is Borat good for the Jews?

Ron Rosenbaum ponders the question. But first he reveals the existence of a Borat One (TV version) and a Borat Two (dumb Hollywood version).

Call me a Borat snob. I was a huge fan of the brilliantly oblivious, appealingly clueless Kazakh “newsman” character when he appeared on segments of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Da Ali G Show on HBO. So, there’s that Borat; let’s call him Borat One.

But then there’s the heavy-handed, frat-boy, butt-head Borat, the dumbed-down buffoon Borat of Borat the movie. The Jackass Borat. Let’s call him Borat Two. Yes, I laughed, you’ll laugh, it’s stupid-funny.

Further along in his exegesis, Rosenbaum wonders about the famous “Throw the Jew Down the Well” episode from Borat One (TV version), which he recalls from memory:

the real suspense, the real news, is the reaction of the crowd. At first, they’re hesitant, then they all begin to join in the chorus: “Throw the Jew down the well”—all but a very few.

It’s one of those moments that raise several possibilities:

1) If you scratch the surface of the average American, you find someone who’s capable of encouraging murderous anti-Semitism.

2) Americans are so friendly and nonxenophobic that they’ll go out of their way to play along with a foreigner even if they wouldn’t in their wildest dreams throw a Jew down a well. They’re just being good sports about the kooky outsider so he’ll feel at home. Maybe it’s anti-Semitism, but it’s not deep-seated Streicher/Goebbels anti-Semitism, is it? It’s more get-along, go-along anti-Semitism. (Like the anti-Semitism in Roth’s The Plot Against America.)

3) Maybe it’s get-along, go-along, friendly-to-foreigners anti-Semitism. But under the right circumstances, a substratum of this sort of jovial sing-along anti-Semitism can be transformed into something uglier.

Whether or not Borat is good for the Jews I leave to others to decide.

Laughter Sacha Baron Cohen-style is certainly good for the Jews, and for the Muslims, and for the Hindus, and for the Zoroastrians, and for the Protestants, and for the Catholics.

Did I leave anyone out?