Susan Sarandon And The Erasure Of Jewish History

There’s more to Sarandon’s racism than just wallowing in Jewish fear like a pig in shit.

Susan Sarandon at a pro-Palestinian rally/ Union Square, NY, November 17 - ERIK PENDZICH/SHUTTERSTOCK

by Justin Rosario

At one time or another, most of us here at The Banter has taken a turn raking Susan Sarandon over the proverbial coals for her dishonesty, obnoxious white privilege, and enabling of fascism. 

Sarandon’s wealth has generally shielded her from the consequences of being an asshole, but this last week possibly saw her cross a line that even her lofty status as a Hollywood A-lister won’t save her from.

And it shouldn’t. She stood up in front of a crowd decided to erase decades of rabid hate and violence against Jews in America. She did this so she could justify her depiction of Jews as “oppressors,” in turn justifying the alt-left’s rank anti-semitism.

Getting a taste?

Sarandon has long portrayed herself as a champion of the oppressed and downtrodden. Her activism is the definition of performative — when push came to shove and America was faced with a choice between a candidate who had advanced women’s rights for decades and a literal fascist rapist, Sarandon urged her supporters to throw their vote away on Jill Stein.

Trump proceeded to make the lives of every oppressed and downtrodden group Sarandon pretends to care about substantially and measurably worse.

Fast forward to 2023 and Sarandon, still unbearably full of her own self-importance, continues to be heavily engaged with the alt-left and its project to make Democrats lose. After a temporary moment of sanity in 2020 when she voted against fascism, Sarandon has relapsed back into the safe embrace of mindless privilege. But it turns out that surrounding yourself with equally toxic people who only see the world in binary good and evil narratives leads you to very bad places. Reported Variety:

Susan Sarandon has been dropped by UTA [United Talent Agency] after she made controversial comments at a pro-Palestine rally in New York on Nov. 17, Variety has confirmed.

Sarandon said at the rally, “There are a lot of people that are afraid, that are afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.” She told protesters to have conversations with Jewish Americans, who don’t feel safe amid the rise of antisemitism in the country.

Jews are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country? Really?

There are two deeply offensive parts to this. The first is that Sarandon is saying this like it’s a good thing — that the physical threats American Jews are being subjected to is useful. It is difficult to put in words just how sick it is to see someone take pleasure in your fear. And then tell others they should be happy about it as well because, hey, we can use that fear to advance our agenda. 

Imagine a white woman standing in front of a crowd saying it is good that Black people are afraid of the police because it will make them more receptive to our message. It would be a huge scandal and they would quickly find themselves standing alone. But not Sarandon. The alt-left rushed to defend her because Jewish fear doesn’t really count. We’re “colonizers” and “oppressors” so we cannot, by definition, be victims. 

The thing that no one can ever seem to explain to me is how American Jews, including those like myself who do not support Israel’s barbarous actions, now or in the past, are “colonizers” and “oppressors” deserving of hate by the virtuous and righteous Sarandon and her ilk. Why, exactly, should I and other Jews have to live in fear just for being Jewish? 

If I were to show up at a “Free Palestine” riot rally wearing a yarmulke and silently holding nothing more than a poster of one of the kidnapped children, I would risk grave bodily harm. If you’re still unsure that these protests are not fueled by hate for Jews, allow me to help clarify the issue for you. 

At the same time these staunch opponents of “genocide” are screaming hate at Jews, they are entirely silent about the ongoing genocide of the Uyghurs. I’m not a fan of “whataboutisms” but China has literal concentration camps. The military has “disappeared” tens of thousands (or more) of Uyghurs, and raped and sterlized Uyghur women.

Not that the numbers matter, exactly, persecution is persecution, but there are 11 million Uyghurs compared to the 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Yet no one chases Chinese-American college students into a library and threatens to kill them. Some genocides are apparently more important than others.

Of course, it would be insane to attack Chinese-Americans for the crimes of the Chinese government. Or Russian-Americans for the war in Ukraine. Or American Muslims for 9/11. 

But lots of people are awfully anxious to rage at American Jews for the actions of Israel. Like Susan Sarandon. I will say it again: holding Jews to a different standard because they are Jews is racism. You are not defending Palestinians. You are venting your hatred of Jews.

But there’s more to Sarandon’s racism than just wallowing in Jewish fear like a pig in shit. The second deeply offensive part of her disgusting outburst of hate is the total erasure of Jewish history in America.

America’s love affair with hating Jews

When I was a wee lad growing up in a lower-middle class majority Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, we told a lot of really offensive Jewish jokes. That was OK because we also told a lot of really offensive Italian jokes. And Irish jokes. And Polish. Black. Puerto Rican. Gay. Japanese. Mexican. So on and so forth. No one took offense because we were mean to everyone. Kind of like a Mel Brooks movie but way less funny and far more offensive. 

