The conservative website Washington Examiner this week published an op-ed about Ben Shapiro’s appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher earlier this month.
Orthodox Jew Daniel Ross Goodman was very happy to see that Shapiro was wearing his yarmulke, and believes this is a new era for orthodox Judaism.
He writes:
For a society that has been so accepting of multiculturalism and in which Jews have played a prominent role in almost all spheres of culture, from Groucho Marx and George Gershwin to Steven Spielberg and Larry David, there have been remarkably few Jewish celebrities who identify as religiously observant. There has been such a plethora of religiously observant Protestants, Catholics, and Muslims who have made notable contributions to American culture that to list even a decent portion of them would require an article in and of itself. By glaring contrast, the number of prominent religious Jews is so small that Orthodox parents trying to point out some of our “successes” to our children have been forced to fall back on fictional characters, such as Krusty the Clown’s father Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky on The Simpsons and the famous convert-by-marriage Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski, who won’t go bowling on Saturday because, as he memorably exclaims, “I don’t roll on Shabbos!”
He goes on to say that he believes that at this peak of multiculturalism, it is time for orthodox Jews to finally make a showing.
I have no reason to believe this Jew isn’t being genuine in his bafflement at the fact that there have been so few Jews identifying religiously on TV. Although he doesn’t really explain why he thinks this is. Maybe he hasn’t thought about it, or simply assumes it is because of the Holocaust.
As an anti-Semite, I can very easily enlighten him: if every Jew appeared on TV with a yarmulke on, people would notice a distinct pattern in their behavior, which would lead to people understanding that the Jews have an agenda. As it stands now, people have been convinced that despite the compulsively ethnocentric nature of the Jews, they somehow lack a cohesive racial agenda, and can really just be on any side of any issue.
Most people look at a Jew without his yarmulke on, and just see an ugly white man – maybe an Italian. The first step in anyone’s red pill journey is checking the “early life” section of the Wikipedia entry of every cultural figure they hate, and finding that 90% of them are Jewish.
If they were all wearing these small hats, people would quickly recognize these patterns. Aside from that, they would just notice how prominent they are – someone would point out that they are only 2% of the population, and people would be shocked that they control every Hollywood studio and every major news network except Fox.
Shapiro uses his Jewishness strategically, the same way Ezra Levant and Dennis Prager do – to convince right-wingers that Jews are somehow their friends. It fits into the basic thing that they are religious. These Jews will claim that it is the non-religious Jews that are leftists and bad, while the religious Jews are conservative and good.
It doesn’t make sense in any other context for a Jew to make the point that he is a Jew.
I mean – obviously there was a reason that the Nazis made them wear yellow stars. People don’t know that the Nazis were just doing something that had been done in medieval Europe for hundreds of years. But there’s a Wiki entry on the “Yellow Badge” that talks about the medieval history.
The reason this practice existed is that Jews tried to pretend to not be Jewish. If they all wore their yarmulkes all the time, there wouldn’t be any need to put the badge on them, would there?