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In HBO’s new Stephen King series, the Holocaust is fuel for jump scares
This article contains spoilers for the first episode of the HBO Max series It: Welcome to Derry.
In the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry, it’s immediately clear that the local high school has a bullying problem. Kids stuff pickle jars in the locker of a girl whose father died in a pickle jarring accident. The Bert the Turtle mascot (it’s set in 1962 after all) is knocked around. But among the bullies stands Theodore “Teddy” Uris, a kinder, more compassionate teenage boy. It may come as no surprise that he’s Jewish.
A prequel to the 2017 movie of It, based on Stephen King’s novel, the series starts with the disappearance of the friendless and abused Matty Clements. Teddy immediately feels guilty, wondering if he could’ve prevented Matty from running away by being nice to him. Teddy’s friend Phil, who is much more interested in spying on female neighbors as they undress, doesn’t understand why Teddy cares.
Jewish men are often painted as less masculine and more sensitive than their non-Jewish counterparts. This is sometimes done derisively, although in Derry, which was developed by Andy and Barbara Muschietti, the brother-sister director-producer team behind It and It Chapter 2, and Jason Fuchs, co-writer of Wonder Woman, it makes Teddy one of the most likeable characters.
What feels more shocking is the way the show incorporates the Holocaust to torment him, although King’s work has mined the Holocaust for horror fodder in the past, such as in the novel Apt Pupil.
Shabbat dinner at the Uris household starts off normally, with the Hebrew prayers for wine and challah (incorrectly identified as “Yiddish” in the subtitles). Teddy, who is haunted by the idea that Matty is still alive, asks his dad, Rabbi Uris, if it’s possible for someone to be held underground for months. His father chides Teddy for what he thinks is his son’s wild imagination. Rabbi Uris reminds Teddy that his grandparents survived Buchenwald, where Jewish skin was allegedly turned into lampshades.
“We are Jews, Theodore,” he says. “We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough as it is. Cut it out with the fantasy.”
That night, as Teddy reads a Batman comic, his lamp begins to turn off on its own. The third time he turns it back on, he is greeted with a lampshade sewn out of groaning faces.
Although the episode is packed with creepy moments — some are so overdone as to verge on parody — this scene feels the most disturbing. You may or may not believe in the two-headed devil baby that flies at us in the beginning of the episode, but the horrors of the Holocaust are very real. Behind the otherworldly spectre of the lampshade is true torture and abuse.
It feels almost exploitative to use the Holocaust for shock value. For many years, claims that Nazis turned the skin of Jewish prisoners into objects were seen as too controversial to discuss. Some feared that the claims were so outlandish, it would give credence to Holocaust deniers. Although it’s not clear if this was a common Nazi practice, at least one lampshade recovered from Buchenwald was confirmed to have been sourced from human skin. Should one really be using the skinned faces of Holocaust victims for a jump scare?
There’s something to be said for how Pennywise, Derry’s resident demon clown, mines the psychology of his victims to terrorize them, and surely the Rabbi’s comments about the Shoah affect Teddy’s young mind. But one can point to epigenetic Jewish trauma in other ways.
In It, the Jewish character Stanley Uris (Teddy’s nephew) is haunted in his synagogue by what looks like a surrealist Amedo Modigliani figure. It’s a Jewish haunting in setting and source (Modigliani was Sephardic), but it didn’t play on specific Jewish trauma the way the lampshade does.
Maybe the whole point of Derry is to take things up a notch from its predecessor. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches in the final scene of the episode: Multiple children are brutally murdered on screen, something most shows tend to avoid depicting in detail. The first — and most graphic kill — is Teddy.
The post In HBO’s new Stephen King series, the Holocaust is fuel for jump scares appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s Pager Attack Against Hezbollah Inspires New Spy Thriller With ‘Fauda’ Actors
An ambulance arrives at a hospital as thousands of people, mainly Hezbollah fighters, were wounded on Sept. 17, 2024 when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
Israel’s operation last year that involved the explosion of pagers carried by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon has inspired a new film by Bleiberg Entertainment, which will launch sales for the project at the American Film Market (AFM) next month, Deadline reported.
The spy thriller “Frequency of Fear” will star “Fauda” cast members Doron Ben-David, Itzik Cohen and Marina Maximilian, as well as Israeli singer and actress Daniella Pick Tarantino (“The Perfect Gamble”), who is married to filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. The film is currently in post-production.
Israeli-American actor, director, and producer Danny Abeckaser is directing and producing with a script by Kosta Kondilopoulos. The two worked together previously on films including “Inside Man” and “The Engineer.”
The “Frequency of Fear” cast includes Ariel Yagen (“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”), actress and social media activist Emily Austin, Angel Bonanni (“Seven Days in Entebbe”), Herzel Tobey (“Damascus Cover”), Moran Attias (“Tyrant”), Aki Avni from Netflix’s “Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” and Yarden Toussia Cohen from the Apple TV+ series “Tehran,” according to Deadline.
The AFM, held this year from Nov. 11-16 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, is an annual event where members of the international film and television industry can meet and collaborate.
The covert Israeli operation took place in September 2024 and targeted members of the Iranian-backed Islamist terror group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon. The blasts took place over the course of two days, wounding thousands and killing more than 40 people. Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among those injured and reportedly lost an eye. The explosions took place across Hezbollah’s main stronghold in Beirut and in southern Lebanon. It was carried out following months of almost daily Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel and almost a year after the Hamas-led deadly terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023
Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad sabotaged thousands of explosive-laden communication devices, such as pagers and hand-held radios, before they were distributed to Hezbollah operatives. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Israel’s involvement in November 2024, telling his cabinet he had approved the operation.
