Married to Another Man, Married to Another Woman

Zionism vs. The Hearthbreak Kid
by Joachim Martillo

In Married to Another Man the author Ghada Karmi states the following in a chapter entitled "Why Does the West Support Israel?"

A type of philosemitism, often as extreme as the antisemitism that preceded it, took over in a number of European countries. Israelis were treated with special care, and there was a widespread sensitivity to any expression of views that could remotely be interpreted as antisemitic. In London a part of the Imperial War Museum was designated as a Holocaust memorial in 2001 with an official Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, inaugurated by Britain's top dignitaries, Steven Spielberg's film about the Holocaust, Schindler's List, became obligatory showing in many British schools, where teaching about the Holocaust was also obligatory.

A corresponding aversion to the presentation of the Palestinian case was the obverse of this coin. Showing films, publishing books and articles, or indeed any other activity sympathetic to the Palestinians was notoriously difficult in many European countries. A major film about the Palestinian story had yet to be made, not because there was no one to make it, but because of the insuperable obstacles of funding and distribution. There was no Garden of the Fitzi-Continis or Life is Beautiful or any of the scores of other sophisticated, imaginative and affecting films made about the Jews to convey the tragedy and pathos of Palestinian life. How differently the Palestinian case would have fared, had it been afforded a fraction of the sympathetic media treatment enjoyed by Israel and the Jewish case.

I am still hoping that Ghada Karmi's In Search of Fatima or Susan Abulhawa's Scar of David will obtain funding for screen adaptation and distribution, but the indirect approach of Schindler's List whose 30 seconds of propaganda at the end makes it the most effective pro-Zionist anti-Palestinian film (see Note below) might serve as the best means to bring the Palestinian case to the American public.

The Elaine May/Neil Simon classic 1970s film comedy entitled The Heartbreak Kid, which depicted somewhat dysfunctional Jewish-Gentile interaction in the USA, could easily work today as a movie investigating Jewish-Gentile conflict in the Middle East with a lot more connection to reality than the nonsense of West Bank Story.

The original Heartbreak Kid was based on based on Bruce Jay Friedman's short story "A Change of Plan" in combination with ideas from the immensely successful Broadway production entitled A Melting Pot, written by Israel Zangwill, who in 1901 coined the slogan "A land without a people for a people without a land" to describe Zionist aspirations in Palestine. Even though the investigation and reversal of Jewish and Gentile stereotypes provided most of the humor and endearing quality of Elaine May's film, the Spielberg-Farrelly-Brothers remake eliminated the intermarriage subtheme possibly "because of the insuperable obstacles of funding and distribution," for even Spielberg has reason to fear the cinematic side of the Israel lobby after the abuse and excoriation he received for giving 15-20 seconds to a Palestinian point of view in Munich.

The following web pages provide a good sample of the reaction to the new Heartbreak Kid.

• Box Office "Heartbreak" For Stiller Comedy - New York Times
• The Heartbreak Kid - Rotten Tomatoes
• Movie review: "The Heartbreak Kid" Salon Arts & Entertainment
• Letters: "The Heartbreak Kid" - Salon

The reviews from the New York Times, Rotten Tomatoes and Salon indicate that the US audience has rewarded the cowardly new Heartbreak Kid with appropriate scorn. The letters from Salon address the themes of Jewish-Gentile conflict, assimilation and intermarriage in the original Heartbreak Kid. The tone of most of the letters would please even a fanatic anti-miscegenist like Ruth Wisse, who is the wicked witch of Harvard NELC (Near Eastern Languages and Civilization) -- I will never understand why Harvard puts Yiddish in this category.

One chapter of Married to Another Man is entitled "Why Do Jews Support Israel?" and describes the anti-assimilationist force that the State of Israel and Zionism represent in Western Jewish life. The phenomenon is not new. Shulamit Volkov provided an article entitled "The Dynamics of Dissimilation: Ostjuden and German Jews" for the anthology The Jewish Response to German Culture, From the Enlightenment to the Second World War, which was edited by Walter Schatzberg and Jehuda Reinharz, who is married to the racist Brandeis sociologist Shulamit Reinharz, who was honest enough to inject her anti-Palestinian hatred explicitly into the controversy at Columbia over conferring tenure to Nadia Abu el Haj, who is a Barnard sociologist.

