The Film, An Education: Anti-Semitic or Just the Facts?

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Tuesday, January 5, 2010 at 11:11am

The Film, An Education: Anti-Semitic or Just the Facts?

Column: Spiritual Psychology

In his aptly titled book Greedy, Cowardly and Weak: Hollywood's Jewish Stereotypes, psychoanalyst Henry Kellerman writes about glaring examples of Jewish stereotypes in popular Hollywood movies since the 1930's—from the 1931 Dracula starring Bela Lugosi to the 2005 film Prime with Meryl Streep and Uma Thurman. When I interviewed Dr. Kellerman on a radio talk show last spring I pointed out that there are also ample positive portrayals of Jewish men and women in films. Jews are often shown to be smart, successful, and champions of social justice. In contrast, other racial and ethnic groups are more strictly stereotyped, especially before intolerance became politically incorrect in public expressions. Consider the long history of outrageously demeaning stereotypes of African-Americans, which only began to ease up after the Civil Rights movement.

The recent movie Inglourious Basterds provided me with some potent ammunition with which to challenge Kellerman. In this film, which takes place during World War II, Jewish recruits are selected to parachute behind enemy lines in occupied France to kill Nazis—and, when the opportunity presented itself, to wipe out the Nazi high command. I reminded Kellerman that these brazen commandos are far removed from the weak, helpless or passive stereotype. In his typical over-the-top fashion, director Quentin Tarantino depicts them as brutal and vengeful—even sadistic. "True," agreed Kellerman, "but who was the leader of the commando unit? A Christian. Wouldn't you agree that this reinforces the stereotype that Jews can't be leaders?" I disagreed. In fact I thought that making a Kentucky "hillbilly" captain of the commando outfit was a brilliant touch by Tarantino. It countered the redneck stereotype of Appalachians, while at the same time extending the film's appeal to the wider non-Jewish audience. Here was a smart, cunning "hillbilly" who liked Jews and hated Nazis. Kellerman didn't buy my evaluation.

But when I saw the new British film An Education I began to give more credence to Kellerman's position. An Education, drawn from a memoir by noted British journalist Lynn Barber, with a screenplay by best-selling author Nicholas Hornby is a moving coming-of-age story superbly performed by an international cast of British and American actors. Set in the early 1960's, it centers on Jenny, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl trapped in a boring bourgeois London suburb with a controlling and penny-pinching father and a pre Betty Friedan housewife mother. Jenny longs to escape to the exciting worlds of her books and fantasies—especially Paris. An excellent student, she knows that getting into Oxford would be the first step on her journey to a thrilling new life.

Then a chance meeting with a man nearly twice her age offers an opportunity to accelerate her dream. David is handsome, sophisticated—very British—and rich. He takes a fancy to Jenny–and as we quickly learn he's a man who easily gets what he wants, with his smooth talk and irresistibly seductive offers. Sitting in his flashy Bristol sports car he spots Jenny waiting in the rain for a bus. He offers her a ride home. She initially refuses to get in the car but allows him to transport her cello while she walks next to the slow-moving auto. Commenting on the Elgar concert rehearsal that she just played in he says, "Jews and Elgar don't mix." She thinks he's referring to her and responds, "I'm not a Jew." "I am," he fires back.

What was the point of his starkly telling us he is Jewish? When I heard these lines, I assumed that we would soon learn the reason and that his religion would be intrinsic to the plot. In fact, this never happens. What we do witness, though, is a series of familiar stereotypes. David is a sleazy entrepreneur. He will do almost anything to make a crooked pound. His main business is moving black Caribbean families into white neighborhoods. That panics the old ladies to sell out at low prices, he tells Jenny. "The schwarzers" [a demeaning Yiddish term for blacks] have to live somewhere, he rationalizes. He and his business partner also steal artworks from homes that are for sale.

Identifying David as a Jew reinforces traditional negative stereotypes but adds nothing to the main theme of the film: an older man seducing a young woman with entree into the magical world of expensive restaurants, posh nightclubs, and travel to exotic places. Immediately after Jenny succumbs to David's offer of marriage, she stops preparing for the Oxford entrance exam and drops out of school. Her fantasy explodes when she stumbles on letters in the glove compartment of David's car addressed to Mr. and Mrs. David Goldman. David is married and has two children. In a brief encounter with David's wife, Jenny learns that David has a history of similar seductions, and has even impregnated some of his young victims.

The film includes a few gratuitous, or half-hearted, efforts to soften the anti-Semitic message. When Jenny tells the prim director of her school that her boyfriend is Jewish, the headmistress replies in horror, "A Jew? But you're aware, I take it, that the Jews killed our Lord." To which Jenny responds, "And you're aware, I suppose, that our Lord was Jewish" When Jenny's parents hear that that the man who will be taking her to dinner is Jewish, they seem surprised but not shocked or dismissive. If it were an issue at all for them, it is trumped by David's charm, wealth, and Oxford education—not surprisingly, we eventually learn he's not an Oxford man, or a graduate of any university.

