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‘Life is Beautiful’ hit US theaters 25 years ago. The film’s Holocaust humor raised issues that linger today.
(JTA) — Ferne Pearlstein re-watched “Life is Beautiful,” Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film, around 2015. She was working on her documentary “The Last Laugh,” which focused on the possibilities — and limits — of Holocaust humor.
Pearlstein was struck not by how subversive Benigni’s film felt, but how tame it seemed. In the 2000s, she argued in a recent interview, Holocaust humor had become so much more ubiquitous, if not always accepted. Joan Rivers had made a joke about Nazi gas chambers on national TV. The blockbuster “The Hangover” — directed and produced by Jewish filmmaker Todd Phillips — casually tossed in a Holocaust joke. The topic has been a longstanding part of Sarah Silverman’s standup routine.
But when “Life is Beautiful” hit U.S. theaters 25 years ago last month, it rocked Hollywood and beyond by attempting to infuse humor into the setting of a concentration camp.
“I, too, remember watching it when it came out, and being amazed that anybody would have taken the time to have represented part of our story that way,” said Rich Brownstein, the author of a book about hundreds of Holocaust-themed films.
Benigni, by then a well-known Italian comedian, starred in the movie as Guido Orefice, a charming Italian-Jewish drifter who repeatedly uses his wit to get out of bad situations. In the opening days of World War II, he courts a non-Jewish woman who was set to marry a local Fascist commander, eventually marrying her and having a son.
By 1944, once the Nazis occupy Italy, Guido and his young son are taken away to an unnamed concentration camp. For the rest of the film, set in the camp, Guido attempts to shield the truth of their predicament from his son — by pretending their entire imprisonment is a game. Guido suffers under the torture of forced labor, but he finds the strength after a day’s work to keep the charade up for his son, to keep him from drifting into despair.
The film — all in Italian — was a surprise hit, and its awards season campaign was nearly as memorable as the film itself. Throughout the campaign, Benigni charmed American audiences with wild interviews and awards acceptance speeches in which he climbed upon theater seats and spoke in broken but enthusiastic English. At the Oscars in 1999, his movie won three awards, including for best foreign language film and best actor.
“This is a terrible mistake because I used up all my English,” Benigni said from the Oscar stage after winning best actor, in his second speech of the night. “I am not able to express all my gratitude, because now, my body is in tumult because it is a colossal moment of joy so everything is really in a way that I cannot express. I would like to be Jupiter! And kidnap everybody and lie down in the firmament making love to everybody, because I don’t know how to express.”
Audiences loved the film too, as it became the highest-grossing foreign language film in U.S. history at the time (although “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” surpassed it two years later).
Some critics loved “Life is Beautiful,” seeing the film as funny, inspirational and original.
“The film finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter. And Benigni isn’t really making comedy out of the Holocaust, anyway,” Roger Ebert wrote. “He is showing how Guido uses the only gift at his command to protect his son. If he had a gun, he would shoot at the Fascists. If he had an army, he would destroy them. He is a clown, and comedy is his weapon.”
The film was an enormous critical success, winning three Oscars, including best actor. (Steve Starr/Corbis via Getty Images)
But many others, from Jewish comedians to academics, were not as kind. Israeli author Kobi Niv wrote an entire book, in 2000, called “Life is Beautiful, But Not for Jews: Another View of the Film by Benigni,” which was critical of the film.
“Oh, Benigni was clearly setting himself up for trouble and he knew it,” Columbia University film professor Annette Insdorf, also an author of a book on the Holocaust in cinema, said at the time.
Many of the comedians Pearlstein interviewed for her film — who included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Gilbert Gottfried and Judy Gold — took issue with the fantastical feel of Benigni’s movie. Guido’s son is able to avoid the Nazis by hiding in the camp’s bunker, something that would not have been possible, Pearlstein noted.
But she added that the bold choice to set much of the film in a camp was a larger trigger point.
“It is sort of verboten to a lot of people to have the camps a part of it, the gas chambers,” she said. “As soon as you evoke those images, it becomes verboten for people, even if the joke was not about the victims.”
Brooks might have been expected to be a fan of “Life is Beautiful,” as someone who had shocked audiences in the late 1960s with “The Producers” — which featured a Broadway musical starring Adolf Hitler as a major plot point. He also mined the Spanish Inquisition for laughs in “History of the World, Part I.” But he hated “Life is Beautiful,” calling it “a crazy film that even attempted to find comedy in a concentration camp.”
