Anti-Semitism: Celebrities’ favorite bigotry

Anti-Semitism is suddenly back in fashion, said Judith Timson in the Toronto Globe and Mail. In just the last few weeks we had Charlie Sheen’s sneering announcement that Chuck Lorre, his TV producer nemesis, is actually named “Chaim Levine.” Then came WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange allegedly complaining that a cabal of Jewish journalists was out to discredit his organization. Most recently, the fashion designer John Galliano was caught on camera phone drunkenly informing a restaurant diner that “I love Hitler,” and that her forefathers should all have been “f---ing gassed.” After decades of raised ethnic and religious sensitivities, are so many people really “just two bottles of wine away from spewing the same old hatred?”

Anti-Semitism never went away, said Alan Dershowitz in the New York Post. Social opprobrium just drove it underground. But cell phone video cameras, Twitter, and other forms of instant communication “have blurred the line between private and public expression,” and for celebrities, the slurs once conveyed in whispers can now become indelible indiscretions. An even more insidious new form of anti-Semitism is the use of “legitimate political criticism” of Israel to mount attacks on the character of Jews as a people. Consider the recent comments of South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He called the Jews “a peculiar people” whose arrogance causes many of the world’s problems. He even compared the power of the “Jewish lobby” to Hitler’s and Stalin’s.

John Galliano’s anti-Semitism is in a category all its own, said Rhonda Garelick in The New York Times. It’s no accident that this particular anti-Semite works in the fashion industry, which has long had “deep and unsettling parallels” with fascism. Like fascism, fashion is based on the anti-democratic dictates of “oracular, charismatic leaders” who beckon their followers to join a “cult of physical perfection,” where beauty is defined by Aryan features, eternal youth, and thin, athletic bodies. Galliano, in his career-ending rant, didn’t just accuse a woman (who, as it happens, is not Jewish) of having a “dirty Jewish face,” but allegedly also told her, “Your boots are of the lowest quality, your thighs are of the lowest quality. You are so ugly I don’t want to see you.” So he invited her to die. Galliano’s bilious outburst was certainly anti-Semitic, but it was something more—an eloquent expression of the fashion industry’s disdain for the great, unwashed masses.

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