La Presse, a Montreal daily, published the above antisemitic cartoon of Benjamin Netanyahu. I wonder if they have ever published a comparable cartoon of a Muslim terrorist mass murderer?
La Presse depicted a Jew as a vampire. Vampires drink blood. The blood libel has been used as an excuse to kill Jews for hundreds of years. La Presse is shameful.
Reports are that La Presse has removed the cartoon.
My book Bieganski
the Brute Polak Stereotype shows that one cannot understand antisemitism in
Poland or Eastern Europe without also understanding antisemitism anywhere else.
Singling Poles or other Eastern Europeans out as "the world's worst
anti-Semites" distorts rather than clarifies. It is morally corrupt, and
it is cowardly. Demonizing Eastern Europeans harms, not helps, any efforts to
address antisemitism. If we want to resist antisemitism, we must begin in our
own backyards, and then address the rest of the world. Antisemites worldwide
tend to have more in common than not.
The Candace Owens antisemitism scandal highlights a problem on the American right. Under Trump, the right abandoned traditional values like intact families, personal responsibility, and lower taxes. The right embraced a convicted rapist, business cheat, and foul-mouthed bully. In its support for a demagogue, the right opened the door to horrors, including misogyny, xenophobia, and antisemitism. Of course there is antisemitism on the left, but under Trump, antisemitism on the right is becoming more prominent. Candace Owens is just one manifestation of that.
The 2023 biopic One Life concludes
with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration
of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene's
power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn't even try to apply the
emotional brakes.
If only the rest of the movie were as
good as that final scene.
One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas
George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort
to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting,
inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would
be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the "dump months"
when movies that haven't tested well are released.
One Life is not a bad movie. It's just not good
enough. I'd give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so
important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton
deserves an eleven out of ten.
As I left the theater, I asked, "Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?" One Life didn't answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I'd never heard of before. Nicky's Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky's Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.
Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater
and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The
Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.
Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who
survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that "Even more than bread we
now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all."
Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It's
fashionable to declare one's superiority by sneering at popular culture. It's
harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless
counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving
Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from
culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important
as the candidates we support with our votes.
We get something from publicly watching
a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a
1942 screwball comedy. I'd watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a
small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich
Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly
realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its
double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the
Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on
Rhett Butler's handsome face (see here).
Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of
psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, "Do
you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?" You comfort and
enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and
tense. Mel Gibson's The Passion depicts Christ's torture, crucifixion,
and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me.
They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock.
After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over,
distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.
The loss of public movie-going erodes
not just community, but also art. Ali's well is a famous, eight-minute scene in
Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless,
tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw
water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize
that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to
death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man to arrive, we experience a fraction of the
desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational
violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could
never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching
alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don't like,
like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler's List.
My students, trained on media that
rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain's
reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali's
well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current
events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all
art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.
The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are three very different films, but they are all innovative, in different ways. Peasants is so innovative another movie like it may never be made again. Zone rewrote how the Holocaust will be treated in film, and how it will be understood. Boys is rebellious, counter-cultural filmmaking in ways I'll detail below. All three films have much to say about our current politico-cultural landscape. Each addresses community. Each, given their visual and auditory artistry and impact, should be seen in a theater.
Friend, please do something for me. Put
this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of
Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then
return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this
movie with others.
The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of
talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and
peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry
pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your
chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You
may feel, "The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it
would be too much like homework. I'd prefer the latest superhero movie."
You may be thinking, "Another
Holocaust film. They're just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can't we
have movies about other atrocities? And I don't like watching people being
tortured."
First, there is no torture, and almost
no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn't cry while watching Zone.
Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even
in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean
people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their
mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big
deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years
a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden's poem "Shield
of Achilles," which uses Jesus' crucifixion and Achilles' shield to
discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden's poem and Zone say as
much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films
directly addressing those topics.
I recommend Zone to every
thinking adult. I say "thinking" because a subset of viewers
are not getting this movie. There are some negative fan reviews online. These
say that the film is "boring." "Nothing happens," they
complain. "There is no plot." Bless their hearts.
Thinking adults are capable of
observing. "To observe" implies an increase in cognitive activity
from "to watch." If you know how to observe, you will get Zone.
Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, winner of four
Academy Awards, said, that Zone is "probably the most important
film of this century, both from the standpoint of his cinematic approach and
the complexity of its theme." And if you are thinking, "Oh, this
movie sounds too artsy-fartsy. I like more direct fare," don't let that
stop you. Glazer got his start in that most democratic of forms, the TV
commercial, where he depicted drinking a Guiness beer as tantamount to being a white
stallion emerging from ocean surf. Glazer knows how to create images that
penetrate to your lizard brain. He wields that magic here, not to sell beer,
but to bring you closer to yourself, your own lowest fears and highest prayers.
In the article, below, I will summarize the plot, and then discuss the filmmaker, his approach, and the history he addresses.
building a broad and inclusive movement
against racism and discrimination, for respect, inclusivity and diversity;
eliminating or marginalizing racist,
xenophobic and antisemitic tendencies in various spheres of life."
The Never Again Association webpage is here.
In December, 2023, the Never Again
Association released "Braun's Hate," a report addressing Grzegorz
Braun's activities. The full, 29-page report can be read here.
The report begins,
"The 'NEVER AGAIN' Association has
prepared a special report that documents several dozen examples of hateful
actions and statements of Grzegorz Braun, Member of Polish Parliament from the
far right Konfederacja (Confederation) party. The hatred expressed by Braun did
not start with the infamous 12 December 2023 attack on the hannukiah in the
Parliament, using a fire extinguisher. In fact, the Konfederacja MP has for
years promoted conspiracy theories about Jews taking over Poland, mocked the
victims of Nazi camps, called for violence against LGBT people, and boasted
about tearing down Ukrainian flags."
Here are just a few examples from the
report:
"On 2 April 2019, in an interview
published on the YouTube channel of wRealu24, online TV, Grzegorz Braun
demanded penalties for homosexuality. He said, 'Let's negotiate not the boundaries
of tolerance, but of penalisation. … If someone comes up with a liberal bill introducing
whipping of homosexuals, then we can discuss how to implement it whether through
European Parliament or Warsaw's Parliament.'
On 9 April 2020, in an interview for the
Panta Rhei channel on YouTube, Braun presented xenophobic conspiracy theories
about the origins of COVID--19, 'Might it be simply an act of biological
warfare? …Who might benefit from it? The Chinese, Americans, Muscovites, Jews,
or all of them at once?'
Braun referred to modern Poland as 'a
Russian German condominium under Jewish fiduciary government', adding that 'the
Jewish fiduciary government has, of course, its guarantor and protector in the
American empire'. He continued: 'Germans, Jews and sodomites must not re write
our history and instruct us how to behave in our own home'"
