From the Defamation website:

“I first had the idea to make a film about anti-Semitism when my earlier work Checkpoint was released. In one of that film’s many reviews, I was called ‘the Israeli Mel Gibson,’ not because of my good looks, but because the views I had expressed, critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, indicated that I was anti-Semitic. The author of that review was Jewish himself.

At first I thought it was amusing. Being called an anti-Semite by an American Jewish reporter seemed completely farfetched. How could someone who chooses to live outside of Israel, who did not do military service like me, who did not lose a grandfather in the war like me, have the nerve to call me an anti-Semite?

Until then I had never considered the central role that anti-Semitism plays in our lives. Upon reflection I realized that it is a constant buzz, always in the background, always annoying. After a while, you simply get used to it. How often are we really disturbed by the hum of an electric fixture or the drone of passing cars? Anti-Semitism may follow us like a shadow, but then again, who really notices his shadow on a daily basis?

Once I did start noticing it, I realized that anti Semitism is actually a very popular topic in the Israeli discourse. Not a day goes by without at least one article in the newspaper mentioning ‘Nazis,’ ‘the Holocaust,’ or ‘anti-Semitism.’ Having never experienced anti-Semitism myself—the closest I came was being compared to Mel Gibson—I decided to learn something about the subject.”

“A nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origin and a collective hostility towards its neighbours.”

(From the website of Sand’s book.)

“Notoriously, Crumb is a gentile who fled from his deeply dysfunctional Delaware family to the Cleveland neighborhood of Harvey Pekar and the arms of the first of two Jewish wives. [...]

Unlike previous Biblical comic adaptations, including some published and drawn by Jews, Crumb’s characters actually look Jewish, the women even more than the men. The contrast to the classic work, EC Comics’ “Picture Stories from the Bible” (1945) in that respect is most illuminating. But more recent works like the best-selling “Manga Bible” (2000) are not much different (nor was the “The Wolverton Bible” by one of the strangest of comic artists Basil Wolverton). [...]

Close readers will see Crumb’s wife Aline Kominsky, to whom the book is dedicated, again and again, in various guises; perhaps only Chagall drew his beloved wife so often and with such varied imagination. Not only are the characters Jewish here, they are all ages and sizes. [...]“

People have been imagining the characters of the Bible in their self-image for ages, so there’s nothing new about that. I’ve seen Moses black, blond, and everything in between.

But doesn’t saying that “Jews” look a certain way suggest they’re all similar, of a certain background or ethnicity?

If you’re only talking about the Kominskis, Yiddish descendents from Long Island, who knows, maybe you can generalize. But what about, say, Moroccan Jews, or Iranian Jews, or Ethiopian Jews?

Do they “actually look Jewish”?

Since the Bible takes place in the Holy Land, what about its current-day inhabitants, known as Palestinians, the most probable descendents of the Roman-era Judeans?

What do they look like, to the ethnic-nationalist newspaper? “The enemy.”

“Zionist ideology has always departed from a question: every people has its state; why not the Jews? A ‘no’ answer would tie you to that evil of evils, antisemitism. The rights of ‘the Jewish people’ meant Israel had a morally titanic ‘right to exist’. It meant that the relentless expansion of Jewish settlement was, far from a mortal threat to the non-Jewish inhabitants of the area, the mere completion of the long Jewish Odyssey. It was just part of the long journey home.

As for the Palestinians, they described themselves as Arabs. This sounded like they *had* a home; it was the whole Arab world. If their ‘Arab brothers’ would not take them in, well, that was no fault of the Zionists. So if the Palestinians were squeezed ever further into unlivable enclaves, it was the Arabs who were to blame. The Arabs would rather dispute a tiny strip of their vast possessions than grant the Jews their little homeland.

These claims – we’re just a people like any other, we just want to go home – are the last bastion of lsrael’s crumbling moral stature. It is hard to imagine a more inappropriate public relations ploy. Israel’s rhetoric of peoples and homelands constitute a rejection of everything we ought to have learned from the Nazi era. The confusions that sustain them not only raise racial crusading to a moral imperative; in other ways they bring unjust disrepute and demoralization on the entire so-called Arab world.

If we cannot see the harm in talk of peoples and homelands, it is because our obsession with antisemitism has blinded us to the true origins of Nazi ideology. Before the Nazis, antisemitism was prevalent all over Western Europe. There were ugly incidents, one or two outrageous miscarriages of justice, but no genocide and nothing remotely resembling the peasant pogroms of Russia and the Ukraine. As for Germany, my Jewish parents, born and raised there, staunchly maintained that it was the least antisemitic country in all of pre-Nazi Europe. Why then is the Nazi genocide attributed to antisemitism, which clearly was necessary but not sufficient to produce it? And what about the aspects of Nazi ethnic cleansing that antisemitism can’t possibly explain – the genocide against the gypsies and the planned extermination of thirty million Slavs, many of whom died as ‘subhumans’ in inhuman prison camps?

There was an ideology sufficient to drive all those atrocities. It fairly stares us in the face. It was not devised by Hitler, but by 19th Century Romantics – poets and pseudo-historians from Scandinavia across Central Europe and down into the Italian Peninsula and the Balkans. It was not the Nazis, but Woodrow Wilson who made it a fixture of contemporary politics. This was the ideology of ethnic nationalism.”

FOLLOW-UP:

Don’t forget the Iranian oil bourse, poised to become the first non-dollar-denominated oil market in the world.

Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, Yom Kippur, 9/28/09

“Okay, what we’re going to do is, you’re going to make a suicide video, then you’re going to bend over and Osama’s going to shove a bomb up your ass. It’s going to be uncomfortable for a while, but then you’ll blow yourself and go to heaven, but without your ass, and probably also without your balls. So, good luck, and try to walk naturally.”

Wow, more morbid than hilarious but I guess it’s a try. But why doesn’t Goldberg riff on something he actually knows about, like the IDF? Their pitch has gotta be pretty funny, what, something like this:

“Okay, what we’re going to do is, you’re going to shoot a boy while al-Jazeera is taping you, then you’re going to torture a man because he won’t say he’s a terrorist. It’s going to make you look and act like a monster, but then you’ll secure the realm for the Jews and be a hero, but you’ll probably be a murderer, and you might have lost your mind, and your grandmother and little sister are still gonna be on that bus that gets blown up one day. So good luck, try not to cry when you shoot.”