The Brutal, Real Pain of Holocaust Portrayals in Hollywood
“Best we can do is Polish propaganda, graphic rape of survivors, and hyper-fixation on non-Jewish saviors.”
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This is a guest essay written by Mallory Mosner, a Jewish writer.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
When Dara Horn published her essay “Is Holocaust Education Making Antisemitism Worse?” in The Atlantic in April 2023, we had not yet collectively witnessed the full scale of global, youth-led neo-Nazism following October 7th, but the writing was on the wall.
A YouGov and The Economist poll from December of 2023 found that 20 percent of people aged 18 to 29 believe “The Holocaust is a myth”; 23 percent believe “The Holocaust has been exaggerated”; and an additional 30 percent said they do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth.
As one popular Jewish Instagram account astutely noted during last week’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is clear that Holocaust education has failed. A January survey from the Anti-Defamation League found that less than half of people around the world recognize the historical accuracy of the Holocaust, and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz passed last week with a slew of public, horrifying acts of erasure, denialism and overt antisemitism.
Journalists, broadcasters, politicians, and ordinary people alike marked the occasion by omitting Jews from Holocaust history (universalizing its effects onto all people), redirecting and projecting the Holocaust onto pretty much any contemporary cause that doesn’t involve antisemitism, and/or castigating and spreading blood libels about the state of Israel.
But the failure to remember the Holocaust does not belong to a broken education system alone; the culture industries — including and especially Hollywood — play just as significant a role in cementing how we interact with and internalize histories and narratives.
Just in time for this momentous anniversary (and the Oscars!), Hollywood came to the rescue with two new Holocaust films for our viewing pleasure: “The Brutalist” and “A Real Pain.” And rest assured, this lot is pretty much exactly like the Holocaust blockbusters that came before it. In other words, delightful fodder for self-congratulatory antisemites.
The ‘Right’ Kind of Holocaust Film
When you note the most popular Holocaust films of all time, you will find a few common themes:
Emphasis on non-Jewish Saviors: “Schindler’s List,” while an undeniably beautiful movie, is more a story about a non-Jewish hero than of the victims of the Holocaust. To be fair, I think it’s important that real hero stories be shared with the world and remembered (although real-life Schindler was a Nazi who was notably complicit in the murder of Jews, and only after 5.5 million Jews were already killed did he suddenly develop a conscience). And this movie was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, but that’s pretty much the extent of prominent Jewish involvement in the film; neither the writer nor the actors (including the one who played the main Jewish character, as usual in Hollywood) were Jewish.
Emphasis on non-Jewish Victims: Movies like “Sophie’s Choice” receive outsize critical acclaim — again, it’s absolutely not wrong to portray non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust, as there were indeed legions of non-Jewish (and non-Roma) people killed in the Holocaust, but the prominence of these films is not a coincidence.
Whitewashing Jews: Movies like “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” starring the lily-white Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy as Jewish Holocaust victims, not only make the victims more “palatable” to audiences precisely because of how non-Jewish they appear, but serve to reinforce the fallacious notion that Judaism is merely a religion (and that Jews are all therefore white, and indistinguishable from German or Swedish people, like Dunst).
Humanizing the “Good” Nazis: Movies like “Jojo Rabbit” or, worst of all, “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” (one of the most harmful books on Holocaust education of all time, and by a landslide the most widely read and taught, despite endless criticism from Jewish people — all of which is simply brushed off by its non-Jewish author) seek to “humanize” Nazis as part of some ambiguous moral imperative. In one of the most egregious Holocaust films ever made, “The Reader” viewers are made to feel sympathy for a Nazi guard who locked 300 Jews in a barn and burned it down, because she is illiterate.
Holocaust films represent a tiny fraction of all movies that get made, yet they are overrepresented when it comes to Jewish stories and to industry accolades. Some 25 percent of all American-made Holocaust films have been nominated for an Academy Award; between 1960 and 2015, every other year, a Holocaust movie was nominated for one of the best foreign language films.
Why is that?
In short, because people love dead Jews.
Holocaust Movies in the Era of the Israel-Hamas War
The environment in which Jewish stories are being shared and viewed at this moment is obviously enormously charged. Despite longstanding conspiracy theories about Jewish control in Hollywood, Jewish representation in Hollywood is sorely lacking.
And so, following the despicable 2024 Oscar acceptance speech from Holocaust film “Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer in which he “refuted [his] Jewishness” in the name of a nonexistent “genocide” in Gaza (to thunderous applause, naturally), it is only appropriate that we should have another year of sh*tty Jewish film representation.
Of course, as a medium, film is subjective; I’m sure even many Zionist Jews enjoyed some or all of “The Brutalist” and “A Real Pain.” But these Oscar-nominated films cannot be extracted from the context in which they have been created and received.
