Documentary filmmaker Marc Levin (Slam) tries to “go do good” as the inscription on his grandfather’s tombstone says, with this investigative feature about the reasons for the recent renaissance of American anti-Semitism. His curiosity begins with a comment made to him by a New York cabbie, who parrots the widely debunked yet not uncommon belief that no Jews died in the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11 because they had all been warned beforehand to stay at home that day. Thus begins Levin’s highly personal and sadly scattershot exploration into the roots and manifestations of this belief, whose origins Levin traces back to Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a cornerstone treatise of modern anti-Semitism that advances the notion that a Jewish cabal is secretly planning to take over the world. Although scholars have proved the book to be a fabrication of Czar Nicholas II’s secret police dating from around the turn of the last century, the book’s influence continues into the present. Once upon a time, Henry Ford handed out a copy with every new Ford purchased, and Adolf Hitler paraphrased portions in his own writings. Today it remains a top-seller among white-supremacist and some black-separatist organizations, and can be seen to still hold sway over certain media and political mouthpieces in various parts of the world. Levin’s documentary is full of disturbing examples of modern anti-Semitism that he gathers as he travels about, speaking with Jewish religious leaders and anti-Semitic activists. In large measure, Protocols of Zion preaches to the choir. Levin’s preferred technique of engaging people in street-corner conversations belongs to the current wave of impromptu documentary filmmaking, although the bigoted arguments he garners from street-corner activists, prison radicals, the editor of an Arab-American newspaper that published the Protocols, a leader of the white supremacy group National Alliance, and others will do nothing to alter anyone’s belief system. Levin is front and center throughout the filming, and he includes his father in much of his investigation for reasons that are as murky as the scenes he includes of a Tribeca group Passover seder and his own personal history. As he digs out his boyhood artifacts from JFK’s assassination and its aftermath, Levin does manage to remind us how tough it can be to sway the minds of convinced conspiracy theorists. In the end, however, Protocols of Zion illuminates manifestations of anti-Semitism without ever really elucidating or posing solutions to the problem. AFS@Dobie.
This article appears in February 10 • 2006.
