“Therefore, Jew,Though justice be thy plea, consider this That in the course of justice none of us Should see salvation.”

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Edmund Mazza begins The Scholastics and the Jews: Coexistence, Conversion, and the Medieval Origins of Tolerance by citing what he calls Jeremy Cohen’s “classic work,” The Friars and the Jews, in which Cohen argues that “the Dominicans and Franciscans developed, refined, and sought to implement a new Christian ideology with regard to the Jews, one that allotted the Jews no legitimate right to exist in European society.”[1] That “new Christian ideology” involved “an organized and aggressive mission to the Jews.” And what was involved in this form of aggression? Raymond of Penaforte, then general of the Dominican order, “committed himself to making contemporary Jews believing Christians.”[2] Working for the conversion of the Jews as a way of bringing about their eternal salvation qualifies in Cohen’s mind as “stirring up hatred against Jews.”[3] Full of rage at the very idea of conversion, Cohen concludes his diatribe against Raymond of Penaforte by claiming that “This Jew-hater was later made a saint.”[4]

Nothing demonstrates the fact that Jews have a negative identity based solely on the rejection of Logos better than Cohen’s claim equating conversion with extinction. Cohen’s book appeared in 1982. We now have decades of Jewish literature affirming the fact that in the Jewish mind there is no difference between Raymond of Penaforte and Adolf Hitler. According to the all but unanimous verdict of recent Jewish scholarship, both men sought the extinction of the Jewish people. The fact that Mazza refers to Cohen’s screed as “serious historical allegations” is all that you need to know about the outdated, irenic tone of The Scholastics and the Jews.

Thirty five years after the publication of The Friars and the Jews, Mazza tries to rescue the reputation of the Catholic Mendicants of the Middle Ages by making the case that it was Tertullian and not John Locke who was the father of religious liberty. The term “’religious liberty,’” he tells us, “was not invented by French philosophes of the eighteenth century, nor by Protestant reformers in the sixteenth century, but by the early Church Father Tertullian in the second century, namely in his Apology for the Christians written in AD 197.”[5] Although many people have championed the idea after Tertullian, no one in “the thousand-year history of Greece and Rome” ever made a “plea for individual liberty grounded in reason/natural law” before Tertullian, who:

recognized that human liberty is rooted in human nature and Nature’s God, to be used in accordance with His eternal Law, which Nature obeys blindly, but which man—whose nature is fashioned in the image and likeness of God—may rationally choose to obey. That is to say: Liberty is not the right to do whatever you want; it is the freedom to do what you ought. And conversely then, “sin” is defined as “an utterance, a deed, or a desire contrary to the eternal law,” to use the words of that infamous-sinner-turned-saint, Augustine of Hippo.[6]

The medieval Scholastics used philosophy rather than force to convert the Jews because they knew that Christ was the Logos Incarnate and that all men were by definition rational creatures who responded instinctively to reasoned argument. This was true of all who followed in Tertullian’s footsteps in their dealing with the Jews:

For all Justin Martyr’s extensive use of the Hebrew Prophets to persuade Trypho into the Christian fold, the catalyst for Justin’s conversation with him was Greek philosophy. Christ is the “Logos,” which is Greek for “Reason/ Truth.” This is how Justin put it in both his 1st Apology and 2nd Apology and he makes a similar argument here in his Dialogue: the argument for the unity of Truth. “Logos” was sent down among men: to the Greeks in the form of philosophy, to the Jews in the form of type and of prophecy. . . . and he exhorted them to become acquainted with the God who was to them unknown, by means of the investigation of reason, saying, “That it is neither easy to find the Father and Maker of all, nor, having found Him, is it safe to declare Him to all.” But these things our Christ did through His own power.[7]

