Anti-Semitism on Saturday Night Live
By Rob Anderson - Oct 6th, 2008 at 11:23 am
There was a time when people blamed the economic crises of their day on sneaky, greedy, powerful Jews who “controlled” the world’s financial markets. These people told stories, cracked jokes, made laws, and created propaganda that advanced this anti-Semitic worldview. Of course, some of these people even advocated rounding up all the world’s Jews and executing them.
Today, in the United States at least, we are generally sensitive to this type of anti-Semitism. It’s easy to spot, and it’s not tolerated. Well, sort of.
Over the weekend, Saturday Night Live featured a skit that blamed our current economic crisis on sneaky, greedy, powerful Jews–George Soros and Herb and Marion Sandler, to be exact–who “control” the world’s financial markets. As a part of the joke, SNL even suggested that the Sandlers be rounded up and executed (as you can see in the screen capture above).
Over at the blog Sans Everything, journalist and comics scholar Jeet Heer provides some of the other anti-Semitic smears that have been used against Soros over the years:
[A]nti-Semitic attacks on Soros are familiar enough in the rightwing media. In 2004 radio show host Michael Savage referring to Soros said: “Not only are you a money changer in the temple of truth, but you are a deceitful, backstabbing, unpatriotic traitorous bastard in my opinion.” On Fox News Tony Blankley described Soros as “a self-admitted atheist … a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust. …He’s buying influence all over the world. He’s a robber baron, he’s a pirate capitalist and he’s a reckless man.”
Heer also defends Soros against the main thrust of the skit–that the financial crisis was supposedly caused by the secret Jewish controllers of the Democratic Party:
Those who think Soros might be behind the financial crisis might want to consider the fact that he’s actually been warning for years, with great prescience, about the dangers a credit crisis. Far from causing the current calamity, Soros was one of those who tried to avert it.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I must add that the Sandler Family Supporting Foundation and Soros’ Open Society Institute fund, in part, the work of the Center for American Progress and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, of which Pushback is a part. But I don’t think that’s clouding my judgment. Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism, and it’s not funny.
UPDATE: Herb Sandler responds to the SNL skit in an interview with USA Today today: “I have been listening to this crap for two years,” Sandler said. “We are being unfairly tarred. People have been telling us to speak out for some time, but we didn’t think it was appropriate. That was clearly a mistake.”
wow, I totally didn’t get that angle when I watched the skit, thanks for bringing it up.
October 6th, 2008 at 12:17 pmThat skit was flat-out boring.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:19 pm