JustASC

Horror director Eli Roth, who plays one of Tarantino’s Basterds, tells The New Yorker what he told Tarantino:

“I told him, ‘The Jews are more angry now about shit from seven thousand years ago than we were seven thousand years ago. We never forget, and we do not forgive. But if you want a good picture of Jewish psychology you should come to my Passover Seder.’ “

My old boss at CLAL, Rabbi Irwin Kula (I know, where haven’t I worked? There’s a fine line between an extensive c.v. and an inability to hold a job) has written an interesting take on Inglourious Basterds for the Huffington Post. He calls it the one Holocaust story “we have been afraid to tell about ourselves: the story of what we would really like to do to those Nazis”: 

Invited to stare into the Face of Vengeance and admit and own we even enjoyed the killing, maybe we can begin to heal and realize the innocence of suffering can never be redeemed by the exercise of power. For if we could do anything we wanted to anyone to make things right, what would we do that could make things right? The suffering of the Nazis’ millions of victims can never be fully set right – that is the difference between reality and fantasy — and to think anything to the contrary leaves a world in which the only people standing are a branded Nazi and a couple of Basterds.

Thank you, Quentin Tarantino. You have reminded us, whether you intended to or not, that we are never as powerful as our greatest fantasies and never as powerless as our worst nightmares.

Reading Irwin’s piece reminded me of something a friend said when she heard my daughter was to celebrate her bat mitzva on Nov. 9:  ”I think that’s so cool that you are doing it on Kristallnacht,” she said. I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t: She explained how wonderful it is to see 60 Jewish kids singing and dancing on the anniversary of a day the Nazis’ intended to mark as the beginning of the annihilation of the Jews.

Since no act of violence, real or imagined, will bring back the Shoa’s victims, the kind of revenge that speaks to me is in creating Jewish life  — Fackenheim’s 614th commandment.  A vibrant, pulsing Jewish community, whether in Tel Aviv or the Upper West Side, is my kind of revenge. Carving swastikas into the heads of cartoon Nazis, not so much.

As I suspected: the “lawsuit” over Kiryat Yam’s mermaid contest is a prank, although on whose part is not clear. Metro reports (the admirable verb here is “reports”):

Contacted yesterday, the real Mermaid Medical Association — a 12-year-old health clinic on Coney Island’s Mermaid Avenue — was confused. A receptionist said the phone had been ringing nonstop but she knew nothing of the letter.

“Do we even have mermaids?” she asked. “I’ve never seen one.”  

Can I ask a serious question about an innocuous story? How does the original reporting on this differ from the brouhaha about the Swedish newspaper and Israeli “organ harvesting”?  This story and the organs story both start with a self-interested rumor or dubious proposition, which gets reported, if not as “fact,” than as an interesting possibility that warrants further study.

The difference, of course, is that the organs story is grossly defamatory (if untrue, of course), traffics in anti-Semitic imagery, and involves what would be a horrifically inhumane and even criminal activity with the potential to lead to even more bloodshed. The mermaid story is … cute (although in invoking the international court in The Hague, even the mermaid story could find its way into the pro- and anti-Israel debate). 

Still, if we care about the big things, we have to sweat the small things.

By the way, J.J. Goldberg has a good piece about the organs story and journalistic gullibility (and malpractice).

This story, about a so-called mermaid rights organization suing the Israeli city of Kiryat Yam for defamation of the mythical creatures, is whipping around the web, with an amazing lack of skepticism from outlets who should know when something smells fishy.

The “Mermaid Medical Association” is exactly what it sounds like — a physician’s office at 1704 Mermaid Ave. in Brooklyn. Google the address and you get a listing for “Yuri Birbrayer, MD.”

So there are really two possibilities here: Birbrayer threatened to sue Israel as a publicity stunt, or someone hijacked the name of his practice, presumably for laughs.

The original Ynet story has all kinds of yellow flags: the reporter quotes from the letter sent by MMA, but doesn’t say whether he/she has seen it. The town official is unnamed. And there is something more than a little suspicious about the official’s boosterish response:

“In any case, we plan to appeal to the organization which sent the letter and suggest that it join the search for the mermaid in order to perpetuate and preserve it.”

What if you held a war movie and your title characters didn’t show up?

