I sympathize with Easterbrook up to a point. The trouble is you can't un-ring the bell. I'd be surprised if some semi-influential wink-wink anti-Semitic group didn't get hold of the line about Jewish Hollywood executives and use it with the tagline "--Gregg Easterbrook, The New Republic." I don't think you can shift the blame to the nature of blogging, either.

What's all this stuff about Christian and Jewish executives anyway? By implication, do atheists get a free pass? His whole discussion sounds nutty.

It's too bad people are not as sensisitive to things that are offensive to Jews as things that are offensive to Catholics, blacks, Irish, Italians and others. You could fill countless volumes with the slurs against Catholics in modern literature, popular culture and the movies. Ironically, if indeed as many have said the industry is one dominated by (secular and non-secular) Jews, it is especially
sad that the portrayals and characterizations that move them to defense mode don't also move them into the same mode when Catholics are offended.

What is really wonderful is how tabu this whole subject is, and how well-armed with scorn and derision ever player seems to be. You can't criticize Israel as a nuclear power (or even mention that it has nukes most of the time)
or as an oppressor of Palestine (there is no Palestine, of course), and you can't say what Easterbrook said. But you can certainly get away with saying anything about Catholics and the Church. I wonder how many more cases of sexual abuse occurred in yeshivas like the one that did briefly make the news here last year? What was the secret that was behind the near failure of the regional Jewish Community Centers last year? These kinds of things rarely get explored because of the power of the lobby. I remember Kevin's noting that my post about the yeshiva where the Times spent a month was surely one in a series of explorations about similar prejudices being taught in Arabic or Japanese or Catholic schools (although that never happened in my Catholic school education). Kevin rightly suggested that the Times was only going to explore that one school as a source of bad
comments about other peoples, not other schools.

Race and religion are terrible dividers. They have between them led to the destruction of hundreds of millions of human lives in the five millennia of history organized religion has been securely with us. On every continent but Antarctica millions have died in the past two centuries alone over religious and racial warfare. Nonetheless, the whole subject as fodder for the curious, seeking mind is tabu, and our human race hurtles ever more deeply into peril as religious zealots in Israel, Pakistan, India and Iran join political zealots in North Korea and elsewhere (I will excuse the West out of an abundance of caution) in compressing the timeline of histry into a few more decades, when they will surely end it for all of us. Please don't speak of these things until they happen.

Well, we've seen one result of Easterbrook's little rant. According to Roger L. Simon, ESPN--which had Easterbrook on its payroll--kicked him to the curb.

http://rogerlsimon.com/archives/00000445.htm

http://www.rishawnbiddle.com/weblog/archives/000005.html

My Tuesdays will now be more productive. I loved the TMQ column. It actually made me care about the NFL.