In the New York Post, Kyle Smith (who also writes for CONTENTIONS) has written a provocative and original column about the degeneration in Hollywood’s treatment of Jews and Israel from the “Epic Jew” played by Paul Newman in Exodus in 1960 to the soul-haunted assassins of the Steven Spielberg travesty Munich: “When Israel is mentioned in American movies, you can barely hear the word above the sound of hand-wringing.”
It has literally been decades since a heroic Israeli appeared on screen, and, Smith writes, “At this point, there is so much pent-up demand for another Paul Newman/Kirk Douglas Epic Jew that eager viewers are willing to watch ‘Munich’ as a full-on action movie and fast-forward through the parts where Eric Bana cries and whines.”
He concludes, writing about Hollywood filmmakers:
Their pride in Israel is negated by their knee-jerk distaste for overdogs. Hollywood is the only place where billionaires fancy themselves outcasts fighting the system. Israel, for all its enemies, is a success story, but a complicated one. If the situation there were reversed – with the Palestinians in charge and the Israelis throwing rocks and submitting to checkpoints – there would be a Hollywood movie about it every other year.
