JustASC

The ADL’s Abe Foxman turns film critic, recommending “Inglourious Basterds” for an Academy Award:

Putting a new twist on the Holocaust genre for a new time and a new audience was none other than the renowned filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. While he opens his Inglourious Basterds with a scene repeated untold times during the Holocaust – a Jewish family hidden by a Christian family is discovered by a Nazi commandant and executed – the film morphs into an allegory about good and evil and the no-holds-barred efforts to defeat the evil personified by Hitler, his henchmen and his Nazi regime.

Employing drama, comedy and romance with the quintessential Quentin Tarantino touch, the film is entertaining, yet thought-provoking. Hopefully the millions who see it will understand the horrors of the Holocaust and echo my view of “if only it were true!” Like its predecessors Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful, Inglourious Basterds should be recognized with an Academy Award.

Not to be a nudzh, but I can think of a few reasons why “Basterds” is not the “good for the Jews” movie of the year:

– At a time when Israel is facing libelous accusations of war crimes for its actions in Gaza, “Basterds” portrays a unit of Jewish soldiers as avenging murderers who gleefully discard niceties like the Geneva Convention.  So much for “purity of arms.”

– Revenge fantasies are the fantasies of the weak. Twelve year old boys invent comic book heroes to destroy their middle school enemies; Jewish writers and artists created superheroes to wage the battles they were losing in Brooklyn and and their relatives were losing in Auschwitz. Tarantino isn’t Jewish, but in creating Jewish fantasy heroes, he underlines both the actual futility of Jewish resistance in WWII, and validates the accusation that Jews were led like sheep to slaughter.

– Doesn’t alternate history falsify history as much as inaccurate history?  “Basterds” is at least two movies — a terrifyingly realistic  portrait of a Nazi Jew hunter and his cat and mouse games with his victims, and a cartoonish exploitation flick about slaughtering Hitler and his top henchmen. Does the “new audience” Foxman writes about know enough about WWII to separate the real from the fantastical?

– I wonder if Foxman would have been quite so enthusiastic if the same film had been made in Germany by a German director. I  can just imagine the ADL press release: “While the director is to be praised for his clear anti-Nazi stance, his picture  obscures  the historical record of World War II, and ignores, and thus threatens to mock, the real and insurmountable obstacles that prevented meaningful Jewish resistance to the Nazi’s Final Solution.”