Clearly in today's world The Heartbreak Kid could only be properly remade in the context of the conflict over Palestine as it plays out both in the Middle East and in the USA

Devorah's Two Weddings (http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/NewTwoWeddings.pdf), which could easily have been entitled Married to Another Man, is an example of a better, more interesting, and potentially more-box-office-successful possible rewrite. It based on a real couple, whom I met in Jerusalem, and tells the story of a born-again Jewish Israeli-American, who realizes at her wedding that she is making a big mistake and who for self-preservation focuses on the Palestinian violinist who plays at her wedding and who is her new husband's opposite.[*] With the track record of A Melting Pot and Elaine May's Heartbreak Kid, the marketers and bean-counters should have demanded the incorporation of an Israeli-Palestinian subplot in the remake. The elimination of the key theme that makes the original interesting is further evidence of the explicit or Pavlovian thought control that the Israel Lobby exerts over popular American culture.

Footnote

[*] Devorah's Two Weddings lacks the pathos found in the Holocaust films as well as in In Search of Fatima and Scar of David. I tried to put that aspect of Palestinian experience into the prequel which is entitled Two Weeks in September (http://www.eaazi.org/ThorsProvoni/twoweeks.pdf) and which tells the story of a desperate Palestinian refugee couple, who can get medical treatment for their dying son only if they accept an offer from a sleazy Russian-Israeli businessman to star in a pornographic film. The screenplay is inspired by a real-life drama that took place in 2002.

---

Note

Subliminal Zionist Propaganda and Genocide Incitement in Schindler's List

11 min 52 sec - Oct 7, 2007
Description:

Schindler's List (1993, Universal) is unprecedented as an expression of extremist nationalist Likud הסברה. We know that the story is fundamentally a nation creation narrative because the movie ends with the death of Schindler to show that the people he lead became capable of standing on the own. This movie proved to be a genuine blockbuster[1] unlike earlier Zionist-oriented films that were only moderately successful. Obviously, no one visits the cinemaplex for the sort of lecture that Exodus provides in Labor Zionist ideology

This film is extremely problematic on several grounds. It is a consciously inverted film noir Wizard of Oz that markets its message subliminally. The evil of Nazism is reduced to psychopathology. Zionist ideologues prefer such an understanding of Nazism because genuine analysis of the phenomenon of Nazism would find too many similarities to Zionism. As history, the movie embodies the serious failures of Zionist historiography to which Hobsbawm referred. The movie describes the Holocaust of Zionist myth not the historical שואה (or catastrophe). The Soviet officer makes the pitch of a שליח (a Zionist emissary that recruits new immigrants).

One must wonder how a Palestinian would view the conclusion. It shows the Schindler Jews, who mostly did not migrate to Palestine, as they step into a rebirth of color and into Jerusalem to the sound in the background of Jerusalem of Goldירושלים של זהב ) ) a song that celebrates the culmination of a series of dispossession, tragedies and expulsions of the native population and that is generally associated now with the extreme right in Israeli politics.[2]

Spielberg is indoctrinating the audience with the following propaganda.

a. The State of Israel is an appropriate monument to murdered European Jews even though the vast majority were either non-Zionist or anti-Zionist, and

b. making Palestine a Jewish state was proper recompense for persecution of European Jews despite the wishes of the majority native population (who in a sinister foreshadowing of planned expulsion or mass extermination are absent as the theme of the 1967 conquest is played).

I am not surprised that the Egyptian and many other governments had some serious issues with subjecting their populations to this sort of blatant Zionist propaganda.

There are a lot of ethical problems associated with the UN recommendation to partition Palestine along völkisch principles that violated the UN charter and that wronged the native population. Universal Studios should have given the film a voluntary NC-17 rating, for it is certainly wrong to indoctrinate young people and children with the idea that two wrongs make a right.