The fact that Jews were free to reject Logos and make that rejection the core of their identity led inexorably to the idea of tolerance, because the Church was adamant, even if temporal leaders were not, in insisting that baptism should not be coerced. Toleration flowed just as inexorably from the understanding that Jews were the enemies of Christian societies. Raymond of Penaforte’s co-religionist and fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas made this point clear when he claimed that “the Jews sin in their rites” and when he called them “our enemies.”[8] This proves that “one did not have to like the Jews to be tolerant.” Quite to the contrary,

one had to dislike them to be tolerant, for tolerance only applied to evil. Tolerance was not an imperative of love but a restraint on one’s hatred. It is thanks to this restraint however, that Jews, in the Thomistic concept, were permitted to live their own lives within the bounds of a Christian society.[9]

This idea has disappeared from the Catholic understanding of tolerance, and, therefore, it has also disappeared from the understanding of the world at large, which believes that “there is no such thing as an absolute truth,” which as Mazza points out, “is actually to proclaim one.”[10] As a result, “the Church is roundly condemned as intolerant for the very reason that it holds to Truth.[11]

Throughout his book, Mazza focuses on Jewish grievance rather than Jewish malfeasance, explaining that “soon after the arrival of the Black Death in 1349, the Jewish communities of Spain found themselves scapegoats for the plague, which killed as much as a third of the population in some cities.”[12] Similarly, “By the 1430s, one third to one half of the Jewish population of the peninsula had converted to Catholicism. By 1492, the remnant that had refused was expelled from the country—a fact equally worthy of a moment of observed silence.”[13] In neither instance was the Church involved in persecuting Jews, but was the government wrong in expelling them, as 190 countries had done and would continue to do? Did Jewish misbehavior have any bearing on the violence which recurred periodically throughout European history? Thomas Aquinas urged “fraternal correction” in dealing with the Jews, but only “in so far as it is necessary for that end, but not so as we have to correct our erring brother at all places and times.”[14] “When preaching leads to people pelting Jews with stones and when censoring blasphemies leads to vendettas against prominent Jewish leaders, it is time to forego fraternal admonition.”[15]

Once again Mazza seems to accept the Jewish narrative of eternal victimhood at face value, even when he exonerates the Church by blaming the peasants for the violence. But he never asks why the peasants were pelting the Jews with stones. Did usury play a role in this anger? Were they forced to take the law into their own hands because the prince, who could borrow at a lower interest rate, refused to enforce the extant laws against usury because he personally benefited from the Jews’ presence in his realm? St. John Capistran referred to this situation as stemming from “the privileges of the Jews,” a term which Mazza never mentions in his book. Instead, the Dominicans are criticized as “sorely lacking in the fraternal love of their saintly founders.”[16]

“History rolled right over my body.” — Sidney Rittenberg

At the end of Euripedes’ play The Bacchae, Cadmus asks his daughter Agave, “What do you see?” Agave is sitting center stage with a severed human head in her lap. It is the head of her son Pentheus, who was torn limb from limb by the women of Thebes as they danced naked on the mountainside worshipping the Asiatic god Dionysos. Still intoxicated by the revelry that led to her son’s death, Agave says, “it’s a lion’s head, a trophy for the palace.” At this point, Cadmus says, “Look carefully. Study it more closely.” As the intoxication wears off, Agave recognizes what she has done and answers, “I see horror. I see suffering. I see grief.”

“Does it still look like a lion?” Cadmus asks.
“No, Pentheus. I am holding his head.”
“You were mad,” Cadmus tells his daughter. “The city was possessed by Dionysos.”
At this point, Agave awakes to the full consequence of her actions.
“I see now,” she says, “Dionysos has destroyed us.”

America went through its own bout of Dionysian intoxication in the days following May 25, when a Minneapolis cop by the name of Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of a 46-year-old Black man by the name of George Floyd, causing his death. Corrupted by 66 years of bad education, America’s Black Lumpenproletariat erupted in an orgy of rioting that brought the rule of law to an end in many of America’s large cities. As of this writing, Antifa, a group which Donald Trump has designated a domestic terrorist organization, is still in control of a six-square block section of downtown Seattle, which they have designated the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.” In Minneapolis, the town where the rioting started, their Pentheus, Mayor Jacob Frey, was denounced by one of the Bacchant women who spoke in the name of Black Lives Matter after he refused to defund the Minneapolis police department. Frey was not torn limb from limb, but he was expelled from the crowd and had to take refuge with the police he was ordered to defund.