While I quickly became familiar with lots of ethnic slurs, I didn’t learn the phrase “kike” until I saw the movie “Porky’s” unsupervised at the advanced age of maybe 9 years old. If you’re familiar with “Porky’s,” you’re probably blanching with horror. If you’re not familiar with “Porky’s,” let’s just say you should not watch the infamous shower scene with the kids in the room. But you really should go watch “Porky’s.” It’s a hell of a movie.

Anyway, even at that young age, I was aware of the Holocaust and that Jews had been hated, at least overseas. “Porky’s” opened my eyes to the reality that anti-Semitism had been/was currently a thing in America, too. Not the casual racism among me and my friends telling jokes that, today, would make my girls look at me like I was some kind of MAGA savage, but real prejudice against Jews: 

That was also the first time I had heard “Jew boy” spat out as a slur. Remember, I lived in New York City which has the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. I lived in Brooklyn, no less, where almost half of the city’s Jews live. Jews like me were an everyday part of life. There was always racism but, by and large, the really nasty stuff that you would find in small towns and good ol’ boy communities just wasn’t there.

Nevertheless, America’s love affair with hating Jews is long and ugly and absolutely not confined to rural America. 

After the original KKK was wiped out by the federal government in the years following the Civil War, a second wave of violent white terrorists arose in 1915. This iteration of the KKK spread across the entire nation and numbered in the millions. Unlike the first version, which primarily targeted freed Blacks and those who supported them, this new KKK had a more diverse list of targets. They went after Blacks, of course. But also Catholics, immigrants, and Jews. 

Most of the violence and murder were reserved for their traditional enemy, Black people who dared to live their lives, but several Jews were also lynched during the decades-long murder spree. That pales in comparison to the thousands of Black men, women, and children murdered by good Christian whites but Susan Sarandon would prefer you not know about it at all.

She also would prefer you didn’t know about Father Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of his time. He had an audience of around 30 million in the 1930s. The population of the US was around 120 million. That means a full one quarter of the nation listened to Coughlin spew the most vile anti-semitic hate imaginable.

How bad was it? The US Holocaust Memorial Museum explains: 

During his radio broadcast on November 20, 1938, while reports of the Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany were still on the front pages of many American newspapers, Coughlin defended the Nazi attacks as justified. Claiming to merely be a “student of history,” he traced “the causes of the effect known as Naziism” [sic] for his listeners, concluding that Nazism had “evolved to act as a defense mechanism against the incursions of Communism.” Coughlin listed supposed communist leaders, claiming that the vast majority were “atheistic Jews.” Therefore, he argued, “Naziism, the effect of Communism, cannot be liquidated in its persecution complex until the religious Jews in high places–in synagogue, in finance, in radio and in the press–attack the cause, attack forthright the errors and spread of Communism, together with their co-nationalists who support it.” 

Coughlin had spent years poisoning the minds of Americans. Jews controlled the banks. Jews controlled the media. Jews were greedy. Jews were behind the war in Europe. Jews are the supervillains behind every bad thing in your life. The fact that everything you just read is what people are still saying today tells you that nothing much has changed. Except now Susan Sarandon would prefer you not remember any of that. 

She definitely doesn’t want you to remember 1939 when 20,000 Nazis held a massive rally in the center of Manhattan at Madison Sqaure Garden. Or that Henry Ford bought a newspaper just so he could publish anti-Semitic propaganda. PBS has more detail:

A close friend recalled a camping trip in 1919 during which Ford lectured a group around the campfire. He "attributes all evil to Jews or to the Jewish capitalists," the friend wrote in his diary. "The Jews caused the war [WWI], the Jews caused the outbreak of thieving and robbery all over the country, the Jews caused the inefficiency of the navy…"

In 1918, Henry Ford purchased his hometown newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. A year and a half later, he began publishing a series of articles that claimed a vast Jewish conspiracy was infecting America. The series ran in the following 91 issues. Ford bound the articles into four volumes titled "The International Jew," and distributed half a million copies to his vast network of dealerships and subscribers. The rhetoric was not unusual for its content, as much as its scope. As one of the most famous men in America, Henry Ford legitimized ideas that otherwise may have been given little authority.

One of the richest and most powerful men in America pushing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on a media platform he bought explicitly for that reason? Good thing that could never happen again on something like a social media platform owned by a rabidly racist and unstable billionaire.

Sarandon would also like you not to think about the decades of terrorism against Synagogues. Swastika graffiti. Broken windows. Firebombings. Mass shootings. Nazis marching in the streets. Burning crosses. All of that doesn’t count because, somehow, Jews are white so we are oppressors and thus fair game for genocide. Yet we are not white in the eyes of the right wing, worse than vermin and again, fair game for genocide.

Isn’t it nice when there’s bipartisanship?

