Remember that scene in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up (2007) where Seth Rogen somewhat counter-intuitively sings the praises of Steven Spielberg’s Munich (2005) because it depicts tough Jewish protagonists who kill other people instead of being killed themselves? I say “counter-intuitively” because, of course, Spielberg’s film wasn’t exactly celebrating all the killing and it was, indeed, wracked with angst and guilt over the propriety of it all.
Last month, that scene, plus the then-impending release of Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, prompted The Screengrab to post a list of ‘The Top 12 Tough Jews in Cinema‘, and some people have been looking forward to the release of Edward Zwick’s Defiance later this year because it will give us more of the same, in the form of a Jewish resistance leader who fights back against the Nazis during World War II and is played in the film by Daniel Craig.
As it happens, Craig played one of the more cold-blooded Israeli killers in Munich — and to make things even more complicated, some critics noted that his character, who is blond-haired and blue-eyed, exudes a Nazi-like racism when he says things like, “The only blood I care about is Jewish blood” — and now, reports Variety, people are beginning to protest that the character he plays in Defiance had something of a dark side too:
Protests are mounting in Poland against Daniel Craig starrer “Defiance,” directed by Edward Zwick, which locals say wrongly portrays three real-life brothers living in the Nazi-occupied country as wartime heroes.
The movie tells the story of the Jewish Bielski brothers who escape into the Belarusian forest where they join Russian resistance fighters and build a village to protect themselves, eventually saving the lives of more than 1,200 Jews.
Craig plays the oldest brother and leader of the forest rebels, Tewje Bielski.
But Poles say that the Bielskis were murderers and have started a campaign to tell the truth about the supposed “heroes.” . . .
Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, which has been probing the subject since 2001, has collected documentation confirming that the forest resistance launched brutal attacks on neighboring Polish villages during World War II and joined Russian partisans in other raids.
It includes a massacre of 128 people in the village of Naliboki in the Nowogrodzkie region of Belarus, then northeast Poland.
Polish historian Jerzy Robert Nowak said: “We Poles are furious. It is a scandal that anyone could think of making a film casting the murderers who massacred Polish villagers as heroes. They were not heroes, they were murderers and bandits.” . . .
I know absolutely nothing about the history behind this story, except for what Wikipedia tells me of course, so I cannot comment on the veracity of these charges. By the same token, I doubt the protestors have actually seen the film yet — I don’t believe it comes out anywhere until December — so it may be a bit too early to complain that it does or doesn’t address this aspect of the story. At any rate, I wouldn’t write it off as full-blown hagiography just yet.
I do find myself wondering how older, even biblical examples of Jews fighting back against oppression would be handled in today’s more complicated artistic and political climate. Israeli director Amos Gitai’s Esther (1986; my comments) has already drawn attention to an often-overlooked passage of that book, which talks about how the Jews living in the Persian Empire killed hundreds of people and “did what they pleased to those who hated them.” And I wonder what a filmmaker might do with the Maccabees, some of whom are regarded not only as Jewish heroes but as Christian saints as well — so I use the term “hagiography” above advisedly.
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