JackEngelhard
JackEngelhardצילום: מתוך האתר האישי

If anything measures the decline of our culture, it’s the distance between a colossus like Frank Sinatra to a Seth Rogen.

A generation apart, and that’s the story.

It’s the story of a Hollywood that once cheered for Israel, but now, alas, Seth Rogen and company.

America was fun while it lasted.
It’s the story of America in the dumps when it dumps on Israel. Strangest thing. But that’s how it is…and the sorry results are in.

Hand it to the Democrats for lousing it up for both our countries.

America was fun while it lasted.

I trust you know the details on Rogen. If not, please brush up on this, because I do not feel like going into it again. Garbage in, garbage out.

But this: Have you ever heard a Frenchman dispute French people the right to live in France? Never. I could go on country to country in this vein, but you get the point.

You also get Seth Rogen, a Jew, complaining about Jews living in Israel. How we keep getting this type, I don’t know. But they do replicate.

They don’t make movies like “Exodus” anymore, nor “Cast a Giant Shadow,” and this book they changed completely, and this book never had a chance.

We could chalk it up to 2020…a year when everything’s gone wrong, or gone Hollywood.

But that would be a mistake because once upon a time Hollywood was Israel’s best friend.

Sinatra tops a star-studded galaxy which featured Marlon Brando, Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni and a cast of thousands who joined up with Ben Hecht and Hillel Kook first to sound the alarm at the gathering storm of the Holocaust, and next to rush to the aid of the fledgling Jewish State.

Sinatra was a tireless hero for the Jewish people…and Sinatra was connected to the big, the bad, and the beautiful. Sinatra was king.

Jews and non-Jews…they showed up. Gangsters showed up, and Robert Rockaway tells it well here in Tablet.

When the chips were down, it was the Meyer Lanskys who answered with the calling card of the Jewish people, from Abraham onward – “here I am.”

Frank Sinatra was one of a kind. If only we had more American Jews like this Catholic Italian-American.

Hemingway once said, “In America a good guy always comes along.”

Back then, yes, so it was in the age of good guys, and tough guys, and Sinatra was the best of the best, and the toughest of the tough.

No time for softies…when there were Jews to be saved and a nation to be born. The softies are today’s special, crawling and groveling on their knees.

Imagine that sort ever saying, here I am. Imagine a good guy coming along for Israel, or even for America, from today’s pool.

Imagine anyone today singing and swinging to the music of New York-New York, as Sinatra once did, when it was his kind of town.

Now it is de Blasio’s kind of town…and nobody is singing. The melody is gone.

From the Rat Pack to the rest of Hollywood, and Broadway, Sinatra’s word was law, and when he said go forth for Israel, everybody chipped in.

You don’t say no to Frank, unless you are Ava Gardner.

His exploits? If you don’t know, a good place to start is Shalom Goldman’s “Mr. Sinatra adored Israel, and Israel adored him back.”

Sinatra. Our kind of man. Hollywood. Our kind of town. What happened? Don’t ask. I don’t know.

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

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