Last night on 60 Minutes, Lesley Stahl interviewed Steven Spielberg and his mother Leah Adler about anti-Semitism he experienced as a boy in Phoenix:
Leah Adler: We lived in an all non-Jewish neighborhood. These people used to chant, “The Spielberg’s are dirty Jews.” And one night, Steve climbed out of his bedroom window and peanut buttered their windows, which I thought was marvelous.
Lesley Stahl: Do you remember what you did?
Steven Spielberg: I took Skippy peanut butter and smeared it all over their windows….
Lesley Stahl: But, you came under some serious anti-Semitic attacks. How did you react? How did you deal with it?
Steven Spielberg: I denied it for a long time….
Lesley Stahl: Denied what? That–
Steven Spielberg: My Judaism.
Lesley Stahl: –you were Jewish? Oh.
Steven Spielberg: Uh-huh (affirm).
Lesley Stahl: Were you ashamed?
Steven Spielberg: Uh-huh (affirm). I often told people my last name was German, not Jewish. I’m sure my grandparents are rolling over in their graves right now, hearing me say that. But I think that– you know, that I was in denial for a long time.
Lesley Stahl: So when people say that a lot of your movies are about outsiders, that’s what you must’ve felt.
Steven Spielberg: Oh, yeah. I was an outsider for all– most of my formative years.
I confess I’m confused by this narration. Were these indeed “serious anti-Semitic attacks”? Were the police ever involved? The evidence in this exchange involves social anti-Semitism of a sort that apparently did not leave the Spielbergs fearful for their lives. And yes, clearly Spielberg was an outsider and felt himself to be one, and his self-abnegation is of a classic variety. But isn’t there another way to tell the story: that this belief gave him motivation and power– just as anti-Irish prejudice built Tammany Hall. Spielberg went into an industry where he was not an outsider, as Lesley Stahl, who is Jewish, went into one where she also was not an outsider. So: I want the whole American Jewish story, not just the outsider one.
I think you are being a bit too harsh. Sure, Hollywood isn’t exactly a longdrawn pogrom for a Jewish guy. Neither was then, neither is now.
But we’re still talking about the 1950s here. Jim Crow was in full effect, America was the indisputable world leader. There were quotas on Jews in all if not most positions of power. America hadn’t even lifted a finger to save any Jews during the Holocaust(often with Jewish advisors close to FDR, who were so paralyzed on this topic and other Jewish issues that you’d be forgiven that they were afraid of their own shadows. They whispered in the ear of FDR and actively advised against saving any Jew, pleading with him to ‘ignore the Jews’, for fear of being accused of dual loyalty).
There was simply no way for young Steven to know that things would change for the better, and everything he knew by childhood had proved that it had gone the other way.
The shock of genocide was a dark, looming cloud over his entire childhood, and the refusal of American might to help but a single Jew was probably an even greater scar. It was for my parents as they were growing up.
Finally, he didn’t grow up in Brooklyn, New York or any other typically Jewish place during those times. He was isolated. I still think he was brave.
But, after he got to Hollywood, the outsider status was probably more a cultural than a physical one. It was at that time, that things slowly started to change and the civil rights movement truly got under way.
But by that time he was already long since an adult and his formative years past him.
Krauss…”America hadn’t even lifted a finger to save any Jews during the Holocaust(often with Jewish advisors close to FDR, who were so paralyzed on this topic and other Jewish issues that you’d be forgiven that they were afraid of their own shadows. They whispered in the ear of FDR and actively advised against saving any Jew, pleading with him to ‘ignore the Jews’, for fear of being accused of dual loyalty).”
Perhaps you could be more specific? Other than defeating the nazis…at a rather significant cost of American lives…what do you think FDR could have done?
Children have always called each other names when feuding with their playmates. When they include anti-Semitic words, they are borrowing from the vocabulary of their parents.
What is with Stahl and 60 minutes timing with this story?
Leslie Stahl who received inside phone calls about the F.B.I’s raid of Aipac’s offices during the investigation of Aipac’s two top officials illegally accessing U.S. classified intelligence and passing it on to Israeli officials and then Stahl blew this story open. Some F.B.I. investigators believe that Stahl’s story interfered in their investigation.
Stahl did one program on 60 minutes about Israeli archeological digs on Palestinian lands that I would bet raised monies for these illegal digs
I thought it was an interesting and revealing interview. The point isn’t whether the Anti-Semitism was “serious” as measured by “police involvement,” but that for a sensitive kid growing up without Jewish friends, it served to isolate him, had an important effect on his character, which became fodder for his work in film. He generally has approached his topics from the standpoint of universal rather than ethno-centric values. Isolated kid, absent father, became ET. When he did Schindler’s List, his character analysis is as deep or deeper into the non-Jewish characters – Schindler himself and the young Nazi officer running their camp, as compared to the Jewish characters, who were in survival mode. The scene where Schindler hoses down the delayed trains to provide relief for the Jews huddled inside on a hot day, while the Nazi officers laugh at him, like so many amused pigs, telling him he is the cruelest of them all, because he gives them hope, Schindler grinning at their “humor,” or the infectiousness of their laughter, while continuing to deliver the relief, was absolutely brilliant. The banality of cruelty, how the harm of racism and prejudice can be so dramatically magnified by institutionalizing them, while people remain people, enjoying a good laugh, in the midst of participating in horror.
The 60 Minutes interview was also about redemption. His father having been remote and unavailable to the youth, Spielberg explores that theme through many pictures, but then reconciles with his father as an adult, at the encouragement of his wife, and this leads to further character development and a change in the fodder for his movies. This is good stuff. Spielberg is a brilliantly successful Jewish American, a valued asset for our country, and the details of his story make for good and informative reporting.
Perhaps, someday, Spielberg will dramatize for the American public some story out of the Middle East that will help America come to realize its responsibility to its values there.