Word: fagin
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...years ago, while setting up U.S. engagements for Director David (Great Expectations) Lean's version of Oliver Twist, British Cinemogul J. Arthur Rank ran into a clamor of protest. Jewish groups protested Dickens' "villainous and repulsive" Fagin, as played in the movie by Alec (The Cocktail Party) Guinness in exaggerated make-up modeled on the famed Cruikshank drawings. Was the movie Fagin a public demonstration of antiSemitism? Rank bowed to the outcry, postponed the U.S. opening "indefinitely" (TIME...
...professional hijacker. Then Luc becomes a ward of the nation, speedily finds that the nation is not much interested in what happens to the sons of heroes. From the cold cup of state charity Luc turns to the warmer brew of Black-Marketeer Vanderputte, a kindly Fagin who harbors a nest of adolescent thieves as runners for his goods...
...Brooklyn, a taxpayer's suit had asked that Oliver Twist and The Merchant of Venice be banned from New York City public schools on the ground that Fagin and Shylock were "antiSemitic and anti-religious." Last week, State Supreme Court Justice Anthony J. DiGiovanna said no. He held that the test was whether either book had been "maliciously written" to rouse prejudice, ruled both Dickens and Shakespeare in the clear...
...terming the movie 'Oliver Twist' "sensitive and powerful," Mr. Friedrich offers no excuse for not prohibiting such a picture in America. Nor is the fact that Bill Sykes is as villainous as Fagin any reason to deny the poisonous hate expressed in the picture. For it is well-known that the majority group need never fear lest one of its members misbehave; whilst the persecuted minority is always categorized by the behavior of its worst rather than best, members...
...petition to the board, Goldstein charged that the books plant "in the student in our public schools the seeds of anti-Semitism . . . [which] will pay dividends in hate, prejudice, intolerance and bigotry for generations to come." The character of Dickens' Fagin, Goldstein maintained, "holds the Jew up to ... contempt, ridicule and depicts the Jew as as fiend ... a murderer . . ." Shylock was hardly better; "the synonym for usurer, cheat . . . hater of all Christians...