Marc Levin on his documentary Protocols of Zion

Marc Levin talks about his provocative documentary Protocols of Zion, and the impact of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, in an unpublished article I wrote for The Independent newspaper in 2005. With antisemitism surging around the world, Ken Livingstone obscenely linking Hitler to Zionism, and recent news that Gibson is working on a sequel to his biblical blockbuster, the article feels more relevant than ever.    

The New York filmmaker Marc Levin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. The dust had barely settled over Ground Zero and conspiracy theorists were already blaming the September 11 outrage on the Jews. First there came the claim that there were no Jewish victims -- there were hundreds. Then the allegation that four thousand Jews had not turned up for work at the World Trade Centre on the day of the attack. In Brooklyn, a rumour circulated that rabbis had tipped off their congregants. Later, Levin, a humanist secular Jew, encountered an Egyptian immigrant taxi driver who put all the stories together, insisting they were true because it was written in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a hundred years ago. “At that point I was like, ‘This is insane. What should I do?’”

Levin had good reason to be shocked. One of the most infamous examples of anti-Semitic propaganda, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion originated in Czarist Russia and purports to be a Jewish plan for world domination. Yet, despite being exposed as a hoax by The Times in 1921, the book became a crucial influence on Hitler, while one of the dictator’s most enthusiastic American supporters, Henry Ford, gave away a copy with every car. Disturbingly, it now appears that a new generation is turning to the Protocols for answers to their post-9/11 confusion.

“If somebody had told me in 1973, when I first read the Protocols, that this thing would be sold on the streets of New York, and would be sold out, I wouldn’t have believed it,” gasps Levin. “To me it was like a comic book from an age that had long gone.” 

But, as his unsettling if at times funny documentary, Protocols of Zion, reveals, Levin could not have been more wrong. Whether he is talking to a bookseller in the Big Apple, the tie-wearing front man for a White Supremacist organisation in the mountains of West Virginia, or a jailed member of the Nation of Islam, the story is always the same: the Protocols are hot. Even Malaysia’s Prime Minister, Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, appeared to have read them when he gave his incredible “Jews are ruling by proxy” speech, a clip of which is included in Levin’s documentary, at the opening of a 57-nation Islamic summit in 2003.

Maybe we should not be surprised. What with Prince Harry wearing a Nazi uniform to a party for a wheeze, Ken Livingstone refusing to apologise for likening a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard, and the Labour Party depicting the Jewish Leader of the Opposition as a pig and Fagin on pre-election campaign posters, it is hard not to feel that there is something in the air.

Meanwhile, according to the League of Human Rights of B’nai Brith’s 2004 audit of anti-Semitic attacks in Canada, media coverage of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ led to an upsurge of attacks against the Canadian Jewish community. In America the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has expressed concern that the Easter release of the Passion Recut will lead to the film becoming “the definitive version of the Passion story for the holy season”. Given this backdrop, the issues raised by Levin’s film are worth considering now, a few months before its US release.

“There are people in their 70s and 80s, like my brother-in-law’s mother who grew up in Poland and escaped right before the Nazis, who can still remember what Easter and Good Friday meant – they would hide,” says Levin. “Even before Nazism, it was fair game to burn some temples, kill some Jews, whatever. People are still alive that lived through that, so to ignore that is crazy.”

Levin wrote to Gibson because he felt that there were questions the Hollywood star needed to address, but neither Gibson nor his production company, Icon, replied. For Levin, the issue was not so much the film’s alleged anti-Semitism as “the context": how the film was released and discussed.

“[Gibson] was very skilful at making it a war with the Jews out to get him. A number of people have written that the martyr complex and violence, the two things that are glorified and celebrated in the Passion story, are the animating imagery in Mel Gibson’s life. So he would rather see himself martyred than as a peacemaker, bridge builder, or interfaith interlocutor. It fits his own self-image maybe more to be a battler who the Jews and others are after.

“That’s what disappoints me about the re-release of The Passion,” continues Levin, whose work, including the acclaimed docudrama Slam, has always been about trying to understand people from different communities, classes, races. “The guy already made half a billion dollars. He proved his point. So now why not use the movie to build some bridges, even if it’s to the more Orthodox Jewish and Muslim communities? Because, ironically, it is the most religious that have the most in common, because they’re all crazy. But I don’t see him doing that. And I can’t believe he’s not doing that.”