The race riots of May and June 2020 were only the latest installment of what might be called the regime of governance by crisis which began four years ago, when the Deep State decided to do whatever was necessary to depose Donald Trump. That campaign began with Russiagate, followed by the impeachment, followed by the hate speech campaign of 2019 which sought to ban “unwanted content” from the Internet, followed by the Covid-19 pandemic. What united all of these crises was oligarch unhappiness with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and a desire to replace the institutions of representative government with ad hoc committees of crisis managers masquerading as scientific experts and/or aggrieved minorities.

By now it should be obvious that the racial narrative writes itself whenever a Black man dies at the hands of a white cop. Floyd’s body was still warm when the mainstream media took up the story which had already been written and declared him a saint, complete with halo and wings. In reality, Floyd was a violent felon who died with traces of fentanyl and cocaine in his system, but the BBC described him as someone who “was simply trying to live life as any other American, in search of betterment in the face of both personal and societal challenges.”[1] He then became “the latest totem of the ills that plague the country in 2020.” After growing in wisdom, age, and grace, Floyd’s life suddenly “took a different turn, with a string of arrests for theft and drug possession culminating in an armed robbery charge in 2007, for which he was sentenced to five years in prison.” Missing from the BBC account was any mention of Floyd’s incarceration, drug dealing, violence against pregnant women or his role as a porn star,[2] but no one needed to tell a graduate of America’s public school system that he was witnessing the latest installment of the ongoing saga of American racism in action.

The Palestinians who watched the same video, however, saw something else. They recognized the knee hold that Officer Chauvin inflicted on Floyd as the same technique which Israeli police routinely used on Palestinians. Also missing from the mainstream account of Floyd’s death was any mention of the role which the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) played in weaponizing the Minneapolis police department. The ADL has been pressuring police departments across the country for years to train with Israeli instructors to learn submission techniques like the knee on the throat hold. But more importantly, the policemen who are subjected to the Israelification of local police forces learn more than techniques. They learn attitudes, and the main attitude they learn is that they should treat the locals who fund their departments with their tax money in the same way that Israelis treat Palestinians. Whenever the race issue gets raised, the Jewish revolutionaries who are the main orchestrators of incidents like the Floyd riots remain invisible. This was certainly true of the ADL, which arranged the 2012 meeting in Chicago which brought together the Minneapolis police department and counter-terrorism experts from Israel at a conference sponsored by the FBI and the Israeli consulate in Chicago which focused on “terrorism prevention techniques.”[3]

After seeing the video of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, Neta Golan, the co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM) said: “I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.”[4] Israeli training of US police is widespread: “Since 2002 the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs have paid for police chiefs, assistant chiefs and captains to train in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.”[5] In the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, Palestinians were quick to draw parallels between the final images of the man suffering under the knee of the officer, and similar choke holds used by Israel occupation forces. “Crazy how the same thing happens in Palestine but the world chooses to ignore it,” Palestinian athlete Mohammad Alqadi wrote on his Twitter feed above four separate images of Israeli soldiers pinning Palestinians to the ground with their knees on their necks or head.[6]

Karl Marx once said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. Nothing proved the truth of Marx’s claim better than the farcical battle over the statue of St. Louis in, yes, St. Louis which followed hot on the heels of the tragedy of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The battle over the statue began as an exercise in identity politics, and before long it degenerated into an example of identity theft. The main protagonist in this story is Umar Lee, who was born Bret Darran Lee in 1974 to a southern Presbyterian family and grew up in Florissant, Missouri just outside St. Louis. Lee may or may not be Black, which is an ideological marker based upon but independent of biological fact, because he claims, according to The Jerusalem Post that he “has two younger siblings who are half African-American.”[1]

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown Jr., an 18-year-old Black man, was fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, leading to extensive rioting. After the death of Michael Brown, Lee got involved with the Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, and was arrested on two occasions and, in his words, “locked up.” After getting fired from his job as cab driver, Lee became a full-time, but little known activist. In 2015, Lee noticed that statues started coming down in St. Louis, largely because of agitation on the part of St. Louis Jews. At some point during this period, Lee made contact with Ben Paremba, an Israeli restauranteur who was “passionate” about promoting Israel and other Jewish causes. At this point Paremba was as little known to locals as Lee, but all of that changed after the Jewish press took notice of their petition to remove the statue of St. Louis and began promoting them as social justice crusaders, if you’ll pardon the term.

