Don't Blame Me for Cardi B

On Old Hollywood and Even Older Antisemitism

(For a far more worthy treatment of this subject, I urge all readers, especially Catholic ones, to read this wonderful reflection by Mary Eberstadt in First Things. Me, I’m just here for the old movies…)

The Mormons are at it again. LDS-bankrolled commentator Jason Whitlock weighed in on the Ben Shapiro/Candace Owens feud, explaining that it is past time to call out the “secular Jews” who pull the strings of Hollywood and the music industry and have used their power to build our toxic culture and “profit off the debauchery, the degradation of black people.”

I, like Whitlock, endeavor to be an outspoken Christian, fighting the degenerate anti-culture of our Godless age; I also know a little bit about secular Jews, having become a Christian in adulthood after an areligious upbringing in a family full of atheist Holocaust survivors. So let me explain, as an ally in the fight for truth, why I think Whitlock’s argument falls apart both factually and tactically.

The most profitable movie for the iconic film studio MGM in 1951 was The Great Caruso. Why bring this up? Well, MGM was founded by three Jews - Marcus Loew, Samuel Goldwyn, and Louis B Mayer - and the thing Caruso was so great at was singing. No, not gangster rap - opera. He was portrayed in the movie by the huge film star - and fellow operatic tenor - Mario Lanza. Yes, a movie starring opera singers and featuring lengthy reenactments of Puccini arias was box office gold for a Jewish-run studio a few decades ago. I do not know if he cares for opera, but I hope Whitlock can at least agree with me that La Boheme is as far from degrading modern rap music as one can possibly get. Were he one of my subscribers, he would also know that such cultural gems were not the exception but the norm during the Golden Age of Hollywood. For many Americans in the days before television, Hollywood films - often produced by Jews - were their first ever exposure to the divine beauty of classical music and opera, featuring compositions from the likes of Massenet, Wagner, Rossini, and Verdi. And those were just the teen movies! For grown-ups, the Hollywood of old produced too many classic masterpieces to name. Heck, the cultural powers that be even pulled Irving Berlin’s puppet strings to get him to write White Christmas! Is White Christmas too secular for your tastes? Then I give you perhaps the greatest director of all time, William Wyler, who celebrated very-unsecular Christianity in unforgettable classics like Friendly Persuasion, Mrs. Miniver, and, of course, Ben-Hur (full title: Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ).

Hollywood and the Jewish community of that day were also, for what it’s worth, driving cultural forces behind the black civil rights movement. All those powerful, unforgettable Sidney Poitier performances? Well, Stanley Kramer, who produced and directed - and profited off of - Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?, was no WASP. Outside of the cinemas, Jews - undoubtedly inspired by such Hollywood productions - played an outsized role in the fight for black freedom, to the point of getting murdered by angry Southern mobs for their efforts.

In sum, the Hollywood studio system, only a few short decades ago, consistently made a mint off of presenting the masses the very best music, stories, and morality tales the Western world has ever produced - and did a great deal to fight for black Americans while doing so. Today, well, keep your kids – of all races and creeds – away from the cinemas. What changed? A great many factors are likely involved, but the Jewishness of some of our cultural powers cannot be one of them - unless you think giants like Wyler or Louis B Mayer, a famously patriotic American who worshiped “good women, honorable men, and saintly mothers” - were faking their parentage. When, in an overwhelmingly Christian culture, Jews were not only writing the best Christmas songs but also the most openly pro-Christian cinematic masterpiece of all time, it’s more than a little gauche to blame them for all the garbage music and movies that get made when the culture at large stops going to church and ends up caring more about Taylor Swift tickets than the Second Coming.

Whitlock, then, is factually wrong to blame Jews for our cultural decline. He is also treading on dangerous tactical ground for those of us who do dream of taking the culture back for Christ. To begin with, there’s his talk of “secular Jews.” If they’re secular – and trust me, they are - why bring up the Jewishness at all? While I’m sure Whitlock doesn’t mean it like that, this is classic antisemitism. When Jews stick devoutly to the Torah and live together in orthodox communities, they are attacked for being outsiders. But when Jews abandon the practices of their ancestors, integrate fully into the culture at large, and become entirely indistinguishable from their gentile friends and neighbors - as, for instance, the highly-integrated, highly-secular Jews of Budapest and Berlin in the 1930s were - they still get singled out and attacked as ’secular-but-nonetheless-Jewish’ by the Jew haters of the world. Adopting this kind of language today to attack music and movie producers does nothing to help rescue the culture and only serves to hurt Whitlock’s potential allies in the fight against degradation.  

Whitlock’s approach is wrong for a deeper tactical reason, as well. By misdiagnosing a problem, you become unable to solve it – see, for instance, those who think a lack of ‘gun-free zone’ signs is what leads to school shootings. If Whitlock truly thinks the problem in our culture today is ‘secular Jews,’ he will never succeed in fixing anything. It might be easier to blame a small minority than the increasingly Godless majority, but you could expel every Jew from America and it wouldn’t make Cardi B into Ella Fitzgerald again. Whitlock’s approach is far more likely to result in another Crown Heights riot than another boffo box office run for Bizet and Puccini.

Finally, to return to my deliberately absurd opener about Mormons, Whitlock’s argument is just plain nuts. Whitlock works for Blaze Media, founded by Glenn Beck, a member of the LDS church. If I called out my wonderful LDS neighbors and told them it was time for them to stop pulling the strings on Whitlock’s fiery anti-Deion Sanders monologues, they would - rightly - look at me like I was deranged. I don’t know a great deal about how to win back our culture, but I do know the first step is highly unlikely to involve dropping bombs about the hidden influence of those harboring Jewish DNA.

I certainly agree with Whitlock on the most important issue – we all need Jesus. Yet look around the last couple months – at the babies burned alive in ovens for being Jewish, at the Jews being forced into hiding and outright murdered by Jew-hating mobs in American, Canadian, and European cities, at the lust for Jewish blood being expressed on so many of our campuses by students and teachers alike. How do we spread the gospel of God’s all-forgiving love to these people, perpetrators and victims alike? By ganging up on the side of the mob, by encouraging their hatred and suspicion? Unlikely. Perhaps instead we should be going out of our way, at this time of all times, to remind the world that God so loved us all, he sent a us a savior: a newborn Jew.

Merry Christmas to all! All my best to you and your families, and see you in the New Year…