“It showed the barracks in which Jews were kept like cattle, and it made jokes about it,” the World War II veteran told German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2006. “The philosophy of the film is: people can get over anything. No, they can’t. They can’t get over a concentration camp.”
Brooks also took issue with the fact that Benigni was not Jewish. “Tell me, Roberto, are you nuts?” he said in the Spiegel interview. “You didn’t lose any relatives in the Holocaust, you’re not even Jewish. You really don’t understand what it’s all about.”
Benigni’s Catholic father reportedly spent two years as a prisoner in the Bergen-Belsen camp, however, and the filmmaker used his recollections of that time in crafting the story. He also consulted with Italian Jewish groups and used Italian Auschwitz survivor Rubino Romeo Salmonì’s memoir “In the End, I Beat Hitler” as further inspiration. Salmonì often used black humor in describing his Holocaust experiences.
Benigni said Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” one of the earliest satires of Hitler, was another influence.
“This is an homage to the master, because I love this movie, and, of course, making a movie — a comedy about [a] concentration camp, I watched this movie a lot of time,” Benigni said at the time.
Pearlstein said that “intent” and “execution” of Holocaust humor are also hugely important. Brooks, she said, “makes a complete distinction between humor about the Nazis versus humor in the camps.” Brownstein agrees.
“There are great Holocaust films made by gentiles, including ‘Cabaret,’ ‘Inglourious Basterds,’ ‘Au revoir les enfants’… and there are horrible Holocaust films made by Jews, including ‘Jojo Rabbit,’” he said. “To make a film of any kind, successfully, you have to have your kishkes in it.”
“Jojo Rabbit,” Taika Waititi’s comedy-drama about a Nazi-era German boy who learns lessons about hate as he becomes disillusioned with the Hitler Youth he once admired, faced a similar gantlet of criticism when it debuted in 2019. Some found the main Jewish character to be hollow, or Waititi’s performance as Hitler — as imagined by the child protagonist — as too light. But the film also won Waititi — a New Zealander who is Māori and Jewish — critical acclaim, and he has since become one of Hollywood’s most in-demand directors.
Pearlstein thinks Holocaust humor will never fully disappear, even in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, which was among the worst attacks against Jews since World War II.
“There might be a dip for a little time. Think about 9/11 — here was a dip, and then people need it; it’s a survival mechanism,” she said. “And that is why you always hear about Jewish people and using humor, because they have used it to survive through the worst of times.”
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Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, Israel, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS
Israel has informed the International Criminal Court that it will contest arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant over their conduct of the Gaza war, Netanyahu’s office said on Wednesday.
The office also said that US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham had updated Netanyahu “on a series of measures he is promoting in the US Congress against the International Criminal Court and against countries that would cooperate with it.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last Thursday for Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri, known as Mohammed Deif, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move comes after the ICC prosecutor Karim Khan announced on May 20 that he was seeking arrest warrants for alleged crimes connected to the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas and the Israeli military response in Gaza.
Israel has rejected the jurisdiction of the Hague-based court and denies war crimes in Gaza.
“Israel today submitted a notice to the International Criminal Court of its intention to appeal to the court, along with a demand to delay the execution of the arrest warrants,” Netanyahu’s office said.
Court spokesperson Fadi El Abdallah told journalists that if requests for an appeal were submitted it would be up to the judges to decide
The court’s rules allow for the UN Security Council to adopt a resolution that would pause or defer an investigation or a prosecution for a year, with the possibility of renewing that annually.
After a warrant is issued the country involved or a person named in an arrest warrant can also issue a challenge to the jurisdiction of the court or the admissibility of the case.
The post Israel Has Told ICC It Will Contest Arrest Warrants, Netanyahu Says first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage
Shomrim officers at the scene of a hate crime in London in which Jewish girls were struck with glass bottles. Photo: Shomrim Stamford Hill/Screenshot
A group of young Jewish girls were the victims of an “abhorrent hate crime” when a man hurled glass bottles at them from a balcony as they were walking through the Stamford Hill section of London on Monday evening.
One of the girls was struck in the head and rushed to the hospital with serious but non-life threatening injuries, according to local law enforcement.