This ending was so close to the Likud formula for "national ritual assertion of Israel state identity and superiority" and conformed so exactly to the "central item of the official system of national beliefs" as promulgated by the Likud party that the ending had to be modified for Israeli audiences. USA popular culture has an even higher tolerance of the most extremist Zionist myth and propaganda than Israeli Jews do. One must wonder whether the success of such clever Likud propaganda at the box office presaged the failure of the Oslo Process? [3]

Footnotes
[1] Selling the Holocaust, From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, by Time Cole has a worthwhile discussion of Schindler's List.

[1] Selling the Holocaust, From Auschwitz to Schindler, How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, by Time Cole has a worthwhile discussion of Schindler's List.

The ending only compares the survivorship of Schindler and Polish Jews. It says nothing about Yiddish culture, and one would be hard pressed to glean from Schindler's List that an independent Yiddish society and culture had been murdered in Eastern Europe. A great movie would have shown more ethical complexity. Hero was ethically a far more sophisticated film. Schindler was far sleazier than portrayed. Making the chief Nazi villain a psychopath lets a lot of Germans escape their guilt. Compare The Nasty Girl. For more serious ethical complexity you might wish to check out Lili Marlene.

In the real world many victims of the Nazi persecutions made an easy transition to victimizing of Palestinians.

[2] The movie made Art Spiegelman (viz "Schindler's List: Myth, Movie, and Memory," Village Voice 39, no. 13 [March 29, 1994], p.26) extremely uncomfortable even before it reached the ending. Art Spiegelman incorrectly criticized Spielberg for a gentrification of "Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer caricatures." The negative characterization of Jews within the film most likely result from the effort Spielberg made to produce an orthodox Zionist Holocaust drama. As a consequence, he probably inadvertently reproduced classic Zionist anti-Diasporatist ideology, which is actually very close to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

[3] Ever since Schindler's List American movie and television audiences have been subjected to a blizzard of Holocaust films. Many and maybe most make the point that the Holocaust provides (ex post facto and anticausal) legitimacy both for Zionism and also for the definition or consolidation of Israel as a racist Jewish state. At this point in time, a Holocaust film need not even make the legitimization argument explicitly. Americans have been conditioned far more strongly than Pavlov's dogs and immediately respond with obeisance to the legitimacy of the racist Jewish state at the barest mention of the Holocaust. Barry Gewen in the following article from the Sunday, New York Times, June 15, 2002, asks, "Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust?" I would have investigated whether the Holocaust documentary inundation relates to the struggle of Palestinians for freedom and justice during the intifadatu-l-aqsa (al-aqsa intifada or 2nd intifada).

Margret Riegel

Universal Newsreel Czechs seeing their children off in "My Knees Were Jumping."

Cinema Guild A family that rescued a Jewish girl from "Secret Lives."

Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?

By BARRY GEWEN

The turning point may have come in 1985 with "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's nine-and-a-half-hour epic of death camp survivors, Nazi officials, Polish bystanders, righteous gentiles and meticulous historians hunched over aging documents. It marked — if it did not initiate — the moment when documentary filmmakers started giving their full attention to Hitler's planned extermination of the Jews. "When I began exploring how films have grappled with the Holocaust in 1979, there were merely a few dozen titles to warrant attention," Annette Insdorf writes in her encyclopedic study "Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust." But for the book's third edition, published this year, she lists, together with the fiction films, 69 documentaries made since 1990 alone — a rate of almost one every two months. Elsewhere she estimates that there are at least six completed Holocaust documentaries that do not get distribution for every one that does. And the stream has continued at flood tide into 2003. Last month "Secret Lives," Aviva Slesin's emotionally complex film about Jewish children hidden by gentile families during the Nazi era, opened in New York. Shortly after, PBS showed Charles Guggenheim's "Berga: Soldiers of Another War," about Jewish-American soldiers captured by the Germans. "Bonhoeffer," Martin Doblmeier's intellectual, spiritually suffused account of the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, is opening on June 27, two days before A & E broadcasts Liz Garbus's "Nazi Officer's Wife," the biography of a Jewish woman who survived by assuming an Aryan identity and marrying a Nazi party member.

