Is Inglourious Basterds Bad For Jews?

We’ve read a lot of reviews of the new Tarantino movie, but our favourite so far came out today in Tablet. Basically it says the new movie would be better if Tarantino was Jewish.

In his astutely worded takedown of the movie, Liel Leibovitz says that Tarantino’s revisionist history—where Jewish soldiers kill Nazis and burn Hitler alive—robs history of its shades of grey, and, thereby, this “bit of shallow propaganda” ruins the lessons we were taught by WWII.

It is a failure not only of imagination, but also of morality. The desire to turn film into a literal, blunt instrument of revenge drains it of the terrific power it has as a sharp and precise tool with which to cut through myopia, forgetfulness, ignorance, and denial. When in the hands of intelligent and sensitive directors, the results are shocking, evocative, world-changing.

Of course, all the filmmakers he goes on to name who do this well—Jean-Pierre Melville, Marcel Ophüls, and Claude Lanzmann—are Jewish.

Theirs is the Jewish way. Rather than burn film, they develop it into art. They are talmudic, offering endless interpretations to the fundamental question of our species, the question of our seemingly endless capacity for evil. Tarantino, however, is not interested in such trifles. He doesn’t see cinema as a way to look at reality, but-ever the child abandoned in front of the television set, ever the video-store geek-as an alternative to reality, a magical and Manichean world where we needn’t worry about the complexities of morality, where violence solves everything, and where the Third Reich is always just a film reel and a lit match away from cartoonish defeat.

So, add to the heaps of criticism of the movie that Tarantino isn’t Jewish enough to make a good movie about Nazis. We don’t agree with that. We believe that no matter the race, creed, or colour, people have the ability to make shitty movies in about equal degree.