That’s how I feel after seeing “Inglourious Basterds.” Marketing and interviews (I avoided the reviews) left me expecting a sort of “Dirty Dozen” homage, with lots of ensemble acting and action scenes involving Tarantino’s twisted band of brothers. Instead, Brad Pitt’s squad of avengers shows up for about 15 minutes of screen time, and the array of Jewish actors assembled barely get speaking lines, and are never individualized. Even Pitt’s role seem more of a cameo than a star turn.

Instead, the movie belongs to Christopher Waltz’s oily, mesmerizing, seductive and quite mad Col. Hans Landa, the SS officer known as “The Jew Hunter”; and the central plot involves a cinema owner (Mélanie Laurent) — and lone Jewish survivor of a Landa-led massacre — who plots to immolate a theater full of Nazi brass.

I suspect a lot of this movie ended up on the cutting room floor, and Tarantino has said in interviews that he had planned a much more sprawling film than the almost 3-hour epic he delivered. You see hints of this grander scheme throughout — only one of the Basterds is given a back story, in a way that suggests Tarantino either filmed or contemplated doing the same for the others (we’ll probably have to wait for the DVD). Pitt’s character has a scar around his neck, as if from a failed hanging. It’s never explained. Why is the title misspelled?  (And why is Laurent’s character’s name spelled ”Shosanna” and pronounced “Shoshana”? It’s not as if it’s a French variant — the common spelling for the Hebrew name, there and just about everywhere else, is “Shoshana.”)

I was expecting a Jewish “Sgt. Rock” with lots of Tarantino’s trademark violence, and got instead a talky alternative history in which Anne Frank survives and goes on to become an avenging angel. Which is not a bad thing — what I’ve always liked best about Tarantino’s films is not the stylized action and aestheticized violence, but the talk — reams and reams of brilliant talk, often by washed up or little known actors whose career Tarantino has rescuscitated or saved from obscurity. There are three amazing, long set pieces in “IB” in which the “action” is mostly in conversation. It starts with Landa’s terrifyingly casual interrogation of a French farmer who is harboring Jews, a scene whose violent climax is not nearly as scary as the quiet conversation that preceded it. There is a lengthy and pivotal scene in a basement tavern, in which three German-speaking Basterds play cat and mouse with another Nazi (a brilliant August Diehl). And there is Landa’s quiet conversation with Laurent’s character, over slices of mouth-watering strudel. Laurent recognizes him as the man who slaughtered her family; Landa may or may not know if she is who she says she is. Their back and forth is as heart-pounding as any chase scene or fire fight.

Nevertheless, I had to seriously readjust my expectations, and any thoughts I had about using the movie as a springboard for thinking about Jewish vengenace. 

The one extended scene showing the Basterds doing what the Basterds do — the scalping and bludgeoning of Nazi soldeirs — was quite enough, thank you. The scene demands that you root for war criminals, and that you take b-movie delight in the slaughter of the bad guys. But in the wake of Guantanamo, I’m finding it harder to laugh when G.I.’s are shown taking the law into their own hands or, worse, carrying our war crimes under orders from the top. And I have less patience for the inevitable argument that in the face of extraordinary evil we have to match cruelty for cruelty or lose. (The United States won World War II, if memory serves, and with a pretty remarkable record for staying on this side of the moral red lines despite the Nazi’s and Japanese’s provocations and example).

As for the pure emotion of fantasy-fulfillment — as a Jew, enjoying as the Nazis get a taste of their own medicine — it’s rather a cheap and hollow thrill. Brad Pitt’s Bowie knife and the (spoiler alert) small-h holocaust that kills Hitler and his cronies don’t bring back any of the Six Million, while they do bring out the worst in me. Many in the mostly gray-haired and generally Jewish audience in the Teaneck theater where I saw the movie laughed when a terrified Nazi soldier, having witnesssed the bludgeoning murder of his comrade, quickly gives away a German unit’s position (in their defense, Tarantino is a master at comic violence). I was just queasy.

Maybe I’m too far removed from the Holocaust to share what Tarantino’s Jewish producer, Lawrence Bender, calls “a f–ing Jewish wet dream” of vengeance. I have no immediate family members or relatives who either lived through the Holcoaust or were killed in it. I didn’t grow up taunted by anti-Semites.