In Lynn Barber's memoir, her older lover is Jewish: an Israeli who speaks with a foreign accent. But does that mean he must be Jewish in the film with the stereotypes punctuated—especially when his ethnicity has no relevance to the story, except to fan the fires of prejudice? Filmmakers routinely change facts to enhance drama and to adapt books to the visual medium. A film version of a book might deemphasize or eliminate facts and themes to avoid distractions and maintain focus and momentum. It's not uncommon for a movie to change a character's sex, profession, and personality—or even to turn a sad ending into a happy one. That's why so many authors are fearful of what a director will do with a book after the rights are sold.

Screenwriter Hornby altered a number of facts and invented others—which author Barber doesn't seem to mind. In her memoir she tells us, "The first draft stuck very closely to my story, which cruelly exposed the fact that it had no proper ending – it reached a dramatic climax and then dwindled away. Over the next few drafts he battled to create a good ending and eventually did; he also fleshed out characters who had been no more than names before and created whole scenes that were not in my story at all. The girl who used to be me became a cellist in the school orchestra, and bought a Burne-Jones at auction, and went to Walthamstow dog track, none of which I did, while her parents slowly mutated from infuriating dinosaurs into perfectly reasonable human beings....The only bad thing Nick did was to change Simon's name to David, because that was my husband's name [the man she married in 1971]."

Hornby didn't care for the name Lynn either; he changed it to Jenny in the film. In the introduction to the published screenplay of An Education Hornby explains that he changed the name to free him up to fictionalize the memoir: "Lynn became Jenny after the first draft or two; there were practical reasons for the change, but it helped me to think about the character that I was in the process of creating, rather than the character who existed already, the person who had written the piece of memoir: I could attempt to raise the stakes for Jenny, whereas I would have felt more obliged to stick to the facts if she had remained Lynn."

There is also no indication in the book that the real Simon/David was a compulsive serial seducer. He continued to pursue Lynn/Jenny at Oxford—and even years later. And he didn't disappear immediately after the revelation of his deception. "My parents were white with shock," reports Barber. "Unlike me, they had no inkling before that Simon was dishonest. My mother cried. When Simon came that evening, my father went to the door and tried to punch him. I heard him shouting, 'You've ruined her life!' From my bedroom window, I saw Simon sitting in the Bristol outside with his shoulders shaking. Then my father strode down the front path and kicked the car as hard as he could, and Simon drove away. I found the sight of my father kicking the car hilarious and wanted to shout out of the window, "Scratch it, Dad! Scratch the bodywork - that'll really upset him!"

The last scene in the movie shows a resilient Jenny rebounding after her dream bubble bursts. She settles into the life of an Oxford student. We see her bicycling with her collegiate student boyfriend. But Barber's memoir paints a less wholesome picture of her university life: "I probably slept with about fifty men in my second year. My fantasy in those days was to meet a stranger, exchange almost no words, jump into bed, and then talk afterwards."

Clearly, sticking literally to the book is not a persuasive argument for emphasizing the Jewish theme since so many other facts were changed to create desired effects. The question remains, why did the movie make a deliberate point of establishing David as Jewish? Was it mindless literalism? Was it unconscious or even conscious prejudice on the part of the filmmakers? David's being Jewish did not add to the descriptive power of the film. In one sense it weakened it. Older men seducing and deceiving young women for personal gratification is not new or germane to any one ethnic group. The theme runs through the literature and legends of every culture.

Surprisingly, none of the major reviews give more than passing notice, if any notice, to the Jewish stereotyping that, for me at least, leaped off the screen. On the contrary, this aspect of the film gets the Emperor's-new-clothes treatment, as if it were not there at all. The New York Times uses the word "Jewish" once in a string of other adjectives to describe David. Variety and, USA Today ignore the subject entirely, as does Time-Out New York , which reviewed the film right after its screening at the Sundance Film Festival last January. In the UK, where An Education was first shown, the reviews also ignore the Jewish theme. The Times, Independent, Mirror and Scotsman make no mention of David's religion. The Telegraph only notes that the headmistress is dismayed that Jenny's boyfriend is Jewish. And the London Observer commented that among David's qualities was his "exotic Jewishness." But David's Jewishness was not pictured as exotic in the film. And this is an odd comment, since the UK has been notable for its exclusionary class-conscious society and anti-Semitism, particularly during the era depicted in the film—and currently there is a rising tide of anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish sentiment reported in the British press.

