In its latest episode, Saturday Night Live featured a joke based on the presumption that Israel denies medical care to its non-Jewish citizens. Another series—Nurses, also on NBC—recently aired an episode featuring an injured ḥasidic teenager and his father. Not only do the writers misrepresent Orthodox Judaism as hostile to medicine, they perpetuate the old anti-Semitic stereotype that Jews are possessed, as the Roman historian Tacitus put it, by “a hatred of humanity in general.” Allison Josephs writes:
Israel, [the ḥasidic teenager], is told by the doctor that he’ll need a bone graft to heal fully. Israel doesn’t understand what this means, so the doctor explains that he’ll have to have part of a dead person’s bone surgically inserted into his leg.
Cue the horror! Israel and his father are distraught at the notion that he’ll have a dead person’s body part in his body and a “goyim” part to boot! But even worse than that—it could be an “Arab” body part or a “lady” body part. Or as the nurse reminds them, “an Arab lady” body part. There is no prohibition, [of course, even in the most stringent interpretations of halakhah], on getting a dead body part surgically inserted into one’s body. In fact, Jewish law [strongly encourages the use] of medicine to recover from illnesses. Nor is there a prohibition on getting a non-Jewish body part inserted, even if it belonged to a woman or an Arab.
[T]he idea that such a surgery would be problematic in general or problematic because of where the bone came from . . . is a vicious lie that endangers men who walk around with curled sidelocks and black hats.
As an aside, another theme of the episode, involving other characters, was kidney donations. If the writers ever bothered to learn about Orthodox Jews, they might discover that they and specifically ḥasidic Jews, are off the charts when it comes to donating kidneys to strangers—15 percent of all altruistic donors in the U.S. are Orthodox Jews, even though they make up only 0.3 percent of the population.
Read more on Jew in the City: https://jewinthecity.com/2021/02/nbc-needs-to-apologize-for-their-libelous-portrayal-of-hasidic-jews-in-nurses/