Word: holocaust
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Should there be a moratorium on Holocaust movies? Stuart Klawans, the film critic of the Nation, says so in the Jewish magazine Nextbook (but not, oddly, in the Nation), and Ella Taylor tentatively endorses the suggestion this week in the Village Voice. Since these are two of the movies' most thoughtful commentators - who each happen to be Jewish - the proposal deserves consideration...
...Edward Zwick, the TV producer (thirtysomething) and maker of Important Films (Glory, Courage Under Fire, Blood Diamond), writes in the New York Times that he felt a similar Holocaust-movie fatigue when offered the idea of a film on the Bielski brothers, a band of real-life Jews in Belorussia during World War II. "I groaned, 'Not another movie about victims,' " he writes. But he went ahead and made Defiance anyway...
...Adam Resurrected - are in theaters. A sixth, Valkyrie with Tom Cruise, is a Holo-cousin: it details a 1944 plot by German officers to kill Hitler. Taylor notes that since the early 1990s, when Steven Spielberg was preparing his Oscar-winning Schindler's List, there have been 170 Holocaust movies. (The Internet Movie Database lists 429 titles on the subject.) It has become not just a topic but a genre, one that, at its most reductive, exploits the awful events of that chapter in history to badger viewers, intimidate critics, elicit easy tears and serve as a back-patting machine...
...that says nothing about the larger issue inherent in Good. We dare not forget the Holocaust. Before and since, there have been genocidal events that are comparable to it in scale and savagery. But never have we witnessed a nation with a civilization as high as Germany's succumbing to such carefully calculated inhumanity. Nor has the mystery of that nation's behavior during the Nazi era remained so insolvable, so beyond the reach of art and scholarship, so beyond the reach, certainly, of earnest, inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe...
...connected whether we like it or not, and our collective energies can change things for the better, while our collective indifference can kill us. Nobel Prize-winning author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel knows this all too well. What must Wiesel be thinking right now? His Foundation for Humanity destroyed by a big-shot Jewish financier? Impossible. But the foundation had $15.2 million under management with Bernard Madoff Investment Securities. This represented substantially all of the foundation's assets. And the double hit for charities like Wiesel's is that there will be no tax recovery available...