Filmmaker tracks how anti-Semitism is infecting different societies
In a still image from ‘Viral’, Director Andrew Goldberg, left, interviews Russ Walker, an open anti-Semite who ran for the North Carolina State House.
NEW YORK — In his new film Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations, director Andrew Goldberg examines one of civilization’s oldest forms of bigotry through four different lenses. The film travels from the U.S. to Hungary to the United Kingdom to France, profiling a variant in each place of what it describes as a virus that evolves and adapts to new host populations.
At the film’s premiere in New York City on Feb. 21, Goldberg said that he wanted to show how the source of the problem varies by location despite it being a global phenomenon. “You could throw a rock at the world and if you hit a country where there are Jews — in fact, if it hit a country where there are or maybe aren’t Jews — you’re going to find anti-Semitism,” he said.
In the U.S., he finds it on the far-right. In Hungary, he finds it in the rhetoric of Viktor Orbán’s government, described as a dictatorship that maintains a facade of democratic ideals. In the U.K, the far-left is the culprit. In France, its Islamic extremists. Each place is a different ecosystem where bad actors use similar Jewish stereotypes to explain problems they see in the world and among them.
Goldberg said he was surprised by the level of violence in France, where he interviewed survivors and surviving loved ones of victims of several deadly attacks. Many French Jews are either leaving the country or moving into neighborhoods where they share the protection of private security guards, he said.
He was particularly unsettled by what he saw in Hungary. There were large signs everywhere that depicted George Soros with images and words that reflected old tropes about Jews as conniving and meddling outsiders who undermine the nation, he said. The billionaire philanthropist is a perfect stand-in for that caricature, the film charges. An image of Soros’ face showing him with a prominent nose and nefarious grin is printed on the ubiquitous signs.
An estimated 42 percent of Hungarians express anti-Semitic beliefs, according to the film, which explains how Orbán stokes those sentiments to his party’s advantage.
“It felt like I was in some kind of strange Kafka novel or something like that, where you just have no idea what’s going on,” Goldberg said.
The documentary took three years to make. Goldberg has produced other films dealing with Jewish history and persecution of minorities, including several about the Armenian genocide. This is his second about anti-Semitism. The first, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence, was released in 2007.
Viral features interviews with victims and anti-Semites, as well as a mix of notable figures and experts. It takes care to represent the unique nature of each case it examines, and simultaneously demonstrates that they tend to have certain themes in common. One is that no matter what a population’s primary concerns are, anti-Semitic messaging is an effective tool for people seeking political influence in those places.
In the U.S., Goldberg interviews Arno Michaelis, a former skinhead who founded the nonprofit Life After Hate in 2011. Its mission is to help people leave the white supremacy movement. Michaelis explains that when he was recruiting for the skinhead group he helped found, he would identify a person’s vulnerability and shape his message to it. If a white 16-year-old boy was unhappy that he didn’t have a girlfriend, Michaelis would say that Jews were behind the images of black basketball players in mainstream media, pushing white women to idealize “black savages” over males of their own race.
“So it’s not your fault you don’t have a girlfriend, it’s the Jews’ fault,” he says.
Jeremy Corbyn’s left-wing Labour Party is the film’s focus in the U.K. Anti-Semitic tropes and rhetoric have become common on social media there, often cloaked as political discourse about Zionism and Israel, the film says. Once the political home of many British Jews, the party’s leadership and messaging now go beyond conversations about foreign policy and veer into stereotypes. Supporters frequently go even further in their online harassment of Jewish politicians and public figures, the film’s subjects attest. Labour’s response to that element within its base has been insufficient, one Labour politician acknowledges on camera.
Goldberg said at the premiere that a similar dynamic exists on the American left, although it has not matured nearly as much as it has in the U.K. That’s a generation away in the U.S., he estimated.
“I wanted to show people what it really can be,” Goldberg said.
His team decided not to wade into some territory, like the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign (BDS). That was because BDS is a tactic and not an idea, Goldberg said. He wanted the film to keep its focus on the ideas that lead to anti-Semitism and not get bogged down in complicated debates about political tactics.
The documentary was knocked for that in a New York Times review, which criticized it for a lack of historical analysis.
“The trouble with this skimmed approach is that by sidelining historical analysis, the film denies its audience the best defense against distortion, a rational necessity when interpreting a conversation that often seems to happen in code.”
In a review for The Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck also laments that Viral doesn’t go deeper:
“Although touching on a multitude of aspects of its disturbing subject matter, it never really digs particularly deep into any of them, with the result that it ultimately proves unsatisfying. Nonetheless, it serves a valuable purpose by simply putting a spotlight on the growing problem, about which it doesn't offer much in the way of optimism.”
The film is being praised, though, for presenting its subjects’ compelling testimonies. It gives viewers an up-close-and-personal experience of anti-Semites and the traumatized aftermath of bigotry taken to violent extremes.
It makes no call to action, and that is intentional, Goldberg said. “In every country, the form of anti-Semitism is so different and in every country the way to treat it is so different,” he said. “And I, as a journalist and a filmmaker, am highly unqualified to make that kind of analysis.”
Micah Danney is a Poynter-Koch fellow and a reporter and associate editor for Religion Unplugged. He is an alumnus of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has reported for news outlets in the NYC area, interned at The Times of Israel and covered religion in Israel for the GroundTruth Project.