The Sandra Bernhard monstrosity

Kevin MacDonald

September 24, 2008

I suppose we could just write off Sandra Bernhard as a nut case and leave it at that. But the thing is that her rant against Christianity and her threatened gang-rape of Sarah Palin occurred at Theater J—J as in Jewish.

Theater J is a project of the Jewish Community Center of Washington. At the bottom of the homepage there is the stamp of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington DC. You can click on tabs for Jewish Living which direct you to material on classes and retreats. Another tab brings you to information on programs for infants, toddlers and school-age children. About what you would expect at a Jewish community center.

But then there’s the video (posted at the Jewish Community Center website) of Bernhard saying about Sarah Palin, “Don’t you fucking reference the Old Testament, bitch. You stay with your goyish, crappy, shiksa-funky [or is it “shiksa-fucking”?] bullshit. Don’t you touch my Old Testament, you bitch. Because we have left it open to interpretation. It is no longer taken literally. You whore …”

So the moral high ground comes from having the correct interpretation of the Bible? I thought that was the sort of thing that people like Palin are accused of. How very quaint coming from this super edgy and ultra-chic Jewish-lesbian radical.

This sort of invective ruins careers if one substitutes, say, anti-black invective for Bernhard’s anti-goy rant. Heard from Michael Richards lately? Bernhard can refer to the New Testament as “goyish, crappy, shiksa-funky bullshit” and it’s a great career move. She gets rave reviews in the mainstream media, including the Washington Post. The audience can be heard laughing and clapping appreciatively in the background while she says it, and Ari Roth, the artistic director, informs us that there are standing ovations after every performance.

Roth’s defense of the indefensible is a masterpiece of double-think: “There is a message of hope and ecumenical tolerance at the heart of what we’re trying to achieve here. Even in Sandra’s show. It’s complicated. It isn’t hate ful [sic]. There’s hope for all of us.”

Yeah, it’s complicated. Love is hate. Up is down. Black is white. Orwell would love it. You can just see the ecumenical tolerance and love in her face in this photo taken during her performance. Feel the love.

The first take-home message, then, is that Jews don’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of us. In an era when talking disparagingly about other groups is a sure way to career oblivion, it’s still possible for a Jewish performer to denigrate the goyim and the Christian religion and to advocate physical violence and sexual degradation against someone merely because they believe what most white people believe. And she can do it at a Jewish community center.

Whites should think about what this really implies about America of the future when whites are a minority and Jews remain as a hostile elite. As I noted elsewhere in commenting on a previous situation where a hostile Jewish elite ruled over a society that they loathed — that is, the Jewish Communists who acted as mass murderers of Christians during a period when Jews were a hostile elite in the Soviet Union:

The situation prompts reflection on what might have happened in the United States had American Communists and their sympathizers assumed power. The “red diaper babies” came from Jewish families which “around the breakfast table, day after day, in Scarsdale, Newton, Great Neck, and Beverly Hills have discussed what an awful, corrupt, immoral, undemocratic, racist society the United States is.” Indeed, hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews … has been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.

It is easy to imagine which sectors of American society would have been deemed overly backward and religious and therefore worthy of mass murder by the American counterparts of the Jewish elite in the Soviet Union…. These [white Christians] now loom large among the “red state” voters who have been so important in recent national elections.

Jewish animosity toward the Christian culture that is so deeply ingrained in much of America is legendary. As Joel Kotkin points out, “for generations, [American] Jews have viewed religious conservatives with a combination of fear and disdain.” … In the end, the dark view of traditional Slavs and their culture [held by the Jewish elite in the USSR] is not very different from the views of contemporary American Jews about a majority of their fellow countrymen.

Sandra Bernhard is Exhibit A for this type of contemporary American Jew. And the target of her wrath is Sarah Palin, the personification of red-state America.

One can imagine the horror that would greet someone who made analogous comments about Judaism or the Holocaust. We doubt that people like Ari Roth would attempt to find nuances and subtleties in such art. There would be no talk of artistic license. No attempts to find deep meanings of tolerance and hope despite the surface message of hatred and the facial expressions of seething rage and sneering contempt.

The second take-home message is that this sort of hostility to whites and to Christianity is a mainstream Jewish phenomenon. Whatever else one might say about Bernhard, she is part of a very large and vibrant Jewish subculture in America and throughout the West. In this case, it is performed by a Jewish comedienne at a Jewish community center, with an appreciative audience, many of whom are doubtless Jewish. And this is no insular culture far removed from the American mainstream. Rather, her work is reviewed respectfully and even enthusiastically in the prestigious media.

The hostility of the mainstream Jewish community, and especially the organized Jewish community, to white Europeans and the culture of the West can be seen across the entire Jewish political spectrum, from leftists like Sandra Bernhard to the neoconservative right.

The neocons do not express their contempt with the apoplectic rage of Sandra Bernhard — at least in public. But it’s there nonetheless. As Jacob Heilbrunn notes, the neocons had “a lifelong antipathy toward the patrician class.” The result, as Norman Podhoretz phrased it, was to proclaim a war against the “WASP patriciate.”

And, like Sandra Bernhard, the neocons aren’t very fond of Middle America either. But of course, they aren’t in competition with Middle America in their crusade to dominate American foreign policy for the benefit of Israel.

This anti-white hostility
affects a wide range of phenomena, from Jewish involvement in the media—as exemplified by Bernhard, to Jewish involvement in immigration policy.

But it goes even beyond that. Bernhard is quite frank about being a lesbian and typically draws a large number of the Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender crowd to her performances. The audience laughing about “big black brothers” gang-raping a female Republican vice-presidential candidate and trashing the New Testament is part and parcel of the culture of the left. It is the sort of humor that would work well among professors at elite universities or op-ed writers at the New York Times.

This culture of the left therefore includes a lot of non-Jews. Destroying this culture is an enormously uphill battle. It is a culture that is now decades old and entrenched in all the elite power centers of society. The task will not be easy. But, considering what happened in the Soviet Union when a hostile Jewish elite obtained political power and was unleashed on the people and culture they hated, there is an obvious moral imperative in doing so.

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