In a series of tweets, Lee tried to establish his position as an aggrieved Muslim, bringing up the Crusades as the cause of his grievance, but the underlying source of his complaint was inspired by a group of Jews, who were incensed that the city where they had come to study had erected a statue in honor of a king who had burned the Talmud.

The petition was started by two people being myself and Ben Poremba (an Israeli Jewish immigrant) and we then asked Moji Sidiqi to join. The campaign is new. We will work on gaining more support. Just tonight a man told me he approached his rabbi.

— Umar Lee (@UmarLeeIII) July 1, 2020

Fact
Louis IX was an anti-semite who persecuted Jews.

Fact
Louis IX was a Crusader who attacked African Muslims in battle.

Fact

France has a long history of White Supremacy https://t.co/Ns2kPOGHQc

— Umar Lee (@UmarLeeIII) June 27, 2020

Once Lee mentioned the term “anti-Semitism,” the Jewish press began carrying stories which lionized Lee as a crusader for Jewish rights. Because of his philo-Semitism, Lee soon found himself lionized in the Jewish press. Writing for the Jewish Telegraph Agency, Ben Sales described Lee as “a local activist who started the petition and also took part in a successful drive to remove a nearby Confederate monument in 2017. Lee, Sales continued, “is not Jewish but started the petition because of Louis IX’s anti-Semitism.”[2] Because Lee’s petition called St. Louis a “rabid anti-Semite” who “inspired Nazi Germany,” it began “drawing Jewish support” from St. Louis Jews like Rabbi Susan Talve, “the founding rabbi of the city’s Central Reform Congregation, who said taking it down would help advance racial justice in the United States.” According to Talve, St. Louis Jews have “been talking about that statue for a long time.” Talve then added that removing the statue would be “a very important part of reclaiming history, reclaiming the stories that have created the institutionalized racism that we are trying to unravel today. If we’re not honest about our history we will never be able to dismantle the systems of oppression that we are living under.”

“Susan Talve hated Cardinal Burke,” according to one Catholic familiar with the local scene. He went on to say that Burke told him that Talve had “an animosity toward me for reasons that I don’t understand.” Blinded by over 50 years of the failed experiment known as Catholic-Jewish dialogue, his eminence was evidently incapable of seeing that Talve’s animosity toward him was based on her ancestral animosity toward the Catholic Church, which he led in St. Louis at the time. Unsurprisingly, Rabbi Talve’s animosity toward the Catholic Church has turned her into an advocate of Lee’s attack on the statue.

St. Louis Catholics were determined to ignore the ethnic animosity behind the struggle. America Needs Fatima, a front group for the Brazilian cult Tradition, Family, and Property joined the fray, criticizing “limp-wristed politicians” who were giving in to “revolutionary extremists.” ANF Protest Coordinator Jose Ferraz, claimed that “American Catholics” who were “strong in their faith” were being “pushed around by anarchist revolutionaries,” but without identifying any of the actual players in the dispute.

After local activist Jim Hoft announced that a group of Catholics associated with his website Gateway Pundit was going to defend the statue, Lee issued a statement describing what he clearly knew to be a group of Catholics as “White Nationalists” along with “those on the alt-right such as those who held the infamous and tragic rally in Charlottesville.”

This is the guy behind the White Nationalist rally on Saturday at noon on Art Hill. This is why it's important for us to show up at eleven.

20-Plus Times Jim Hoft And The Gateway Pundit Were Absurdly Wrong https://t.co/UBGvC6vWu3

— Umar Lee (@UmarLeeIII) June 26, 2020

Hoft then responded by claiming that Lee deliberately misrepresented the Gateway Pundit rosary group as white racists: “We are Christians and Christian allies who believe we still have the freedom to practice our religion in America. We are organizing a prayer rally with Catholic and Christian men. And now we are being threatened — In America. We will not apologize for our Christianity. Not in St. Louis.”

