Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network
We've had a Netflicks DVD of The Social Network hanging around the house for months. My wife watched it ages ago, by herself, but because I'm so dependent, I've been pressing her to watch it again, with me. Last night I almost got her to do it, till she frowned and said she found the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg "anti-Semitic." Well then I was bound and determined to see the movie. I took it over to a friend's house, and watched it there.
My wife is on to something. The portrait of Zuckerberg in the movie is repulsive, and it ends up being generic, a portrait of the new striving American Jewish meritocratic billionaire. Given that this portrait was brought to us by a production team that included Jews-- writer Aaron Sorkin and mega-producer Scott Rudin among others--I relate it to my own disaffection with the new Jewish establishment. Watching the film, I remembered that I'm not the only one who goes around counting my people in the news, and not the only one ashamed of what the winners look like. Am I self-hater? No. Just a little disgusted.
It's really hard to believe that Zuckerberg is as bad as he's made out to be. He's a soulless anti-Gatsby, clamoring for inclusion, and clamoring for hedonism, but without any affection. The joyless Jewish Harvard social milieu from which Zuckerberg springs are a crude caricature in this film-- and certainly misrepresent Harvard in 2003. I don't think Zuckerberg really cared about getting into a WASPy club; besides, those clubs weren't even WASPy anymore. But the social divide the film captures was certainly true of Sorkin and my generation: we felt ourselves to be confined to a grind community built around law and guilt, and wondered about how much wild fun those goyim were having with girls and drugs. We wanted a part of that; and the desire to be at the fun party is what drives Zuckerberg in this movie. The movie uses Phillips Exeter, the fancy private school Zuckerberg went to, as a rapier against him: he's continually shown wearing PE t-shirts.
Yes, all the WASPs are caricatured here. The Winkelvosses are a vicious joke about gentile privilege. But I'm not interested in the WASP caricatures, I'm interested in what my wife gleaned in the Zuckerberg portrayal. The character played by Jesse Eisenberg only cares about elites and the big score. He has no friends, because he fucks everyone over, beginning with the first scene when he disses the girl who just dumped him on a blog by talking about her bra size. He screws the Winkelvosses and the math whiz on whom he depends for a crucial algorithm to build his website, Eduardo Saverin. And yes Saverin is Jewish, from Brazil, but he doesn't really relieve the picture of Jewish piggitude. That picture is filled out by Harvard President Larry Summers, who looks like a pig (as played by Douglas Urbanski) and crudely tells the Winkelvoss twins that they are wrong to be demanding relief from Harvard for the fact that Zuckerberg stole an idea from them.
The Winkelvosses are a WASP joke because they are following an entitled American code of honor in pursuing Zuckerberg through the Harvard hierarchy, but if they're a joke-- their lawyer is called Hotchkiss-- Zuckerberg and Summers are the new ugly breed of success. I spent a lot of time with Scott Rudin once and know he has a great sociological mind; I can just see him and Sorkin sitting around laughing about how Jews have taken over the Establishment, the same thing I often write about here. And let's show the world how they're doing it-- ugly.
Is the Zuckerberg picture anti-Semitic? Well it comes close. I started thinking about Zuckerberg's recent facebook pictures, including the one below, and thinking, well
Zuckerberg and girlfriend Priscilla Chan
he can't be that much of a dick. Still, this movie strikes me as a landmark in a great tradition, the Jewish literary hatred of money. From I.L. Peretz's short stories about the Polish ghetto to Philip Roth's viciousness toward the Patimkins in Goodbye, Columbus, there is a Jewish tradition of afflicting the reverence of wealth in our community.
Kafka put it best in his undelivered letter to his father of 1919, upbraiding him for the Jewish "materials" he had tried to give him:
This was the religious material that was handed on to me, to which may be added at most the outstretched hand pointing to "the sons of the millionaire Fuchs," who attended the synagogue with their father on the High Holy Days. How one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible, I could not understand; precisely the getting rid of it seemed to me to be the devoted action.
I remember that outstretched hand of reverence in my life. I remember being told to worship the Blaustein family in Baltimore (he of Standard Oil and the famous dialogue with Ben-Gurion about, we ain't moving to Israel) and bridling. And I put this film in that category: hatred of the millionaire Fuchs. A fine tradition, but it made this film hard to watch.
paranoid nonsense.
You should download a copy of ‘pirates of silicon valley’ and consider the rather negative portraits of bill gates and steve jobs. Even the title tells you where the film-makers stand. Then you should try to argue that that the portrait of Gates is ‘anti-Christian’ or ‘anti-Congregationalist’, or that the portrait of Jobs is ‘anti-Buddhist’ or a slur on adopted people. Your arguments would make make as much sense as those you’ve made about The Social Network.’
The world doesn’t revolve around Judaism, any more than it revolves around Congregationalism or Buddhism. The portrayal of Zuckerberg in the movie has nothing to do with his religion or ethnicity.
anti-semetic is such a loaded word.
“Portraying Jews in a negative way” is much better than antisemitic.
“Portraying Jews in a negative way” … racist works for me. it seems to work for all the other ethnicities on the planet so why jews have their own word for it is rather baffling. oh well.
Why is there a special word for Jew-hatred? Because Jews are hated (and loved and neither) as a racial group, but also as an ethnicity and also as a religion.
And, of course there are other groups with special words, such as Islamophobia which is used for the same reason as above, that Arabs and Muslims are looked at in the same Venn diagram.
And then there is Homophobia etc… to describe hatred of another class that is not quite a race.
Hi tokyokb,
Q: Because Jews are hated (and loved and neither) as a racial group…
R: Did/do you mean ‘tribal or religious’ group?
R: Did/do you mean ‘tribal or religious’ group?
That too, but there are also countries, like Great Britain and its UK Race Relations Act, under which the Jews are legally regarded as a race. link to news.bbc.co.uk
@ Hostage,
Thanks for the explanation and link. Appreciated.
“paranoid nonsense.”