Maybe Gibson simply does not care, given the views of his Holocaust-denier father. There will no doubt be some who consider Levin’s inclusion of a recording of Hutton Gibson claiming that six million Jews were not killed by the Nazis but simply “upped and left” because they have to follow the money, a cheap shot. But, as the pugnacious filmmaker rightly argues, Hutton’s views form part of the background against which The Passion should be discussed.

“[Mel Gibson] thinks everyone’s trying to pit him against his old man. Hey, you could say you love your father and your father’s a great man but there are certain things you and he don’t agree on . . . but he’s never said that.”

The Passion section of Protocols of Zion, and a troubling journey through the world of perma-smiling evangelical Christians, takes us back to the historical roots of the deicide charge which led to the hatred underlying The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the Holocaust. “You can’t ignore the question: where does all this come from?” says Levin. “It goes back to the charge that the Jews killed Christ. The Jews are evil. The Jews conspired. They’re always conspiring. So, in that context, the Passion story is radioactive.”

Nonetheless, Levin ultimately views anti-Semitism as just a part of a bigger problem of religious fundamentalism, and, apparently, as a symptom of the human condition. The September 11 attack, he confesses, “rocked some of my humanist assumptions” and awakened in him the “kind of tribal instincts that can be so destructive. That may be one of the reasons I was able to make this film when I did,” he muses. “I don’t know if I would be able to make it now. But right then, in the post 9/11 world, I felt some of that ‘Fuck it, they just blew up part of my neighbourhood. This is personal. This is war. Who gives a shit about humanism anymore?’

“That’s something inside all of us that has been manipulated and exploited so successfully by the Bush administration in our country. But this religious fanatic impulse, and how it can use some of your own humanist, democratic, tolerant and open society against you to destroy you, how you wrestle with that and not fall into the trap of just becoming a crusader who blindly marches off and creates more Osama bin Ladens, that is a dilemma. I still don’t have an answer to it.”

Agnieszka Holland: In Darkness

Director Agnieszka Holland is striving for reality and honesty in her film about Polish Jews hiding from the Nazis

By Stephen Applebaum, March 8, 2012

It is late January and two days since Agnieszka Holland's tough Holocaust film, In Darkness, was nominated for the foreign-language film Oscar. She has been in this position before, but 2012 is the first time that the 63-year-old director has represented her homeland: Poland. On the night, the prize will go to Iran's A Separation. For now, though, Holland feels like she is carrying the weight of the Polish people on her shoulders.

"It's like God gave me the honour of Poles and now I have to win the World Cup," she says in heavily accented English. "Normally I am cool about these things, but today I am really nervous."

In Darkness has not been an easy project. Having covered the Holocaust in Angry Harvest and Europa, Europa, the film that broke her in America, and as a screenwriter on Andrzej Wajda's Korzcak - whose final scene led to Holland, the daughter of a Catholic mother and Jewish father, being branded antisemitic - she was not in a hurry to return to it again.

While its stories are charged with dramatic, psychological and moral potential, "you have to go into the reality very deeply, on many levels, for two or three years," she says. "So you read books, watch documentaries, watch movies, talk to people, and then you try to recreate the horrors without being superficial or kitsch. This process is so complicated and so painful that after finishing the film, you feel like you have been there in some way."

Holland (right) believes a tendency towards sentimentality has undermined recent Holocaust films.

The specific "there" in In Darkness is the rat-infested sewers of Lvov, where for 14 months a group of Jews hide from the Nazis following the liquidation of the ghetto, helped by a Polish Catholic sewer worker. The story is true but has so many incredible elements that even Holland admits she thought David Shamoon's screenplay was fiction when she first read it. Adding to this impression was the presentation of the Jewish characters as flawed individuals rather than the noble innocents often found in films. For someone who insists on the truth, in her life and her work, this honesty was appealing.