And the idea of this film as a corrective to the 2,000-year-old portrayal of Jews as passive victims would be welcome, if this were 1947. (Although I will acknowledge Tarantino’s point, as he explained to Jeffrey Goldberg, that “Basterds” is a corrective to the long list of Shoa movies that “always have Jews as victims”).

I don’t need a movie to affirm that Jews are able to wield power and fight back — the state of Israel has done a pretty god job of that for the past 65 years. Israelis long ago proved that a Jew can wield a weapon and use it on his enemies. They proved it in spades  – if fact, the 2009 conversation is not whether Jews have the kishkes to wage war, but whether they continue to display the restraint that was to be the signature of a Jewish army. Tarantino doesn’t like all the “hand wringing” in war films, but real-life Israelis are professional hand-wringers when it comes to waging war. Israel’s self-image is of a military force that does what it has to do to survive and defend itself, no more. At least since Lebanon I, and certainly Lebanon II and the Gaza invasion, the public debate has been about whether Israel has violated its own ethic of defense, and allowed veangeance, perhaps, to rush ahead of its ethical ideals. The message of “Basterds” is, “see, Jews can be as cold-blooded and cruel as the rest of us.” Well, thanks, Quentin. That will help Israel when the United Nations or the Hague sits down yet again to contemplate Israeli “war crimes.”

Tarantino doesn’t have a “Jewish” agenda — his movies are always about movies, and seem to bear only a tangential relationship to what’s happening in real life. In a sense, “Basterds” is a brainless film — there isn’t a hint of introspection on the part of any of the characters or in the dialogue. The film has “ideas” only in relation with other films — how does this scene comment on, pay hommage to, or subvert Hollywood classics like “The Great Escape”? How does Waltz’s Landa stack up against Ralph Fiennes’ Goeth character in “Schindler’s List”?

So I don’t expect Tarantino intended to comment on the Jewish present. But I’ve seen signs that Jews are still fighting the Nazis, or, more to the point, fighting Palestinians as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict represents unfinished business of the Second World War.

For example, some who defend the right of Jewish settlers to move into the Shepherd Hotel in predominantly Arab East Jerusalem point out that the building was once home to the  mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Moving Jews into the home of this Nazi collaborator would be the ultimate revenge on the Mufti’s memory, according to this line of thinking — nevermind its effect on the peace process or the everyday reality of the Arabs who live next door or the daily routines of the Israeli soldiers who will be called in to guard the enclave.

Former Forward editor Seth Lipsky also praised Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Leiberman, for distributing a photograph of the Mufti and the Fuhrer in recent weeks. Wrote Lipsky:

Certainly the fact that the Palestinian Arabs hewed to Hitler was understood by an earlier generation as fundamental. It was marked over and over again by such great liberal institutions as the Forward newspaper. The error of the Arabs was compounded as they refused — in sharp contradistinction to, say, the Germans — to make an effort to educate their people to the facts of what happened under Hitler and what it all meant. It seems they wanted the world not to regret but to forget.

According to this view, the pro-Nazi Mufti (who died in 1974) must remain part of the current debate because he suggests the degree to which Palestinians refuse to acknowledge the extent of the Holocaust (although it’s strange that other conservative writers, although not Lipsky as far as I can tell, jumped down Obama’s throat because, in his Cairo speech, he made too strong a connection between the Shoa and the creation of Israel).

Perhaps Lipsky is right, but I think this talk of the Mufti reflects a deep desire by some to erase distinctions between Palestinians and Nazis. Doing so would make the current conflict not a boundary dispute or a human rights issue or even a  religous conflict but the latest battle in World War II.  If that’s the case, the “Basterds” fantasy — in which morality and the rules of war are gleefully and unregretfully suspended in the face of a cruel and conscience-less enemy — is not an ironic movie device, but a policy recommendation.

In “Basterds,” Pitt rallies his killing squad:

“We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.”

As wish-fulfillment, that’s stirring stuff. But there’s movies and there’s real life.  My fellow Jews surely know the difference, right?

Right?