Perhaps so, but in Phil’s defence he might be wondering, if only subconsciously, whether all Jewish web-site proprietors are like Zuckerberg?
Sadly, Mondoweiss: The Movie is one project that Hollywood is unlikely to green-light. So we’ll probably never know the full story behind why today we’re not all avidly reading Mondowitty.
Hmmm… Pictures are deceiving. There is something wrong about seeing a bunch of unhappy young people at the bar snapping pictures pretending to have fun and then immediately turn into zombies as they upload them to their facebook via their smartphone. Those pictures are telling a lie. Maybe the above Zuckerberg photo is also telling a lie. Like how the media always runs photos of Pollard looking all sensitive. I could be wrong. IMO, Zuckerberg in all likelihood is probably just a dick. That’s it.
Zuckerberg, Jewishness aside, came from a well-off family and went to Harvard. If you can’t be successful given those circumstances, you’re doing it wrong.
Perhaps Phil is on to something though. Producers are pretty darn important in Hollywood in terms of getting the film they want, however, the director is the main person that ultimately translates this to film via their vision. David Fincher, the director, is not Jewish.
Fincher has been fighting against the Hollywood system since his very first film, Alien 3. He pretty much disowns Alien 3. The studio hacked his version of the film into an incoherent mess. When he made The Game, the studio forced him to tack on a ‘happy ending’ he wasn’t crazy about. And when he made Fight Club, the studio hated it and and no idea how to market it. Since Fight Club is intended for a male audience, Fincher was opposed to exploiting Brad Pitt’s likeness in advertising as the studio wanted to do. Perhaps that’s why the initial posters has a pink bar of soap. Pink washing?
I don’t think this is anything new really. Hollywood and the studio heads are predominantly Jewish. Somebody told me that they won’t watch Harry Potter because the goblins who control the gold are antisemitic caricatures. Are they? They might be. And some say that George Lucas was also frustrated with the studio system and Jawas (phonetically similar to Jews) and Watto (prequel character with allegedly antisemitic caricature features), who are both dishonest merchants, are apparently a jab at them. If true, it’s probably just a joke. Spielberg is one of Lucas’ best friends, so he can’t be antisemitic.
Re Lucas – I always thought that with the use of “Jedi” he was word-playing with the Slavic word for Jews – “zhiddeh” (my spelling). If I am correct, as they represent “A Force For Good”, this would be the opposite of anti-semitism.
Hi Charon,
Q: …the director is the main person that ultimately translates this to film via their vision.
R: Makes you wonder why there’s always a ‘director’s cut’ of a flick, doesn’t it?
“R: Makes you wonder why there’s always a ‘director’s cut’ of a flick, doesn’t it?”
Hmmm…there’s a joke in there about videotaping a bris. Maybe I can tease it out.
“R: Makes you wonder why there’s always a ‘director’s cut’ of a flick, doesn’t it?”
That’s where commerce meets art meeting commerce. The studio doesn’t give up final cut in the first instance on business grounds; turns out an inferior film; director gains a following which demands superior version of the film; studio, on business grounds, is happy to oblige.
“Somebody told me that they won’t watch Harry Potter because the goblins who control the gold are antisemitic caricatures. Are they? They might be. ”
You can see the goblins as anti-Semitic caricatures if you really want to, but mostly they seem to be anti-goblin caricatures.
But if the goblins really are like that, is anti-goblinism wrong?
“And some say that George Lucas was also frustrated with the studio system…”
And “some say” that the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods. LOL. Lucas has a well known hatred of the Hollywood studio system, so he we went and created his own little empire in NoCal so he didn’t have to work there.
The movie portrayed Zuckerberg as an awful individual. But, the first commentator is right it had nothing to do with his ethnic heritage. Nowhere ever does the movie suggest that Zuckerberg and Summers are awful people because they are Jewish. They are simply portrayed as awful people (rightly or wrongly) and their ethnicity is never even hinted at in the movie. Compare this to the huge number of movies portraying Arabs or Muslims or Germans as inherently evil because they are Arab, Muslim, or German.
It didn’t occur to me what ethnicity Larry Summers was until I read this thread. Jew or not, he’s still a schmuck.
Good topic, but sometimes a film character is just a film character. I don’t doubt that the movie’s Zuckerberg isn’t exactly the real Mark Zuckerberg. Liberties were taken both to make the story more dramatic and to include the film makers’ own preoccupations.
The obsession with final clubs was Aaron Sorkin’s. Maybe you can go to Exeter and Harvard today without taking much interest in old WASP institutions and rituals, but you can’t write an Ivy-related success story and escape the influence of Fitzgerald and Gatsby. If Zuckerberg had been preoccupied with making Porcellian or Fly or Spee, he wouldn’t have invented Facebook (or whatever it was he did that got him all that money).
But anti-Semitic? No, a film portrayal of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates might have been similar, stressing the nerdish, anti-social aspects and ruthlessness, without being anti-Arab or anti-WASP.
The Summers’ portrait, though, was interesting. It didn’t look entirely believable. How accurate was it? Has Harvard ever had a president like that before?
phil should read kafka’s “jackals and arabs”
A better question might be, “Is Mark Zuckerberg an anti-semite” because, according to the conventional wisdom here, every act by a Jew, is directly related to his jewishness. I for one think this is nonsense. Z’berg is probably just a dick. Like most kids who went to Exeter…. haha.
And instead of crying about anti-semitism – think about how far we have come. It’s a movie about a jewish kid who actually PRODUCED something ( he may have ripped off some ideas etc) but the kid actually produced a product – which is radically different from the traditional role jews play in cinema, namely the guy who takes 5%.
Ari Gold on Entourage is waaaaaaaay more anti-semitic than Zuckerberg in social network
Ari Gold on Entourage is waaaaaaaay more anti-semitic than Zuckerberg in social network
I assumed Entourage was a documentary based upon a true story . . .;-)
“a jewish kid who actually PRODUCED something”
Though I still don’t understand what it’s for.
haha – me neither….
“haha – me neither….”