The turnout is phenomenal! pic.twitter.com/1BvJAgYdlc

— Right Honorable Dr. Walker More Esq. (@SirMarchmain) July 4, 2020

The leader of a local rosary group, taken in by Lee’s propaganda, began to suspect that local Catholic activists at the rosary protest “might be backed by white supremacists” and warned his group off. He then retracted his first tweet after he learned that the Rosary rally was being sponsored by local activist Jim Hoft’s Gateway Pundit and TFP-America Needs Fatima. Neither group talked about the Jews. As a result, neither group was able to discuss the conflict’s most significant player. Both groups as a result became proxy warriors in an exercise in street theater which kept the true dynamics of the conflict hidden.

In his article, Sales found a local Catholic who made a valiant attempt to defend the city’s eponymous saint, only to be shot down later by Talve, who opined that “Asserting that your way is the only way I think is always wrong” with no sense that this was precisely the gist of what the local Jews and their Muslim front man were imposing on the citizens of St. Louis.

“Fear” is the first word of The Plot against America, the Philip Roth novel which just got re-cycled as an HBO series by David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Corner, The Wire, and Generation Kill. “Fear,” Roth tells us, “presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” The memories in question are Roth’s, of growing up in a Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. The fear comes from the one alteration of history that turns these memories into what Roth referred to in an interview with Robert Siegel on NPR as “a kind of false memoir.” The premise of the novel is that Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940. Everything else in the book follows from that premise and from Roth’s ethnic paranoia and his ethnic bigotry. The most significant thing about Roth’s book is the fact that it’s fiction. The Plot against America is a Jewish fantasy, which is interesting first of all for what it tells us about Roth personally but also because of what it tells us about the ethnic group which has accepted his paranoid Jewish fantasy as something to be taken seriously by people other than psychiatrists and cultural pathologists.

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To give an early example of the kind of fear which pervades the novel, seven-year-old Philip sees a German beer garden on a trip to Union, New Jersey, the town his father is thinking of moving the family to take advantage of a promotion at the insurance firm where he is employed. What follows is the 71-year-old’s bigotry projected into the mind of his seven-year-old name-sake. What ordinary Americans might consider “the homey acre of open-air merriment smack in the middle of town” was in fact some-thing “called a beer garden.” and before you know it the beer garden becomes the American equivalent of Auschwitz according to the following logic: “the beer garden had something to do with the German-American Bund, the German American Bund had something to do with Hitler, and Hitler, as I hadn’t to be told, had everything to do with persecuting Jews.” The beer garden was the place where Americans drank “the intoxicant of anti-Semitism. That’s what I came to imagine them all so carefully drinking in their beer garden that day—like all the Nazis everywhere, downing pint after pint of anti-Semitism as though imbibing the universal remedy.” All this passes through the mind of an allegedly seven-year-old child while driving past in a car.

Roth’s book is some indication that anti-Semitism is the universal remedy, but not in the way that Roth indicates. Charges of anti-Semitism have become the universal remedy to unwelcome discourse. They are also the universal remedy to an accurate history of the 20^th century. As evidence of the anti-Semitism which was raging in America on the eve of America’s entry into World War II (and also of unwelcome discourse which got silenced), Roth cites Charles Lindbergh’s Des Moines radio speech at an America First rally; in fact, he gives the entire speech in an appendix to the book. This is a mistake, at least from the point of view of what Roth wants to achieve, because it says the opposite of what Roth wants Lindbergh to say. In the speech we read, among other things, Lindbergh’s statement; “No person with a sense of dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany,” This does not sound like the raving of an anti-Semite. Lindbergh’s point was that three groups were trying to get America into the War at the time—the Roosevelt administration, the English, and the Jews—and that the Jews “would be the first to feel its consequences” because “tolerance cannot survive war and devastation.” It was the last time that anyone in public life in America singled out Jews as a group for criticism. Lindbergh and America First were silenced after the Roosevelt administration entered the war, and they have been demonized ever since. Roth’s book is one more contribution to that demonization.

