Hatred of Jews:
alive and corrosive
Men in long coats snatch a child off the street, take him to a dark room and slit his throat. The killers, wearing traditional Jewish hats and sidelocks, will make matzoh with gentile blood.
The brutal scene in an Egyptian miniseries aired across the Arab world in 2002.
The next year, a widely broadcast Syrian serial showed long-ago Jewish leaders plotting by candlelight to run the world.
With these and other ancient racist libels propagated actively in the Middle East and elsewhere, anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence have risen dramatically, according to the documentary Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence, which airs on many PBS stations Jan. 8 [2007].
The anti-Semitic myths, codified in a century-old czarist Russian assemblage called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, are cited by Muslim political leaders and taken as facts by many followers, according to the PBS doc.
To supplement the old myths, the haters conceive new ones: Jews killed Princess Diana. They spread AIDS. They knew to stay away from the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Other minority groups are demonized, but scholars say in the film that anti-Semitism is an exceptionally dark prejudice with roots in a once-widespread Christian teaching that Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death. “No other religion accuses another of killing its God,” says Frederick Schweitzer of Columbia University.
There was enough anti-Semitism around the world for a film of two or three hours instead of one, producer Andrew Goldberg told Current, but he had to move along. This is the former ABC and CNN journalist’s eighth public TV documentary and his second on PBS — the other being The Armenian Genocide, aired in April, about the bloody Turkish-Armenian conflict of 1915-23.
For Goldberg, the hardest work was writing the script. “You’re walking such a delicate line with these conversations,” he explains.
The film captures an extended, sometimes adamant exchange over the interaction between Israel and anti-Semitism. Is Arab rage against Jews primarily a reaction to Israeli actions, or would the ancient prejudice flourish no matter what Israel does?
“There’s no question that Israel’s behavior does affect the way people think about Jews,” Goldberg comments, “but I do think anti-Semitism . . . thrives distinctly from the state of Israel, does damage distinctly.”
“Here’s the issue,” he adds. “As a person in the world, if somebody doesn’t like me, it’s partly my responsibility to ask, What have I done? This model doesn’t apply to many other cases of ethnic hatred. If you want to study racism against blacks . . . you study racists, not blacks.”
Why does this debate carry such emotional weight? It’s distressing when critics of Israel blame it for prompting anti-Semitism. “It sounds,” says Goldberg, “like ‘What are you Jews doing to bring this upon yourselves?”
Web page posted Nov. 27, 2007
Copyright 2006 by Current Publishing Committee