But simply listing these new films raises a troubling question: Are too many Holocaust documentaries now being made? Has supply outstripped demand? It's a question that makes people uncomfortable. Who would want to appear callous in the face of such suffering, or, worse, anti-Semitic? Yet there are definite signs of Holocaust fatigue. Perhaps because she is a survivor, Ms. Slesin is more forthright than most. "I can't bear to see evil over and over again," she says. "Even I roll my eyes when I hear about another Holocaust documentary" — but then she quickly adds, "until I see what it's about."

Stephen Feinstein, the director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, has sat on a selection committee for a Jewish film festival when more than 15 Holocaust documentaries were submitted. With each year bringing still more films, he says, "you can't see them all." Many of the films have become formulaic, using the same German footage, the same static interviewing techniques. "Get out of the talking-head format," Mr. Feinstein advises. Raye Farr, the director of the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, says that filmmakers are too often taking the easy way out, showing an "increasing inclination to go for sentimentality." With an undertone of exasperation in her voice, she says, "Crying is not very edifying."

Why do filmmakers have such an abiding interest in the Holocaust? In part, they are simply reflecting the extraordinary phenomenon that the Holocaust has become in American life. Publishers churn out books on the subject in voluminous numbers, state governments legislate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington greets millions of visitors each year. It would be odd if filmmakers didn't share this general fascination. And yet many of them feel a particular urgency about their work.

As the documentarian Joseph Dorman observed in a recent interview, anyone with a relative who went through the Holocaust has a "natural desire" to tell that story. Most of these films are made not for any commercial reason, and not really with an educational intent. They are works of moral witness.

Melissa Hacker's mother was a survivor of the Kindertransport, one of thousands of Jewish children from Germany and Austria who were sent to England in the months before the start of World War II. Ms. Hacker had grown up with the story, but there were many things her mother wouldn't talk about, "forbidden stuff." It was only when she set about making a documentary, "My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports" (1995), that her mother opened up to her. The film, Ms. Hacker says, "was a way of learning more about my own family."

Such personal involvement can inspire intense dedication. Ms. Slesin took three and a half years to complete her film. Ms. Hacker, a first-time documentarian when she made "My Knees Were Jumping," required seven. Funding is always a problem. Sometimes, it seems that Holocaust documentaries have a lock on all the awards: they have won five Oscars over the last eight years. But their commercial prospects are generally slim, and rare is the investor willing to back a film almost guaranteed to be a box-office loser. (Ms. Slesin likes to think of her supporters as donors rather than investors.)

Most movie audiences want to be entertained; they don't want to dwell on the sealed boxcars, extermination camps and mounds of corpses that are the staples of the Holocaust narrative. There has been a tendency of late among documentary filmmakers to concentrate on the more "positive" side — gentiles who opposed Hitler or rescued victims; Jewish resisters in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere; and of course the survivors themselves. These individuals are often presented as inspirational (although, with the millions of victims who are not here to go before the camera, there is nothing inspirational about the Holocaust). Even so, their stories don't readily win financial backing.

Independent filmmakers speak of "endless hours" of fund-raising, "a tremendous amount of scrambling." Even established institutions have trouble. Major archives exist for the express purpose of capturing the survivors on film. Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has a collection of more than 4,000 testimonies. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, established by Steven Spielberg in 1994 following the success of "Schindler's List," is by far the largest. It houses more than 50,000 testimonies. Both the Fortunoff Archive and the Shoah Foundation have produced films using their collections, but they, too, have had to struggle to raise money. Douglas Greenberg, the president and C.E.O. of the Shoah Foundation, describes "banging with a tin cup" for outside support. "Steven doesn't pay all the bills," Mr. Greenberg says.

