I’m watching this great documentary “Defamation” by Yoav Shamir about the Anti-Defamation League and anti-Semitism.
About 38 minutes in, you see Abraham Foxman, head of the ADL, lecturing the president of Ukraine to not compare the Ukrainian genocide to the Holocaust.
Abe Foxman and the ADL makes my skin crawl. They are leftist ethnic activists akin to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
The film examines whether anti-Semitic has become an all purpose label for anyone who criticizes Israel and the possibility that some Jews’ preoccupation with the past—i.e., the Holocaust—is preventing progress in the here and now.[1] Shamir decided to make this film after a critic of an earlier film accused him of antisemitism.[1]
Filmmaker Yoav Shamir states in the beginning of the film that as an Israeli he has never experienced antisemitism himself and wants to learn more about it since references to antisemitism in countries all over the world are common in the Israeli media.
The film includes interviews with Abraham Foxman, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, John J. Mearsheimer, co-author of New York Times Best Seller The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Norman Finkelstein, a critic of Israeli government policy, as well as many others. The film also follows a group of Israeli high school students on a class trip to Poland where they tour Auschwitz, as well as a number of other notable Holocaust locations.
The film notes that in 2007, the ADL reported a spike in antisemitism, claiming that there were 1,500 anti-Semitic incidents in the United States, yet when Shamir contacts the ADL they can only list minor incidents such as websites with inflammatory comments, letters from employees denied time off for a Jewish holiday, or people offended by a cop’s use of the word “Jew”. A case presented concerns a group of African American boys, aged between 10 and 12, who pelted a school bus with rocks, breaking two windows.
Shamir also interviews a rabbi who says that the hypervigilance of the ADL inflames relations between Jews and non-Jews in the United States. He also finds that among his interviewees there is more sensitivity to antisemitism among secular Jews than religious ones.
Forty three minutes in, Rabbi Bleich (Chabad) in Kiev says: “For some reason, secular Jews are more worried about anti-semitism than religious Jews. Fighting anti-Semitism is not part of being Jewish for an Orthodox Jew. Part of being Jewish means practicing Judaism. There is no mitzvah in the Torah to fight anti-Semitism. Very often, people who are not practicing find their thing in fighting anti-semitism. So they’ll express their Jewish identity by fighting anti-semitism and helping the community.”
People who have a traditional identity are much more secure in general than those who don’t.
Near the end of the documentary, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors, gives an ironic Nazi salute and says that Abe Foxman is worse than Hitler because Hitler didn’t do it for the money.
Norman tells the Israeli director: “The best thing for Israel will be if they get rid of these American Jews who are warmongers from Martha’s Vineyard, the Hamptoms, Beverly Hills, Miami. It’s been a disaster for Israel.”
“You’re funny. You come from a society in which everyone calls everyone a Nazi. They called Rabin a Nazi. Ben Gurion called Jabotinksy a Nazi. Jabotinsky called Ben Gurion a Nazi. Begin called Ben Gurion a Nazi. They all said each of them is worse than Hitler. That’s the whole language of your society. That’s also the language I grew up with. Everything in my house, the food, worse than Auschwitz. The clothes, worse than Auschwitz. All of a sudden, you get so pious when I go like that. Your whole society is like that.”