My friend and former boss at the Forward, J.J. Goldberg, is blogging regularly. Of everyone I know in the Jewish press, J.J. is the smartest when it comes to Jewish organizational politics, the American Jewish zeitgeist, and getting to the ideological and emotional currents behind the day’s brouhaha. He’s a human search engine when it comes to recalling the last half century of communal history. And beyond the Jewish press, it’s hard to name a better interpreter of our tribe’s strange folkways. And he actually does research, interviewing even those he intends to lambaste.

Start with his recent post about Times columnist Roger Cohen, and the original article it revisits.

My column this week is on the “death” of the two-state solution, and the odd consensus forming on the right and left margins of the debate.

The article referenced a piece by Robert Malley and Hussein Agah in the Times, titled “The Two State Solution Won’t Solve Anything.” Many read their oped as a call for a “one-state” solution, Jewish and Palestinian. I wasn’t sure that’s what they were after. Malley tries to clarify in the Huffington Post:

Q: Are you arguing in favor of a one-state solution?

MALLEY: Absolutely not. Our work over the years has consistently been about the two state solution. This article is no exception, as the passages you cite illustrate. Far from arguing against the two-state solution, we are seeking to understand why, despite years of efforts, attempts to achieve it have failed. And we are suggesting that this has less to do with disagreements over the precise territorial boundaries than with something deeper that must be grappled with rather than ignored.

I missed this one, about a NJ judge who made a joking reference to the pro-Nazi Bund:

Superior Court Judge William Wertheimer, who hears civil cases in Union County, in April was presiding over a jury trial at which the plaintiff’s lawyer, William Gold, advised he needed to leave by 4 p.m. because it was the first night of Passover and he planned to attend a Seder, according to the complaint.

With the jury present but in a sidebar with lawyers, Wertheimer reportedly asked the attorneys if he should tell jurors the trial would conclude for the day so one or both lawyers could attend a “Bund meeting” – a reference to a 1930s anti-Semitic group in America that promoted Adolf Hitler’s regime.

The state Advisory Committee on Judicial Conduct filed a formal complaint, saying the judge “ violated four aspects of the judicial code of conduct, by creating the appearance of an ethnic and religious bias and not acting in a manner that promotes confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the courts.”

Great lawsuit in Maryland:  Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Ralph Jaffe, who needed to use the facilities, said he was turned away from the governor’s mansion by security and told to use the restroom at the nearby McDonald’s.

Here’s the twist:

The aspiring governor is Jewish, and he claims that made a McDonald’s pit stop particularly unappetizing. Jewish law does not forbid relieving oneself at a nonkosher restaurant, he acknowledged, but he said he has an image to protect.

“For me to have to go to a McDonald’s, which is a nonkosher restaurant, is extremely uncomfortable for me because it’s going to give people the impression that I’m going over there to order a hamburger,” he said.

Jaffe’s federal civil rights lawsuit seeks $120,000 in damages.

I think “I’m going to order a hamburger” should become a new Jewish euphemism for having to pee.

Mike Huckabee is in Israel, criticizing Obama’s Mideast policy, just as NJ Rep. Leonard Lance and other Republican lawmakers did a few weeks ago. Glenn Greenwald points out that when Democrats have gone abroad and criticized their government, they usually come under a hailstorm of criticism from their GOP critics. Greenwald remembers when Al Gore traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2006 and criticized American policies in the wake of 9/11, and conservative bloggers accused him of “disloyalty” and worse.

Writes Greenwald:

When “liberals” like Al Gore criticize U.S. foreign policy in Muslim countries, that is an act of virtual treason that spawns intense controversy. When leading members of the American Right do the same in and on behalf of Israel, the silence is deafening.

It’s an interesting point. Greewald doesn’t endorse the principle that a politican can’t speak ill of his country’s leaders on foreign soil, he says — but rather objects to the selective application of that “principle.”

But he loses me here by adding:

Rules governing what one can and cannot do with regard to “foreign countries” tend to be waived very quickly when it comes to Israel — and America’s Right…. Within that disparity lies many of the explanations for why America’s foreign policy in the Middle East has wrought so much destruction.

What-what WAH? I thought the target here was hypocrisy? No, it turns out it’s about Israel — and the way support for it distorts everything. It’s the grand unifying theory for America’s “destructive” Mideast policy.