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May 12, 2009 | 7:47 pm

Is the sword of anti-Semitism overblown? Defining ‘Defamation’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Yoav Shamir has a new documentary out called “Defamation.” You can watch trailer above; the distributor sent me a screener today, so I’ll have more later. The gist looks to be that, as an Israeli, Shamir has never felt anti-Semitism and so he set out to find out what all the hubbub was about. His conclusion, after following Abe Foxman around and talking with folks about their experiences, was that modern-day Jew hatred is tragically overblown and that “putting so much emphasis on the past, horrific as it has been, is holding us back.”

Anti-Semitism is no doubt real. Today, in fact, I found this comment on a TMZ post about new topless photos of Miss California: “danm jews.” I guess at least one person blames Harvey Levin’s Jewishness for the witch hunt of Carrie Prejean. And, as I’ve written about ad infinitum, the financial crisis has sparked its own anti-Semitic orgy.

But “Defamation” is making waves. Here’s what Philip Weiss, a liberal anti-Zionist/post-Zionist who often appears here, had to say:

The film is great journalism for Shamir’s tenacity at insiniuating himself into the emotional life of events, and for his portraits: of Abraham Foxman, Charles Jacobs, John Mearsheimer, Uri Avnery, and Norman Finkelstein.

The Foxman portrait is the core of the film and at once devastating and sympathetic. We see him manipulating the Holocaust in a number of situations. The scenes of ADL staff coming up with anti-Semitic incidents in the US to keep the ball rolling are strictly farcical. There is even farcical music, as they tell you of threats that aren’t threats. Foxman is shown pressing Ukrainian president Viktor Yuschenko in a conference room over Holocaust remembrance/guilt. Later, in Rome, enroute to meet the Pope, Foxman tells Shamir that there’s a “very thin line” between the perceptions of Jewish power by anti-Semites and the actual power that Jews have in the world. “Jews are not as powerful… as our enemies think we are.” But we’re not going to try and convince them otherwise, he says. Yes: the man is going to meet the Pope. Of course Jews have power, and Foxman has no awareness of this.

The portrait becomes transcendent at Babi Yar. Foxman gathers the board of the ADL at the Ukrainian massacre site and all the old Jews are talking about how Israel must be maintained because it may be necessary for all Jews in the world to go there, and then Foxman says a Hebrew prayer and his voice trembles and he is in tears. The scene gave me tremendous sympathy for Foxman. He is locked in his childhood of suffering. It makes perfect sense that he has projected his childhood demons on to the world, but they are just demons. The same point is made with an old Israeli journalist who has blue numbers tattooed on his arm and writes about anti-Semitism night and day. Well he has a fine reason, Shamir is saying.

The real blows to Foxman come from a couple of rabbis. A Rabbi Hecht in Brooklyn says, “I’m nervous about his reports… Are they accurate? He has to create a problem because he needs a job.” A Rabbi Dov Bleich in Kiev, who is Orthodox, says that anti-Semitism is not a problem, and that if these people only had a religious practice they wouldn’t need the church of anti-Semitism.

The ADL released a short statement Friday in response to the film’s characterizations of the organization and anti-Semitism:

Two years ago Yoav Shamir approached the Anti-Defamation League for assistance on a documentary he was making on the subject of anti-Semitism.  We provided him wide access to film ADL in action, in our offices, at our annual national meeting, on leadership missions in Italy, Ukraine and Poland, and in Israel.  Our expectation was that his documentary would present a serious portrait of what Jews worldwide face today—anti-Semitism in both its age-old and new forms, and the actions taken to counter it.

After seeing “Defamation” we can only say the film fell far short of our expectation.  Rather than document anti-Semites and their hatred of Jews and the Jewish State of Israel, the film belittles the issue and portrays the work of ADL and that of his own country as inconsequential.  There was so much more Shamir could have and should have done.

“Defamation” is neither enlightening, nor edifying, nor compelling.  It distorts the prevalence and impact of anti-Semitism and cheapens the Holocaust.  It is Shamir’s perverse, personal, political perspective and a missed opportunity to document a serious and important issue.

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This person and his film are ridiculous, and Phillip Weiss is a cowardly tuchus-lecker. I can’t for the life of me figure out why you honor and credit him. He is devoted to currying favor with Jew-haters.

Among pet cats, there are two kinds; inside-cats and outside-cats. Inside cats could not live 48 hours outside.  Israelis like to think that they are normalized without the ‘galus’ neurosis. The opposite is true. Israelis without a national memory are like inside-cats; couldn’t survive a minute in Galus. This Shamir is a naive and dumb fool, not to mention a coward.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 1:03 am

destruction from within. more dangerous than missles.

Comment by concerned parent on 5/13/09 at 1:38 am

I did not notice earlier that Michael Santomauro, the professional Holocaust denier and street team for David Irving commented on the Philip Weiss blog thread you linked to.

I am sure you remember the time this guy spent on your blog and the time I spent parrying him. Not because he had any points to make, but to prove the point that as irrational as it seems, people who do what he does exist. I know it was difficult for you to ban him on principle, but his material was growing and spreading like bedbugs. Since you have experienced him personally, maybe you can judge whether I am oversensitive about Philip Weiss.

Now why does a guy like that feel at home (since at least 2007) on Weiss’ blog? Because they are both fellow-travelers on the road and technique of ridiculing and denigrating Jews and Jewish causes. If Michael Santomauro had the idea and resources to put together a video of defenders of Jews, whatever their quirks, with an undertone of rinky-dinky klezmer music, and play w Norman Finkelstein straight, he would. Weiss does everything to predigest the facts before feeding them to his public. Jacobs is a wildeyed crazy man and Hirsch is brave and Foxman is self-serving and Finkelstein is an eloquent and fierce Biblical prophet and Mearsheimer is wise. What the hey? And antisemitism is overblown when police reports around the world show it accelerating and the UN itself runs hate-fests, and armed men break into Jewish centers in Venezuela.

