My valet shoved away some of the piles of money I use to shield my eyes from all the gold-reflections in my home and placed an iPad in front of me. On it was a clip of Pat Robertson talking about how Jews never tinker with cars, and how we’re too busy polishing diamonds. Finally! Someone understands!
Of course, all this video-watching was really cutting into my diamond-polishing time, so I slapped my valet away and grabbed another sack of diamonds to polish. Later, as I shoved a Christian baby into the juicer to make my lunch-matzoh, I found my mind kept wandering back to Robertson’s statement, so I decided to watch the whole thing.
Robertson also said
You almost never find Jews tinkering with their cars on the weekends or mowing their lawns.
... which is how he introduced Orthodox rabbi Daniel Lapin, who elaborated on that idea:
When you correctly said in Jewish neighborhoods you do not find Jews lying under their cars on Sunday afternoons, no, I pay one of the best mechanics around to take care of my BMW, I’d be crazy to take my time doing it myself.
Oh, Rabbi Lapin! Please, let me be the first one to congratulate you on developing an amazing time machine that runs on the power of the stupid shit that comes out of your mouth and has the incredible ability to take the collective popular perception of the Jews back hundreds of years! You must be so proud.
Pat Robertson’s statement a bit later saying that Jews spend their weekends
polishing diamonds, not fixing cars.
is, of course, one of the most inane, old-school anti-semite nuggets of horseshit I’ve heard in a long while, but it’s Pat Robertson saying it. My expectations of him are already so low I think they’re being consumed by the heat of the Earth’s core as we speak. Of course he’s saying shit like that — the man was born in the 1600s and probably learned about Jews from watching the Oberammergau Passion Play or some shit.
But to hear this tired old Jews-don’t-work-on-cars (or fix things, or make stuff, except for making copper wire from pennies when two of us grab one, I’m told) coming from an actual Rabbi makes me want to scream. I’ve been hearing this bullshit my whole auto-loving life, and I’m fucking done with it.
I’m sure Rabbi Dipshit there doesn’t work on his BMW — I’m pretty sure that he has trouble changing the batteries in his electrified stereotype-enhancing harness that he wears clenched tight around his genitals, too. But that has absolutely nothing to do with his status as a Jew, and it in no way makes him a model for any other Jewish person, anywhere.
I grew up in the South, and encountered all sorts of exciting anti-Semitism, of all kinds — I’m a Christ-killer, I’m cheap, I’m disgustingly rich, but the one that actually bothered me the most was the idea that I have to be some fumbling nebbish who can’t hold a wrench.
It often wasn’t even that vicious — just an expression of surprise when someone who knew me as a Jew first and a person second found me working on my car, or talking about cars or whatever. I feel like finally this stupid old trope is going away, and then assholes like Rabbi Lapin go on national TV and gleefully re-enforce this same old shit all over again.
So, my plea here is that nobody listen to Rabbi Lapin. He has no idea what he’s talking about. Sure, I bet he can tell you if otter meat is kosher, but beyond that, ignore him. Actually, I’m not even sure how trustworthy he is on anything else, since in this interview he also said that Hebrew has no words for “adolescent” or “retire.”
Really? מתבגר and לפרוש. Google Translate, bitch.
There’s been plenty of important Jews in motoring: André Citroën, father of the Corvette Zora Arkus-Duntov, Jody Scheckter, Josef Ganz — and there’s many, many other Jews who just love cars and work on them the best they can, because they sure as hell don’t have any fucking diamonds to fucking polish.
So, Rabbi Lapin, as one Jew to another, please have some appreciation for the naches I feel for every Jewish gearhead out there, and fuck off. I’m pretty sure there’s a passage in the Talmud that will explain exactly how the best way to fuck off is, if that helps.
(Thanks for showing us this crap, Blair!)