In my case, it would be of great assistance to bounty hunters, baliffs, creditors and ex-wives. I stay as far away from Snitchbook as possible.
There is an obsession, I think, with WASPs among older Jews.
I read an interview with Weiner about Mad Men and his influences. He names a lot of books, many of them written by gentiles, by it’s almost as he has to ascribe to the books ‘Jewish themes’.
Mad Men itself, I think, is in many ways a Jew grappling with a world he has inherited. You can sense that Weiner, a good liberal, looks onto the newfound wealth with bittersweet taste. Feminism is a hoax(he has four children, and is a dedicated shulgoer). He is the kind of Jew who is very much into ethnic stuff; he views much of modern liberal orthodoxy as a way to prevent Jewish continuation.
He views the same modern liberal orthodoxy as something Jewish, something which removed the old, WASP order and the same orthodoxy that is now responsible for lower birthrates, assimilation and intermarriage. It took on the WASPs, but it was a boomerang. People just didn’t think long enough – it would inflict the new king on the throne too. The WASPs, for all their faults and hypocrises, held a glue to the society that they controlled. That glue came undone, and the seams in American public life, as well as in American Jewish life, slowly came apart.
There was criticism against Mad Men, a few seasons into it, because they had no minorities. Weiner ably swatted the question away by a frowned look and a shrug: “sadly, that’s how it looked like”. Perhaps, deep down, he is skeptical of the entire validity of the criticism. After all, does he want to replay the societal changes that happened during the 60s and led the way for the Jewish cultural revolution? Psychological introspection, or therapy? To do that, he is only interested in two groups. He only needs two groups, although one will remain mostly invisible.
A few days ago, when I thought about Mad Men and the interview he did(with the Jewish Journal, no less! Coincidence?), I re-visited it and saw the books he listed.
Catcher in the Rye, by Salinger, was mentioned as a huge source of inspiration.
He mentions WASPs right off the bat, but feels he has to infuse Jewishness into the disucssion and talks about how the book is really Jewish in it’s themes. There is this duality, are these people that different from us? Is our caricature of them as old, fossified, wrong? Was there something pulsing underneath that society by pioneers like Salinger? In short: did he quelch something beautiful before it began by ruling it out and waging cultural war on it?
There is, as you note, a generational difference here. Among younger Jews, for the most part, you do not have this tendency. Zuckerberg could perhaps be a difference, but was he goaded by older Jews like Summers – still trapped in the wars of yesteryear?
It reminds me of this recent article in Commentary by a very old Jew.
link to commentarymagazine.com
You see the racial undertones, the hostility and Jewish focus on looks(like height) and ultimate revenge: brains. All the stereotypes are there.
You saw it in Milbank’s attack on Walt/Mearsheimer back in 2006 when he talked about their blue eyes and Germanic names, about Mearsheimer’s white knuckles.
Jaboitinsky hated his own physique, he saw himself as weak. He viewed in envy and contempt those around him, the goys who were taller and more masculine – it fed in large part his hatred of those around him and his own insecurities. This racial focus on features is something which gentiles simply do not do anymore, noses or facial features. They used to, but they’ve stopped. And so have most younger Jews, but this heritage lives on among much older Jews.
I saw similar dismissal when I was watching a panel on the GA, with Beinart and the CEO of Hillel. He denounced a caricature of Jews as blond and blue eyed. I found that interesting. There are many such Jews today with those features, yet why is he dismissive of it, why such features?
Haaretz did a recent interview with a Jewish actor, playing Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter. He blatantly, easily, states that he insisted on him having blond hair. As he said:
“Isaacs’ character even looks Aryan, with his long blonde locks and cruel blue eyes, though the actor told the journal that wasn’t the original plan.
“Lucius wasn’t blond when I first turned up; sketches showed him with short, salt-and-pepper hair and a pinstriped suit,” Isaacs told the Jewish Journal, “but I thought, if I’m going to play a wizard once in my life, then let me dress up with all the toys in the dressing-up box. And if I was going to play a racist, I should look the part.”
link to haaretz.com
Remember Vanity Fair’s sweeping talk about chromosomes, Phil, in their recent article on the WASP twins?
There are still faint echoes of this cultural war, and racial stereotypes were employed by Jews to a large extent in ways which would never be accepted if it were the other way. Still, some Jews, like Weiner, have a reactionary impulse; a shock of nostalgia. Mad Men is in many ways a glorification, not a damning, of American society just on the cusp of social change. Many people think it’s the other way around, but they do not understand the complexity that shapes the narrative.
It’s Jewish guilt, I think, that in the end shapes a lot of it. Guilt for behaviour that is on display during the Social Network.
“It reminds me of this recent article in Commentary by a very old Jew.”
John Steele Gordon is now a senior citizen, almost part of that “Mad Men” generation, but it’s not clear that he’s Jewish. Judging from his background, Millbrook School and Vanderbilt, two grandfathers on the New York Stock Exchange, he may actually be one of those hated WASPs, or if part-Jewish, he’s very assimilated.
You didn’t have to be Jewish to end up hating John Lindsay.
‘madmen’ is one of the very few TV series i watch. the writing is consistently brilliant, the sets beautiful, the acting great. sadly it can also be extremely racist. several glowing reviews of the show have commented that its portrayal of adultery, smoking, copious alcohol consumption, is a guilty pleasure for the 21st century upper middle class who avoid poly-unsaturated fats and second hand smoke, and lather their kids in anti-bacterial soap. there is that part. but what about the oft-told racist cracks? the gang hires a chinese family to set up shop in Pete’s office for his return from his honeymoon (‘who put the china family in my office’”); in anticipation of the ali-liston fight, the cranky old secretary remarks that if she wanted to see two coloreds fight, she’d ‘throw a dollar in the street’. that is the repulsive part of ‘mad men’. the 60s setting is used as cover for weiner’s apparently less than enlightened world view.