Let’s start with “The Brutalist” (warning: spoilers ahead). This film is a story about a Holocaust survivor, but its intent — despite some actually decent religious Jewish and even Zionist representation — is clearly to function more as a universal American immigrant story, rather than to suggest anything particularly notable about the Holocaust or Jews.
They generously allowed Adrien Brody, a Jewish man, to play the role of a Jew; however, his character is a severe drug addict who finds himself embroiled in many grotesque and gratuitous sex scenes, up until the point that he is literally graphically raped by his boss — the character played by Guy Pearce, who is also now nominated for an Oscar.
An interesting arc, especially given Guy Pearce has been donning the infamous “Artists4Ceasefire” red hand pin at red carpet events. The reprehensible red hand pin has been criticized for its overt reference to the gruesome Ramallah lynching in 2000 in which Palestinian terrorists brutally murdered and mutilated two Israelis and then held up their blood-soaked red hands to a cheering crowd of more than a thousand “civilians.”
Pearce prides himself on being a vocal “pro-Palestinian” activist, though like most of these virtue-signaling terror-lovers, his bubbling, underlying Jew-hatred simply can’t be suppressed. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Pearce said, “I’ve had someone say to me, ‘Let’s not forget what Hollywood is made up of. Be careful.’” You can take the white Aussie out of Australia, but you can’t take Australia out of the white Aussie, I guess.
Guy Pearce is hardly the first actor whose career has benefitted from promoting allegedly Jewish stories, only to turn around and sign a pathetic letter suggesting that Israel kindly sit down and die. But hey, at the very least, unlike fellow petition signatory Bradley Cooper, Guy Pearce at least had the decency not to put on a prosthetic nose and play a Jew. He could just enjoy raping one on-screen instead.
The film simultaneously reaffirms stereotypes about Jews as sexual predators while minimizing and universalizing the experience of Holocaust survivors as merely being about all immigrants who are metaphorically and literally raped by American WASPiness. No thanks!
Now, onto “A Real Pain.” I like when crappy Jewish media subconsciously acknowledges its own innate deficiency in its titling, so I’ll give it points for that. But pretty much nothing else, since this movie is literally — and I do mean literally — Polish propaganda.
Jesse Eisenberg has always given me the creeps, but then he had to become a literal Polish propaganda bot (its giving kapo1). This man, who evidently has very little interest in or understanding of Judaism (and is married to a very Left-wing Polish woman), was so enamored with the endemically, chronically antisemitic society of Poland, that he decided to become a Polish citizen.
The film engages in flagrant historical revisionism, painting Polish people as mere victims of the Holocaust, and attempts to whitewash Jews by constantly denying ethnic or cultural distinctions between Jews and Poles.
To be clear, Polish people were very much responsible for the genocide against Jews during the Holocaust. Antisemitism is so foundational in their society, however, that they’ve had a bill akin to Holocaust denial in place since 2018, which criminalizes anyone who suggests that Poland was complicit in the Holocaust.
To paraphrase, around 3 million Jews (90 percent of Poland’s Jewish population) was murdered during the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945. There were only 80,000 German SS members deployed to Poland during the war; the only reason this small number of Nazis succeeded in murdering that many Jews was because of Polish collaboration (at worst) and indifference to the suffering of Jews (at best).
A consequential number of Polish citizens actively collaborated with the Nazis; as many as hundreds of thousands of Poles worked for them. Even the quarter of the Polish population that actually resisted the Germans were essentially completely indifferent to the persecution of Jews — or they were direct perpetrators themselves.
Just a few of the treacherous anti-Jewish pogroms perpetrated by Polish citizens during World War II include the Szczuczyn pogrom, the Wąsosz pogrom, and the Jedwabne pogrom — in which around 300 Jews, including women and children, were locked in a barn and burned alive.
As if this wasn’t enough, the hostility that continued to fester in the Polish Home Army made clear that Jews were not welcome in Poland, even after the war. As a result, up to 2,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who actually tried to return to Poland after the war ended were brutally butchered by Polish citizens. (Remember, that’s what the “anti-Zionists” actually mean when they say, “Go back to Poland.”)
Poland has bent over backwards trying to rewrite history and vindicate themselves for the atrocities they were complicit in and perpetrated before, during and after the Holocaust. Interestingly, when Amelia Adams (also known as the hilarious “Neurotic Jewish Gay” on Instagram) confronted the Auschwitz Twitter account for their Holocaust distortion, they immediately blocked her.
It is under these nefarious circumstances that we must contextualize how Jesse Eisenberg was able to get this movie made (and filmed in Poland) — to the great approbation of his Polish overlords. No wonder the movie contained such insulting, cringe moments as when the Jews posed at the memorial for Polish soldiers and literally said, “Get a photo of me standing with my brethren.” Excuse me?