She was "irritated" by many of the Holocaust films made in the past 20 years or so, she says, because of the tendency of filmmakers to theatricalise events and, in particular, to draw moral conclusions. "I hated Life is Beautiful [Roberto Benigni's 1999 Oscar winner] for this reason. The philosophy of that was so offending to the people that went through this because it says if you love your child, you will save it. And what was worst about the Holocaust is that you could love your child, and still you could not save it… It wasn't that the right people were rewarded and the wrong people were punished, and this absurd, irrational meaninglessness is something which is crucial, I think, to this experience. If you try to embellish it and make it sentimental, you just lie." 

Her commitment to the truth in In Darkness has been praised by Krystyna Chiger, the last surviving member of the Lvov Jews, who declared the film to be "very, very realistic, and accurate. What happened was so terrible that you don't need to dramatise anything. Show the truth of how it was, I think this is the best way. And I think that Agnieszka did this." Chiger had heard about the movie only after filming was completed, something Holland blames on her Canadian producers. "They'd been doing the research and told me everyone was dead," she says. When she received a letter from Chiger, she immediately set up a screening for the Long Island-based retired dentist. 

"I showed her a rough cut of the film because I wanted her to have the possibility of making changes, but she didn't have any comments." What would have been the worst criticism she could have made? "That she found the spirit of the story wrong and emotionally didn't connect to it. It would mean that I'd shot very far away from the target. That, fortunately, didn't happen."

The relationship between Jews and Catholics in In Darkness, and in Holland's other Holocaust films, reflects the filmmaker's own "double identity" as a Pole and a Jew (the "battlefield", she calls it), and her personal experience of antisemitism. In contrast to her own openness, her father never spoke about being Jewish to her, and it was only when some children called her a "dirty Jew" while out playing, aged six, that she discovered this side of her heritage. "I felt intrigued and offended, and I asked my mother what it meant." Her mother, who as a member of the Polish underground had fought in the Warsaw uprising in 1944, explained that Holland's father was really Jewish and that his parents had died in the Warsaw ghetto. "She said I didn't need to feel ashamed or angry, and that I should be proud, and made a speech about Jewish martyrhood." Asked why her dad had been silent, Holland pauses for a moment. "I think he was traumatised. I think he felt guilty. He escaped at the beginning of the war and he left his family behind and they all died, except for one sister." 

He later died in mysterious circumstances while being held by the secret police under suspicion of treason, a victim of one of the post-war Communist regime's antisemitic purges. The Holland name was blacklisted and although Agnieszka had several opportunities to change it, she refused, feeling it her "duty to preserve the line."

Unable to go to film school in Poland, she studied in Prague instead. When she returned home, she struggled to get her films seen. In 1981, she went into exile in France and today lives between Los Angeles and Brittany. 

Does representing Poland at the Oscars feel bitter-sweet? "No, no, no," insists Holland. "After Communism fell apart I started to go there very often and got involved in the inner life, the social life, cultural life, and political life, even. This year I was listed as one of the 100 most influential and important people in Poland." She smiles. "So I am Polish, you know?"

From The Jewish Chronicle, 8th March, 2012

The Long Road Home

How Yaacov Weksler-Waszkinel reconciled his Polish upbringing with his Jewish roots

 

What makes a Jew? This was one of the questions at the heart of Israeli filmmaker Ronit Kerstner's documentary Torn, which screened as part of the 10th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival in partnership with UK Jewish Film last week.

A moving and thought-provoking study of a man struggling for recognition as a Jew, the film follows Romuald-Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel (now known as Yaacov Weksler-Waszkinel) - a Polish Catholic priest who, 12 years after his ordination, discovered that he was the son of Jews killed in the Holocaust - as he tries to settle in Israel under the Law of Return.

The statute doesn't recognise Jews practicing other religions, however, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs rejects his application for citizenship. Instead, he is granted temporary residency on a religious worker's visa. He tries to join Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu to study Hebrew and Judaism, but has a request that initially dumbfounds its leaders: he wants to be able to leave on Sundays to observe Mass at a nearby monastary.

A compromise is found allowing him to worship privately in his room. But one kibbutznik still wants to know: “Who are you, Yaacov? Are you a Jew? Are you a Christian?”

