Catch the Jew: Tuvia Tenenbom on Israel, the Media, and Bad Jews, Part Two

On the day I heard Tuvia Tenenbom give a talk, he leaned in to the first row and yelled slurs at a member of the audience. He was reenacting what had been yelled into his face by an anti-Israel protester at an event he covered. The audience chuckled uncomfortably but immediately recognized the narrative: either you’re a ‘’good Jew’’ who denounces Israel, or you’re a hateful stereotype of a Jew – ​evil, greedy, and ugly (in less kind words).

When I read Catch the Jew, I knew Tenenbom would be interesting to interview. He is opinionated and unafraid to say what he believes – ​a quality many people find refreshing in times when the politically correct police seem to be out in force. When trigger words and self-censorship are declared the law of the land is when it becomes most important to speak your mind. Below are excerpts from that interview.

You mentioned that journalists don’t ask the obvious questions, that they deliberately overlook things. Is there a journalist or news organization, in your opinion, who’s doing it right?

I didn’t meet them yet…  Everyone has a preconceived notion. I mean these are things that are happening to the media for a long time… People come out with a set opinion. The media changed. If you look at the NY Times 30 years ago, there was more variety of opinions – ​you had conservatives, you had liberals. Today, what are you going to read in the NY Times? It’s going to be basically almost one answer… And the frightening thing is that their news pages, their news section, is also politically motivated. It’s an opinion. And that’s what happens in the media. And I see it even in America, I see it in Germany, I see it everywhere. I mean, I have to fight with my paper many times and many times I’ve threatened I’d quit. And I am now in a big fight with them and I might quit for a stupid thing like the glacier conference in Alaska. Because this has become the new god of climate change. You can’t even make fun of it anymore. I’m saying, I’m not a geologist, I don’t know, but people are so–it has become so politically oriented, you can’t question it. That’s what happened to the media. And if you don’t follow the line – ​out! Either you’ll be fired or you’ll have to fire yourself.

You mentioned in your talk that you love Arabs and you love their culture – ​how do you reconcile that with the fact that you met so many who were ready to kill you if they found out you were Jewish?

First of all, I am a theater person. I have studied drama… And in dramatic roles you learn that the villains are the best characters. Without the villains you have no story. You have to learn to love the villains. And number two, and it’s also relating to something in theatre, is I am also a director. So as a director you know, and as a theater person you know, that you have to divorce yourself from what you see. You have to represent a world – ​an imaginary world or a real world, whatever it is, you have to construct it on the stage. And you start seeing people as characters. All of them serve you.

And thirdly, and it’s the most important – ​we tend to think that the people who are politically bad animals are not human. We say that Adolf Hitler was an animal, a demon, whatever, but he was not. He was a human being just like you and me. And we have to divorce between what a person says and what a person thinks. And realize that we are all humans, no matter what we think…. And once you train yourself – ​it takes training to divorce people from their political view – ​you are more likely to report news honestly. You know what I’m saying? Because you don’t bring yourself, you take yourself out of the picture and you are more likely not to fall into the trap.

In your book, you admire many qualities in the Arabs you meet and I was wondering what qualities you’d want Jews to have.

To stop hating themselves, to stop doubting themselves, to be normal. To be proud of one’s culture. Not to be ashamed. I’m not asking you to walk with a Star of David but if you feel like it, why not? Don’t be afraid of it. And just say, ‘’I am a Jew. Hey, you have a problem with it?’’ I want to see Jews talking like this.

What do you think motivates self-hating Jews?

I think it’s like something is rubbing off. It’s anti-Semitism of two thousand years and it’s very very deep and some of it is repetitive, it goes on and on and on. It’s never ending and some of it rubbed off on the Jews. It’s like you say ‘’Hare Krishna’’ many times you start believing in ‘’Hare Krishna.’’ You start hearing how bad the Jews are and you start believing that you’re bad.

Is there anything that can change popular opinion of Israel and the Jews, whether in Europe or America?

Only if some people start facing it directly. Calling a spade a spade. Staring at those people and saying to them, ‘’Sorry to tell you: you are fucking racist.’’ And I do that. Does it work? In my articles, every article that I write, almost every one comes to most read, ‘’number one’’ in the paper. Again, how long will I stay in that job, I have no idea. I risk it every day.

There’s been a marked uptick in anti-Semitism in Europe. Is America heading in the same direction?

I can tell you only what I know up to now, I don’t have a solid conclusion. I haven’t traveled to the Southern states yet. I will keep final judgment, but yes, to an extent from what I know now, at the university level, the educational part is very much what you call progressive liberal. And this affects the population and this affects the young people. And at the end of the day Europe and America have a unity between them. It’s a unity of thoughts, to some extent. It’s Western culture, which is dictated by so-called intellectuals and it’s affecting the young generation, the next generation and the next generation of politicians, and the next generation of businesspeople and what I see at the moment, at least up to now, people who call themselves intellectuals, even young ones, are the elite of America moving away from Israel.

