by ARWA MAHDAWI
The comedian’s remarks on a podcast join his cheerleading of genocidal violence and jokes about suffering children in Gaza
Jerry Seinfeld misses ‘dominant masculinity’
There are few things certain in life except death, taxes and the knowledge that every single goddamn day you can look at the news and find a rich man complaining about how feminism and wokeness have ruined the world.
Today’s edition of Bigotry Is Acceptable Again comes via Jerry Seinfeld, who appears to be on a mission to make sure people don’t associate him with a much-loved sitcom from the 1990s but with being a boring reactionary obsessed with shaking his fist at progress.
Seinfeld’s lurch to the right hasn’t come out of nowhere: the billionaire comedian was never exactly woke. He famously dated a 17-year-old high school student when he was 38 and definitely not a high school student. Several years ago, he also took his family to a so-called Anti-terror Fantasy Camp in an illegal Israeli settlement in the West Bank accused of “gamifying” apartheid, where they could shoot guns and pretend to be soldiers.
But while Seinfeld has never been a bleeding-heart liberal, it feels like he’s never been quite so vocally anti-progressive as he is now. Ever since 7 October, Seinfeld has advocated loudly for Israel’s collective punishment of Palestinians, demonized pro-Palestinian protesters, and joked about suffering children in Gaza. “Save the children of Gaza,” he said in a mocking voice after getting heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters at a show. Along with cheerleading what the United Nations human rights council has described as genocidal violence, he has also apparently decided that a great tactic for publicizing his much-panned movie about Pop-Tarts is by complaining about the left.
In April, for example, Seinfeld told the New Yorker’s Radio Hour that comedy was dying because of the “result of the extreme left and PC crap and people worrying so much about offending other people”. (Really hilarious comedy, my friends, is joking about dead Palestinian children.)
Then this week, Seinfeld decided to get nostalgic about “real men” on the conservative agitator Bari Weiss’s podcast. “I miss a dominant masculinity,” Seinfeld said. “Yeah, I get the toxic thing … But still, I like a real man.” The pair also talked about Israel and managed to display so little regard for the suffering in Gaza that an Israeli journalist wrote a disgusted column about it.
“The amount of empathy it would have taken for Bari Weiss and Seinfeld to stop and think that perhaps ‘the mob,’ as they referred to the pro-Palestinian movement … is also in pain is so miniscule, I am still astounded neither of them could muster it up,” Rachel Fink wrote in the Israeli paper Haaretz.
Oh, there’s more. Weiss and Seinfeld both got weirdly nostalgic about the 60s. “Obviously there were problems. [The] civil rights movement had yet to start, like a zillion. But the thing that was present that I feel like isn’t now is a sense of, like … a common culture,” Weiss said. Seinfeld agreed, saying the best thing about that era, which is when his Pop-Tarts movie was based, was “an agreed-upon hierarchy”.
I’m not sure hierarchies are ever “agreed-upon” – I rather think they’re imposed. Do Weiss and Seinfeld realize what it sounds like when they reminisce about an era before the civil rights movement when there was an accepted “hierarchy”; when Black people and gay people and women, they seem to be saying, all knew their place?
The answer to that question is probably: “Yes, and they don’t care.” Bigotry seems to be perfectly acceptable now and not something that impedes anyone’s career. A few weeks ago, the NFL player Harrison Butker gave a massively misogynist and homophobic speech at a Catholic college in Kansas, for example. He’s since doubled down on it, saying he doesn’t regret his remarks. Possibly inspired by Butker, the Jaws actor Richard Dreyfuss also recently made a number of sexist and transphobic comments at a Q&A. Meanwhile, the Minnesota Republican party has just endorsed the conspiracy theorist candidate Royce White, who has complained that “women have become too mouthy”.
The Guardian for more