If Lindbergh was talking about Europe, however, he was profoundly right in a way that no one could have understood at the time. War provided the cover for the annihilation of large numbers of Jews in Europe. If Lindbergh was talking about America, he was wrong because—pace, Mr. Roth—there were no pogroms in America. So which Lindbergh is Philip Roth talking about? He is talking about the Lindbergh in his mind, a fictional prop that is dragged out to justify Roth’s hatred of the goyim and his deep ambivalence toward an America that, even more than Renaissance Poland, has been the paradisus Judaeorum. The ambivalence comes out best in an argument between Roth’s parents. Roth’s father is outraged by the programs of President Lindbergh, shouting “This is our country,” Roth’s mother, on the other hand, responds by saying, “Not anymore. It’s Lindbergh’s. It’s the goyims’. It’s their country.” In other words, the book revolves around the unhealthy dichotomy—it’s our country/it’s their country—without any understanding of why the dichotomy is unhealthy. Roth’s book is exactly what he says it is. It is a “false memoir.” It is a distortion of history for political and racial purposes. It is also an exercise in bigotry and slander. Anything is justified because Roth considers his foes the embodiment of evil and as fully worthy of the hatred he lavishes on them. Roth is no longer promoting sexual liberation, as he did in Portnoy’s Complaint, but the hatred and bigotry are still there, even if the twisted humor is gone.

Because it is a “false memoir,” Roth’s book is the mirror image of what was really going on. If there was such a thing as fascist America, it was created by Roth’s hero Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If there were ever “a plot to replace American democracy with the absolute authority of a despotic rule” in America, Roosevelt inaugurated it, and the presidents who have succeeded him simply implemented what he inaugurated.

The first program which creates indignation among the Roth family is Lindbergh’s “Just Folks Program,” which sends Jewish children off to places like Kentucky—one of the two centers of evil in Roth’s America (the other is Detroit), where Philip’s brother works on a tobacco farm near Danville. “The only purpose of this so-called Just Folks,” Roth tells us, “is to make Jewish children into a fifth column and turn them against their parents.”

Well, that sounds like a plausible explanation of the purpose behind a government program of this sort. But just who was proposing this sort of the thing in the 1930s? The answer is just about everyone in power at the time. The Nazis had their Hitlerjugend, but unmentioned in Roth’s account is that Stalin’s Comsomol was doing the same sort of thing, and unmentioned as well is the fact that “Just Folks” bears an eerie resemblance to the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was, of course, instituted by Roosevelt. According to Roth’s fantasy, Jews “were being coerced to be other than the Americans we were.” Lindbergh had ordered that Jews were “to be shipped thousands of miles from family and friends. . . . The Jews will be scattered far and wide to wherever Hitlerite America Firsters flourish.”

Louis Wirth and Ethnic Cleansing

“You must not exact vengeance.” — Leviticus 19:17

“This is not murder. This is mitzvah.” — Meyer Offerman, Hunters

Over the course of 2019 the Jews lost control of the narrative in America. When Jews lose control they get upset, because, in a world without logos, the only order is the order they impose on the rest of us, a group known as the goyim, whom, Jews believe, have a natural tendency toward anti-Semitism. When the Jew loses control, he thinks the world is out to get him, and when he thinks the world is out to get him, his thoughts turn to murder. As a result, we are now being subjected to one paranoid Jewish fantasy after another advocating murder as the solution to what they perceive as the problem of anti-Semitism. A year ago Amazon Prime members were subjected to The Man from High Castle, a fantasy about what America would be like after losing World War II. In mid-March Netflix released the film version of Philip Roth’s paranoid fantasy The Plot Against America, and in late February Amazon Prime released Hunters, probably the most flagrant example of Jewish paranoia leading to Jewish murderous fantasies to date. Hunters is set in America in 1977. In the opening scene, a Jewish couple arrive at a barbecue given by the husband’s new employer, an obnoxious white southerner (Is there any other kind?) wearing a “Kiss the Cook” apron as he presides over grilling hot dogs, which is of course prescient of the Holocaust. After our obnoxious Southern host makes some tactless sexual remarks, the Jewish wife, who looks to be in her thirties, suddenly recognizes him as a former officer in Auschwitz. After trying to brush off her distress with a few humorous remarks, the southerner pulls a gun out of the barbecue and shoots not only the Jewish couple but every member of his own family as well. He then sits down in a lawn chair, where he waits for 24 hours until a fellow Nazi arrives to dispose of the bodies and then shoot him in the arm to give him an alibi.

