Embarrassing the Tribe
By their flakes shall ye know them.

May 4, 2001 8:40 a.m.

he ancient rift over who killed Jesus has lately smitten the peace. In his easily overlooked Easter message, Paul Weyrich, noted crank and fundraiser, opined that the Jews killed Jesus; a couple of New York basketball players said much the same thing in a later airing of views. The ballplayers' cracks inspired a column in the Los Angeles Times by Jonathan Zimmerman, who teaches history at New York University's School of Education. His piece was entitled "Anti-Semitism: an All-American Attribute" — which indicates that Jew-hating is a fulltime passion in this country.

One hates to side even slightly with a raver, and Zimmerman seems to fit that description. Yet it is reasonable to assume that many Gentile American Princes (and Princesses) - GAPs — may harbor at least something of a grudge toward Jews — for a more prosaic reason: The Jews they most often encounter have made their way onto TV or into the newspapers. Many are activists, and as we all know, activists tend to be loud, hysterical, monomaniacal, and arrogant no matter what their cause. Some are clearly crazy.

A few weeks ago, for example, a couple of PETA activists went over to Africa to protest meat-eating. They were reported to have gotten inside cages in the hope of establishing widespread solidarity with chickens. As it happens, they were protesting in a nation full of very hungry people who would not only eat the first chicken that happened by, but its tracks and shadow as well. To the untrained mind, these guys represent the face of vegetarianism. Yet I know vegetarians, both active and recovering. They have very little in common with those guys.

Christians get plenty of cringe time when the more antic members of their tribe pop up on television to pray away a hurricane or to suggest that God unleashed a hurricane in retaliation for a bad public-policy decision. Gay activists embarrass their tribe, as do environmental activists, and so on down the line.

The same is true for Jews. For many GAPs, their exposure is largely limited to activists they encounter in the media. Around Christmas time, for instance, GAPs turn on the television and see a guy from the Anti-Defamation League moaning about senior citizens singing Christmas carols at the town recreation hall or a Christmas tree in a Colorado classroom.

Similarly, cartoonist Johnny Hart drew fire for an Easter cartoon expressing the fact that Christianity evolved from Judaism. His critics interpreted the cartoon differently, which is certainly their right. Yet they also insisted that their interpretation was the only legitimate one, and mounted an all-out campaign to kill the strip prior to publication. This strikes reasonable people as thuggish behavior.

Similar stories crop up on a fairly regular basis. A religious enthusiast opens up a biblical theme park and is accused by the Jewish Defense League of engaging in cultural genocide. Baptists announce they're going to pray for the conversion of Jews and the charge is the same. These stories can lead to the conclusion that most Jews believe Christianity is a bad and dangerous presence that should be marginalized at all costs. Because the vast majority of Americans subscribe to some form of Christianity, the potential for widespread ill will is obviously great.

While this is merely a suspicion, though one based on personal experience, I doubt many Jews sit around worrying about people singing Christmas carols in the town rec hall, or about the prayers of Baptists, nor do they fear that most of their Christian neighbors harbor an Inner Nazi. The masterful Binyamin L. Jolkovsky, for example (I name him because he posts some of my columns on his excellent website: www.JewishWorldReview.com) unleashed a veritable hydrogen bomb against Johnny Hart's attackers. As Bin put it, many of these activists are primarily interested in advancing secularism. They are quite the evangelists in that regard.

The moral of this story is found in a slight reworking of a well-known verse: "By their flakes shall ye know them." The moral, of course, is that it is our duty as Americans to ignore this verse, jot and title.