Defamation is a documentary on anti-Semitism by 38-year-old Israeli director Yoav Shamir. It won a special jury prize at Tribeca 09 and First Run Features, the New York-based distributor, has picked up the film’s US rights.
Similar in some respects to Yves Jeuland’s documentary Being Jewish In France (2007), currently showing in Manhattan, and which focuses on the virulent hatred endured by Jews in one country, Defamation mixes personal reminiscences with archival footage. This film, however, is much more peripatetic, with locales set in Israel, New York City, Poland, and Russia. The film is constructed along three main expository threads.
One of these consists of interviews with various rabbis and community leaders in Brooklyn. We hear things like “love for Israel is like a love for a child”, albeit a child with, among other things, sulphur bombs for toys, as some viewers are bound to think. There is a revealing encounter with a group of blacks on a street corner in the Crown Heights section of that polyglot borough. It is not made explicit, but Crown Heights was a flashpoint in the recent past of long standing and deeply held animosity between Jews and African Americans in New York.
Shamir treats us to a biting and highly entertaining entretien with his own nonagenarian grandmother in Israel - a place where the director has stated that he has never personally experienced anti-Semitism, which does not, with all due respect, exactly come as a shock. Shamir also looks at a particularly vicious attack on a synagogue in Moscow, one he referred to again in the Q&A following the screening I attended at Tribeca.
The second main thread is comprised of unflattering portrayals of Abe Foxman, the head of the NY based Anti-Defamation League, and his archenemy, Norman Finkelstein, the hounded ex-academic, and author of the vilified (primarily by Zionist apologists) book, The Holocaust Industry. The presentation of and contrast between these two men, both of whom were tragically affected by the Nazi holocaust, constitutes the heart of the movie.
Frankly, they come off as monomaniacal obssesionists, each obdurate in their point of view. In one scene, for example, we watch Foxman lecture a group of Ukrainian leaders on the lack of moral equivalence between Stalin’s genocidal acts, which resulted in the deaths of 11 million Ukrainians by starvation, and the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust. Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul University and subjected to personal obloquy for his controversial book (which I have never heard of, but read following the movie; it is an extremely well written piece of scholarly research), comes across as a bit of an odd bird.
Finally, Shamir depicts, not without a dash of leavening irony, a group of Israeli teens on a pilgrimage to Majdanek - a former Nazi death camp in Poland. For example, there is a scene of the kids eating snacks while watching historical footage of emaciated Jews in the notorious concentration camp.
There are no Palestinians in evidence anywhere in the film, but Shamir gets a pass from me on this one, given the director’s previous work, Checkpoint and 5 Days, which scrutinise the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians.
Jews are not the only ones in this world to get defamed. Following 9-11, Hollywood, for example, at last found its new, post-Commie-scum villains. Take Robert Downey Jr’s comic book vehicle, Iron Man (2008), where the enemy is a gang of brutaloid Middle Eastern terroristos. Not to be outdone, Dennis Quaid’s very own action thriller, Vantage Point (2008), features a group of swarthy (read, Arab) types that is behind a conspiracy to off the head honcho of the United States. I wonder if Abe Foxman is in a hissy fit about these films; after all, are not Arabs Semites too?
Shamir narrates the voiceover in the movie. At the end, he concludes, “Maybe it’s time to live in the present and look to the future.”
Good luck with that.