And Santomauro mildly asks in his reasonable tone why we can’t open everything to discussion and debate and skepticism and doubt. The reason he was banned here (correct me if I am wrong) is not because you oppose free speech but because it is is impossible to discuss and debate and win a point with a person so committed to lies and a damaging agenda than to truth.

Philip Weiss is like that. Yoav Shamir is on that path.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 1:35 pm

I do remember Michael, and I also did not notice the comment thread on Weiss’ blog.

Comment by Brad A. Greenberg on 5/13/09 at 2:22 pm

But if he did not happen to check in to Weiss’ blog last week, the movie and its maker and its intended purposes, and Weiss’ additional highlighting would still all be just as they were.

Not everything is serious, but things that presume to be serious have a responsibility to truth and justice, to provide context as well as a sense of of proportion. Anything else is unethical, immoral and potentially damaging and dangerous. That is the difference between The Onion and a Michael Moore film. You know The Onion is kidding, but Moore and his imitator Shamir don’t admit it or reveal where the lines and biases are.

In this particular post, Weiss ridicules serious people and takes ridiculous people seriously. I only know that after several tries on my part I find that there is nothing to be gained from his blog and in the best case he is not to be trusted.

In the case of Shamir, he has already made his bones on the corpses of victims of Palestinians in his context-free film ‘Checkpoints’ which portrays the problems of Palestinians at checkpoints, without explaining why checkpoints exist (hint: there were no checkpoints before the intifada). In ‘Defamation’ he purports to show that Jews are paranoid about antisemitism, without considering that most Jews are just realistic about it.

Motivation for both of them? In my opinion a needy quest for acceptance, something secular Jews are hung up on. You can take some Jews out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of such Jews. Ironically, one of Shamir’s films was rejected at a European film festival because of its Israeli origin. That would bring some adults to their senses, but not Shamir.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 3:29 pm

“In ‘Defamation’ he purports to show that Jews are paranoid about antisemitism, without considering that most Jews are just realistic about it.”

i don’t know, in the USA at least, it seems a bit overdone.  to the point that whenever i see an accusation of antisemitism here, my first instinct is that it’s either wrong, or an over-reaction.  it seems to me that now it is mostly a way to try and control the public discourse, nothing but politics.

Comment by Proton Soup on 5/13/09 at 4:40 pm

As for your first instinct, you really need to keep an open mind. And the US is somewhat exceptional in this respect if far from perfect. You can’t have a feeling for this stuff with nothing at stake; I doubt anyone wants you dead or gone or out, or denies your ethnicities’ rights and humanity in various senses. You wouldn’t even be aware of the background radiation of anti-Semitism but you can’t miss the atmosphere of threat and intimidation such as Brad has documented at the UC Irvine campus (in the USA) for the last seven years.
 
“The Price of Liberty is Eternal Vigilance”. For actual violence you need the JDL, not the ADL, but surely you don’t object to defending what is legally defensible. There is no way to stem the losses to our individual business and academic careers from the thousand cuts we experience. One of the things that keeps it manageable is early warning systems such as the ADL.

Maybe Shamir means no harm, but some do, and for them ridiculing the ADL and downplaying anti-Semitism is a logical first step. Getting a Jewish dupe to do it is even better. As far as who’s talking, I don’t see that Shamir or Weiss are any less eccentric or more accomplished than Foxman.

It has been well said that only the most paranoid Jews before the fact survived the war. Yoav Shamir’s predecessors ridiculed them too, and they ignored that and got themselves, their families and possibly a few assets out before the place became hell on earth. The laughers’ and deniers’ survival rate was much poorer. Shamir is not in a position to make any guarantees, and in fact he has already ditched the Jews, Israel and Zionism thrown his lot in with the anti-Semites.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 7:59 pm

“In democratic America it is so easy. Yet so many say, ‘It’s so hard.‘ Go figure.“

Comment by Proton Soup on 5/13/09 at 8:08 pm

Indeed. “And the US is somewhat exceptional in this respect if far from perfect.” The bar is much higher here. We split from Europe largely for these reasons, and they are light-years behind even though their mouths aren’t.

We literally tore ourselves apart as a country to work out the racial slavery thing, and yet I can’t see that a similar discussion of racial bigotry and discrimination would be necessary, or a film treatment by a minority filmmaker (or any filmmaker) poking fun of civil rights personalities and proposing that bigotry and discrimination are overblown.

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 8:30 pm

i’m not sure the US civil was simply about working out the slavery thing.

Comment by Proton Soup on 5/13/09 at 9:17 pm

I know, it was about States’ Rights vs. Federal. But it was not not about slavery either.

Why be picky on a tangential issue? If it makes you happy, read the above without that clause, and start the sentence “I can’t see that a similar discussion of racial bigotry and discrimination would be necessary, or a film treatment by a minority filmmaker (or any filmmaker) poking fun of civil rights personalities and proposing that bigotry and discrimination are overblown.”

Comment by Ben Plonie on 5/13/09 at 9:41 pm

i don’t know that we’ve had any similar films here, and i doubt we’ll see any anytime soon.  it’s only politically correct to poke fun at white people about such things.  there have however been books such as “Shakedown” about Jesse Jackson, although it was more serious than satirical.

but who knows…  keep your fingers crossed and maybe Borat will do you next.

Comment by Proton Soup on 5/13/09 at 10:19 pm

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