User Reviews

Mr. Bloomstien, please broaden your coverage next time.

I had hoped to get a thorough examination of antisemitism. I had hoped that it would go into details and ironies like Edward I's expulsion of the Jews and Cromwell's welcoming them back. I'd even appreciate the mention of Le Affaire Dreyfus.

BUT Noooooooo, all I got was the version Woody Allen jokes about with the fixation on the Nazis and a rapid segway to the deadly perils of embattled Israel. This isn't rocket science: You know what you are in for when your talking heads include Bernard Lewis and Allen Dershowitz but not Noam Chomsky nor Norman Finkelstein.

An unexpected vignette which is a real gem is where the director (I assume) interviews Hanan Ashrawi, then 14 years younger than we see her today. This is indeed a class act with her poised, thoughtful and articulate enumeration of her values and how she maintains a humanistic balance when all about her is occupation and chaos, maintaining her calm even with the constant badgering of the director

The first part of the film shows the anti-semitic attitudes of the leaders of the Catholic Church and European Catholics. The second part explores the anti-Judaism in the Middle East. One premise of the film is that Christianity must take responsibility for the Holocaust. To make their point, the film makers use Catholicism to represent all Christians (which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 or 6), and interview a racist Catholic priest and some European Catholics to show how Jews are thought of by all Christians as the killers of Jesus. As a member of a Christian church whose doctrine is that members of the House of Israel (obviously including Jews) are God's chosen people, I found this disturbing and unfair. Anyone that blames any person or group of people for the death of Jesus does not understand His divine nature as the Son of God, nor His purpose as the Savior of the world. The entire purpose of His mortal mission was to be crucified for the sins of the world, and to be resurrected so that all of us will be resurrected. Had He not allowed Himself to be crucified, He simply would not have been crucified. The Nazis may have used the "Christ-killers" idea in the beginning in order gain approval for their actions, but they did not exterminate six million Jews because of some religious zeal. Hitler was an atheist, and his anti-Jew attitude had nothing to do with religion. Using Jesus' death as a basis for anti-Judaism is a perversion of true Cristianity, just as terrorism is a perversion of Islam. The film goes on to show the anti-Jew and anti-Israel attitudes in the Arab world. I am not Muslim, nor have I ever been to the Middle East, so I cannot offer any credible commentary on that portion of the film, but some of the things that were said by anti-Jew Arabs seemed to me to be utterly ridiculous. All-in-all, it is an educational, if somewhat dated (the interviews appeared to be from the 70s and 80s), film about a very serious current issue.

An excellent documentary. I must have seen a completely different film than ETO Buff, because s/he complains that all Christians are lumped in with Catholics. It is important to note that once upon a time there were no non-Catholic Christians, and naturally Rome plays an important role in this doc. However, Martin Luther was also covered, and the point was made that even though Christianity is a "faith of love", it can still unassumingly inherit a warped view of the Jews.

So, I hope you'll give the film a try. It's not an attack on Christianity, just an explanation of how over time, Jews came to represent different ideas to different people. Unfortunately, those ideas are by and large negative ones, and really don't have much basis in reality.

A very important presentation on a long misunderstood subject. Bloomstein's documentary presents a reflective representation of the strained and complicated historical relationship between nationalism(s), Christianity in its various manifestations and the parent religious tradition that begot it, Judaism. From the time of the late Roman Empire, through the Crusades and on to post-Communist Poland and Russia, adherents of the Jewish faith have endured an unwelcome environment in the lands in which they've dwelled. If you are, for instance, looking for legitimate "reasons" to explain the surprising behavior behind much of this planet's citizenry during the horrific period known as the Holocaust, this film makes a fine choice to begin that investigation. - B. Hobbs