Are they all like that?
This isn’t the first time this is happening.
Something I’d never felt before in the United States – the loneliness of being Jewish.
During an earlier Gaza War, and for that reason Jews being targeted everywhere, I wondered if here, across from Manhattan, the fever had reached the newsroom.
Cries for Jewish blood everywhere.
Something I’d never felt before in the United States – the loneliness of being Jewish.
I remember sitting at my desk, unsure if I had any friends left, even among the reporters and editors I worked with as family. This was a time (like today) to be suspicious of everybody.
Was there a dampness in a handshake, a coolness in a smile, eyes lowered at your approach – or just your imagination.
That morning, along came Fitzpatrick, a budding novelist like me at that time, and who had assured me that this writing was as good as it gets. From him, rare praise.
Months later, when I really needed it, he was timely again.
So that morning, he bent down, patted me on the shoulder, and whispered, “Take it easy. We’re not all like that.”
Bless him.
But here we go again, and there is no Fitzpatrick in sight.
These days they are not all like that, either, I am sure, or so I think, or so I hope, but like the Terminix man tells me, “Just because you don’t see them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.”
You sure do hear them, though.
Loudest of all, to my ears, is someone like Geraldo, who first assures you on Fox News that he is a Jew, which we applaud. We are left to assume, then, that he is a glatt kosher kind of guy.
Who knew?
Or… like the pig who is glatt treyf because it only shows off its cloven hooves, okay, but does not chew the cud, not okay. Hence, fake.
Hence, Geraldo, who in the next breath goes on a tirade against Jews who live in Israel, which nullifies his second claim; that he is a Zionist.
Ditto Bernie Sanders.
Get the trend?
Useful Jews.
They are especially in use these days when it is not enough to be an ordinary anti-Semite. In other words, guys like Trevor Noah and John Oliver are good. But when the networks, and The New York Times, and The New Yorker magazine need someone to really pile on, those two will do. but Jewish anti-Semites will do better.
Jewish anti-Semites are the jackpot.
AOC and Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar are quite a crew by themselves, but fellow travelers from the Jewish side are always welcome.
So quite a win-win when the NYT finds someone named Michelle Goldberg to scorch the Jewish State, which is being condemned from all over for defending itself.
A good time to cash in and really double down, as did The New Yorker, which brought up Peter Beinart from a forgotten farm team in the minors to assess Israel with curses.
As he has for years and years…but this is how the trick works, quote…” Beinart, formerly a staunch Zionist, is arguing for Palestinians’ right of return.”
Nope. No staunch Zionist would ever want Israel swamped out of existence, and Beinart was never a Zionist of any kind, from what anyone can recall.
But that is how the scheme sets up…as the NYT has for years, if you are The New Yorker, you also play the Jewish “change-of-heart” angle.
That gets double points. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, and who accentuated Beinart from some heap, is Jewish.
Fortunately, we are not all like that…and that for every Remnick there’s a Fitzpatrick, maybe.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com
