Last month, the actress Susan Sarandon—known for The Rocky Horror Picture Show and for saying that maybe Donald Trump’s election could be a good thing, because it would bring us closer to the Revolution—told a rally in New York City that (to quote the Times) “people feeling afraid of being Jewish right now were ‘getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country, so often subjected to violence.’”
Consequences followed: She was attacked on various social media platforms, Fox News put her comment in wide rotation, and she was dropped by her talent agency, UTA. (She was, of course, wildly cheered at the rally where she made these comments.)
Now, she has apologized. From Friday’s New York Times:
In a statement posted to Instagram Friday night, Sarandon said that she had been trying to communicate her concern for rising hate crimes. “This phrasing was a terrible mistake,” she said, “as it implies that until recently Jews have been strangers to persecution, when the opposite is true.”
“As we all know, from centuries of oppression and genocide in Europe, to the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, PA,” she said, referring to the synagogue shooting that killed 11 and wounding six others in the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history, “Jews have long been familiar with discrimination and religious violence which continues to this day.”
As somebody who knows a lot about the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, I was gratified to read that Sarandon had heard of it. But that’s about the only good thing I can say about her “apology”; she either needs to search her conscience of fire whatever p.r. rep wrote and Insta’d it. Here it is:
I had to read this statement over several times to figure out what was so noxious about it. Finally I figured it out: it’s a big lie. Not that she regrets saying the stuff she said—if only because of the blowback, it seems she does regret saying it. No, the lie is that she was intending to “communicate [her] concern for an increase in hate crimes.” There are a lot of things one might say to communicate a concern about the increase in hate crimes, but what she said sounds like the exact opposite of “I’m concerned by the increase in hate crimes.” No, what she seems to have been saying is, “I grant you that there has been an increase in hate crimes, and to the extent that the increase is in hate crimes against Jews, they deserve their fate.” Or, more charitably, “maybe they don’t deserve their fate, but there’s poetic justice in what’s happening to them.”
Because, if you feel bad for somebody, one thing you don’t say is that she or he is “getting a taste of” what something is like. In common parlance, people “get a taste of” what they deserve, or what they have coming.
In other words, there is really nothing Susan Sarandon can say to effectively walk back her comment. She made a gaffe, in something like the sense famously defined by the journalist Michael Kinsley: she unintentionally said what she was really thinking. She didn’t make a “mistake”; she didn’t misspeak; she unintentionally spoke what she believed. She revealed herself to be callous toward, even triumphalist about, the antisemitism many Jews are currently facing in the United States. She revealed herself to be loathsome.
If this is not her truest self—if she said something that she doesn’t really believe, or is ashamed to have discovered was lurking in her black heart—then she might have said, “I said something really cruel, and I am ashamed.” Instead, she recited some obvious facts (Jews have been victims of persecution, Jews have been murdered), as if the problem was that, until just this minute, she was ill informed. (And then … she met with someone from the Anti-Defamation League, who schooled her in the history of the pogroms?) But Susan Sarandon is a well-educated lifelong activist and politically minded person. She knows Jews’ history, yet she was still able to say that we are now “getting a taste of” what other groups have suffered. We suffered, but apparently not enough, and now hopefully that is changing.
Incidentally, it is not evident that Muslims have been more persecuted than Jews in American history. Let me be clear: as somebody who abhors bigotry of all kinds, and writes about it, I put no stock in misery derbies. Nobody wins in comparing battle scars. And American Muslims have suffered plenty. But to read the last ten years of hate-crime statistics from both the FBI and the ADL—the two groups that most thoroughly monitor hate crimes—no religious or ethnic group is as likely to be targeted by hate crimes as Jews. Here is one relevant table, from 2019; you can see that among religiously-based hate crimes, Jews were most victimized, both in absolute numbers and relative to our percentage in the population. One can quibble with these numbers; the stats are imperfect in various ways. And as a Jew who feels quite un-victimized in the US, I am not crying woe. But suffice it to say: Susan Sarandon has absolutely no idea what she is talking about.
Which brings me to another point: Actors who talk about politics often don’t know what they are talking about. They’re as likely to get things wrong as to get things right, and when they get things wrong, they can get them way, way wrong. Mel Gibson has done a lot more harm than Alan Alda has done good.
Mel Gibson has done a lot more harm than Alan Alda has done good.
I have a general rule (Oppenheimer’s Rule #7): People are good at one thing, at most. Last night, I was talking to a friend who knows a favorite musician of mine. As my friend told it, he tried to collaborate with this musician on a book—he wanted the musician to talk about his music, and my friend would take notes, and shape the musician’s thoughts into something readable. But the musician, my friend said, was so woefully and utterly inarticulate that the whole project fell apart. This musician writes great melodies, and even great lyrics, but he can’t talk worth a damn.
I, by contrast, write pretty goodly, but even my shower doesn’t want to hear me sing.
One thing at most.
Which is why I am wary even of writers weighing in on politics, except when it comes to topics they know well, or have some professional affinity for. I have done a lot of reporting on clergy sex abuse, antisemitic murder, and preppy clothing, and I will weigh in on the politics of those topics until the day they bury me in my cords and repp tie. But when it comes to Big Pharma, housing policy, or invasive species, I keep my mouth, and my typewrite case, shut.
Here in The New York Review of Books we have very good writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Benjamin Moser, and Richard Ford weighing in on the Hamas murders in the most euphemistic, twisted language (“Hamas militants broke out of Gaza,” “[m]ore than 1,300 Israelis were subsequently killed”—italics mine; for a good dissection of this language, which would would put Orwell in his grave all over again, read Gal Beckerman’s Atlantic piece). Part of what’s going on here is that, for these writers, the Jewish Israelis were only getting what they deserved (paging Susan Sarandon); but part of what’s going on is that these writers don’t know what they are talking about, but feel called to sign virtue-signaling petitions anyway. Because they believe that writers should “be political.”
And in Lou Reed news…
In the last edition of this newsletter, I talked about how good Will Hermes’s biography of Lou Reed is. I am reading it slowly, savoring it. In tonight’s reading, I learned a) that political blogger Mickey Kaus once, as a teenager, booked the Velvet Underground to play a show at Beverly Hills High School, and b) that Jonathan Richman once opened for the Velvet Underground at the Paramount Theatre in my hometown of Springfield, Mass. Both facts are totally awesome.
Fun fact
Brian Koppelman, who wrote Rounders, which may be my favorite movie, has a great podcast that I just discovered. He often interviews writers—check out his episodes with Rich Cohen and David Lipsky.