There is one grand exception to this rule of penury. Rabbi Marvin Hier, the founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaks with the confidence and ebullience of a man who knows he sits astride a well-oiled machine. The center has its own movie division, Moriah Films, and it turns out a film about once every two years (not all of them about the Holocaust). Two, "Genocide" and "The Long Way Home," have won Oscars. Unlike everyone else involved in making Holocaust documentaries, Rabbi Hier says raising money has been "very easy," and since 1989 Moriah Films has collected about $15 million. The minimum gift the center accepts is $100,000 spread over five years, and Hollywood celebrities like Orson Welles, Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Douglas have volunteered their services as narrators for the films. The scrambling documentarians clustered on the East Coast can only stare across the continent with envy at this odd coupling of Hollywood star power and the awesome atrocity of the Holocaust.

But rich or poor, every Holocaust documentarian is working the same territory, and some critics complain that the basic plot line of the Holocaust has become too familiar by now to permit genuinely original work. We all know it: first the arrival of the Nazis, then the initial terror, then the rounding up into ghettos, then the shipment to the camps, then the gassing and death or, alternatively, the humiliation, degradation, starvation, torture, gassing and death. And at this point, it seems, just about all that documentarians can do with the history is to fill in the gaps. The recently shown "Berga" is an example. It tells of 350 G.I.'s captured during the Battle of the Bulge who were Jewish or looked Jewish, and who were shipped off to a concentration camp to be slave laborers.

No one is suggesting that documentarians stop making Holocaust films. As Ms. Farr puts it, "There'll always be more to discover and understand." But Mr. Dorman, for one, believes it is time to pay more attention to the perpetrators. Film, he says, has proved "an ideal medium" for allowing the victims to tell their stories, but where, he wonders, are the far more complex stories of the criminals? Books have been written about them — Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" (1992), for example, has become an instant classic — yet filmmakers have exhibited a greater reluctance than historians to examine this aspect of the Holocaust. Perhaps they are fearful of humanizing the inhuman. Audiences, after all, feel a natural tendency to identify with the person on the screen.

Even the archivists shy away. Mr. Greenberg argues that the perpetrators "have had their say," and sees the Shoah Foundation's work as "redressing the balance." (Among its collections are 1,000 interviews with rescuers.) Besides, Mr. Greenberg says, "perpetrators aren't lining up to be interviewed." He's surely right. And yet one of the most gripping — and disturbing — moments in the foundation's own film "The Last Days" is an interview with a former Nazi doctor who participated in the human experiments at Auschwitz.

One way out of their box is for documentarians to cease being documentarians. Among the most astute commentators on the Holocaust is Lawrence L. Langer, the author of "Holocaust Testimonies" (1991) and several other works. He believes that the standard narrative has scarcely been exhausted, but that the individual experiences of the victims can most accurately be captured through fiction films. Mr. Feinstein seconds this view, saying that fiction films will "take over" because there's only so much you can show in a documentary. However, Mr. Langer is not optimistic. It requires great courage and imagination to make honest fiction films about the Holocaust, he says.

Mr. Langer praises the "raw reality" of Tim Blake Nelson's "Grey Zone," a dramatization of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish slaves forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz. It's an unrelenting film of ubiquitous terror and arbitrary death, with no consoling message. It opened and closed in New York City last year in a matter of days.

Perhaps the most fruitful avenue for documentarians at the present time is to follow the lead of the historians and broaden their canvas. Many scholars are now reaching beyond the standard Holocaust narrative to ask questions that require wider comparative and contextual analyses. Samantha Power, for instance, writes about "the age of genocide" in her book "A Problem From Hell." Institutions devoted to the Holocaust have also enlarged their perspective. The Holocaust Museum in Washington has run exhibits and programs on Sudan, Bosnia and Rwanda. Mr. Greenberg says the Shoah Foundation is looking to expand its range because "the pace of genocides has increased." He is confident that filmmakers are already moving in the same direction. "We will have documentaries about Rwanda in reasonably short order," he predicts.

The Holocaust will no doubt remain the defining atrocity of our time — for several reasons, good and bad — and a springboard for any discussion of mass extermination. But now it coexists with the slaughter of the Armenians, the malignity of the gulag, the autogenocide in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansings in the Balkans and the sanguinary tribal wars across Africa. For filmmakers interested in examining man's inhumanity to man or bringing it to public attention or simply bearing witness, there is no shortage of material.

Barry Gewen is an editor at The New York Times Book Review.

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