And please, whatever you do, don’t read about how Jews were hunted for over a year in Boston and beaten to a pulp. Susan Sarandon thinks Jews are just finding out what it’s like to fear for their lives in America the way Muslims do. But I don’t recall any period in American history for Muslims like what Project Muse describes. It’s a bit of a long read but you really need to understand just how close we came to normalizing Jews being murdered in the streets in America:

In October 1943 , the New York newspaper PM declared that bands of Irish Catholic youths, inspired by the Coughlinite Christian Front, had for over a year waged an "organized campaign of terrorism" against Jews in Boston's Dorchester district and in neighboring Roxbury and Mattapan. They had violently assaulted Jews in the streets and parks, often inflicting serious injuries with blackjacks and brass knuckles, and had desecrated synagogues and vandalized Jewish stores and homes. The New York Post stated that the "beatings of Jews" in Boston were "an almost daily occurrence." State Senator Maurice Goldman, representing 100,000 Jews, residing mostly in Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan, joined by four state representatives from those areas, declared to Governor Leverett Saltonstall that their constituents were living "in mortal fear." Many Jews could not leave their homes, even in daylight, frightened of being beaten by youths from adjacent Irish Catholic neighborhoods like South Boston, Fields Corner, and the Codman Square area, who deliberately entered Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan to go "Jew hunting." The New York Yiddish daily The Day called the antisemitic violence that had occurred in Dorchester during the previous year "a series of small pogroms."

Neither Boston's police nor its Catholic clergy made any serious effort to discourage the antisemitic violence. Jewish victims of the attacks had repeatedly complained about them, "only to be insulted and beaten again by the police themselves." One Jewish leader in Dorchester stated that the Boston police, largely Irish American, not only took no action to prevent antisemitic violence, but "would just as soon encourage it." The Christian Front, during the middle of World War II, distributed inflammatory antisemitic literature throughout Boston, "without the slightest interference by the police." Frances Sweeney, a prominent Boston Irish Catholic anti-fascist, denounced both city and state authorities and Boston's Catholic Church at all levels for their lack of concern about the antisemitic outbreaks: "The attacks on Jew[s] . . . are the complete responsibility of Governor Saltonstall, Mayor [Maurice] Tobin, the [Catholic] church, and the clergy-all of whom . . . ignored this tragedy."

Not even after 9/11 were Muslims subjected to that level of violence. We wouldn’t have tolerated it. When Trump banned Muslims from entering the country, people took to the streets in protest. In the run up to the Holocaust, though, we wouldn’t even allow Jewish children fleeing the violence of the Nazis to come here. We turned a boat of almost a thousand Jewish refugees away. Many of them later died in the camps.

But, you know, thank god Jews are just now getting a taste of the fear Muslims have to live with, right?

A choice

Does Sarandon know she’s erasing Jewish history? She’s not stupid, so even if she doesn’t know about Father Coughlin and the Boston pogroms, she absolutely knows about the massive spike in anti-Semitic hate speech and violence in the last several years. She knows about Kanye and Musk and Trump and how widespread and normalized hating Jews has become. She has to or she wouldn’t be so comfortable doing it herself.

And that’s what this all comes down to. The right has paved the way for the alt-left to indulge its worst instincts. This is how hate speech works. It lowers the barriers. First, only the very worst say these things. Then it spreads and becomes the air we breathe. 

These days, I have people telling me that I’m using my identity/heritage as a Jew as a hammer. I’m old enough to remember Republicans saying exactly the same thing about the LGBT community. And Feminists. And Latinos. And Blacks. Republicans said this to silence and deflect criticism of their bigotry.

Now here we are, with people who honestly think of themselves as progressives using identical language in an attempt to silence and deflect criticism of their bigotry. Horseshoe Theory is a hell of a thing.

Once the war between Israel and Hamas ends, whatever that end looks like, the alt-left will have irrevocably crossed a line. They will find, I think, much like Sarandon has, that giving in to that hate will have unanticipated consequences. It is one thing to protest Israel — God knows their far-right government deserves it. But once you let rabid hatred of Jews seep into your protests, you don’t get to wash the stench of bigotry off. That tends to stick to you for a good long while.

Democrats were getting quite comfortable with progressive policies. Now there’s an opening to push back on them from the center. Is it fair to smear all progressives and progressive policies for the actions of the alt-left? No, it’s not. But it’s going to happen anyway. Hopefully the attempt will fail but maybe it won’t. Either way, the alt-left will have done tremendous damage to the causes they claim to champion.

On a more personal level, protesters are going to find themselves paying a price in their personal lives. Sarandon has been dropped by her talent agency. There’s a very real chance that job offers will become scarce for the foreseeable future. For others, companies are not going to be particularly eager to hire graduates who condemned Israel just days after it suffered a massive terrorist attack. Is that punishing the graduates for expressing their opinion? Maybe. The tiki torch Nazis were expressing an opinion, too. A lot of them lost their jobs as a result. C’est la vie. Maybe wait a few weeks before telling the world how much the Jews deserved to be murdered next time. Or maybe don’t do that at all.

The longer Sarandon and her cohort rage at Jews and spread their hate, the more severe these consequences are going to get. They’re going to be outraged and claim persecution but at least they’ll know what it feels like to be targeted. And that’s a good thing, right? Oh, it’s only good when Jews are the target? Yeah, that’s what I thought, Sarandon.

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