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How I learned to laugh at neo-Nazis
I write about a lot of Jewish movies and TV across a big range — shows that examine different valences of Jewish identity, like Long Story Short, or that explore Hasidic life, like Shtisel. But there’s one common genre that ticks me off: The dire warning.
This is a common form of Jewishly-inflected media that crosses my desk. Maybe it’s a Holocaust movie or TV show. Maybe it’s about modern antisemitism. Maybe it’s about neo-Nazis. But the intent of all of them is clear, namely, to warn the public about the rise of extremist ideology. “We should all be very worried!” they scream at the audiences. “Nazis are everywhere!”
In Nuremberg, characters observe, in serious tones, that even seemingly normal people can be capable of great evil. Americans, they say, should watch out lest the German hatred arrive on their shores. In shows like A Little Light, about Miep Gies’ heroism in hiding the Frank family, the obvious message is about how everyday people must step up to fight evil Nazis. It’s all painfully heavy-handed.
I agree: We should learn from history, and we should be on alert for rising antisemitism. But this message also gets old. We grow numb to it. If the most effective way to prevent the return of fascism or Nazism was simply telling people “Nazi bad!” then there would never be any issue.
That’s why I was so fascinated when I finally watched One Battle After Another, after it won Best Picture at the Golden Globes and got a slew of Oscar nominations. Much of the movie is in fact a satire of Christian nationalism and its connection to Nazi ideology. And that satirical lens gives it a sharper, and more compelling, take than most of the movies on that topic I’ve covered.
The movie opens with the French 75, a leftist group whose exact commitments are hazy beyond a vague stance for immigration and against The Man. After some politica
l actions — freeing immigrants at a detention center while whooping “Viva la revolución!” — they end up disbanding when a raid goes wrong. The movie picks back up years later with former French 75 explosives expert Pat (DiCaprio) and his now-teenage daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti), who are living under the assumed identities of Bob and Willa, fearing that an old agent of The Man, Colonel Steven Lockjaw — played to perfection by Sean Penn at his most blusteringly punctilious — might be after them.
As it turns out, he is. See, Lockjaw is trying to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, a group of elite white supremacists and Christian nationalists — each member seems to be part of the billionaire class — dedicated to making the world “safe and pure.” Part of the interview process for Lockjaw involves swearing that he is “American-born by gentile” and never had an interracial relationship. But he has — he had an affair with Willa’s mother, a Black revolutionary member of the French 75. He suspects Willa may be his daughter, not Bob’s, and if she is, she could give away Lockjaw’s past sins to the Christmas Adventurers Club, who already suspect him of being “soft” in his “duty to racial purification.”
Much of the rest of the movie is a slapstick, absurdist chase. Bob, who has spent the last decade smoking weed and impotently lecturing his daughter, barely remembers his days as Pat the explosives expert. He can’t keep up with the new generation of activists, faceplanting into an alley when he tries to join three teens doing parkour across rooftops.
There’s a lot going on — examinations of masculinity in the military industrial complex, ego and political idealism, aging and activism. And, of course, the Christian nationalism and genteel racism woven into our elite institutions.
But One Battle After Another does not make a didactic parallel to the Christian nationalists in our current government; we don’t see a character, for example, brushing off praise for Hitler, as JD Vance did, or pleading for Norway to send us immigrants instead of “shithole countries” like Somalia, as Donald Trump just did. Instead, the Christmas Adventurers Club is simultaneously dizzyingly malevolent and completely ludicrous. Their solemn greeting is, “All hail Saint Nick.” A motherly figure offers banana pancakes to members as they march off to their clubhouse, as though they’re going to an adult Boy Scouts meeting not planning a murder. The secret knock to their underground bunker is tapped to the rhythm of “Jingle Bells.” Their statement of belief feels both true to the core of white supremacy, and completely, obviously unhinged: Members of the club are, they say, “superior to other human beings.”
The power of a movie or a book is that it lets someone explore and inhabit ideas through the story and characters. If you’re so worried that an audience will miss the intended message that you rush to tell them what it is, you end up preventing them from having the chance to really understand what the work is saying, or consider the questions it’s posing and come to their own conclusions. It rushes viewers to the finish line without giving them a chance to engage with the art.
It was a relief to watch One Battle After Another skewer the extremism of its villains, making them palpably freakish instead of just menacingly evil. It’s more effective to undermine an ideology by making it laughably strange than by scolding anyone who dares to agree with it.
Still, in case you missed the idea that the Christmas Adventurers were neo-Nazis, the end of the movie makes it pretty hard to miss. (Here’s your spoiler alert.) Lockjaw is told he has finally gotten approval to join the club, and is given a corner office. As he kicks his feet up on the desk and proudly leans back in his chair, a hissing noise begins; in fact, the club found out about his crime of interracial sin, and, like any good Nazis, they’re gassing him for it.
After all, there’s really no winning with Nazis.
The post How I learned to laugh at neo-Nazis appeared first on The Forward.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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Netanyahu’s Torah exemption pledge highlights election stakes
Sometimes a statement can contain multitudes, or at least provide a crystallizing moment in an election campaign. So it was when Benjamin Netanyahu, while criticizing the detention of about 40 Haredi draft evaders by military police at Ben-Gurion Airport this week, declared in a radio interview: “We need to protect the world of the Torah … But whoever doesn’t study must serve in the military.”
