Film/TV review: Gratuitous hate crime episode on 'Law and Order'

NBC's "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" (Season 23, Episode 10, "Silent Night, Hateful Night,") began 2022 with a troubling episode about religious hate crimes. But just as troubling as the hate crimes catalogued here was the very existence of the episode itself.

Principal series writers/producers Julie Martin, Kathy Dobie and Warren Leight concocted this discombobulated fare about a wave of anti-Jewish, anti-Muslim and anti-Sikh attacks on houses of worship and businesses, all on Christmas Eve. The suggestion is that violence and vandalism were someone's idea of celebrating the birth of the Christian savior, especially when Christmas coincided with the Jewish Sabbath.

The writers are most specific about the places attacked. Some of the attacks are indeed based on widely publicized events. But clearly no one was concerned that such specificity can give ideas to would-be perpetrators among haters.

The opening suggests a plot on the part of a white supremacist neo-Nazi group. But almost immediately attention is turned to African American male youths who attack a young haredi (ultra-Orthodox) man and throw stones at a synagogue and are suspected of vandalizing a Jewish bookstore.

Given the sequence of images, it seems at first that these Black teens were somehow recruited or hired by a white supremacist group. But that was not the case. The writers ended up depicting the Black teens as blasé about their vicious acts (though the youngest has reservations and walks away). One teen declares that he has no feelings about Jews one way or another. He just wanted to see if his rock went farther than his friend's into the synagogue window.

When another teen is asked whether he vandalized a Judaica store, he replies: "So what now?"-indicating unfamiliarity with the term, "Judaica." Though he did not smash windows and write Nazi graffiti on the store, the writers suggest that he committed other heinous acts because he has been poorly parented. Told by the police that they plan to call his parents, he says: "Like they come here. I'll hold my breath for that." 

As regards the attack on the haredi man, the excuse is, "Those people in the funny hats, they think they're better than us." Detective Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) asks one of the suspects if he attacked the Jewish guy "just because he disrespected you." The response he gets is, "Just something to do."

So the writers go out of their way to suggest that Black crimes are out of ignorance, boredom (more than spite) and lack of supervision, while other hate crimes are more focused, such as the attack on the Sikh man. The script does not let go of the "Black" angle so quickly. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) doesn't want pictures of the young suspects sent out "because it becomes a meme" and because they are minors, anyway, legally protected from publicity. The chief himself asks, "So we can't go after hate crimes against Jews if Black kids commit them?" A captain does not want the hate issue to be reduced to "a gang of project thugs wilding." But the "wilding" angle is precisely what the writers are suggesting. Why the racial profiling to provide a lesson in "atavistic" versus "ideological" hate, to use the words used here by a captain? 

The writers attribute the Nazi graffiti, severe assaults and fire bombings, both committed and planned, to right wing social media videos influencing disgruntled individuals who both hate in general and have a personal animus toward Jews in particular. A detective named Andy Parlato-Goldstein (Jason Biggs), called in to provide insight into the Jewish community, decides that statements like "Jews will not replace us" are "political talk. That's not the kids. They're making a statement." The major local culprit is identified as a 20-something immigrant from Serbia whose parents divorced and whose mother married a Jewish gentleman while his father, a building super, died in a fire for which the suspect blamed a Jewish landlord. That's how the writers "elucidate" the issues here.

For "comic relief," by the way, the episode provides a standing joke: Detective Parlato-Goldstein's last name. "Those are both me," he volunteers. The suggestion is that the character is half-Christian half-Jewish, with no religious conversions. But such characters are hardly a novelty on TV. Still, the writers regard this as hilarious. When Goldstein is handed a Christmas wreath, he quips, "I really should only take half." The writers never miss an opportunity for such a remark, even though they mainly use this detective to mouth Jewish terms like "minyan" and to communicate something about Jewish customs and traditions and current Orthodox communal practices, like private ("matzah-box") ambulance services.

What constructive purpose does this episode serve? The answer is: None. 

Disjointed, jumbled and disorganized, it has no socially redeeming value and can only lead to harm. It even provides a (hopefully) unintended stereotype of a Holocaust survivor by having the bookstore owner's daughter opine that while her mother survived Auschwitz, she may not survive the attack on her business.

The dangers of such an episode are many. Even at a time when attacks on Jews and synagogues are widely publicized, it could give ideas to haters. Production staffs need to vet such episodes lest they reveal vulnerabilities, both ritual and soft target specific, in religious groups, and name particular targets. Obviously, there was no such vetting here.

Why rehash hate crimes, even from recent news, especially when there are no novel, helpful insights to offer? And why suggest a toxicity to Christmas in such a context?

Why such a ragtag episode? Why stir up so much multi-ethnic hate with neither unifying plot nor message nor concern, from start to souped-up ending? Could it be that the writers harped on hate toward disparate ethnicities in order to pave the way for bringing specialized teams (this one, or others) into future episodes of various Law and Order series, including the revival of the "original" series that began in late February?

And if so, how reckless and self-serving and thoughtless!

Elliot B. Gertel is the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Rodfei Zedek in Chicago. He has been film and television reviewer for the "National Jewish Post and Opinion" since 1979. His books include "What Jews Know About Salvation" and "Over the Top Judaism: Precedents and Trends in the Depiction of Jewish Beliefs and Observances in Film and Television."