The Believer : the (true) story of a neo-nazi Jew

[Adaryn]

The Believer is a US movie released in 2001. I had seen it at the cinema, and have recently seen it again in DVD. This movie had left a strong impression on me, and the feeling has been confirmed after watching it again.
It is the story (inspired by the true story of a certain Daniel Burros) of a young Neo-Nazi Jew taken in the net of contradictions between his religion/roots and his antisemitic ideology, between the quest for meaning and self-hatred. One might have feared clichés and simplistic psychology, but none of these in that movie. The actor (whose performance some newspapers rightly compared to De Niro's in Taxi Driver) perfectly incarnates this young man undergoing a metaphysicial crisis -- a rebel rejecting his roots and religion, but prisioner, despite himself, of his own identity, which will constantly catch him up (this theme will strongly echo CofZ, when Reed describes the condition of the Jews enslaved and cut off from humanity by their Talmudist rulers)
Metaphysical questioning and very interesting reflexions on judaism make of this movie a powerful, thought provoking and excellent cinema remainder to the reading of Cof Z (careful though : several violent scenes).
A scene particularly intense, depicting a "conversation" between young neo-nazis and survivors of concentration camps, and the comparison between today's comfortable society and the situation in Europe at the time, will strongly resonate, too.

The non-manicheistic, quite existentialist end of the movie brings more questions than answers and illustrates the inner questioning and complex / yet coherent psychology of Daniel, the protagonist.

In short, an intense and powerful movie, that I recommand in parallel with the reading of Cof Z, this extract of which perfectly illustrates D's questioning and self-destructive feelings/behaviour :

As for the Judahites, or the Judaists and Jews who sprang from
them, they seem to have acquired the unhappiest future of all.
Anyway, it was not a happy man (though it was a Jewish writer of our
day, 2,500 years later, Mr. Maurice Samuel) who wrote: ". . . we Jews,
the destroyers, will remain the destroyer forever. . . nothing that the
Gentiles will do will meet our needs and demands".
At first sight this seems mocking, venomous, shameless. The
diligent student of the controversy of Zionism discovers that it is more
in the nature of a cry of hopelessness, such as the "Mosaic Law" must
wring from any man who feels he cannot escape its remorseless
doctrine of destruction.

When it was released, the Believer didn't find a film distributor in USA, and remained confidential there -- given the anti-Hollywood treatment of the subject, this is no surprise. Yet the film was released in various European countries and Israel as well. It won the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance Festival in 2001.
Official site : http://www.palmpictures.com/film/the-believer.php
available on Amazon.

 

[tatou]

Interesting comment, I saw the film back in two thousand and two or three and thought that the idea behind it was just to perpetuate the myth of the "self-hating Jew", applied to any Jewish person who dares to criticize the politics of Israel and Zionism in general, like, let's say Norman Finkelstein for instance (The Holocaust Industry, highly recommended) but fair enough I'll try to watch it again with your thoughts in mind...

 

[Adaryn]

Hi,

Interesting comment, I saw the film back in two thousand and two or three and thought that the idea behind it was just to perpetuate the myth of the "self-hating Jew", applied to any Jewish person who dares to criticize the politics of Israel and Zionism in general, like, let's say Norman Finkelstein for instance (The Holocaust Industry, highly recommended) but fair enough I'll try to watch it again with your thoughts in mind...

I didn't see it like that (but it's only my personal impression). I saw it as the the story of the personal quest of someone who feels emprisonned in his religion and roots, and all, he thinks, represents "jewishness", but at the same time he can't forget and reject that without denying himself. For me it's not a sort of paramoralistic story picturing the 'archetype or the cliché of the self-hating Jew'. I think it's far more subtle than that. There are profound questioning, the psychology of the character is complex. It goes beyond the theme of Jewish self-hatred and reaches a more metaphysical/existentialist level addressing to everyone.
Maybe this is my understanding because it echoes CofZ -- when Reed points out several times that the Jews were secluded from humanity by the Judaite, Levite, and Talmudist priests. When he tells about their inner struggle. The main character's reflexion on Judaism also echoes Reed's analysis and comments on this religion.
This is just my take on it. It touched me coz despite the violence of the character, I still empathized with him. Someone somewhere pointed at that his behaviour and speech should make people hate him, yet we don't (or at least I didn't), because he's very human (not a psycho). All in all, I really liked it for the strong impact it had, and listed it in my favourite movies.