Why <i>Saturday Night Live</i> Is Not Anti-Semitic
Is anti-Semitism always anti-Semitic, or can it be something else? Abraham
Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League thinks it's always anti-Semitic, but
Culturebox disagrees. The case in point: A little more than a week ago, Foxman
wrote a letter to NBC asking it never to rebroadcast portions of a Dec. 4
Saturday Night Live skit he said were offensive to Jews. NBC first
agreed not to. But after SNL 's executive producer, Lorne Michaels,
objected, the network put the matter "under review." The sketch in question
parodies a recent CBS Christmas special And So This Is Christmas . The
idea is to do a promotional spot for the forthcoming CBS special "And So
This Is Hanukkah ." For those who didn't tune in on Dec. 4, it went like
this:
Strains of bad klezmer music and a portentous voice-over give way to clips
of pop stars (played by SNL cast members) singing Hanukkah songs. The
female performers wear scanty clothing and make crude sexual gestures. The men
wear yarmulkes and rap exaggeratedly or dry-hump their backup singers. The
songs range from the mildly amusing to the unfunny. "Lou Bega" replaces
"Monica" with "Hanukkah" in his famous refrain, "A little bit of Monica in my
life." "Ricky Martin" does the same with "La Vida Loca." "Tori Amos" sings a
torchy holiday ballad while nearly having sex with a piano leg. And divas
"Britney Spears" (played by guest host Christina Ricci), "Mariah Carey," and
"Celine Dion" share their feelings about the Jewish holiday. "Spears" thinks
it's OK because the Christians have forgiven the Jews for killing Christ.
"Dion" recalls that when she asked her mother what Hanukkah was, her mother
said it was a holiday celebrated by the people who own the movie studios and
the banks.
It's those last two bits Foxman wants pulled from circulation. Out of
context, this isn't crazy, since the Christ-killer epithet has justified
pogroms for centuries and the international Jewish banking and media conspiracy
theory is alive and being propagated. But Foxman is wrong to think he needs to
defend his people from the producers of SNL , however tasteless they may
be. The people being made fun of in this sketch are not Jews. They're pop
stars.
Culturebox doesn't mean to suggest that your average pop star is not
an ignorant, self-promoting ditzbrain, of course. In the scene Foxman objects
to, however, the mockery is not aimed at pop stars in general. It targets a
specific kind of pop star--the one from a background so low-class she doesn't
know enough to hide her anti-Semitism. In other words, it's white-trash
pop stars who are being insulted, so it is the trailer-park pop-star
anti-defamation league, not Foxman's, that should be demanding a
retraction.
If you want to understand who exactly is being skewered in "Spears" and
"Dion," it helps to think of a scene in a better television comedy in which a
white-trash country singer makes a similarly anti-Semitic remark. (This
insight, by the way, is not Culturebox's. It was sent to her by a
Slate
reader who insists on anonymity but who seems to be
possessed of an astonishing memory. Whether his memory is accurate cannot be
confirmed, since Columbia Tristar Television, which owns the tapes in question,
says it is unable to look the incident up.) Culturebox's correspondent
writes:
With respect to current controversy over SNL /Christina Ricci/Britney
Spears, you may recall an almost identical line from Mary Hartman, Mary
Hartman , back in its first season. Loretta Haggers (Mary Kay Place), Mary's
neighbor and a country singer, got her big break on a Carson-like show. She
told the host that everyone had been so nice to her in L.A. and rattled off a
bunch of Jewish names. Then she added, "I can't believe they're the same people
who killed our Lord." I'm not sure if it was controversial at the time in the
real world. It did kill Loretta's career on the show.
