In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Joel Stein asks “How Jewish Is Hollywood?“

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). …

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) …

Ari Emanuel, who is the original for Jeremy Piven’s “Ari Gold” character on HBO’s Entourage, is the brother of Obama chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel.

Whatever happened to Armenian moguls? It seemed like in the past there was often one studio boss who’d be Armenian.

In general, isn’t it weird how it has become fashionable to be naive and less worldly, as evidenced by the drop in percentage of Americans who agreed with the factual statement “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews”? It used to be that people felt proud of knowing the score, of understanding the way of the world, of being clued in to how things work.

Today, though, it’s cool to be ignorant. I don’t think it’s just people who actually know the facts about Hollywood and lied to the ADL to be safe. Judging from comments by countless anonymous people on the Internet, a lot of people are proud of being out of touch with what’s happening. They want you to be aware that they’ve cultivated their cluelessness. It’s really very strange for somebody like me who can remember back to the late 1960s. That era had its flaws, to be sure, but willful ignorance was not one of them. (more…)

A reader suggests Bernie Madoff must have been running two scams, on and off: the famous Ponzi pyramid scheme, but also abusing his position as a “market-maker” to front-run (i.e., insert his buy and sell orders just in front of his customers’ orders in the direction that they are running.)

The idea that Madoff was flexibly switching back and forth among his scams makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to keep a Ponzi scheme going for years, and it’s hard to avoid being caught front-running because it’s such an obvious gag. So, you do a little front-running to get the Ponzi scheme going, turn it off before the SEC gets around to checking, turn it back on when you need to get through a tough stretch with your Ponzi scheme, etc. Further, having a well-known opportunity to front-run as a market maker serves as great advertising among your sophisticated investors who assume your too-good-to-be true returns coming from cheating outsiders, not from cheating the insiders.

Why confess only to the Ponzi scheme? Well, that probably helps limit the number of family members who go to prison.

The San Francisco Chronicle runs a major Pulitzer-worthy investigative report:

Asian Americans remain rare in men’s college basketball

Bryan Chu, Special to The Chronicle

Jeremy Lin has seen it and heard it.

Too short. Too skinny. Picked last. Asian.

Those tags stick to Lin wherever he goes, even as the starting point guard for Harvard’s basketball team.

“It’s a sport for white and black people,” Lin said. “You don’t get respect for being an Asian American basketball player in the U.S.”

Although the game is brimming in popularity among Asian American youth - there are Asian leagues, club teams like the San Jose Ninjas and San Jose Zebras, and packed courts outside schools, churches and temples - Lin practically is alone.

Of 4,814 Division I men’s basketball players in 2006-07, there were 19 Asian Americans (including Pacific Islanders and ethnically mixed), according to the most recent NCAA Student-Athlete Race and Ethnicity Report. That’s 0.4 percent.

Players, coaches and sociologists cite stereotypes and cultural factors as reasons that percentage might not rise very much in the foreseeable future. At the same time, there are players and coaches making inroads to mainstream, high-profile basketball, and there’s a feeling of pioneer spirit among them.

“Especially now that there are lots of Asian Americans growing up and playing, I have to try to hold my own in college,” Lin said. “It’s definitely motivational and it gives me a chip on my shoulder.”

More.

Ilana Mercer has a powerful World Net Daily column, O’Reilly won the battle – but lost the debate (December 19), arguing that while Bill O’Reilly has succeeded in embarrassing Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire for permitting an anti-religous placard alongside the traditional nativity display in the state capitol, he has no effective answer to her claim that the U.S. Supreme Court requires her to give equal time to all beliefs:

Bill might have won the battle, but he lost the debate. Why? Because O’Reilly fiddles with the icing rather than the cake:

He defends the country’s founding faith on the frivolous grounds that it is a federal festival like any other – an “uplifting tradition … where peace and love are the theme of the great day.” The substance of O’Reilly’s claim against those who’d disrespect a Christmas display is: “Be nice, because Christmas is nice.” And because the feds have told you to.

Having defended Christmas as a lawful, public holiday, logical consistency then compels O’Reilly to stick up for every foul federal holiday, including Martin Luther King’s dedicated day. This he duly did, even going so far as to suggest that atheists apply to have their own, federally approved, winter solstice celebration. Until such a day, however, Bill vowed to banish them from the public square.

But, Ilana notes: “This is the country’s founding faith O’Reilly is talking about; not one among many competing holidays.” She concludes that Christmas should be defended

not because the State designated it a holiday, or because it is a harmless and happy day. Christmas ought to be defended on the basis that Christianity is America’s founding faith.

To defend Christian America with reference to un-Christian State law that has all but banished Christianity from the public square is worse than silly.

E.V. Kontorovich made a similar argument in a famous and controversial 1997 column in the New York Post, which I quoted when adjudicating the 2005 War Against Christmas Competition:

Unless society draws a line—the only obvious place to draw it is at Christianity—an unmanageable tumult will ensue: gridlock in the public square.

Kontorovich and Mercer are Jewish. Would anyone else would have the courage to make this argument?

For the record, it was also Ilana who alerted me to the fact that MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, a loud War Against Christmas Denier, recently accused me of anti-semitism for my role in pioneering the issue. (Thanks, Ilana!)

You didn’t think I watch Olbermann, did you?