similarly, in the vein of bellow’s revisionist ethic, weiner belittles ‘the greatest generation’, reducing its veterans to drunken killers, or privileged buffoons. (roger sterling’s only inspired move, the hiring of don draper, is a forgotten offer of employment made in the middle of a 15 martini lunch. see also the ubiquitous treatment of gentile doctors as incompetents, such as joan’s husband who can only get a gig as a surgeon by joining the army, or cooper’s doctor who mistakenly castrates him.) weiner’s nihilistic revisionism can be contrasted with roth’s ‘nemisis’, in which roth paints WWII in miniature for his brooklyn protagonist, new york italian anti-semites standing in for nazis, and disease-laiden mosquitos dive bombing his jewish neighborhood, in place of german stukas over poland. at least roth has the sensitivity to question his own ‘tribe’s’ role in the war, as his character abandons his neighborhood at his girlfriend’s urging for safer shores, only to learn that he is a carrier of the disease. (this is, however, typical roth misogynistic slight of hand, and another hawthorne rip off, the tempting female playing a prominent role in the man’s decision to act unmanly.)
zionism is the only political movement treated with respect, the rest of the ‘politics’ in ‘mad men’ being theatre or sausage making. (for example, see ‘man men’s’ treatment of 60s avant garde/counterculture where a female beat poet coos on about castro, then takes off her shirt in response to the crowd. she is immediately followed by a soulful, folk music rendering of ‘old zion’ – ‘we laid down and wept’, etc. similarly when WASPish pete campbell carps on about israel being ‘positively communistic’, this is insider, retrospective 21st century ‘funny’ because we know israel to be operating under rules that are something other than ‘communistic’.)
You know, I don’t go to movies (I get tired of telling people “But they don’t come off, you’ll just have to look around them”) and didn’t know about Priscilla Chan. I do now! Yowsa! (That’s Yiddish for “Va-va-voom” or “Hubba-hubba”)
Whoops, I put my glasses on, and somebody needs to deflate her a little.
Brilliant answer to the task: “prove anti-Semitism in a movie of your own choosing”.
Like, altering “WASP” into “gentile”, not smearing only spreading the smell (“… anti-Semitic? Well it comes close”), and referring to “those goyim” as you saw it in your time (not 2003): all good tricks. Next task is a step up: the same proof, now about “Casablanca”.
>> Is the Zuckerberg picture anti-Semitic? Well it comes close.
Really? Zuckerberg’s Jewishness never entered my mind when watching that film. I just thought he was a conniving, sociopathic turd. Does that make me anti-turdistic?
Zuckerberg is just an individual who happens to be of Jewish heritage. It would be rascist (antisemitic) to assume that Zuckerberg represents a negative stereotype of a Jew. It would be also rascist (philosemitic) to assume that there’s something like a positive stereotype of a Jew and it’s not represented by someone like Zuckerberg.
So what did the author of this article and his wife actually assume?
I myself can’t understand where Phil is coming from with all this about Jews. I often wonder if his problem isn’t that he has too low an opinion of Jews,(this is all within the context of American society) but rather, a too-high estimation of non-Jews. If that is a testimony to the non-Jews he knows and who have affected his life, he’s a fortunate man.
ahahahahahaaaa!!!!
According to Victor Gao’s affidavit, Zuckerberg stole the idea right out from under the Winklevosses, after being given access to the server and password of HarvardConnect and therefore the code of the Facebook-like project he was hired to write a piece of and agreed to take an equity position in. Zuckerberg was hired to write the front-end of the website; instead, after gaining access to the Winklevoss’s server and code, he registered thefacebook.com and launched a competing service while ostensibly still working for the W’s. Victor Gao was the Harvard student hired by the Winklevosses who handed his work over to Zuckerberg because of other obligations. The Winklevosses were apparently programming fools themselves since childhood, and came up with the idea of linking Harvard students with others around the world.
link to docs.justia.com
Open Source and Free Software guru, Eben Moglen, isn’t too impressed with Z, stating on Feb 5, 2010 in NYC, “Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy.” Moglen is the guy to do it. You want a smart moral Jew? Try Moglen.
I think Phil and his wife are on to something. It didn’t occur to me that the movie was antisemitic when I saw it. However, later I was tending to interpret the story in terms of Jews versus the goyim and was entertaining some very negative stereotypes of Jews that I had been exposed to over the course of my 65 years. I even stopped myself once be during discussing the movie with the warning ‘but that would be antisemitic’.
It seems younger viewers could watch this movie without even being aware of who the Jewish characters were so in that sense it is not antisemitic. But it did remind older folk what I was once exposed to.
So your interpretation was antisemitic, too?
I think Phil is reaching a little here.
Zuckerberg’s religion was never raised in this movie (as I remember) and he was portrayed as a highly intelligent person with a ruthless business streak. Perfect for business. I’ve been in business long enough and been screwed over enough times to know how a successful businessman’s mind works.
His contemporaries were portrayed as slightly naive spoiled rich kids who did well of the back of their parent’s wealth and position. Depending on your view on the world, they were all pretty loathsome or all pretty talented.
I never thought about this angle when watching the movie and I doubt Zuckerberg did. He took the entire Facebook staff to see it when it opened.
In the ‘Matrix’ ‘we’ had to protect ‘Zion…’ My wife, who’s Japanese and watches a lot of US TV shows, asked me why there’s so much reference to ‘Jewishness’ in so many different TV shows. As I don’t watch TV, I don’t know. Anyone willing to help me out here?
I see it in the few shows I watch. I see it in the recent comedies I’ve watched. Although to be fair, they each had Jewish writers or directors or producers. So I figure it’s their right to include Jewish-this-or-that-related stuff.
One thing I thought was weird though – one of my favorite shows, The Office.
Everyone knows that the character, Dwight Shcrute, is a weirdo. He owns a beat farm and is of German descent. His German background was often mocked early on in the series (and a little bit in recent seasons). If you follow the show, you’ll know that Dwight even has a grandfather living in Argentina (hint hint). In one episode, Dwight mentions he tried visiting his grandfather but his visa was protested by ‘the Shoah Foundation’.