A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said officers were called to the Woodberry Down Estate in the city’s borough of Hackney following reports of an assault on Monday evening at 7:44 pm local time.
“A group of schoolgirls had been walking through the estate when a bottle was thrown from the upper floor of a building,” the spokesperson said. “A 16-year-old girl was struck on the head and was taken to hospital. Her injuries have since been assessed as non-life changing.”
Police noted they were unable to locate the suspect and an investigation is ongoing before adding, “The incident is being treated as a potential antisemitic hate crime.”
Following the incident, Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and serves as a neighborhood watch group, reported that the girls were en route to a rehearsal for an upcoming event. The community, the group added, was “shocked” by the attack on “innocent young Jewish girls,” calling it an “abhorrent hate crime.”
14-year-old girl rushed to Hospital with head & facial injuries following an attack in #StamfordHill.
Young Jewish girls on their way to a rehearsal were pelted with glass bottles by a male on a balcony at Woodberry Down Estate N4.
This… pic.twitter.com/MzHPHusgyX
— Shomrim (London North & East) (@Shomrim) November 26, 2024
Since then, another Jewish girl, age 14, has reported being pelted with a hard object which caused her to be “knocked unconscious, and left feeling dizzy and with a bump on her head,” according to Shomrim.
Monday’s crime was one among many which have targeted London Jews in recent years, an issue The Algemeiner has reported on extensively.
Last December, an Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by a man riding a bicycle on the sidewalk, two attackers brutally mauled a Jewish woman, and a group of Jewish children was berated by a woman who screamed “I’ll kill all of you Jews. You are murderers!” A similar incident occurred when a man confronted a Jewish shopper and shouted, “You f—king Jew, I will kill you!”
Months prior, a perpetrator stalked and assaulted an Orthodox Jewish woman. He followed her, shouting “dirty Jew” before snatching her shopping bag and “spilling her shopping onto the pavement whilst laughing.” That incident followed a woman wielding a wooden stick approaching a Jewish woman near the Seven Sisters area and declaring “I am doing it because you are Jew,” while striking her over the head and pouring liquid on her. The next day, the same woman — described by an eyewitness as a “serial racist” — chased a mother and her baby with a wooden stick after spraying liquid on the baby. That same week, three people accosted a Jewish teenager and knocked his hat off his head while yelling “f—king Jew.”
According to an Algemeiner review of Metropolitan Police Service data, 2,383 antisemitic hate crimes occurred in London between October 2023 and October 2024, eclipsing the full-year totals of 550 in 2022 and 845 in 2021. The problem is so serious that city officials created a new bus route to help Jewish residents “feel safe” when they travel.
“Jewish Londoners have felt scared to leave their homes,” London Mayor Sadiq Khan told The Jewish Chronicle in a statement about the policy decision earlier this year. “So, this direct bus link between these two significant communities [Stamford Hill in Hackney and Golders Green in Barnet, areas with two of the biggest Jewish communities in London] means you can travel on the 310, not need to change, and be safe and feel safer. I hope that will lead to more Londoners from these communities using public transport safely.”
Khan added that the route “connects communities, connects congregations” and would reassure Jewish Londoners they would be “safe when they travel between these two communities.”
However, it doesn’t solve the problem at hand — an explosion of antisemitism unlike anything seen in the Western world since World War II. Just this week, according to a story by GB News, an unknown group scattered leaflets across the streets of London which threatened that “every Zionist needs to leave Britain or be slaughtered.”
Responding to this latest incident, the director of the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs UK Isaaz Zarfati told GB News that the comments should be taken “seriously.”
“We are witnessing a troubling trend of red lines being repeatedly crossed,” he said. “This is not just another wave that will pass if we remain passive. We must take those threats and statement seriously because they will one day turn into actions, and decisive steps are needed to combat this alarming phenomenon.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Jewish Girls Attacked in London With Glass Bottles in Antisemitic Outrage first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks
Israeli soldiers gesture from an Israeli military vehicle, after a ceasefire was agreed to by Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, near Israel’s border with Lebanon in northern Israel, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
While US President Joe Biden hailed the new ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on Tuesday as a “courageous” step toward peace, security experts and residents of northern Israel voiced starkly contrasting sentiments, criticizing the agreement as falling far short of addressing the ongoing threats posed by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group.
