Had mother lived to see it, she would have cringed to watch the A&E Biography tonight of Joel David Rifkin, who between 1989 and 1993 murdered 17 prostitutes and hid their bodies, often dismembered, in various locales around New York and New Jersey.

Although no one in the program said that this sicko was Jewish, mom would have envisioned anti-Semites having a field day with Rifkin's twisted tale of sexual compulsion. The program worried me too, but for different reasons.

I think that non-Jewish Americans have been exposed to so many of us Jews over the years—in politics, education, movies, the arts, science, medicine, to name just some of the fields—that they are not likely to generalize about us Jews from Rifkin's case history.  If an image of a "Jew" hops into their heads, they're more likely to think about Joseph Lieberman, Shawn Green or Jerry Seinfeld than about Rifkin.

What was scary to me about the documentary was that some impressionable people—especially ones who, like Rifkin, were social outcasts during their school years—might want to become as infamous as this killer.

One certainly could get the idea from this A&E biography that "crime does pay"—if not financially, then at least in Rifkin's sense of satisfaction, even pride, in the deeds for which he will be remembered.

On camera, he smiled, grinned, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy reliving the circumstances surrounding his brutal killing of 17 prostitutes—victims whom, he conceded, he did not consider to be fellow human beings.  "They were objects," he said.  "In my mind, they never had families or anything."

Could some social misfit want to go out and replicate Rifkin's misdeeds after watching such a program?  The mass media certainly had a deleterious effect on Rifkin, himself.  He kept clippings on other mass murderers, among them Jeffrey Dahmer and the so-called "Son of Sam," David Bercowitz. Additionally, Rifkin told an interviewer that he was inspired to strangle his victims by the Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller, Frenzy.    

Am I advocating censorship?  I can't bring myself to do that.  I know that censorship could lead to many outrages, such as the stifling of dissent and the suppression of information that might be embarrassing to those in power. But if I had my druthers, A&E Biography would have found a more worthwhile subject to profile.  Perhaps someone worth emulating.  —Donald H. Harrison