<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
	xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/"
	xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/"
	>

<channel>
	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Jerry Seinfeld</title>
	<atom:link href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/tag/jerry-seinfeld/feed/" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />
	<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com</link>
	<description></description>
	<lastBuildDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2014 16:20:06 +0000</lastBuildDate>
	<language>en-US</language>
		<sy:updatePeriod>hourly</sy:updatePeriod>
		<sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
	
	<item>
		<title>Diversity and Too Much Diversity</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-rotberg/diversity-and-too-much-diversity/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=diversity-and-too-much-diversity</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-rotberg/diversity-and-too-much-diversity/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Feb 2014 05:20:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Howard Rotberg]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Haneen Zoabi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerry Seinfeld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Political Correctness]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tolerance]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218326</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[From Jerry Seinfeld to Haneen Zoabi.    ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jerry-seinfeld.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218417" alt="jerry-seinfeld" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/jerry-seinfeld.jpg" width="280" height="175" /></a>Has “political correctness” now taken us to the point where every area of human endeavor must reflect gender, race and religious diversity?</p>
<p>Two interesting stories caught my eye yesterday about two very different sources blowing back at the enforced diversity that the left-liberal do-gooders are seeking to impose.</p>
<p>One was the great Jewish comedian Jerry Seinfeld.   Melissa Clyne, writing in <i>Newsmax</i>, notes that in an interview with CBS This Morning, Seinfeld responded to a question about whether his new web series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, is stacked with white men like himself.   Seinfeld thought the question was silly. He asked whether “people think it’s the census or something?”  “We represent the actual pie chart of America? Who cares? I have no interest in gender or race or anything like that.”</p>
<p>According to Jerry:  “Everyone else is calculating, is this the exact right mix? To me, it’s anti-comedy. It’s more about PC nonsense then, are you making us laugh?”</p>
<p>But it wasn’t long until the PC Police started to pounce.  Lily Rothman of <i>Time</i> magazine in a column told Seinfeld that he was on the losing side of this issue:</p>
<blockquote><p>“A continued lack of diversity on his show would prove his detractors’ point — and make him look racist and sexist, even if he’s merely failing to actively think about matters of race and sex — while increased diversity would seem to acknowledge that the “nonsense” isn’t so nonsensical at all. There’s no longer a way for a prominent comedian with Seinfeld’s level of influence to be so glib about the issue — especially given that of his 26 guests, only two have been women and another two have been nonwhite. (There have been no minority women guests so far.)”</p></blockquote>
<p>Jews have been traditionally been overrepresented in comedy in America.  In 1979, for example, <i>Time</i> estimated that whereas Jews made up only 3 percent of the American population, fully 80 percent of professional comedians were Jewish.  It probably stems from the Jewish habit of dealing with misery and adverse circumstances by making jokes.   I thought that was a great contribution to American culture;  unfortunately, being funny is no longer the main criterion for being in a comedy, so ethnic groups that have dealt with adversity through violence rather than jokes now have an equal right to be represented in comedy as elsewhere.   Poor Jerry, something has changed and he doesn’t get it.</p>
<p>As a Canadian who must live with so-called Human Rights Commissions adjudicating on diversity issues, I have seen the future that Seinfeld does not understand;  it is not pretty.</p>
<p>Take a look at the second story, which comes from what I have called the “first front” in the Islamist war against Western values – Israel.   With all its security problems in its very hostile neighbourhood where Muslim children are incited in kindergarten against the Jewish State, one would think there would be little interest in the diversity obsession.</p>
<p>However, in the <i>Jerusalem Post, </i>reporter Lahav Harkov writes about a controversy that arose when the Knesset’s Labor, Health, and Welfare Committee was discussing a bill to give Arab Christians separate representation from Arab Muslims on the Advisory Committee for Equal Opportunity in Employment.</p>
<p>Arab Muslim Member of the Knesset Jamal Zahalka took offense and suggested that the bill’s proponent, rather than seeking to promote diverse membership on the Committee was intending to “wickedly divide the Arab public, which is oppressed anyway.”</p>
<p>Christian IDF Officers Forum leader Lt. (res.) Shadi Halul, however, said he is proud to be a Christian and that he wants and deserves to be recognized as such.  Furthermore he called the Arab Muslim objectors “racists”.</p>