Around the Gaza massacre (so 2008), there was an episode (entitled ‘Sabre’) where Dwight mentions a good seafood restaurant in Tel Aviv….
I was like, really? Tel Aviv? When did Dwight Shcrute leave the tri-state area? Let alone visit Israel!
You’re creating a world with life-like characters. And these characters have their own histories with context and a kind of spacial limitation to them. I just couldn’t see Dwight ever going to Israel. Not as an opinion but as a non-issue. So whoever wrote that episode decided to create that in Dwight. It was out of character.
In movies, I see references to Jewishness often. Mostly movies in the past 5 years and usually comedies. It is due to the Jewish authorship of the material.
Hi Cliff,
Thank you for saving my time. Have you any idea how this works percentage-wise? If those writers/producers/etc. really long for a much touted multicultural world, do you think that’s thoroughly reflected in said TV shows/movies as well?
I think Jewish identity manifests in these stories in very random and subtle ways.
It’s always framed in a positive, normalizing manner. The point is that it normalizes Jewish identity.
In comedy, I think minorities make jokes about themselves and race relations in general to ingratiate themselves with ‘White America’. They do it to build bridges. Jokes to laugh to, together.
If you look at a show like South Park, Kyle (the Jewish kid of the 4 main kids of the show) is often ridiculed by Cartman for being Jewish. Cartman is a sociopath, and phobic of all minorities. It’s a joke though. He’s over-the-top and his character is the actually meant to show the absurdity of those views.
The jokes he makes about Kyle’s Jewishness are so over-the-top that it normalizes Jewish identity. It’s the kind of humor that is meant to ridicule the ridiculous nature of antisemitism.
It’s like the opposite method (but with the same objective) of including Jewish identity markers in various contemporary movies. And sometimes the characters are Jewish so it wouldn’t even count. But in one of the examples I listed (The Office) – it was totally out of character and bizarre.
It happened after the Gaza massacre and it was not about Jewish identity really. It was about Zionist identity. Plugging Israel into a popular show during a time when Israel had a lot of *immediate* bad PR.
I keep seeing ‘Krav Magra’ (some martial arts used by the IDF or something) popping up in some mainstream comedies. It’s explicitly articulated by the characters but always in passing. Like they were doing product placement.
The way to decide whether something fits or doesn’t fit is how the identifier is delivered.
And in the cases I mention or allude to, it’s always awkward and feels forced and unnatural in the character’s biography.
I don’t think it’s Exodus every film. It’s subtle and meant to reinforce a positive image of Jewish identity.
“…One thing I thought was weird though – one of my favorite shows, The Office.
Oh, but Ricky Gervais is such a wicked SOB sometimes!
link to thejc.com
And Jimmy Fallon — is sooo not funny!
link to sdjewishjournal.com
And Jimmy Fallon — is sooo not funny!
comedy is really a lost art form, isn’t it? jimmy fallon? tina fey? adam sandler? that repulsive indian woman who writes for ‘the office’? it seems like their entire intellectual and emotional foundations were built from TV sitcom one-liners. pfffft.
Because of Richard Stallman at MIT, programmers and developers the world over have developed a ‘code of honor’ when they work with each other, testing each others’ code, hacking holes, fighting over solutions, making it bullet-proof. It’s almost a sacred trust; it’s certainly assumed. (And that universe is filled with coders from every Abrahamic and Eastern religion.) What Zuckerberg did violated that. Zuckerberg didn’t invent the code he used. He used the sweat and genius of the people who came before him, who gave it up for free.
Tell your wife, Phil, that what Zuckerberg did–and how the computing world views him–is the equivalent of you screwing her maid of honor at your wedding reception, not an hour after you looked your wife in the eyes, teared up, and vowed.
(And tell her that even the under-21 programming geniuses (Jewish) at NYU have no respect for him—their visionary is Eben Moglen. If Scott Rudin has the great sociological mind that you say he has, then it’s a surety he picked that up in his research.)
Obviously the Winkelvosses should have bound Zuckerberg with an NDA and a Work for Hire agreement, but under the Universal Commercial Code that is in effect in many US states including Massachusetts, if I am not mistaken, the Winkelvosses had a reasonable presumption that Zuckerberg would not appropriate Winkelvoss proprietary information.
Summers was the last person to consult on the issue.
The Winkelvosses should have contacted one of the lawyers at the Harvard Office of Technology Development for advice.
I have the impression that the Winkelvosses have money. In fact, the probably should have skipped talking with the Harvard Office and Technology Development and hired their own IP lawyer to slap an ex parte injunction on Zuckerberg as soon as the initial facebook site went live. It would have cost about $20K and would have been money well-spent.
The portrait of Zuckerberg in the movie is repulsive
I find Jesse Eisenberg repulsive, and I wonder if it was the portrait of Zuckerberg, or the portrayal by Eisenberg that colored your distaste for the film. I saw an interview with Eisenberg, and he came across as such a pompous, arrogant — yet strangely sullen — prick that I can’t even stand the sight of him. (Zombieland was okay, though)
I haven’t seen the movie.
All I know is Summers really is a real life racist pig from way back, the Jewish kid did do the WASP kids wrong if you want to look at it as a matter of ethics or character.
If someone wants to ascribe what the Jewish kid did to his being Jewish or the WASP kids attitude to being WASP then they will…although I think that is beside the point for anyone except those that are obsessed with Jewishness or WASPness.
The point is what the Jewish kid did wasn’t cricket if you want to use Waspy terms about it. Did his Jewishness hang up, if he had one, make him act like that or was he just a social nerd envious or contemptous of the dumb WASP socialites or was he brought up to believe all’s fair in getting the golden egg? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s a symptom of the cheating culture we have today….worshipping success even if it’s obtained by cheating others.
RE: “The portrait of Zuckerberg in the movie is repulsive, and it ends up being generic, a portrait of the new striving American Jewish meritocratic billionaire.” ~ Weiss
MY COMMENT: It can’t possibly portray Jews as being worse than the gentile residents of “Dogville” (2003) [VIDEO, 04:48].
