Defamation

Yoav Shamir is Israeli; he’s never experienced anti-Semitism so he sets out to understand it, following Israeli kids on a trip to Auschwitz, tracking Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, and talking to naysayers who don’t think anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism should be confused. What he finds is a traumatised people living, one way or another, in the past and emphasising self-justification over comprehension. It’s not a hatchet job; the traumas of the Holocaust are alive in the survivors and their children. But Shamir concludes, in a film that’s interesting but inefficiently edited and so far too long, that this petrified gazing at ancient horrors is damaging Judaism’s future.