Veteran radio host and political commentator Steve Malzberg ripped into Saturday Night Live’s Michael Che and CNN’s Jake Tapper on his weekly Sunday commentary show “Eat the Press,” accusing both of reprehensible rhetoric — Che for taking “gratuitous, bigoted shots at Jews and Israel” and Tapper for “obsessive hatred” and “attempting to use the cancel culture to cancel [former President Donald Trump’s attorney] as a Jew.”
In a recent Saturday Night Live (SNL) segment, Michael Che comically claimed Israel likely only vaccinates its Jewish citizens, breathing life into an age-old anti-Jewish libel.
“Israel is reporting that they vaccinated half of their population and I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half,” Che remarked.
“That was Michael Che on Saturday Night Live last week, once again going after the Jews in Israel,” Malzberg stated. “This time he’s helping spread the lie that Israel is only giving the COVID [coronavirus] vaccine to her Jewish citizens.”
Malzberg then noted that, in response, the American Jewish Committee tweeted an image depicting Israeli-Arab citizens being vaccinated while explaining that the governing Palestinian Authority is legally responsible for supplying vaccines to Palestinians — who are neither Israeli citizens nor under the authority of the Israeli government.
All of these photos were taken in Israel.
Here are the inconvenient facts:
1. Israel is vaccinating *all* Israelis, Jewish and Arab alike.
2. The Palestinians are governed by the Palestinian Authority, which is responsible for vaccinating them under the Oslo Accords. pic.twitter.com/63NXITYvwp
— Avi Mayer (@AviMayer) February 21, 2021
“And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Che take gratuitous, bigoted shots at Jews and Israel,” Malzberg continued, presenting viewers with another clip featuring Che using antisemitic rhetoric.
“GoDaddy has shut down a website that hosted a Miss Hitler beauty pageant,” Che said on a previous SNL episode. If you’re wondering who the winner of the Miss Hitler pageant was… Miss Israel,” he quipped.
Malzberg then turned to hate crime statistics to drive home the gravity of Che’s “humor.”
“Need I remind Michael Che and NBC that year after year more religious hate crimes in the United States are committed against Jews than any other religion,” Malzberg said, noting Jews were the victims of over sixty percent of religious hate crimes in 2019, according to FBI statistics.
Malzberg then called out CNN’s Jake Tapper, who is Jewish himself, for deciding “that it would be so much fun to mock one of President Trump’s defense attorneys from his recent impeachment trial, David Schoen, who happens to be an Orthodox Jew.”
After Tapper reported Schoen left the trial early to observe the Jewish Sabbath, Malzberg claims Tapper mocked the attorney for “being a hypocrite as he quoted from a portion of what would be read” in synagogue the next day.
“You shall not spread a false report,” Tapper wrote, quoting a biblical portion. “You shall not join hands with a wicked man.”
Exodus 21:1-24:18 includes:
"You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. 2 You shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, siding with the many, so as to pervert justice"
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 12, 2021
“Tapper was trying to claim that Schoen was doing all of these evil things by daring to provide legal representation to Trump, that it was going against his Jewish faith by representing the ‘evil’ Donald Trump,” Malzberg said.
Malzberg then accused Tapper of “attempting to use the cancel culture to cancel Schoen as a Jew.”
“What Jake Tapper did was as deranged, depraved, perverted, and twisted as anything I’ve seen in a long time,” Malzberg said.
“Jake Tapper is a textbook example of what obsessive hatred can do to one’s soul,” he concluded.
Democrats and the media have increasingly been in the spotlight for embracing and condoning antisemitic figures and statements lately.
Last week, NBC decided to pull an episode of its medical drama “Nurses” after falling under heavy fire for a scene deemed antisemitic in which a Hasidic patient refuses a bone graft from “goyim” — the Yiddish word for a non-Jewish person.
In February, The Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America, declared that the promotion of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) to a senior committee position shows that Congress accepts antisemitism.
In a senate hearing last month, Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pressed Biden’s U.S. Attorney General nominee Merrick Garland about controversial past views and statements of Biden Department of Justice nominee Kristen Clarke who, as a Harvard student in 1994, invited an antisemitic lecturer to campus and defended his views as based on “indisputable fact.”
In December, the CJV accused then-Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock of “antisemitic rhetoric” and liberal Jews from the Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA) of trying to “whitewash” Warnock’s views by circulating a petition claiming that he was the victim of “baseless claims and attacks.”
In one sermon from 2018, Warnock said that Israel was shooting “unarmed” Palestinians like “birds of prey.” His later attempt to brush aside criticism was deemed unacceptable by many.
In October, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) faced allegations of antisemitism after threatening to cut off public assistance to yeshivas, or religious seminaries, adding that some Jews had “never complied” with coronavirus rules.
Follow Joshua Klein on Twitter @JoshuaKlein.
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