09/21/2008

Jewish intellectualism lives

From the Fall 2008 issue of the Nextbook Reader, on Israeli-American-German filmmaker Omer Fast's Spielberg's List:


"The beginning of the film seems like just so much more Holocaust testimony: first-person descriptions of the camps, the smokestacks, the dogs, the hunger, the widely plumbed range of Nazi inhumanity. One might watch this testimony with the same measures of sadness and respect and anger and exhaustion with which most Holocaust testimony, at this point, is taken.

"But the film starts to breed some strange incongruities ... The interviewees, it begins to become clear, aren't talking about their experiences in the camps themselves but about their experiences as extras in the film Schindler's List.
...

"Where the woman in Poland had actually been at a fake place, the medic in Jerusalem seemed to have been absent from something real: His participation in a real event was a far less emotional experience than her participation in a staged one."


Also some interesting stuff on dybbuks and women, the "Jewess" and Obama hate this month.