https://youtu.be/lQds7dL7RUY

Does that sound plausible to you? Well, it’s as plausible as this paranoid piece of Jewish revenge porn gets. Hunters tells the story of how Meyer Offerman, “a wealthy Holocaust survivor with a thick Yiddish accent played by Al Pacino,” based loosely on Simon Wiesenthal, who got into the Nazi hunting business in 1977, assembled “a diverse band of Nazi hunters” to kill anyone they suspected of being Nazis from taking over America and turning it into—you will be expecting this—the “Fourth Reich.” Jonah Heidelbaum, the protagonist in this struggle, is a young man whose grandmother got murdered by a man in a black hat, whom Offerman identifies after introducing himself at Grandma’s wake as a Nazi hunter. Jonah initially ignores Offerman’s offer to help, but soon gets busted for selling dope, and when Offerman goes his bail, their collaboration begins.

Al Pacino as Meyer Offerman

Unfortunately, Jonah shows some initial reluctance at killing people in cold blood even if they’re Nazis. As a result, Offerman spends a good part of the conclusion of the first episode trying to convince Jonah that his homicidal rampage is both religiously and morally justified: “This is not murder,” Offerman tells Jonah, “This is mitzvah,” which means blessing in Hebrew. Once again Hollywood has drawn us into an alternative universe where hate is a Jewish virtue, and we become anti-Semites who are complicit in Nazi crimes if we object to Jews gunning down in cold blood anyone they find suspicious.

Director David Weil told the Jewish Telegraph Agency that “his first and main inspiration was his grandmother, who survived imprisonment in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and whom Weil said he used to see as a superhero while growing up in a Conservative Jewish family on Long Island.” Hunters is “a love letter to my grandmother, it is a way to honor my birthright and my heritage and my Judaism, and it’s a way to shed light on hidden crimes and secrets.”[1]

Weil also had specific movies in mind when he directed Hunters, which is a mash up of Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. “If ‘Inglourious Basterds’ is one end of the spectrum, and ‘Munich’ is the other end of the spectrum, I think ‘Hunters’ lives in the middle,” Weil said in the same interview.[2]

Hunters is also about morality, as Jews like Weil defines that term, which means in this instance comic book morality according to which “The center of the [Hunters] series really revolves around the moral, ethical question about ‘Does it take evil to fight evil? Do you have to be a bad guy in order to effectively combat the bad guys?’” Logan Lerman, who plays the show’s protagonist Jonah Heidelbaum, says in a phone interview from Los Angeles. “I’m really curious to see what people’s responses are.”[3]

As Weil indicates, we have been down this road before. Steven Spielberg’s Munich, an epic drama about Mossad agents who seek to retaliate against the Palestinians responsible for the “Munich Massacre” at the 1972 Olympics, offers two arguments for the need for violent Jewish revenge — one is the biblical eye-for-an-eye means of paying back the Nazis for the suffering they caused. Hunters, which gets its moral theology from Munich, is full of flashbacks to scenes of chilling Nazi atrocities, such as a chess match that SS officers play involving real prisoners, who are forced to kill each other as the game progresses. The other argument is one of self-defense. As the hunters torture a Nazi by blaring loud music into his ears, Jonah urges them to stop — he is clearly conflicted by inflicting pain on someone else. But since the goal of the torture is to extract information about who else the Nazi might be working with in order to stop a possible plot that could harm Jews and others, he reluctantly accepts the death of the Nazi they were trying to interrogate.