I don’t want to say a lot about this, it’s too weird, Jewish religious groups getting mixed up with jihadi feeling. The same week we learn that leading American Jewish figures are financing a settlers group that backs a rabbi who spouts racist venom about murdering gentiles, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the leading Conservative academy in NY, screened Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi revenge fantasy, Inglourious Basterds, with a prestige panel discussion after. "Sickmaking," as Jack Ross told me; and a sign of the unhealed wound of the Holocaust in American Jewish life.
JTA reports that someone said, Well this has no real-life applications. Actually, it does. It has served to rationalize violence against Palestinians; note that American-Jewish-id-golem Jeffrey Goldberg left a screening of the period-40s picture and dreamed of committing violence in the West Bank. Ami Eden says, wisely, on JTA:
I’m wondering about the morality and wisdom of religious communities relying on and elevating the work of movie directors whose films consistently fetishize and glorify violence.