NETFLIX LISTING – link to movies.netflix.com
P.S. RE: “We’ve had a Netflicks DVD of The Social Network hanging around the house for months.” ~ Weiss
MY COMMENT: Sorry Phil, but I feel compelled to report you and your wife. It’s my duty as a member in good standing of the Netflix community. And, there might be a reward for squealing on wayward/lapsed members.
Hey, these are difficult times, so it’s “dog eat dog(s)”!
“The penalty of success is being bored by the people who used to snub you.”
-Lady Astor
c’mon Phil, this move is not anti-Semitic. His jewishness never even mentioned in the film. One would have to know he was jewish to make that connection.
I think it is easy to believe that zuckerberg is as bad as he is made out to be.
He stole the code from the Olympic Rowers
he fucked his friend totally
The only redeeming quality about zuckerberg was his work ethic.
And even sociopaths can like Puppies.
heck, I heard that Hitler was a big proponent of animal rights.
mabye I just don’t get your argument
This reminds me of the move Boomerrag, with Eddie Murphy, Halle Berry, Robing Givens and Martin Lawerence, where they are commenting on Pool being inherently racist.
People can find racism and prejudice in anything
It’s like the movie about Bill Gates, or the Enron movie about Jeff Skilling, which I recommend, by the way. There is a capitalist culture of greed and callousness and competitiveness.
Now look at Josef Stalin, how he attacked his own former friends. That is what Zuckerberg reminded me of when he spread the story about the chicken and it’s suggested he may have called the cops on his friend / partner in California.
And if we look at the Isr. Pal. conflict, we see that we, America, did the same thing 200 years ago with the Indians, except with the Isr. Pal. conflict it’s an ongoing process of replacement/recolonization in the modern era.
So greed and confiscation and manipulation and callousness is something sadly that cuts across cultures and ethnicities and belonging to religions.
Now when you watch the movie, you could say that (A) the person was raised thinking this treatment of other people and “ethics” was OK. So you could criticize the person’s background. But another impression can be that (B) he met Severin, of his own background, in a Jewish club , where Severin was being cheerful and inviting to him. And yet Zuckerberg consequently is portrayed as having ditched Severin, so it suggests he really didn’t care about his background community after all, and in fact harmed someone in the community and didn’t pay back the same welcome he had received.
So in conclusion, I highly doubt that it is by nature anti-semitic. You can look at it that way(A), but you can look at it the opposite way(B) too.
And in any case, anti-semitic refers to racial and/or crackpot genetic ideas. You could say that these qualities are fostered by capitalism, and that the Kibbutzes were a way to get around this, by turning people into farmers, an enterprise that created different problems for other people though. So you don’t need to go into racist (antisemitic) theories to explain people’s culture. Plus you needn’t stereotype anyway. My impression of Saverin from the film was a more positive one, because he seemed cheerful and loyal.
“Anti-semitic”?
Really Phil, how crass can you sometimes be?
If Zuckerman was christian and the film written by a christian would you have called the film and it’s maker ‘christophobes’? Somehow I doubt it.
Zuckerman stole someone else’ idea and yes took it further than the twins ‘probably’ woulda – but HE STOLE the idea in the first place, clearly. He wouldn’t have settled outta court with the waspy twins and his ex-partner if there was no truth in their accusation now would he?!
What an unbelievable bunch of tribal twaddle is in your analysis of the movie, Phil.
It was well written and well directed and as far as I know, Zuckerman himself didn’t consider the film “anti-semitic”.
Many jews were involved in the making of the movie – so are they ALL self-hating jews too?
Good grief!
Zuckerman comes off like an asshole NOT because he’s jewish and successful but because he IS an asshole who knowingly(?) breached Intellectual Copy-write laws.
When Zuckerman’s lawyers take the filmmakers to court with the accusation of “antisemitism” is when I will take this analysis of yours seriously.
Till then, you need to re-write this article and withdraw your feeble and unwarranted accusation. The filmmakers involved are decent people and true professionals, not horrid little propagandists.
but because he IS an asshole
exactly. let’s recap: zuckerberg starts his project by designing a program which ranks women according to their looks, steals liberally from the winkelvosses (emails released after the settlement have ZBerg talking about fucking the WVosses), and ZBerg goes on to establish a FB ‘empire’, the purpose of which is too reduce human relationships to commercially lucrative bits, picking apart and manipulating the pyches of pre-teens (emotional and chronological) to sell them more shit and aid in the mining of data for intelligence collection by the national security state. the movie hardly touches the surface of what a piece of crap ZBerg is. and, jesus, a picture with a puppy? delusional.
re; Gates and Zuckerberg, the ancient adage still holds true:
behind every great fortune lies a great crime
… as for any possible anti-jewish vibe in Social Network, ponder what actor Eisenberg himself had to say (he being a person who is jewish) about taking meetings prior to filming Social Network – paraphrasing [since I can't seem to find the actual quote]: “I found myself sitting with a bunch of powerful jews“
here’s what i remember about the movie. Jesse Eisenberg has a really loveable face. even the first scene where you sympathize with w/the girl..it’s hard to not like him. the casting of eisenberg was a great choice. for me, watching the movie before knowing any of the facts softened the character of zuckerberg. because frankly, knowing what came down..he screwed the brothers over. maybe if there was 100′s of millions at stake it could twist my mind but at the origin of the deal there were no millions, there were just a few college guys and one of them massively ripped off the others by making a deal and then taking it all once he realized what a good deal it could be. and that’s unethical.
i don’t think zuck did what he did because he was jewish. some people have a moral backbone, integrity and ethics and some don’t. he doesn’t. he’s cut throat and lots of people in the business world are cut throat. me, i have managed to do well financially sans being cut throat(for the most part) but then i probably could be worth a lot more today if i didn’t have the kind of conscience i was raised with. like a persons honor is in their word and trust is everything.
so, i don’t think the movie was anti semitic. they cast a remarkable actor who did a very good job and made him so complex we somehow forgot he lacked ethics and integrity, or we excused it. his ethnicity wasn’t really explored , as i recall.
the other jewish characters i can’t really remember. or maybe i wasn’t aware they were jewish. did the movie lie about any of the jews? truth is not anti semitic, it’s just truth. so the facts of the case remain.
that’s all i have to say. i would gladly share a beer and more w/eisenberg any day. the twins as they were portrayed in that movie? not so much.
annie, ” the twins as they were portrayed in that movie? not so much.”
