Marlon Brando's Bad Rap As An Anti-Semite

On the occasion of the death of Charlton Heston, Jason Maoz takes a look at Marlon Brando, who--based on baiting during a Larry King interview--made Anti-Semitic remarks for which he was strongly condemned.

Maoz rebuts this image of Brando:

But Brando’s feelings about Jews can best be appreciated from the following eloquent passages in his 1994 autobiography, Songs My Mother Taught Me, about the year he spent as a young man at New York’s New School for Social Research:

I lived in a world of Jews. . . . They introduced me to a world of books and ideas that I didn’t know existed. I stayed up all night with them — asking questions, arguing, probing, discovering how little I knew, learning how inarticulate I was and how abysmal my education was. I hadn’t even finished high school, and many of them had advanced degrees from the finest institutes in Europe. I felt dumb and ashamed, but they gave me an appetite to learn everything. They made me hungry for information. . . .

One of the great mysteries that has always puzzled me is how Jews, who account for such a tiny fraction of the world’s population, have been able to achieve so much and excel in so many different fields — science, music, medicine, literature, arts, business and more. . . .

They are an amazing people. Imagine the persecution they endured over the centuries: pogroms, temple burnings, Cossack raids, uprootings of families, their dispersal to the winds and the Holocaust . . . . Yet their children survived and Jews became by far the most accomplished people per capita that the world has ever produced. . . .

Whatever the reasons for their brilliance and success, I was never educated until I was exposed to them.

'Nuff said.

Technorati Tag: Marlon Brando.