews to see anti-Semitism where it manifestly does not exist, although, as the old gag goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. As for Hesh himself. I guess he was inspired by a phenomenon that some Jews prefer not to see where it manifestly does exist, the Jewish gangster. There have, in fact, been plenty of them. The notorious Jack Spot, for instance, was a powerful operator in the London underworld in the the 1950s.” [VINER, B., 11-29-2002, p. 37]
As Jewish comedian Milton Berle declared: “The Irish ignore anything they can’t fight or drink!” [BERLE, M., 1996, p. 303]
(Korda is from a very wealthy mass media family. His uncle, Alexander Korda, was “one of the most legendary and flamboyant of all film tycoons” who “brought to stardom” Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Marlene Dietrich, and Vivien Leigh, among others. [KORDA, M., 1979, dustjacket]
Executive Producer of the Howie Mandel show? Diane Rappaport. And further behind many of such shows is “one of television’s foremost specialists on syndication launches,” Bonnie Kaplan, who has promoted a variety of talk show formats, including the Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones, Ophra Winfrey, and Joan Rivers shows, among others. [FEDER, p. 49]
A 2001 column by Michael Kelly in the Washington Post noted the influence of Jeff Zucker upon popular culture:
“Mr. Zucker is the very role model for us. He is the president of NBC Entertainment.
As such, he is responsible for ‘Fear Factor,’ NBC’s ‘reality show’ in which
people who are desperate enough for money are induced to risk bodily harm
and endure national humiliation. Contestants on ‘Fear Factor’ have allowed hundreds
of rats to swarm over their bodies and have been chased, in protective clothing,
by attack dogs. Mr. Zucker mocks those who find something wrong with this.
‘We’re having fun, we’re having a great summer,’ he told reporters this week.
‘Get a life.'” [KELLY, M., 7-25-01]
dagobertobellucci 