And yet, in an interview two weeks ago with Bill Maher to promote “A Real Pain” — despite the pervasive, arguably record-high global antisemitism — the only time Jesse Eisenberg uttered a word about antisemitism was in the following statement: “It’s such a shame that a lot of American Jews of Polish descent have this kind of negative attitude towards Poland like it’s antisemitic.”
When pushed back on by Bill Maher (who, unlike Eisenberg, is not a Nazi-simping moron), Eisenberg buckled and shut down the conversation, emotionally stating: “I am very sensitive to the plight of the Poles historically.”
The spirit of the kapo lives on.
As for the movie, it is a blight on the already piteous genre of Holocaust films, and most certainly on Judaism itself. Under any other circumstance, I would question why Jesse Eisenberg would tap Emma Stone to produce this movie — especially since she is a friend of notorious antisemite Mark Ruffalo, and helped buoy and legitimize his career.
Of course, Kieran Culkin, who overacted his best impression of a stereotypical Jewish stoner loser, is nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars. White people giving sh*tty portrayals of Jews in antisemitic propaganda films? Get that guy an Oscar!
It would’ve been one thing if, like “The Brutalist,” there was literally any Jewish significance or meaning in the movie whatsoever. But there isn’t. In fact, it seems like Eisenberg went out of his way to emphasize how much he doesn’t care about Jewish traditions or culture, and to imply that that is how most Jews are.
Not coincidentally, it’s only the African man — still relatively secular Jewish convert — who really feels or knows anything about Judaism whatsoever in their group. He doesn’t care about reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish or really anything religious about Judaism at all; the closest he comes to internalizing anything traditional is when he misappropriates the tradition of putting stones on Jewish graves when he puts a stone on his own New York City stoop at the end of the film, so that he feels like him and his shiksa wife and their non-Jewish son will be “remembered” — because the Holocaust happens to everybody, but especially non-Jews, right?
In the Jesse Eisenberg paradigm, Poland was “our country” and Israel doesn’t exist — and it certainly isn’t our homeland. (It is.) Jews are simply white, and the “real” oppression that exists is directed at the poor Polish people, and anyone other than Jews. Pathetic.
Jewish people are far from the only group misrepresented and underrepresented in Hollywood. But thanks to an exclusionary, bigoted DEI culture that deliberately omits Jewish people from protected “minority” status (despite our encompassing 0.2 percent of the world’s population), most people will still see films like this and feel validated in their prejudices about “Jewish control” of Hollywood.
It is sickening.
The Fallout
When people see films like this, not only does it have the effect of making them feel like they are wiping their hands clean of any culpability for espousing antisemitism in the past year and a half (like them basically saying, “I saw a Jew victim movie! I can’t be an antisemite!”).
But it perpetuates the erasure of ethnic and religious Jewish identity, dilutes and distorts the history of the Holocaust, and intentionally diminishes the connection of Israel to Jewish identity — and to the Holocaust.
A local non-profit indie movie theater (a cesspool of leftist “Free Palestine” garbage) has been putting on a parade of Palestinian propaganda films since October 7th, and my partner recently reached out to them to inquire about why they’ve never shown an Israeli perspective, and how they justify that bias with their shallow mission about education and tolerance and understanding.
Interestingly, despite the leftists’ nonsensical insistence that people should not conflate “anti-Zionism” with antisemitism (they are the same thing), their comical response was that they were proudly showing “The Brutalist” and “A Real Pain” to provide Jewish perspectives as well.
There you have it, straight from the neo-Nazis’ mouths: mediocre, ahistorical films that distort, whitewash, and universalize the Jewish experience in the Holocaust are considered to be a balanced parallel to contemporary Palestinian propaganda — because, in their minds, they believe both to be the same thing, and Israel is always synonymous with Jews, whose actual genocide is only allowed a retrospective “glad that’s over with, thankfully that was a million years ago” kind of nod; typically followed by accusing Israel of blood libels.
It is difficult to comprehend how we will be able to reform education in the West, when even small children are starting to be indoctrinated with a deep-seated hatred of Jews and Israel (and large swaths of staff at the most prestigious universities in the world openly vilify Jews without consequence). However, we can at least demand better from Hollywood.
Jewish inmates at Nazi concentration camps who were forced by the Nazis to serve as “stand-in” guards; modern-day slang to imply a Jew who acts against other Jews or a self-hating Jew
Thanks for putting together this scathing indictment of Hollywood's pathetic attempts to tell the stories of the Holocaust. Your contempt and disdain are fully justified.
Hollywood has had a woke view on all things Jewish for decades It is very uncomfortable with Jewish values and traditions except to be shown as relics of life in a ghetto of its imagination