<p>This was too much for Arab Muslim member  Haneen Zoabi   This woman, who has a B.A. from Haifa University and an M.A. from Hebrew University (and who worked as a school inspector for the Israeli Ministry of Education), at the Knesset swearing-in ceremony on February 24, 2009, left the room because she objected to the singing of <a title="Hatikva" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatikva" target="_blank">Hatikva</a>, Israel&#8217;s national anthem;  she has voiced support for <a title="Iran" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran" target="_blank">Iranian</a> acquisition of nuclear weapons and participated in the <a title="Gaza flotilla raid" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_flotilla_raid" target="_blank">Gaza flotilla</a>, on board the <i><a title="MV Mavi Marmara" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Mavi_Marmara" target="_blank">MV Mavi Marmara</a>.</i></p>
<p>Zoabi was ejected from the Knesset building by Committee chairman Haim Katz for implying the Christian Halul deserves violence, after she declared to him: <b>“You are a coward! Go to the streets of Nazareth and Kafr Kana, say what you just said, and they’ll give you the response you deserve.”</b></p>
<p>The proposed legislation sought to expand the advisory committee by giving the 160,000 Christians in Israel their own representative and adding another Druze member.   (Druze are an offshoot of <a title="Ismailism" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ismailism" target="_blank">Ismailism</a>, a branch of <a title="Shia Islam" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shia_Islam" target="_blank">Shia Islam</a>, whose adherents participate in the Israeli army, and the Israeli Judiciary and Foreign Service.)</p>
<p>The panel would also have representation from the ultra-religious, new immigrants, reservists, older people, and women.</p>
<p>So we see that attempts at diversity, rather than implementing fairness and harmony, will become nothing more than alternate battlefields in the culture war that has befallen us.  The left liberals who think that respect for diversity is the recipe for their tolerant paradise on earth will soon come up against the hard reality of the culture war where the Islamists merely <i>use </i>our tolerance, until they get power -and then will end all diversity representation just like they will end all tolerance.</p>
<p>And as Jerry Seinfeld would say, there is nothing funny about that, and it is, as he puts it, “<i>anti-comedy</i>”.</p>
<p><i>Howard Rotberg is the author of The Second Catastrophe:  A Novel about a Book and its Author and TOLERism:  The Ideology Revealed.  He is president of Mantua Books, an imprint dedicated to fighting cultural relativism and protecting fundamental liberties:  </i><a href="http://www.mantuabooks.com" target="_blank">www.mantuabooks.com.</a></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/howard-rotberg/diversity-and-too-much-diversity/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>35</slash:comments>
		</item>
		<item>
		<title>Jerry Seinfeld, the Racist?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/jerry-seinfeld-the-racist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jerry-seinfeld-the-racist</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/jerry-seinfeld-the-racist/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:29:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Comedy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jerry Seinfeld]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Male]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[PC]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[White]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218376</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An anti-PC thought-criminal is on the loose! ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218377" alt="121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/121003074150-jerry-seinfeld-2011-story-top-450x336.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>How refreshing the sound of a top-flight celebrity fearlessly shrugging off the idiocy of political correctness! The other day, on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">CBS This Morning, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">an interviewer</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">pointed out to Jerry Seinfeld that most of the guests he&#8217;s had on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">his online series on which he has automotive tête-à-têtes with fellow practitioners of the stand-up art (and the occasional just-plain-funny person), have been white males. “Oh, this really pisses me off,” replied a bracingly honest Seinfeld, who plainly saw where his fatuous interlocutor was headed. After a bit of back and forth, the comic spelled out just how he feels about the application of this kind of absurd bean-counting to matters of entertainment: “People think it&#8217;s the census or something. Its got to represent the actual pie chart of America. Who cares?&#8230;I have no interest in gender or race&#8230;.It&#8217;s anti-comedy&#8230;It&#8217;s PC nonsense.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The attacks on Seinfeld for these purportedly insensitive remarks began materializing almost at once. A contributor to the Gawker website, who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://gawker.com/who-cares-about-diversity-in-comedy-says-jerry-seinf-1515412052">sneeringly</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> called Seinfeld a “maker of comedy for and about white people,” represented him as having indicated that he “isn&#8217;t interested in trying to include non-white anything in his work” and that in his view “any comedian who is not a white male is also not funny.” Having read the entire Gawker article, I strongly suspect that this characterization of Seinfeld, far from being deliberately deceitful, was in fact an honest reflection of the author&#8217;s utter inability to grasp the concept of colorblindedness. Charging Seinfeld with “downplaying the work” of all nonwhite comics, the man from Gawker made a point of demonstrating his own PC purity: comedy, he proclaimed, “should represent the entire pie chart of America, and the glorious, multicolored diversity pie should be thrown directly at Jerry Seinfeld&#8217;s face.