“I applaud the courageous decision made by the leaders of Lebanon and Israel to end the violence. It reminds us that peace is possible,” Biden said one day before the ceasefire took effect on Wednesday.
He added that it was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” vowing that Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, would “not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”
But according to Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi, a resident of northern Israel and the founder and director of Alma — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — the ceasefire deal, the details of which have not been made public, is nowhere close to establishing peace.
“Let’s not be mistaken. Ceasefire is not peace,” Zehavi told The Algemeiner. “There is a gap between the two and in order to bridge the gap, we need a thorough change in Lebanon and in the Iranian involvement in the region.”
According to Zehavi, the deal was problematic at the outset because it was based on UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Second Lebanon War and has been criticized for its historical ineffectiveness. Zehavi highlighted the failures of the Lebanese army and UNIFIL [UN Interim Force in Lebanon] troops in enforcing the resolution in the past, warning that the same could happen again.
As part of the deal, Israel has insisted on retaining the ability to enforce the resolution independently, but this approach carries risks, Zehavi said. “If we enforce the resolution, it means that there won’t be a ceasefire. If there isn’t a ceasefire, it means that Hezbollah will retaliate, and we will continue the ongoing fighting.”
Hezbollah had already violated the terms of the deal within hours of its signing, with operatives disguised as civilians entering restricted zones in southern Lebanon, including the villages of Kila, Mais a-Jabal, and Markaba, despite warnings from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Another sticking point is the lack of safeguards preventing Hezbollah from rearming, leaving Israel reliant on Lebanese assurances. “After what happened on [last] Oct. 7, Israelis are not willing to enable Hezbollah to recover,” Zehavi asserted. “We cannot rely on just promises; we need to make sure that Hezbollah is not capable of threatening us and our families over here in the north.”
The international community, Zehavi argued, has a crucial role to play in pressuring Lebanon to sever its ties with Hezbollah. So long as Lebanon does not designate Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, she said, the Shi’ite Muslim group will continue to exert influence over the country and therefore pose a threat to neighboring Israel. Members of the group hold influential positions in the Lebanese government, including ministers who control border crossings and airports, facilitating the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon.
Zehavi also pointed to Iran’s declaration that it will help rebuild both Lebanon and Hezbollah, even while continuing to funnel weapons and financial aid into the terrorist group through smuggling routes.
“As long as the ayatollahs of Iran continue to nourish proxy militias in the Middle East against Israel, we are not going to see peace,” she said.
Other northern residents similarly argued that halting the fight against Hezbollah now would give the terrorist group an opportunity to rebuild its arsenal, strengthen its forces, and potentially replicate the scale of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel’s northern region.
“We never learn. Just like in 2006, and many other times, we stop at the brink of total victory, handing our enemies the opportunity to rebuild and return years later, stronger and deadlier than before,” said Moti Vanunu, a resident who was evacuated from the northern town of Kiryat Shmona.
Gabi Naaman, mayor of the battered northern city of Shlomi, expressed skepticism that the ceasefire would bring lasting security to Israel’s northern residents.
“Everything we’ve seen indicates that the next round is inevitable, whether it’s in a month, two months, or ten years,” he said.
Despite her reservations, Zehavi explained that Israel had no real alternative but to accept the ceasefire, citing the need to provide northern residents with a return to normalcy and to provide the opportunity to the IDF to resupply ammunition and allow soldiers time to recover. “We had to choose between two bad options,” she said.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in the north were forced to evacuate their homes amid unrelenting rocket, missile, and drone attacks from Hezbollah, which began firing on Oct. 8 of last year, one day after Hamas’s invasion of and massacre southern Israel from Gaza. Israel had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah across the Lebanon border until it ramped up its military efforts over the last two months, moving ground forces into southern Lebanon and destroying much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes.
While Zehavi viewed the timing of the campaign’s start in September — ahead of the challenges of fighting during the winter months — and not in May as a strategic error, she applauded the army’s achievements of the past two months.
In a poll conducted by Israel’s Channel 12 News on Tuesday night, half of those surveyed felt there was no clear winner in the war against Hezbollah. Twenty percent of respondents believed the IDF emerged victorious in the war, while 19 percent thought Hezbollah prevailed. A further 11 percent were unsure who had the upper hand.
The post Biden Lauds ‘Permanent’ Ceasefire, but Northern Israelis Warn It Opens Door to Future Hezbollah Attacks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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