Alan Dershowitz says that Jews are all over the media, but you can’t generalize about their views (emphasis mine):
Yes, there are many individual Jews in positions of influence in Hollywood, in network television, in sports and entertainment, and in many other areas of American public life. These individuals, who happen to be Jewish, do not act together in any kind of conspiratorial manner. There is no “Jewish control” of any of these areas — or of the many other areas, such as medicine, law, academia, finance — where there are large numbers of individual Jews in high positions. Many of these individuals are Jewish only in the sense that their parents or grandparents happen to be Jews. They do not live Jewish lives or support Jewish causes. They certainly do not conspire to exercise any sort of “Jewish control” over the areas in which they work. Indeed, many individual Jews who are in positions of authority are anti-Israel and critical of Jewish values.
But Dershowitz himself generalizes, fervently, about Jewish views in The Vanishing American Jew [emphasis mine]:
My generation of Jews saw important reasons for remaining Jewish, even if we did not always practice the ritual or completely believe in the theology. As actual or vicarious survivors of the Holocaust, of Israel’s defense against sworn enemies, and of the numerous assaults on Judaism and Zionism, we saw ourselves as having a vital– indeed, a sacred– mission: to protect embattled Jews against our external enemies. We were part of a long traditon of defending the Jewish barricades, which were always on the verge of being overrun by… the pogromists, the Nazis, the Arabs, the religiously inspired Jew-haters… and the assorted bigots and crazies who have persecuted us from the beginning of Jewish history.
P.S. I believe
that Dershowitz’s second statement actually reflects the “sacred” charge felt by Jews in powerful positions. Former CNN correspondent Linda Scherzer has said, “We, as Jews, must understand that we come with a certain bias…We believe in the Israeli narrative of history. We support the values that we as Americans, Westerners, and Jews espouse. Thus, we see news reporting through our own prism.” This blog was cut off at the New York Observer because its owner is a Zionist. The NYT’s former executive editor Max Frankel wrote, “I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert … Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognized, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.” NBC’s Jeff Zucker said he didn’t want news of “jihadists raging about Palestine.” I’d sure like to meet some of those anti-Israel editors.
