Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger

Image credit: Nicolas Guerin/Corbis

Early in the spring of 1944, when I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before I killed him, he cried like a little Nazi bitch.

Then I woke up, ate a bowl of Rice Krispies, and walked to school—the Howard T. Herber Middle School—where a sixth-grade pogromist named Patrick Harrington and his Cossack associates pitched pennies at me in a game sometimes known as “Bend the Jew,” which ended, inevitably, with me being jumped for refusing to pick up the aforementioned pennies, and also for killing Jesus. It is in part because of young Mr. Harrington and his lieutenants that I would later join the Israeli army, and that, more recently, I found myself sitting beside Quentin Tarantino’s pool in the Hollywood Hills, listening in wonder as the writer and director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction diagnosed what he saw as the essential, maddening flaw of every Holocaust movie ever made.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

It is true that most—some might even say all—films about the Holocaust focus on the persecution of Jews. The Holocaust was very bad for Jews; this is an immovable fact of history. But Tarantino isn’t wrong to suggest that the cinematic depiction of anti-Semitic persecution can become wearying over time, particularly for Semites. In Judd Apatow’s comedy Knocked Up, Seth Rogen’s character praises Steven Spielberg’s Munich for featuring Jewish assassins: “Every movie with Jews, we’re the ones getting killed. Munich flips it on its ear. We’re capping motherfuckers!”

Munich, though, is a neurotic’s delight in comparison to Tarantino’s preposterous, sporadically brutal, and greatly entertaining new film, Inglourious Basterds. (The misspellings are intentional, for reasons that Tarantino won’t fully explain.) Though he opens the film with the murder of a Jewish family in a French farmhouse, he spends much of the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour film allowing his Jewish characters—including a beautiful young woman named Shoshanna, the only survivor of the farmhouse massacre—to beat Nazis, scalp Nazis, burn Nazis, and carve swastikas into the foreheads of Nazis. Inglourious Basterds is part Dirty Dozen, part Sergio Leone, part Leon Uris—but not much Night and Fog or Shoah, and certainly not much Schindler’s List. (Spielberg is too nice a Jewish boy to have a U.S. soldier tell a Gestapo officer, before shooting him, “Say auf Wiedersehen to your Nazi balls!”) The film also contains suggestions—intentional or not—of Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS and Springtime for Hitler. But Tarantino, a famously derivative filmmaker, has managed to create out of these parts something that seems entirely new: a story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-Western justice to their would-be exterminators.

The film tracks two separate, though converging, plotlines: the revenge conspiracy of Shoshanna, who, after her escape from the almost comically evil SS officer Hans Landa, recreates herself as a cinema owner in Paris; and the deployment in occupied France of the “Basterds,” a squad of American Jewish Nazi-hunters led by an officer nicknamed “Aldo the Apache,” who is played by Brad Pitt and who is meant to be a Tennessee hillbilly, not a Jew, because even Quentin Tarantino understands that there are limits to plausibility. Shoshanna’s plan and the Basterds’ mission come together in Paris, with world-historical consequences. Suffice it to say that Tarantino brings about the end of World War II in a way that would please Jews, and most everyone else, including devotees of David Bowie, who sings “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” as the Third Reich collapses. Along the way, the Basterds terrorize German soldiers and even Hitler himself.

On one level, Inglourious Basterds is a sophisticated and knowing evisceration of fascist cinema—the war ends, essentially, in a conflagration in Shoshanna’s theater. And because this is Tarantino, scenes of unmediated gore are interrupted by debates about German movie-making, including a discussion (whose participants include Winston Churchill) of whether Joseph Goebbels runs his movie studios in the manner of Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick. But it is the unapologetic depiction of an alternate reality in which Jews torture and murder Nazis that made this film particularly interesting to a veteran REM-state Mengele-killer such as myself.

Early in the film, Aldo the Apache announces the goals of his unit: “We will be cruel to the Germans, and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, and disfigured bodies of their brothers we leave behind us.” Soon enough, the Basterds are committing war crimes, beating prisoners to death and collecting the scalps of dead Germans. “Every man under my command owes me 100 Nazi scalps,” Aldo demands.

The horror-movie director Eli Roth—his film Hostel is the most repulsively violent movie I’ve ever seen twice—plays a Basterd known as the “Bear Jew,” whose specialty is braining Germans with a baseball bat. Roth told me recently that Inglourious Basterds falls into a subgenre he calls “kosher porn.”

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, says that after reading the first draft of Inglourious Basterds, he told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherfucker, because this movie is a fucking Jewish wet dream.” Harvey and Bob Weinstein, the film’s executive producers, also reportedly enjoyed the film’s theme of Jewish revenge.

Tarantino told me he has received only positive reactions from his Jewish friends. “The Jewish males that I’ve known since I’ve been writing the film and telling them about it, they’ve just been, ‘Man, I can’t fucking wait for this fucking movie!’” he told me. “And they tell their dads, and they’re like, ‘I want to see that movie!’”

It is not an accident that it took a non-Jewish director to concoct this story of brutal Jewish revenge. It is difficult to imagine a Jew in Hollywood—each one more self-conscious than the next—portraying Jews as vengeance-seeking knifemen. Neal Gabler, the author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, told me that Jewish revenge fantasies aren’t entirely alien to the movie industry, but they’ve always been exercises in sublimation, Superman being only the most obvious. “Jews have gone from being nonexistent in film to being thoroughly represented, but no Jew would ever make a film like Inglourious Basterds,” Gabler said. “It’s too brazen.”