Of course not, because those twins started playing classical piano at age 6 (for the next 12 years), rowed at the Beijing Olympics, were programming at 13 (1994), ran a business in their early teens building websites, had raging IQs, got into Harvard, invented what became Facebook, were tall and good-looking, and were stinking rich.
Anti-semitic? I’d call it anti-WASP. Or anti-gentilism. I’d start telling the truth (which is an out-of-date commodity these days, but I prefer it to call it pap, or bullshit).
Anti-semitic? I’d call it anti-WASP. Or anti-gentilism. I’d start telling the truth (which is an out-of-date commodity these days, but I prefer it to call it pap, or bullshit)….MRW
As said I didn’t see the movie, but after all the descriptions here if people want to call it anti semitic then I want to ask how many Jewish boys are raised being told it’s o.k. to screw the gentiles, in particular, every chance they get.
And whether that had anything to do with Zuckerberg’s motives or not no point in denying that’s how some of them are raised…we’ve seen many quotes and examples of this right out of their own mouths.
And this Jewish meritocracy thing?..what the hell is that? All Jews rose by merit?.. my ass….and all Gentiles rise thru WASP connections?.. my ass.
I guess the only reason coverage of Madoff wasn’t labeled anti semitic was because he was a Jew who ripped off other Jews. If it had been a Gentile cheating Jews we’d never hear the end of it, it would have been a hate crime, a financial holocaust, a conspiracy to improvish Jews, proof of Jew hatred , an existential threat, etc.,etc..
And this Jewish meritocracy thing?..what the hell is that?
but, american, what about all the awards? don’t friedman’s multiple pulitzers prove that a meritocracy exists?
In a word…..No.
Consider Obama getting the Peace Prize. LOL
Maybe some one with nothing else to do will do a study of how many Jews rose on merit as opposed to tribalism and how many Gentiles rose on merit as opposed to WASPism.
I doubt there would be much difference except in the cases of those like Zuckerberg who sure doesn’t belong in any meritocracy.
Phil, since you and your wife were willing to spend 90+ minutes watching an imaginary Zuckerberg, you owe it to yourselves to watch 15 minutes of this. At the very least, you must watch the first five. (Shmuel and ToivoS, this is a command performance):
link to vimeo.com
[The real deal is to watch this, what kicked it off worldwide almost two years ago, and what gave Zuckerberg diarrhea when he heard about it: link to vimeo.com As you will see and hear, being Jewish had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with it, because the people who went after Zuckerberg were smarter (more moral, more distinguished) Jews themselves. BTW, the guy talking in both videos invented email when he was 16 years old.]
Some observations:
1. There is no such thing as a WASPy club at Harvard of 2003. As early as the 1990s, Harvard was already dominated by a Jewish-only club. I know this for a fact.
2. I have yet to hear a member of the Christian religion or the Moselm religion refer to a monolithic The Christian People or The Moslem People. Yet, time and again, a Jew would bring up The Jewish People, as though Jews were a nation.
3. Given the countless films, shows, plays, articles, stories, and songs in which Jews are depicted in such positive light, a little balance here and there doesn’t hurt. Is one to assume that every single Jew on the face of the planet is perfect? And if a Jew is depicted in a negative light, does that necessarily constitute “anti-Semitism”?
That’s ridiculous. What if the movie producers wanted to show that Jews, contrary to common myth, are normal human beings with flaws and negative attributes like everyone else?
By contrast, the national discourse in the US — by Zionist design — is so Islamophobic that Islam and Moslem-Americans could use some positive depictions in the media.
4. As Dickerson has already pointed out, the company’s name is Netflix. And even though I’m in good standing, the company’s repertoire is highly disappointing, so I won’t be reporting you to the company in order to maintain said standing. Feel free to Netflicks at will….
Haven’t seen it, not interested in it. BUT ONE QUESTION: did the movie say anything whatever about ALL JEWS? Anything that could be interpreted even by a super-sensitive as “about and “negative about” “all Jews”?
If not it is not a-S. Period. even if it knocks Israel (which it probably did not do, being on another subject). Does it unnecessarily portray some unpleasant character(s) as Jewish? Is criticizing someone and mentioning/indicating he is Jewish an instance of a-S? In that case, indeed, we cannot criticize Israeli Jews.
Apologies to Phil if this is incorrect, but I would say that perhaps his reaction to the portrayal of Zuckerberg has something to do with some kind of “outsider paranoia” [an impulse I recognize well] – thus the perhaps undue concern with the portrayal of a Jew in a negative light… except that it was his wife (non-Jewish, as I understand it) who first expressed the concern. Perhaps in the context of world history, criticisms of Jews, or Jewish political endeavors (like Zionism) , will always prompt, to one degree or another, either paranoid or legitimate concerns of anti-semitism. What I am trying to figure is whether this column has anything to do with the I/P conflict (other than Phil’s blog-ownership perogative) – is it that one just cannot always discern the motivations of a movie maker, just like one cannot always discern the motivations of critics of Zionism? One just has to decide, is the portrayal (or criticism) legit, regardless of motivation.
First of all, please use the proper word “anti-Jewish”. Semites are a group of ancient tribes of which Hebrews were only a subgroup. We need to use precise language goddamnit.
Second, what the fuck is anti-Jewish about showing what a prick somebody is? Zuckerbergs Jewishness is never a factor when it comes to why he behaves badly. He is shown as a stubborn rebel. Nothing Jewish about that.
