Charles Krauthammer has an
excellent piece on "Borat" and anti-Semitism in the U.S. Krauthammer writes:
Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of anti-Semitism -- not "indifference" to but active -- unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual -- et tu, Norway? -- mocks "God's Chosen People" ("We laugh at this people's capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds") and calls for the destruction of Israel, the "state founded . . . on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion."Yet, amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically Southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.I have refused to see "Borat" for a number of reasons, the main reason being that I don't find it at all amusing. It's Tom Green meets H.L. Mencken, vilifying the country rube through dissimulation, laughing at the Hillbilly because we at least like to think the Hillbilly can't defend himself. As Jim Goad has written, "laughing at the hillbilly is a way of wishing the hillbilly won't get the last laugh." H.L. Mencken, who famously called the American South the "Sahara of the Bozart" would have loved "Borat," not only for its depiction of evangelical Southerners as rubes, but also for its anti-Semitism, with which Mencken seems to have had a strange relationship.
But it's this myth of the supposedly anti-Semitic Southern evangelical that bothers me most, given what historians know about the Southern past. The American South has historically not only been the least anti-Semitic region of the country, but perhaps the most Philo-Semitic. Jewish merchants filled an economic need in the rural South and were often regarded with a mix of affection and ignorance (a Southerner once asked, "Now, are you a Methodist or a Baptist Jew?"). Many Jewish "firsts" were in the South. The largest community of Jews prior to 1830 was in the South, in Charleston South Carolina. The first Jewish Senator was from the South, David Levy Yulee of Florida, after which a town and county in Florida are named. The highest ranking Jewish politician before Kissinger was Judah Benjamin, who was arguably the second most powerful man in the Confederate government.
This in no way minimizes the white supremacy of the region. In the South, the truth is often stranger than fiction. For instance, the Democrat governor and U.S. Senator from North Carolina, Zebulon Vance (1830-1894), who was lifted into power through racist campaigns, carried out a national speaking campaign to encourage tolerance towards and equality for Jews entitled "The Scattered Nation." Vance spoke of Jews as "those from whom we derive our civilization, kinsmen, after the flesh, of Him whom we esteem as the Son of God and Savior of Men." Vance railed against how Jews were "ignominiously ejected from hotels and watering places as unworthy the association of men who had grown rich by the sale of a new brand of soap or an improved patent rat-trap!" However, Vance was unwilling to critique such treatment of blacks, a reality which would persist long into the last century.
The myth that the South is highly anti-Semitic comes from incidents such as the lynching of Leo Frank by the Ku Klux Klan in 1915, but such incidents have been sporadic and seldom deadly (Frank was the only Jew to ever be lynched in the South). Attacks on Jews in the South reached a height during the Civil Rights Movement when numerous synagogues were attacked by Klansmen and other anti-integrationist extremists, but the violence was hardly widespread. This myth may also stem from the "fundie" image of Bible belt Southerners - from the bigoted assumption that evangelical Christians are the heritors of the "Christ Killer" myth. But what group in this nation has given more support to Israel than the evangelicals? The evangelicalism that is so often denigrated by "progressives" is in fact more a source of Philo-Semitism than anti-Semitism.
