Jewish Website Tablet Blames Harvey Weinstein Scandal on ‘Specifically Jewy Perviness’

The claims caused an immediate backlash on Twitter

Harvey Weinstein
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Tablet, a prominent “online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture,” has sparked an outcry over an essay published Monday blaming the downfall of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in part on his Judaism.

In a piece titled “The Specifically Jewy Perviness of Harvey Weinstein,” editor at large Mark Oppenheimer insisted that Harvey’s specific cases of sexual harassment were part of larger “revenge fantasies on the Goyim.”

The Twitterverse was not pleased. “No matter how PC the world gets, ripping on Jews has never gone out of style,” wrote one commenter.

Oppenheimer defended his take. “Maybe it came too early for some, or I might not have done it correctly,” he told TheWrap via email. “But my intent here was to examine, not to cause pain.”

In his piece, Oppenheimer cited the title character in Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint” to make his point. “All those years craving unattainable Gentiles, but never before the means to entice them. The result is Alexander Portnoy of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ a grown man whose emotional and sexual life is still all one big performance piece, just as it had been when he was a teenager and pleasured himself with a piece of liver,” wrote Oppenheimer.

“Harvey is cut from the same cloth,” he continued. “Growing up in Queens, he fantasized of fame and fortune, and, once he got them, he struggled to maintain them by building himself into a larger-than-life figure.”

Oppenheimer also opined that the non-Jewish origin of women targeted by Weinstein was deliberate.

“It goes without saying that nearly every one of these women — Rose McGowan, Ambra Batillana, Laura Madden, Ashley Judd, etc. — was a Gentile, all the better to feed Weinstein’s revenge-tinged fantasy of having risen above his outer-borough, bridge-and-tunnel Semitic origins,” he wrote.

In his email to TheWrap, Oppenheimer said, “What I was trying to do in this case was examine how common narratives — particularly those transmitted by literature — might influence how people may be processing Weinstein’s Jewish identity in this story.”

But pinning Weinstein’s transgressions on his Jewish heritage promptly ignited a storm of criticism on Twitter.

One man who was a fan was the prominent white nationalist, Richard Spencer, who called the post a “powerful essay”

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