Why should Jews be concerned? In a London Times interview Lynn Barber announced:
"Distribution rights have been sold to practically every country in the world — Greece and Turkey were the last to go — so people in Bangkok, in Bahrain, in Budapest will be watching my Twickenham childhood." Many of these countries have less than favorable views of Jews, if not outright hatred. An Education is likely to reinforce and intensify their prejudice.

Since prejudice has historically hidden behind denial and silence, it's important to bring the issue to the fore, at the very least to remind moviegoers how easily stereotypes can creep into a film regardless of the filmmaker's intent. I don't believe the producer, director or writer had a malicious motive in this instance. But without further clarification from them, An Education will stand as an education in more than one way.

— — —
Bernard Starr, Ph.D., formerly professor of developmental and educational psychology at the City University of New York, now teaches "Psychology and Spirituality in Film" at Marymount Manhattan College and is producer and host for Phoenix Rising Television Productions. In addition to his work in radio ("The Longevity Report"), he is a longtime contributor of commentary and opinion articles to numerous major newspapers and other publications. He is also the President of the Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy and is the main United Nations representative for the Institute of Global Education that founded the Mucherla Global School in Mucherla, India.

— — —
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[Christopher Marlowe]

Yes. Everyone will see this movie about a British girl being seduced by a Jewish man and then there will be a holocaust. This whole article is so pathetic. As if Jews aren't commonly presented as heroes and the source of morality in Hollywood movies.

The beginning of the article starts off by presenting the idea that the author wants to debate the other side of this argument, i.e. he wants to debate another Jews by saying that Jews are shown in a good light in films.  But the authors one example, "Inglorious Basterds" is shown to be weak because those Jews are led by a "Christian".  That is an example of a straw man: the author (pathetically) cannot think of any examples of positive portrayals of Jews in movies, so the lazy reader is to assume that it cannot be done. Then the author is confronted with this movie, made from a memoir about a girl who was seduced by no-good Jew.  That was the real story, but the author is upset because the film maker didn't change the seducer into a black man.  Or a Christian preacher.  Just as long as the villain isn't a Jew, because that would lead to a holocaust.

The author is also upset because the real-life Jewish man was not a serial seducer, as he was presented in the movie.  The Jewish man in the movie made money from playing races against each other through shady real estate practices, but it is interesting that the author isn't upset about this and DOESN'T say that the Jew in the book didn't make his money this way. Shady real estate deals is a Jewish stereotype. In my own experience I have found that some stereotypes come about because they are true. There is a term, "Jewish Lightning", that refers to Jews buying insurance on overvalued real estate, like old apartment buildings, and then burning down the buildings and collecting the insurance. Notice that the term isn't "Scottish Lightning" of "Puerto-Rican Lightning".  I think that this term came about after insurance investigators kept running into names like "Goldberg" and "Silverstein" on fraudulent insurance scams.  A famous example of this is Larry Silverstein, who bought the WTC 6 weeks before 9/11, and then made $4.5 BILLION insurance.  The WTC could be called an overvalued "white elephant" because it had asbestos that would cost many millions to remove. Prior to selling the WTC to Silverstein, the New Jersey port authority had applied twice for permits to bring the towers down by controlled demolition.

The author also tries to diminish the bad actions of the Jewish villain, basically a seduction under false pretenses, by noting that the girl went off to Oxford and slept with 50 different men.  This is interesting to me because the author is basically acting like the Jewish man's defense attorney by painting the girl out to be a whore. That works fine on the jury, but for me I'm still left with the fact that this guy was a bastard because he lied by hiding his marriage in order to seduce this girl. Her whorish behavior after the fact could just as easily be blamed on the older Jewish man's mistreatment of her virginity. This touches on another Jewish sterotype because Jews have a history of using women as whores in prostitution and in the porn industry. The porn industry is dominated by Jews and the nation of israel imports thousands of young girls from Eastern Europe to work in their whore houses.  

As long as we are discussing stereotypes, another Jewish stereotype is for Jews to stick together and defend each other's criminal behavior no matter what. Jews will say that the accused Jew is innocent. (Leo Frank) Or they will say that the crime wasn't so bad and that everybody was doing it. (Mark Rich)  Or they will say that Jews were the only victims. (Bernie Madoff) Or much later, they will say that the convicted Jew has served his time and should be pardoned. (Jonathan Pollard)  Their cause for perversely sticking together and defending other Jews, no matter what, is called Shanda fur di Goyim.

The Yiddish phrase "Shanda fur di goyim" refers to (Jewish) embarrassment at a fellow Jew doing something Really Bad in front of non-Jews. In other words, don't wash your dirty linen in public. Do we have problems? Of course. There have always been problems. But, the phrase suggests, be careful: the world tends to look at "the Jews" as one people and what one Jew does reflects well – or badly – on the rest of us. According to this idea, doing something bad is bad enough, but it becomes much worse when it reflects badly on the entire Jewish people.

