A.O. Scott, Jewish, On Jewish Identity, Jewish Cinema and Inbetween

Following up on a previous post of mine, I spot that A. O. Scott, the NYTimes film reviewer, has taken on the Coen Brothers Jewish History, Popcorn Included.

He deals with that film as well as with another:

...In the modern world, after all, to broach the idea of Jewish identity is to invoke not one crisis but many. Religion or ethnicity? Theology or ethics? Culture or ideology? Brooklyn or Tel Aviv?...More than 60 years after the Nazi genocide and the founding of the state of Israel, more than 40 years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and a more than a century into the Ashkenazi passage through the North American melting pot, the old puzzles persist, though in some perplexing new forms. In novels, on television and especially, lately, on movie screens, fresh expositions of ancient dilemmas and anxieties quarrel and contend. Nothing is settled...

...a different, if related, set of associations animates “A Serious Man,” the latest movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. That film, which opened on the Friday after Yom Kippur (just in time for the Sukkot box office rush), travels back to suburban Minnesota in 1967 (after a prologue set in a Polish shtetl centuries before) to re-examine themes first laid out in that long, grim Jewish joke known as the Book of Job. The Coens’ protagonist, though not their title character, is Larry Gopnik, a devoted family man, a quiet neighbor and a hard-working professor whose life is turned upside down by a host of torments...

...Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,”...presented one of the most audacious examples of counterfactual history ever committed to film. Not only did Mr. Tarantino posit a band of ultraviolent Hebrew avengers smashing the skulls and slicing off the scalps of German soldiers; he also imagined an act of terroristic mass murder —a fire in a crowded theater — that did not so much avenge the Holocaust as undo it.

Was this good for the Jews? Mr. Tarantino’s philo-Semitism, though unorthodox, also proved surprisingly less controversial than it might have even a few years ago. But now even the Holocaust has become a safe subject for pure entertainment. And there was something seductive in the fantasy figures he put up on screen in lavishly saturated color. The basterds themselves, to be sure, but even more so Shosanna, their unwitting co-conspirator, with her honey-blond hair, her African lover and her fangirl appreciation of cinema. In an Allen movie or a Roth novel, such a woman would have the added, transgressive attraction of being an archetypal shiksa, but in Mr. Tarantino’s looking-glass world of wish fulfillment, she was a Nice Jewish Girl.

In the real world of ethical reasoning, a crime like the Shoah refutes the logic of vengeance, which is the only story Mr. Tarantino knows how to tell. He derives it from westerns and martial arts films, among other sources, but the honor-based personal vendettas that propel those narratives become preposterous in the face of mass killing. Which may be why the machinery of death that has become a fixture (and something of a fetish) in so many Holocaust films has no place in the world of “Inglourious Basterds,” where the murder is retail, specific and individual.