RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I have long wanted to make a film about the Dreyfus Affair, treating it not as a costume drama but as a spy story,” said Polanski. “In this way one can show its absolute relevance to what is happening in today’s world – the age-old spectacle of the witch-hunt of a minority group, security paranoia, secret military tribunals, out-of-control intelligence agencies, governmental cover-ups and a rabid press.”

He may want to make the story of Dreyfus into a leftist parable, but it was a real event with a real underlying cause. But Polanski has a history of ignoring real anti-Semitism in his films, despite the fact that he is a Holocaust survivor. The Pianist had several soft stereotypes of Jews in it, including guests in a café checking whether their gold coins are genuine; meanwhile, the film soft-pedals the brutality of the Germans – in the film’s climactic scene, the main character is let go by a German officer who is converted to kindness by the character’s piano-playing.

This is typical Hollywood. Anti-Semitism can never be treated as an actual phenomenon – instead, it is a metaphor for other suffering. No doubt; Emile Zola, who exposed the Dreyfus prosecution as a fraud, will be portrayed not as an enterprising truth-teller, but as a synonym for today’s modern leftist press.

Whatever its attitude toward fictional Jews, Hollywood targets the real ones who live in Israel with many Hollywood Jews going out of their way to rip the Jewish state. Harvey Weinstein is a typical Hollywood Jew – more interested in Jew as analog for Palestinian than Jew as continuing focus of world anti-Semitism.

It will be interesting to see whether Polanski is cut from the same cloth. At the very least, he will probably push his own self-centered approach to Dreyfus, likening Dreyfus’ persecution for his Jewish heritage to his own “persecution” for child molestation. Nobody is coming after Polanski because he’s Jewish. They’re coming after him because he had sex with a 13-year-old girl. But to Hollywood, that’s not rape-rape.

Only Hollywood arrogance and self-centeredness could turn the story of Dreyfus, a story of monumental Jew-hatred – the same Jew hatred that led to the Holocaust – into a personal tale about child molestation, or a metaphor for broader victimization for various minority groups. Missing the point is a Hollywood specialty.

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