Storahtelling

Jewish Revenge & Kosher Porn:
How 'Inglorious Basterds' inspired the making of 'Bloody Esther'

a note from Amichai Lau-Lavie

The making of Bloody Esther was a rollercoaster. We knew we wanted to challenge the last chapter of the Scroll of Esther – the one in which 75,000 Persians are killed by the Jews. Post Goldstone Report, post so many wars and hostilities – can we put the guns down, even on Purim?

‘Inglorious Basterds’ fueled the fires of bloodlust. We watched it as we worked on the show and decided to go with it – and NOT kill Haman, and not his ten sons and no Persians at all. Even as a fantasy of power and revenge – we wanted to try another way. Even Hadassah Gross, Holocaust Survivor and fierce bitch that she is, agreed... the rest is history. We’ll figure out what to do next year. The massacre behind the mask is not going away. We must deal with it, one way or another.

Read below - some of our inspiration…


Excerpts from ‘Hollywood’s Jewish Avenger’
By Geoffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

In ‘Inglorius Basterds’ Tarantino managed to create something that seems entirely new: a story of emotionally uncomplicated, physically threatening, non-morally-anguished Jews dealing out spaghetti-Western justice to their would-be exterminators…The horror-movie director Eli Roth plays a Basterd known as the “Bear Jew,” whose specialty is braining Germans with a baseball bat. Roth told me recently that Inglourious Basterds falls into a subgenre he calls “kosher porn.”

“It’s almost a deep sexual satisfaction of wanting to beat Nazis to death, an orgasmic feeling,” Roth said. “My character gets to beat Nazis to death. That’s something I could watch all day. My parents are very strong about Holocaust education. My grandparents got out of Poland and Russia and Austria, but their relatives did not.”

Roth told me that Tarantino came to his home for Passover just as he was wrestling with the final act of Basterds. “I was his Jewish sounding board,” Roth said. “‘Would a Jew do this, would a Jew do that?’ He kind of didn’t have an ending. But after the seder, he said, ‘I’m going home to finish.’ He understood that we are still pissed off about things that happened to us 3,000 years ago. At the end of the seder, we talked about how the Jewish thing was to remember, that there was no absolution.”

My ambivalence about some of the excesses of Inglourious Basterds fully emerged only in the days after our conversation. I had met Tarantino less than 24 hours after I first saw the film. When I came out of the screening room the night before our interview, I was so hopped up on righteous Jewish violence that I was almost ready to settle the West Bank—and possibly the East Bank. But when my blood cooled, I began to think about the morality of kosher porn in the context of current Middle East politics. Some of this was informed by my own experience in the Israeli army, in which I saw my fellow Jewish soldiers do moral things—such as risking their lives to prevent the murder of innocent Jews—as well as immoral things, like beating the hell out of Palestinians because they could….

But why risk creating sympathy for Nazis at all? Why have any scene that, in Neal Gabler’s words, “conventionalizes Jews, puts them in the same revenge motif as everyone else”?

Read more here