Contemporary Anti-Semitism’s Gray Areas

Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League national director, at Auschwitz.

Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League national director, at Auschwitz.

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

There are some kinds of laughter that stick in your throat until you want to choke and vomit. You’ll pardon the harsh language, but watching Yoav Shamir’s new documentary film, “Defamation,” which opens Friday, engenders that kind of strong reaction. Not that Shamir’s film makes one sick, but many of the people he interviews and the events he depicts in his 92-minute study of contemporary anti-Semitism are guaranteed to trigger even the most insensitive gag reflex. If anything, I guess that is a tribute to Shamir’s filmmaking talents.

“Defamation” is a densely constructed film about the nature of contemporary anti-Semitism. Shamir spends a lot of time with Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, Norman Finkelstein, the author of “The Holocaust Industry,” Israeli teens on

a school trip to Poland, a lot of self-appointed and self-proclaimed experts and an occasional man- or woman-in-the-street in New York and his native Israel. He even briefly interviews his 90-year-old grandmother, whose immediate predecessors came to the Yishuv from Russia in one of the first aliyot.

And like the overwhelming majority of the people he interviews in the film, Shamir is not interested in studying the activities of the obvious anti-Semitic organizations in the U.S. or Europe. We hear nothing from anyone in the film about neo-Nazi groups in the American Northwest, the British National Party or the extreme right-wing parties in post-1989 Europe. Nor does Shamir examine the propagation of openly anti-Semitic literature by media in the Arab World, such as the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” (That book’s dubious virtues are extolled by a couple of street-corner nitwits he meets in Crown Heights; they get the title wrong repeatedly, but as the saying goes, stupid is as stupid does.)

The crux of Shamir’s film and its argument is the use of Jewish history by competing interests in the politics of the Middle East both here and in Israel. Hence the focus on Foxman, Finkelstein, et al. Shamir’s position is startlingly simple, given the complexity of the film’s structure, an intricate web of give-and-take, argument and counter-argument. We have, Shamir concludes, dwelled too long on the past and, if the future is to be secured, should turn our attention to the future.

Stated that bluntly, the premise of the film sounds almost simple-minded. But “Defamation” is anything but that. His seemingly faux-naif interviewing style lets his subjects say exactly what they think and, perhaps, almost too much of what they mean. For example, Noah Klinger, a survivor of Auschwitz who is now a journalist at the Israeli daily Yediot Achronot, boldly trumpets his belief that virtually all non-Jews are anti-Semites, barking, “Why should I be objective? They’ve never been objective towards us.” When questioned by Shamir about his vocal lack of concern for Israeli victims of terror bombing and IDF casualties, Finkelstein begins literally to rant at the filmmaker, finally virtually daring him to keep the footage in the film.

It’s not too hard to get extreme personalities to behave in an extreme manner. That’s what talk-radio is based on, and it hardly constitutes a rational form of argument. Fortunately, Shamir is aiming for something more complex, more nuanced, even — dare I say it — more balanced. He earnestly goes out looking for signs of anti-Semitism in the United States; the results are a strange mixture of the genuinely troubling and the trivial, but nobody seems inclined to distinguish between the two.

He goes to the New York regional director of the ADL looking for an incident of anti-Semitism he can explore; although Shamir is told solemnly that there are 1,500 incidents a year, the only five on the books for the previous two weeks involve people claiming employment discrimination because they were asked to work on Jewish holidays and a complaint about a Web site someone came upon.

Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind reports a complaint from a constituent who overheard a police officer on duty at a large funeral allegedly making anti-Semitic remarks in a private conversation on his cell phone. (The remark in question turns out to be insensitive in the context of a funeral, but highly equivocal in content, and the police officer phoned the complainant to offer a personal apology.)

When he finally finds a stone-throwing incident involving a Lubavitch school bus and bunch of 10-year-old African-American kids, Rabbi Shea Hecht talks Shamir down from the ledge with words of calm, speaking about black-on-white violence in the larger social context of New York’s contested streets, “That’s not anti-Semitism . . . we’ve gone a little too far [looking for real hate].”

Foxman wouldn’t agree, and Shamir is cognizant of and sympathetic to the ADL chair’s history as a survivor of the Shoah. Foxman is presented as a genial and deeply committed advocate for his position. But the filmmaker doesn’t hesitate to juxtapose Foxman speaking vehemently about the need to keep constant pressure on Washington on behalf of Israel and a description of the controversial book by political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” in which their thesis is presented as having little difference from what Foxman has previously said. At the same time, Shamir juxtaposes a knife attack at a synagogue in Moscow with the insistence of a couple of the congregants that there is no anti-Semitism in Russia. Uri Avneri insists that there is no anti-Semitism in the United States about 10 minutes after we have heard the three street-corner geniuses urging Shamir to read “The Elders of the Protocols of Zion.”

But the film’s most disturbing moments come on the Poland trip. Two Israeli teens try to converse with a trio of elderly Poles; they speak no Polish, the men speak no Hebrew, but the girls, dead certain of what they have heard decide that they have been insulted and defamed. When Shamir tries to explain what actually was said (and the film’s subtitles provide an accurate translation of what is nothing more than the amused incomprehension of senior citizens for teenagers), the girls don’t want to hear it and their handlers, who include an Israeli Secret Service officer, hustle them away from him.

The organizers of the trip refuse to allow any contact with locals, and the entire exercise is shot through with a disturbing subtext that non-Jews are all potential Nazis and that anti-Semitism is some kind of genetic condition, ahistorical and incurable.

That is not, as Shamir quietly says at the end of the film, a point of view calculated to produce anything like peace in the world. When his first film, “Checkpoint,” was shown here, I applauded Shamir for his even-handedness. I wrote, “He doesn’t take sides; he allows the Israelis and Palestinians to vent their anger, their boredom, their frustration. As a result, we see for ourselves the Kafkaesque confusion, irrationality and injustice that govern the checkpoint system.”

In “Defamation,” Shamir takes a more active role, eschewing the cinema-verité approach of “Checkpoint” and “5 Days,” but the result is even more impressive.

If you can get through the film with your blood pressure under control.

“Defamation” directed by Yoav Shamir, opens Friday, Nov. 20 at the Cinema Village (22 E. 12th St.). For information, call (212) 924-3363 or go to www.cinemavillage.com.

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