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The funnyman also came under fire for a Canadian woman named Maya Roy, who, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/maya-roy/seinfeld-diversity-comments_b_4733365.html">writing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in the Huffington Post under the headline “Seinfeld&#8217;s Racist Comments Make Him the Joke,” accused him of “whitewashing New York” in his 1990s sitcom – only to chide him, in her next breath, for featuring on various episodes of that show “heavily accented Chinese food delivery boys” and an “inept Pakistani entrepreneur, Babu Bhatt,” among others. To nonwhite viewers like herself, railed Roy, these nonwhite characters “only existed to make &#8216;whitey&#8217; feel superior.” She contrasted the nonwhites on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Seinfeld </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">with Indian-Canadian comic Russell Peters and Korean-American comic Margaret Cho, both of whom, exulted Roy, “use humour to mock racists and homophobes, and make life just a little more bearable for the rest of us.” (Yes, indeed, they are moral scolds, which is surely part of the reason why I, for one, find both of them excruciatingly unfunny.)</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Half a century ago, an America in which people don&#8217;t have an interest in gender or race was Martin Luther King&#8217;s dream – the vision around which Americans of every color, eager to see their country live out the meaning of its creed, rallied enthusiastically. Today that kind of thinking is condemned as bigotry. Today a sitcom that doesn&#8217;t seek to mirror the population pie chart risks being called out for racism or sexism. Today a show that permits itself to include black or Chinese or Pakistani characters who, far from being role models and pillars of virtue prove to be every bit as hapless, goofy, mendacious, and/or self-absorbed as the white characters is by definition guilty of hate speech. Today, according to the PC sentries at the gates of American culture, comedy should exist not to amuse us by (among other things) treating received opinions with indifference and even irreverence but, on the contrary, to promote The Proper Values, as determined by, well, people like Maya Roy and the man from Gawker. Its focus should be on chiding the evil souls who harbor prejudice and providing comfort and affirmation to the virtuous innocents who are the objects of that prejudice. In other words, comedy, in this age of victimhood, of group identity, and of ubiquitous therapy, should succor the victims, go out of its way to affirm the unconditionally positive contribution of minority groups (especially those favored by multicultural dogma) to the wonderful mosaic of American society; it should serve, without exception, a psychically healthful, wholesome, and therapeutic purpose, while of course never doing anything that might stand the remotest chance of hurting or offending those who have already (in the PC view) been hurt or offended too mightily.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time Magazine – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">yes, it still exists – piled onto Seinfeld after his comments on CBS, running a piece in which one Lily Rothman (a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.lilyrothman.com/">self-identified</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> playwright and backpacker who studied at Yale and the Columbia School of Journalism) did her share of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://entertainment.time.com/2014/02/04/jerry-seinfeld-diversity/">tsk-tsking</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> about “the homogeneity of [the] guests” on Jerry&#8217;s webseries – guests, mind you, who have ranged from Jay Leno to Howard Stern, from Carl Reiner to Colin Quinn. Ms. Rothman&#8217;s inability to view these performers as a remarkably diverse crew only serves as a salutary reminder that for some people, melanin would appear to be the only</span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">measure of difference. Color, in short, is all. It&#8217;s this kind of illiberal thinking that once was recognized as a genuinely serious threat to true liberal values, and that today, in the corridors of American cultural power – including those at </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Time – </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">is, perversely, the very essence of what goes by the name of liberalism. Ms. Rothman concluded her harangue by expressing the hope that “public pressure” would force Seinfeld to enhance his show&#8217;s “diversity.” Not so many years ago such a sentiment would have been widely recognized as ignoble, despicable – indeed, totalitarian. No more.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If anything is striking about this incident, it&#8217;s not the attacks on Seinfeld – who only a few months ago, by the way, said on </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">that his “Mount Rushmore” of stand-ups would consist of Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, and Don Rickles (two blacks, two whites). No, the attacks are just the usual multicultural claptrap. What was striking – and gratifying, and heartening – were Seinfeld&#8217;s original remarks about “PC nonsense” – which, considering that they came from a man who is still the top-earning comedian in the U.S., raised expectations that the growing impatience of influential cultural figures with the poisonous influence of political correctness may yet help bring an end to the madness.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
]]></content:encoded>
			<wfw:commentRss>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-bawer/jerry-seinfeld-the-racist/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
		<slash:comments>62</slash:comments>
		</item>
	</channel>
</rss>

<!-- Performance optimized by W3 Total Cache. Learn more: http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/

Object Caching 400/412 objects using disk
Content Delivery Network via cdn.frontpagemag.com

 Served from: www.frontpagemag.com @ 2014-12-31 13:37:30 by W3 Total Cache -->