As the passage suggests, if people heard about the bad things that Jews did, the non-Jews would be inclined to holocaust the Jews. If I didn't know better, I would be reminded of the mafia practice of "Omerta":

Omertà implies "the categorical prohibition of cooperation with state authorities or reliance on its services, even when one has been victim of a crime." A person should absolutely avoid interfering in the business of others and should not inform the authorities of a crime under any circumstances (though if justified he may personally avenge a physical attack on himself or on his family through the use of vendetta). Even if somebody is convicted of a crime he has not committed, he is supposed to serve the sentence without giving the police any information about the real criminal, even if that criminal has nothing to do with the Mafia himself. Within Mafia culture, breaking omertà is punishable by death.

I wonder what Jews must think about having their cultural taboos styled after the actions of a criminal gang.  

Another Jewish stereotype is that they claim to be the most picked-on people in the world.  "Poor us. The whole world hates us for no reason.  They burned up 6 Billion of us in world war II for no reason except that we are highly flammable." This article is another example of this victim mentality: A book about a Jewish seducer was made into a movie, and the author is upset because the screenwriter didn't turn the seducer into another race. The author sees that the screenwriters efforts to make the seducer into a more hateful character has to be based on anti-semitism, just because everybody hates Jews for no reason.  It couldn't be for the reason that this makes the movie more dramatic.  It couldn't be for the reason that this would tend to heighten the conflict, which is what a screenplay is supposed to do.  The author of this piece might be interested to know that Shakespeare made a lot of changes to English history, and for the same reason.  Presenting Richard III as a legitimate heir would make the audience much less inclined to hate him when he tricks and murders his way to the throne.  Richard III is a great villain, and it looks like the screenwriters were trying to make the Jewish seducer into a better villain.  

It is unfortunate that Jews can no longer be used as villains because the crazy Nazis took everything literally about the fractional reserve lending scam, and the Jewish porn industry, and the Jewish turning white girls into whores, and Jews hiring each other into Universities and as Judges, and taking over medical schools, and forming business monopolies. The crazy Nazis took all of those stereotypes literally, and burned 666 trillion Jews after raking them up in a big pile, and by putting the fat ones on the bottom to get the fire going.  And since everyone now has a proclivity to burn Jews for no reason, we can no longer make Jews into villains.  From now on Jews have to be heroes. They can also be victims, lining up naked in the snow to take zyklon-B shower, or getting blamed for the rape and murder of a young factory worker, or falsely accused of being a spy... but not villains.  Jewish villains will lead to certain death. People are so anxious to kill Jews that they will move heaven and earth to do it.  Did you know that those devious nazis captured a submarine, pulled out its massive diesel engine and brought it down to Poland, and then rigged up a miniature gas chamber using a farmer's cottage?  Adolph Eichmann confessed to this before they hung him in israel. A lot of people might think that it is a stupid waste of time and energy to carry a diesel engine over hundreds of miles in order to gas people. They might say that a diesel engine wouldn't even be useful for gassing people because diesels don't produce enough carbon monoxide, or that a farmer's shack would tend to leak gas. But this is an example of how crazy-mad people get when they want to kill the Jews.  Even Germans, who are otherwise thought to be excellent engineers, will rig up the most wasteful method of killing.  Sure, it would be easier to just shoot people in the head like the Jewish run communists did in the Soviet Union.  But when people see a Jewish villain in a movie, and get into a crazy mood to kill Jews, they do crazy things like bury millions of bodies and then dig them up again and burn them in a pile with the fats ones on the bottom.  They do all of these insane things, but then afterwards they manage to cover it up so that there isn't a single trace of mass graves or even a paper trail showing a single order to do it.  

That is why Jews can't be the villains, even when they actually are the villains. That is why Jews have to relentlessly stick up for one another and tell little white lies. That is why the Omerta, I mean the "Shanda fur di goyim" must be upheld.  Otherwise it is curtains for the Jews.  And by that I mean that they will be made into lampshades, mattresses and curtains.

[sullivan]

He will do almost anything to make a crooked pound. His main business is moving black Caribbean families into white neighborhoods. That panics the old ladies to sell out at low prices, he tells Jenny. "The schwarzers" [a demeaning Yiddish term for blacks] have to live somewhere, he rationalizes.

In this case, fiction is not that far away from fact.  Peter Rachman, the notorious London landlord did exactly what is described above. This filthy exploiter even gave his name to a new term in the Oxford English Dictionary, "Rachmanism", a euphemism for greed and unscrupulousness.  His reputation didn't stop him being buried in a nice Jewish-only cemetery when he died though.