Dear Friends,
This past Saturday night, there were two skits on SNL (Saturday Night Live) that we, as Jews, probably heard a little differently from the average person in the audience:
One was part of the cold open, in which Cecily Strong portrayed Gina Carano. Gina Carano is an actress who has been appearing in a Disney+ show called, “The Mandalorian.” Her character was mocked on SNL for recently putting out an instagram post that suggested to some that she thought that “being a Republican today is like being a Jew during the Holocaust.”1 Ouch.
Carano’s post, incidentally, was swiftly condemned. The actress was fired from “The Mandalorian,” and her agency severed their relationship with her.
Then, Michael Che, in SNL’s Weekend Update segment, talked about the pandemic. He reported accurately that half the folks in Israel have already gotten the COVID vaccine. He then added, as a joke, “I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half.”
That stung, because it seemed to validate a long-standing canard against Jews, namely, that we only take care of our own, and we don’t care about other people. In fact, vaccines have been equitably distributed within Israel proper, to Jews, Arabs, Druze and others. It is true that Palestinians, living in the Occupied Territories, did not receive vaccines from the Israeli healthcare system, but there’s a good reason for that. When the Oslo Accords which set up the Palestinian Authority were signed, the Palestinian leadership specifically insisted that they, rather than Israel, take full control over medical care, including the distribution of medicines such as vaccines, within their territory.
Understandably, the Jewish world has been up in arms. Many organizations have written to NBC decrying Che’s joke.
So, are we Jews oversensitive? Or are we reacting to something that’s really there? And if so, what is that? Ignorance, thoughtlessness, malevolence?
Both of these moments on SNL are a reminder of a strange phenomenon: We Jews are actually a very small percentage -- approximately 2% -- of the American population. And yet, again and again, Jews figure quite prominently in American cultural expression: books, films, television, and the news. And we don’t always like the way we are described or depicted.
A good friend of mine, Rabbi Amy Katz of Temple Beth El of Springfield put it this way: “We’ve seen this movie before.”
Indeed, we have. It’s truly unbelievable that today, thousands of years after the Purim story presented the world with a textbook case of antisemitism in the diaspora, we’re still seeing genocidal threats against Jews trivialized. It’s unbelievable that conspiracy theories about Jews routinely continue to circulate around the globe; that Jews continue to be depicted as insular and self-absorbed and even dismissive or hateful toward those outside of the Jewish community.
It seems as though, as within every previous generation, ours has become infected with anti-semitism as well.
All of which reminds us of an uncomfortable truth: the holiday of Purim is not for children. Really.
Yes, I know that little girls like to dress up as Queen Esther, and I know that we shape our services and celebrations for kids. I know that.
But, if we think about it, if we take it seriously, the story of Purim is horrifying. It really is. That a character who feels slighted by one particular Jew could develop an enduring hatred of all Jews, and manage to convince the ruling powers to give him the power to commit genocide against us … That’s very frightening -- because we know how close he came to succeeding.
We are duty-bound to tell the story, word for word. We mustn’t imagine that this was a one-off. And yet part of the Jewish response on Purim is to try not to think too hard about how bad things could really be. It’s to drink some intoxicating beverages. It’s to try to push aside the unpleasant thoughts that come to our mind when we pay attention to the story told in the Book of Esther.
And so I encourage all of us to gather together to, on the one hand, hear the story read from the Megillah, and, on the other, to celebrate together as a community. Click here for information about our Purim programming this year.
But we should do more than that. We owe it to ourselves and to our children and grandchildren to pay attention to the way in which the antisemitism depicted in the Purim story has morphed and expressed itself even up to our own day. Who knows?2 Perhaps we will personally encounter it, and we will wonder how we should respond.
It’s for that reason that I invited Rob Leikind, the director of the Boston office of the American Jewish Committee, to address us at services on Shabbat. His topic will be: “Jews, Conspiracies and the American Dream: What is Happening and Why Should We Care." Rob has been an indefatigable effective advocate for the Jewish people his entire career. He has built vital relationships with leaders of different faiths and from different countries, seeking always to combat intolerance and hatred, seeking always to further the interests of the Jewish people. This is a unique opportunity to hear him in our shul, and I encourage everyone to join us.
But let me not leave on that note.
After all, the Jewish tradition insists that on Purim we do more than remember what Haman tried to accomplish. In addition to reading the megillah, we send treats to one another (called, mishloach manot), and we give tzedakah (called, in the megillah, matanot la-evyonim), reminding ourselves that our ethical life, our caring for one another, are critical to our self-preservation.
Yes, it is important for all of us to come better to understand antisemitism, conspiracy theories, and other forms of evil. But ultimately, we owe it to ourselves and our posterity to focus on positive reasons to be Jewish; to practice Judaism; to study Jewish texts; and to transmit Judaism lovingly to the next generation in every way possible, in every encounter.
Let’s not allow what has happened (or what is happening) to us, determine the nature of our Jewish identities. Instead, let’s base our identities on a love of virtue, a love of our people, and a desire to live out and share our beautiful heritage with all humankind.
Happy Purim!
Sincerely,
Rabbi Carl M. Perkins
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1That’s the language used by the Hollywood Reporter to describe Carano’s post. SNL characterized what she said as suggesting that “Conservatives have it as bad as people living in Nazi Germany.” Carano’s post was actually more ambiguous. It read as follows: "Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors... even by children... Because history is edited, most people today don't realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?" Carano has subsequently denied that intended to compare how today’s Conservatives or Republicans are treated with the fate of Jews during the Holocaust. See: https://tinyurl.com/yoeqw4zl .
2See: Esther 4:14.
