In a flashback episode of the old Odd Couple series, Felix and Murray the cop are in the army together. Murray is feeling down in the dumps, and a sympathetic Felix asks if it’s because the men are making fun of Murray’s big nose.
Murray says, “I didn’t know the men are making fun of my nose!”
“They are,” says Felix. “I heard them. One said it looked like a two-car garage.”
The joke here, of course, is that Felix thinks he’s being helpful — kind of the way Rush Limbaugh did last week, when he suggested why Jews who voted for Obama should be feeling “buyer’s remorse.”
“There are a lot of people, when you say banker, people think Jewish,” Limbaugh said on his Jan. 20 broadcast. “People who have prejudice, people who have, you know — what’s the best way to say — a little prejudice about them. To some people, bankers — code word for Jewish — and guess who Obama’s assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.”
Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League jumped all over this one. He said Limbaugh’s remarks were “borderline anti-Semitic,” and trafficked in the “age-old stereotype about Jews and money.” He demanded an apology.
Rush is defiant. His website posted a defense of his remarks by Norman Podhoretz. The neoconservative icon noted that Limbaugh twice referred to “prejudiced people” who equate Jews with high finance. All Limbaugh was doing, writes Podhoretz, was expressing the “undeniable fact” that for prejudiced people “the words ‘banker’ and ‘Wall Street’ are code words for ‘Jewish.’”
Or was he? Michael Ledeen of the National Review Online also defended Limbaugh, decrying Obama’s “attacks on ‘greedy bankers’ (which Rush mentioned), free broadcasting, and of course the crusade against American medicine, all enterprises in which Jews have long flourished.”
Note the confusion. Podhoretz said Limbaugh was only referring to the opinions of “prejudiced people.” Ledeen says, approvingly, that Rush had it right in suggesting that banking is a Jewish “enterprise.”
Remember Felix, folks. The key thing about Limbaugh’s remarks is that it appears he’s trying to be sensitive to the Jews. But for his logic to work, Jews (like Ledeen, for instance), need to accept that the anti-Semites are right — we are a bunch of bankers. Either that, or we have to agree that Jews identify so closely with banking that we will, or at least should, interpret an “assault” on the banking industry as a cause for communal concern and group action.
Limbaugh has gone down this road before. Last August, he equated the Democrats and the Nazis because both “were opposed to Jewish capitalism.” Again, to accept his logic, you have to accept the borderline anti-Semitic premise (in this case, that capitalism is somehow “Jewish”).
The Zionist Organization of America and other right-wing Jewish groups have also jumped to Limbaugh’s defense. All Limbaugh meant, according to a ZOA release, is “that when Obama criticized bankers and Wall Street, some prejudiced people could have interpreted this as an Obama attack against Jews.”
First of all, that’s not all Limbaugh said. The radio personality specified that “a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish.” (Thanks, Rush. If the anti-Semites weren’t aware of that before, they are now.) Furthermore, he strongly suggests that Jews should interpret Obama’s actions against the banking industry as an assault, coded or not, on the Jews. It’s like the friendly neighbor who says you ought to be careful because he heard bullies are picking on ugly people.
Foxman is right that Limbaugh’s remarks were “borderline anti-Semitic.” There’s been a lot of creepily coded rhetoric floating around since the start of the current financial crisis, with bankers being referred to as “moneylenders” and “bloodsuckers.” Jews on the Left and Right get a little worried whenever people talk like this. If Limbaugh and his allies weren’t interested in scoring the usual ideological points (“Mr. Foxman, if you really want to go after anti-Semitism you should first start looking at it on the Left,” he said the next day), they might have acknowledged that in linking Jews and the banking industry, he stumbled, inadvertently or not, into toxic territory.
But Foxman doesn’t come off so well either. His statement slips into disingenuousness when he writes the following: “[Limbaugh’s] notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.”
C’mon, Abe. It’s hardly anti-Semitic for someone to suggest that “Jews vote based on their religion” or – in Limbaugh’s case, perceived group interests. We all talk about the “Jewish vote.” And by “we” I mean Jewish newspapers, mainstream pollsters, all the major Jewish organizations, and your zayde. A politician would have to be an idiot to wander into districts with large Jewish populations and not consider the ways Jews, like all ethnic groups, vote their particular as well as general interests.
This whole episode is an object lesson in how not to talk about the ethnic vote. Of course Jews have voting tendencies (and a tendency is not the same thing as a conspiracy). It’s fair game for a pundit to discuss the factors that may lead the Jewish majority to lean one way or the other.
But the difference between that sort of analysis and Limbaugh’s comes down to the central premise of modern anti-anti-Semitism. The goal is not to keep people from talking about Jews, but to keep them from talking about Jews using hurtful, false, historically resonant, and dangerous stereotypes.
Feel free to discuss the pro-Israel vote, or the Jewish Left. But spare us your conjectures, well-intended or not, about “Jewish bankers.”
It’s the difference between making fun of someone’s politics, and making fun of his—well, his nose.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is Editor-in-Chief of the New Jersey Jewish News. Between columns you can read his writing at the JustASC blog.