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Documentary Festival in Amsterdam Bans Gov’t-Funded Israeli Film Institutions in Support of Israel Boycott
Illustrative: Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
One of the world’s largest documentary festivals has prohibited Israeli film institutions receiving government funding from participating in its event this year, in support of a Dutch and Belgian cultural boycott of Israel.
Every year, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) invites more than 300 independent films, 45 projects, and more than 3,000 professionals to the festival.
“These films and individual film professionals can come from any country, even if freedom of expression is under pressure in those countries or if human rights violations are committed in the name of governments,” an IDFA spokesperson explained to The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “Filmmakers and films with demonstrable ties to governments that contribute to serious human rights violations (for example, if a film or project has been financed by such government) will not be selected. Official government delegations or affiliated institutions from these countries are not eligible for official accreditation to IDFA.”
The festival will be held this year from Nov. 13-23.
The IDFA similarly explained its policy for next month’s event on its website under its “principles and guidelines.” The festival stated that it “does not claim to settle or resolve political debates, but rather to enrich them from an artistic perspective, thereby stimulating public debate and fostering understanding and individual growth.” Organizers also noted that the festival “cannot and does not want” to have a neutral position but instead hopes to be “a committed institution with a socially critical perspective.”
Despite participating in a boycott against Israel, IDFA further claimed that it aims to serve as a “safe space” for independent filmmakers, artists, and audiences, “where everyone feels welcome and respected and can express themselves freely even when perspectives differ.”
“At IDFA there is a plurality of voices, that established names and opinions can be critically questioned, that protests can be heard, and friction can exist to discuss social issues and contribute to change,” according to the festival’s website. “We must protect this open space, especially when things get complicated.”
IDFA organizers declined accreditation to Israel’s DocAviv Festival, the Israeli public broadcaster Kan, and the Israeli Co-Production Market because they receive partial funding from the Israeli state budget, according to Variety. Filmmaker and producer Michal Weits, who became Docaviv’s artistic director last year, released a statement criticizing global cultural boycotts of Israel. He called on colleagues in the international documentary filmmaking community not to “conflate the Israeli government with the state and its people.”
“This is the moment to strengthen liberal institutions and voices of dissent within Israel, and to ensure that they do not disappear,” he said. “The budgets allocated to cinema in Israel do not belong to the government; they belong to the public. They belong to the citizens, to the taxpayers. These resources enable us to amplify critical voices, to shed light on injustices, and to provide the broad platform we dedicate to filmmakers from across the world, offering audiences the opportunity to encounter urgent and meaningful cinema.”
The IDFA is among hundreds of Dutch and Belgian cultural organizations, artists, and cultural workers that recently signed a pledge to boycott Israel and Israeli entities that are complicit in alleged “grave human rights violations against the Palestinian people.” The signatories support boycotts of Israel in every field, including sports and music, like the Eurovision Song Contest.
“A cultural boycott alone cannot end the genocide, apartheid, or illegal occupation,” they said. “We thus echo longstanding Palestinian calls on the sports sector, academia, the economic sectors, and all spheres of politics to sever ties with complicit institutions.”
The group added that it is composed of “members of the Dutch and Belgian cultural sector, [who] wish to no longer remain bystanders to the ongoing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and what has been widely recognized by all authoritative institutions as a genocide of the Palestinian people.” Individual independent filmmakers and film professionals are not affected by the boycott.
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Harvard conservative magazine is shut down after publishing article laced with Nazi rhetoric
A conservative magazine at Harvard University was suspended by its board of directors Sunday amid scrutiny over an article published in September that closely resembled the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
In its September print issue, the Harvard Salient published an article by student David F.X. Army that read “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” echoing the words Hitler used in a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag in which he forecasted that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews.
The Harvard Salient piece also argued that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and called for a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” (The phrase “blood and soil” also echoes a Nazi idea that the inherent features of a people are its land and race.)
In a statement to the school’s newspaper, the Salient’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers, claimed that Army “did not intentionally quote Adolf Hitler, nor did any member of our editorial staff recognize the resemblance prior to publication.”
Rodgers continued, “The article was a meditation on how nations and cultures preserve coherence in an age of rootless cosmopolitanism and global homogenization. To confuse a defense of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer.”
The print edition of the article was placed in undergraduate dormitories last month. Harvard installed Salient distribution boxes in dorms in February after the publication, which is independent from the university, complained that students could not easily access its work.
The uproar comes as politicians and other public figures on the right have faced allegations that their rhetoric echoes that of the Nazis. It also comes as Harvard and other universities face pressure from the Trump administration to show that they are not clamping down on conservative voices.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had illegally frozen more than $2.6 billion in federal funding to the school as a “smokescreen” for advancing its political agenda. The Trump administration had frozen the funds over allegations that Harvard was persecuting conservative ideology on its campus as well as fostering a climate of antisemitism.
The school’s mainstream student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, published three opinion pieces criticizing the rhetoric used in the Salient piece, to which Rodgers published his own article last week lamenting that “ordinary conservative thought is one headline away from criminality.”
“Together, the coverage forms a coherent script. The conservative scholar becomes the reactionary theorist. The traditionalist student becomes the bigot,” wrote Rogers. “‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.”
On Sunday, the Salient’s board of directors brought the debate over the Salient to a close and announced that it would suspend its operations pending a review.
“The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material—material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands,” read the statement from the board, whose ex officio members include the prominent Jewish literature scholar Ruth Wisse.
“The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization. It is our fiduciary responsibility to investigate these matters fully and take appropriate action to address them,” the statement continued. “We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review.”
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The post Harvard conservative magazine is shut down after publishing article laced with Nazi rhetoric appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.