Netanyahu was effectively saying that yeshiva study should continue to be, as it has been under an informal arrangement, a free pass out of military service – and he went on to repeat a pledge to turn this into law. It is a position opposed by the overwhelming majority of Israelis.
The statement came amid such a calamitous two-week stretch for Netanyahu’s campaign leading up to the Oct. 27 election that it has some people joking that agents of the opposition might have infiltrated Likud headquarters and taken charge.
In a tragicomic episode, one of Netanyahu’s chief propagandists called leading opposition candidate Gadi Eisenkot – a former military chief who is of Moroccan Jewish background – a “monkey” who is under the control of Ashkenazi elites.
Yinon Magal, who has described himself as a vessel for Netanyahu’s messaging, made the comments on Channel 14, the pro-Netanyahu propaganda TV channel where he is the leading host. He later filmed himself explaining that the simian reference, in Israel’s mafia parlance, merely refers to a junior criminal who is a puppet of more heavyweight mafiosi. His clarification did little to stem the tide of criticism.
As Netanyahu awkwardly tried to distance himself, he also charged that opposition figures had used racist slurs, referring to a recent podcast interview with businesswoman Galia Albin in which she said his supporters are Mizrahis who plan to vote for him mindlessly.
Then came leaked comments (made last year) by Haredi Rabbi Dov Lando, leading spiritual leader of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party – proclaiming that Zionism had brought disasters upon the Jewish people, that life under Arab rule would have been preferable and that religious Zionist soldiers were being killed because their rabbis taught them “distorted Torah.” Once again, outrage boiled over, and received mostly silence from the Likud.
Donald Trump’s enthusiastic endorsement of Netanyahu might have qualified as good news – but the U.S. president seemed to connect a Bibi reelection to a renewed assault against Iran. That rests on the dubious assumption that Israelis are eager for another few weeks (or more) in bomb shelters.
A punctuation mark arrived a few days later with reports, albeit unverified, that Netanyahu actually had planned to attack Iran earlier this month but was blocked by Trump. Many expected that scenario, which would have been interpreted as a gambit to delay, by dint of national emergency, an election in which he’s badly trailing in credible polls.
Polling is not available on every such twist and turn of the campaign, but decades of studying Israel and a nose to the ground tell me none of this is popular. And there is no question that most Israelis want to end the draft evasion by Haredim. Recent polls put support for that at 85 percent, which essentially means all non-Haredim.
The issue, as I have said before, is easily the most effective axe for the opposition to grind – because the current situation with the Haredim is utterly untenable.
Tens of thousands of Haredi men of military age remain outside the draft system, while soldiers and reservists from other communities carry an increasingly intolerable burden that has ,in many cases, reached hundreds of days a year.
Whether all those registered as yeshiva students genuinely study – a central question for some people – should be beside the point. Why should Torah study confer a privilege unavailable to Israelis studying physics, medicine, engineering or law? Why should one form of education exempt citizens from defending the country while every other form does not?
The consequences of the Haredi parties’ extortion extend far beyond the army. Israel has created an incentive system in which prolonged religious study preserves military exemptions, public subsidies and a way of life often characterized by economic dependence. Many Haredi educational institutions reject the core curriculum essential for participation in a modern workforce, even as the state helps finance them.
This is an extraordinary arrangement for a country whose security depends on its economic strength, and whose economic strength depends on scientific education, technological innovation and a highly skilled workforce.
Demography makes the issue existential. Haredim already account for roughly one-sixth of Israel’s population, and their exceptionally high birth rates – almost seven children per family on average – mean their share will continue to skyrocket. Unless patterns of education, employment and military participation change dramatically, Israel faces the prospect of an ever-smaller proportion of its citizens supporting and defending an ever-larger population.
The danger is compounded by the mobility of the people on whom Israel’s prosperity depends. Engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs and physicians have opportunities elsewhere. If enough conclude that the country’s trajectory has become irreversible, the resulting brain drain could be catastrophic.
Earlier this year, my friend Rabbi Hershel Grossman arranged for me to meet senior rabbis associated with the Mir and Hebron yeshivot. They were gracious and pleasant, but strikingly candid about their opposition to compulsory core education, military service and ordinary employment whenever these conflicted with Torah study. More troubling was their confidence that demographic change would eventually give their community decisive political power.
The necessary alternative is a comprehensive overhaul of the incentives governing Haredi education, military service and employment. Every child should receive a core curriculum. Young adults should perform military or meaningful national service, with appropriate accommodations for religious observance. Public funding should encourage economic participation rather than prolonged dependence.
Opposition parties promise various versions of such plans. None of this will be easy, and it will not be accomplished by dialogue alone. But the alternative is a version of national suicide. There is no question that – alongside accountability for Oct. 7 and the demand for an independent state commission of inquiry – the future of Haredi military service, education and economic participation belongs at the center of this election.
So why would Netanyahu effectively say that studying Torah should entitle an able-bodied young man to exemption from military service?
There are several possible explanations for this – and the rest of the parade of seeming political misjudgments.
One might be a calculated strategy of mobilizing the base through fear and resentment rather than persuading the center. This might be useful in various scenarios involving a messy outcome of the election.
The others might be overpowering hubris, a toxic contempt for the public or the myriad other pathologies that often accompany too long a time in power.
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