First Run Features
Reviewed for Arizona Reporter by Harvey Karten
Grade: A-
Directed by: Yoav Shamir
Written By: Yoav Shamir
Cast: Abraham Foxman, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen M. Walt, John J. Mearsheimer
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 11/4/09
Opens: November 20, 2009

Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story,” may be the funniest documentary seen this year by Americans, but consider “Defamation” for sheer power, audience interest, a look at diverse groups all dealing with a single big, global issue, the nonfiction picture that should be rained upon with awards. Yoav Shamir, serving as cameraman and director simultaneously, deals with a catch-all theme: the nature of anti-Semitism today, a motif that evokes such controversial questions as: Can you be against Israeli policies yet not be considered anti-Semitic? Is anti-Semitism an organic poison that infests the body politic no matter what the world’s Jews are up to? Yoav, in interviewing a wide range of subjects, evokes even one fellow’s statement that anti-Semitism does not even exist, that you can put it “under a microscope” and see nothing. Journalists and politicians on the right and left battle out the issues either in front of each other or in separate filming locations, all of which rivets audience attention and keeps us spellbound not only from Shamir’s questioning, sporting a neutrality which summons up the work of Fred Wiesman, but by sharp editing from Morten Hojbjerg’s canny editing, which zips us away scenes at key moments thereby impacting their drama.

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Some Jews, we are told, see anti-Semitism everywhere, even blaming its toxins for their own failures. Others insist that Jews never had it so good, that statistically, Jews are the most prosperous ethnic group in the United States. There are, of course, opinions that stand between those two extremes, since as they say, put two Jews in a room and you get three opinions. People from all walks of life fall under Shamir’s lenses, including Blacks in Brooklyn, high-school students in Israel, a professor who had recently lost his job at a Chicago university, the head of the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), writers, professors, rabbis, Polish bystanders, you-name-‘em.

Shamir, a Tel Aviv resident who majored in philosophy and filmmaking, had already contributed “Flipping Out” which deals with Israeli’s military obligations, “Checkpoint,” about the barriers that the Israeli Defense Force places in the Palestinian territories, and “5 Days,” about the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza. He is at his best in capturing the enthusiasm and seriousness of a group of Israeli high-school students who travel to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, then on to Poland where they visit Auschwitz and where their hotel hijinks do an about face as the kids openly sob. (One student said that she has a serious problem, that the exhibits at the death camp have not gotten to her, and that she cannot cry. That problem was later remedied.)

Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League which has offices around the world with the mission of tracking anti-Semitic incidents, is the principal subject. But for sheer chutzpah, there is no character more obnoxious, and therefore of greatest audience interest, than Norman Finkelstein. Finkelstein, called a self-hating Jew (not without cause), had been the target of barbs from Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, strangely absent from this film. When Finkelstein was denied tenure by his Chicago college which claimed that he did not publish original research, the man blamed not himself but the “Israel lobby,” which had been snapping at his heels for years. The former professor, who in one segment gave a Nazi salute and said he did not care that the scene would be remain in the film, believes that America has fallen under the influence of the Israeli lobby, that there is an entire Holocaust industry that allows Israelis to maltreat Palestinians. “Nobody has had it worse than we,” is the theory that Finkelstein fights against, all of which is unusual considering that he is himself the son of Holocaust victims. Fink, uh, Finkelstein warns about “warmongers of Martha’s Vineyard,” which brings to mind that Colorado professor who called the victims of 9/11 “little Eichmanns.” His point is that American Jews are financing Israel, keeping the Jewish state alive and therefore a party to what he considers atrocities against their neighbors.

This is muscular, intelligent documentary filmmaking of the first order—trenchant, controversial, riveting.

DEFAMATION (Hashmatsa)
Unrated. 91 minutes. © 2009 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online