Although the question has haunted him for most of his life, sitting in a small screening room at the Everyman cinema in Hampstead it seems clear that the gentle 69 year old is a man at peace with himself, having reconciled his seemingly irreconcilable Christian and Jewish identities through the love of his adoptive and murdered parents.

“The only reason I cannot say no to my Polish parents is their love for me,” he says. “The only reason that, for the rest of my days, I am going to shout that I am Jewish, is my love for my Jewish parents. The rest is the Holocaust. My only fault is to be born at the wrong time, and to survive.”

Circumstance has made him a Jew who cannot deny Jesus, the Jew he believes plucked him to safety, but he doesn't feel torn. It is the world that wants to tear him apart, he insists, “because people like to have clear and strong divisions . . . I simply want to be both. My life has formed me in this way and I believe I can't be otherwise. Without my Jewish parents I would have no life. Without my Polish parents, my life would have perished.”

The latter were devout Catholics who showered him with love. He had no reason to think he wasn't their offspring, although he did sometimes wonder why he didn't share their Slavic features. So did other people. “I had black curly hair and on the street they called me 'Yid',” he says. “Children would say, 'Who are your parents?' It was a big problem.”

He asked his doting mother, Emilia, what a Jew was because he had never met one (and wouldn't until the anti-Zionist purges in 1968, the same year he found out about the Holocaust), but waited decades before asking her if he was one himself. “I was afraid,” he says candidly. “When I went to church all I heard was bad things about Jews, like Jews murdered Christ. And when I went to my religion lessons, the sister who was teaching us showed us pictures by Bosch with all kinds of frightening types that Hitler, apparently, had used to portray Jews. I didn't want to be somebody like that.”

He would often search for evidence of his father in his face in the mirror. One day he thought he'd spotted something. “I shouted, 'Mum, look, I am similar to Dad, aren't I?'” His mother didn't reply. “Because of that silence I said, 'If I am a Jew, you will see what I am going to do to myself.' When I looked in the mirror, I saw tears in my mother's eyes.”

It was a profound moment that years later, on 23rd February, 1978, when he finally confronted the ailing Emilia about his origins, she said was the reason why she'd kept the truth from him for so long. “She told me, 'What, do you think that we don't love you? How could we tell you if we knew that you could take your life?'” Yaacov understands: “I really believe that if I had been told earlier, today I would be in a psychiatric ward, because it was too strong an experience for me.”

Emilia could only tell him that he was born in the ghetto in Swieciany and that his father was a tailor; she didn't know his biological parents' names. These were revealed in 1992, when Klara Jaroszynska, a Polish nun who had helped Jews during the war, went to Israel and met survivors from Swieciany who knew that the town's only tailor was called Jacob Weksler (he died in the Stutthoff concentration camp). He then discovered that his mother was Batia, a Zionist, and that he had an older brother, Samuel – they both died at or on the transport to Sobibor. When he was shown a photograph of Batia, “I found the first person who I was similar to,” he says tearfully.

There were living relatives too – an uncle and an aunt - who'd escaped through Russia and were living in Israel. They knew nothing about him. When they met, his uncle wanted to know how, as a priest, Yaacov could “cope with carrying the hatred of 2000 years”? “I burst out crying,” he says, “because there is no answer to that. No words can express the hurt that Christianity has caused Jews for 2000 years. But one answer sprang into my head: 'But, darling Uncle, I am not 2000 years old, I am only 49, and I love you. And it's me who has found you, not you who has found me.'”

Returning to Poland, Yaacov became more and more aware of the antisemitism that was still being preached from pulpits by Catholic priests. He felt isolated and lonely, and as his retirement as a philosophy professor at the Catholic University of Lublin approached, he decided to move to Israel.

Today he is a permanent resident and works at Yad Vashem, who've named his Polish parents Righteous Gentiles.

"Yad Vashem is not my place of work it's my home,” he says, “because I am both an exhibit and a researcher. I belong in that time and everything that I find there is not about the fate of some nation or something, it is the fate of me and my parents.”
 
A shorter version of this story appeared in The Jewish Chronicle, 23rd March, 2012