Is there anything young people can do to stop the move away from Israel?

Call a spade a spade, argue with people, debate. Step proudly, don’t just keep to yourself. Do not be afraid to make your own mind known to others, your opinion known to others, and I think if Israel behaved like this – ​I can’t blame only the non-Jews. The Jews need to be blamed also.

I mean, if Israel behaved more strongly – ​look at Israel, there was a war in 1967 and the Jews still did not decide what to do with the territories. Any normal country would either say, ‘’Take it back,’’ or ‘’We take it and if we take it it’s all ours. It’s called Ireland or whatever it is called, England, and we kill everybody or we convert everybody or we sue everybody or whatever we do.’’ And Israel, the Jewish state, won the war, and what does a country that wins a war do? It claims the land. No, they didn’t claim the land. They put it over there. Now there is an open question and that’s what happens…  If the Jews behave normally maybe they’d get more respect. I am sure they’d get more respect.

Is there anything American Jews need to understand about Arab culture that might help matters?

…In general the one thing they do have to understand is that Arab culture and Eastern culture is not America, is not Western culture. It’s a totally different culture. It’s not at all comparable. Westerners think that if there’s a problem, we have to solve it. One way or another. In the East, we don’t solve our problems. ‘’We have a problem? We can live with it, thank you very much.’’ We’ve been living with it for centuries. The Sunnis and the Shiites have been fighting each other. Who is solving it?

The moment the West tried to force its way of thinking by ‘’solving’’ something, we got death, we got wounded, and we got homelessness, and we got refugees – ​millions of them. That’s because we thought we could solve the problem. That we have to solve the problems of the East. No…first of all, you have no right. Our culture is not superior to their culture, it just happened to be our culture. You know, there are other cultures in the world and they are very, very nice. They are beautiful, you know, and we have to understand it. Let’s say you have a boyfriend and he’s nice and you love him very much. He’s not the only man in the world, even if you love him and you continue to love him, there are a lot of other people who are nice. And people who are not nice.

We have to realize – ​before we try to understand the East, we have to understand the West. We are supremacists. We are trying to force our views on the world. We are trying to enforce democracy or whatever we call it on the East. We’ve done that in Russia. Did that help? No way, Jose.

What about the argument that if we don’t try to establish democracy elsewhere, then the problems, like terrorism, that people have there will be imported here?

First of all, this is bullshit racism. Saying, ‘’Ok, there is a little Arab there, let’s kill him before he blows up.’’ That’s basically what it is. Let’s kill them before they blow up. Hello, that’s total bullshit racism. And if they do attack us, we have to attack back. But let’s see if they attack us. How do you know they’re going to attack us? Everything is terrorism. Homeland Security closed down rent-a-boy.com – ​it’s like a gay escort service. But it’s Homeland Security! It’s Homeland Security to do that! We’ve gone crazy with our security. We have trampled every right of freedom we have in this country in the name of security.

What about countries like Iran that openly threaten to destroy us?

Let them say it – ​it was good that there were sanctions, they obviously suffered from it. Keep the sanctions on. You don’t have to go every time and attack somebody because somebody’s an idiot and kill them.

There are better ways.

There are better ways. Sanctions – ​for some reason it worked. Not perfect, worked 50%, not 100%, not even 60%; they kept on doing whatever they wanted to do, but they were suffering. And they wanted a way out. So the West gave them a way out. So the country that believes in fighting terrorism to the amazing degree of closing rent-a-boy.com is signing a deal with the ayatollahs. It’s a little bit ridiculous.

So you see with these security things, we have no idea what we’re doing. We have no clue! We are contradicting ourselves. A few Saudis came from Hamburg and blew up the Twin Towers in New York so we go and invade Iraq. Sorry? What is this? And that’s not just Republicans, it’s Democrats also. They are all in the pact together. They came with a new president who said ‘’no more wars’’ and then he’s engaging in a war in Afghanistan…  Then America got involved in the Middle East in the Arab Spring under a Democratic leader who said he would not get involved. And they got involved. And we got a huge mess there, which maybe will affect Western culture if the refugee flow does not stop. What are we doing? And we, by the way, created this refugee problem. This is America’s doing, and some European countries’.

Do you think Europe and America should be taking refugees?

They have to understand one thing: if the number of refugees they take is going to be in the millions, it will affect the culture. If they’re ok with it, take them, if not, don’t. That’s basically the solution. You’re not God you don’t have to solve every problem.

Tuvia Tenenbom is the author of Catch the Jew and I Sleep in Hitler’s Room. You can find both books at Amazon.com. For more info on Catch the Jew, visit CatchtheJew.net.

Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco has gotten into the terrible habit of thinking too much about everything. She enjoys fantasizing about traveling, compulsively buying literature, laughing at her own puns, and consuming anything (and everything) that can be found in a bakery. She is a graduate of UC Berkeley where she got a degree in English with a minor in Italian. She can be found celebrating awesome female friendships on LadyBromance.com.

By Tatiana Sundeyeva-Orozco