You are right with the larger context here, though, in that the Jewish producers certainly have commented on the “Jews are taking over the old WASP establishment” theme.
But please don’t throw around baseless accusations of anti-Jewish potrayals. That’s Abe Foxmans job :-)
this is by far one of weiss’s most reflexive, and worst, analyses. it’s been touched on already by others, but in an industry in which a mentally ill man is put through the ‘anti-semitism’ meat grinder for his demented, alcohol-fueled rantings, does anyone believe that an ‘anti-semitic’ movie could have passed through the various filters in the movie making process, to find its way to the big screen, receiving nearly universal praise?
I think it was fairly clear to me that the film was about Sorkin playing with some Jews v. WASP themes, but that was secondary to the themes of the film about friendship and success. The key visual in the film isn’t the PE shirts, but the vision of Zuckerberg, at the pinacle of his business “success” in an empty conference room; he can’t, the movie seems to be saying, even buy a friend.
Yeah Phil, I didn’t see the antisemitism in this one either. The only real mention of Jews is in the Jewish frat party scene, and having been involved in Jewish programming at college, it made me laugh.
You see things that aren’t there, and this isn’t the first time.
why do they establish the zuckerberg character purely with jewish materials: the jewish fraternity, the social aspiration…
You’re picking up on the ethnically-coded materials, but they doesn’t wholly define or describe the Zuckerberg character. Or do they? I suppose if you’re more sensitive to those things they might, but is it a kind of bigotry to see a character only in an ethnic light, to see the Jewishness in computer whiz as dominating over other characteristics?
So much of the film reflects Aaron Sorkin’s own preoccupations. Here’s an article attacking him for misogyny and demeaning Jewish women. And here’s one arguing that he really takes the side of Zuckerberg as the Jewish upstart who comes out on top in the end.
Maybe Sorkin’s the liberal arts grad who is repelled by the single-mindedness and social cluelessness of the successful technological entrepreneur, yet also a little proud of the success of someone from a similar background. If Aaron Sorkin has a developed self-consciousness he probably can’t help seeing something of himself in Mark Zuckerberg.
In The Social Network, Zuckerberg is yet another shocking Jewish outsider, yet another Jewish modernist shattering tradition, yet another Jewish argonaut of the unconscious. Marx thought he saw the mental destruction wreaked by capitalism’s creative forces. Freud thought he saw a war of all against all beneath the happy facade of the bourgeois family. According to Aaron Sorkin (a Jewish counterrevolutionary?), Zuckerberg perceived the ruthless will to gratify oneself behind the pleasant conventions of friendship.
yes, but the important point of this apparent progression is that these states of the ‘unconscious’ don’t necessarily tell us much about ‘human nature’ other than that ‘human nature’ is a wildly elastic thing, subject to manipulation. freud’s theory of familial relations is just as illuminating as the observation of a lab rat pressing a lever, in response to a light, to receive a jolt of cocaine. in other words, both situations describe the response of an organism in a highly contrived environment. i don’t doubt that freud, laboring under his particularly constrained, suffocating set of circumstances, wanted to kill his father and eff his mother, but those sentiments are not universally shared. zberg is just marrying these two potentials (freud and the lab) but you can hardly call his ‘invention’ revolutionary, particularly since he stole it from someone else.
“why do they establish the zuckerberg character purely with jewish materials: the jewish fraternity, the social aspiration”..Phil
Wern’t the WASPs caricatured also? With their ivy league suits and surfboards? Did they not come off being stereotyped also?
Maybe all the Jewish stuff was part of Zuckerberg’s personality like surfboarding was part of the gentile twins personality or maybe the director added it for more contrast.
Really you have to give this up. You have expanded umpteen times about Jews now being part of the establishment, having made it in the US……..and yet you worry about some little movie that portrays it’s characters like Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby?
Everyone gets caricatured today, everyone…..you should celebrate the fact that Jews are now so accepted they can be made fun of or caricatured like everyone else without the world coming to an end.
Jews are in, so welcome to the good and bad of the establishment…it goes with the territory.
“why do they establish the zuckerberg character purely with jewish materials: the jewish fraternity, the social aspiration…”
Because that’s what it is and it doesn’t mean anything more than that. That’s his version of Jewish, you’ve got yours, and others have their own. It’s like hair. Some have curly and luxurious. Some have straight. And some should keep a hat on. But ultimately it’s not defining, or monolithic, to the exclusion of everything else.
MRW and american, this is just weiss performing his tribal ritual of ‘sticking together’, or in this case, sticking up for someone who isn’t deserving of a defense. (it really takes some olympic quality emotional and mental gymnastics to come to the conclusion that the portrait of zberg/eberg in ‘the social network’ is not designed to elicit admiration.)
what weiss fails to understand, whether he is incapable of it or simply won’t expend the effort, is that his tribal theory of ‘sticking together’ is fundamentally incompatible with his goal of creating a more just, equitable world. his race-based, tribal theory of identity is an indispensible part of every propaganda campaign in support of every war and other atrocity committed.
hophmi:”…and having been involved in Jewish programming at college…”
Are we still on computer science here, hophmi? Is there a Jewish programming language? It’s certainly been kept secret from me. But perhaps its super-powerful syntax is behind the success of Facebook, and maybe even Google? No wonder Microsoft is tanking.
By Jewish programming, it’s more likely that he planned or attended Jewish programs (cultural, religious, educational, political ..) hosted by Hillel or Jewish Studies. But you never know, it could be something else — we keep hearing about how Israel excels in tech (and cherry tomatoes).
Weiss: Zuckerberg … purely with jewish materials: does that include the Phillips Exeter t-shirt you mention? The dealing with the Winkelvosses is a jewish asset?
And didn’t you write WASPs are caricatured too, so it’s more like everything is caricatured in this movie?
so it’s more like everything is caricatured in this movie?
great point. we are talking about reducing thousands of interactions over a period of years, all being crammed into a two hour format with the goal of amusing viewers. so, isn’t every movie a caricature?